Thank you so much, Chris.
And it's truly a great honor to have the opportunity to come to this stage twice; I'm extremely grateful.
(Laughter) I flew on Air Force Two for eight years.
Soon after Tipper and I left the -- (Mock sob) White House -- (Laughter) we were driving from our home in Nashville to a little farm we have 50 miles east of Nashville.
(Laughter) I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but -- (Laughter) I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me.
(Laughter) You've heard of phantom limb pain?
(Laughter) This was a rented Ford Taurus.
(Laughter) It was dinnertime, and we started looking for a place to eat.
We were on I-40.
Low-cost family restaurant chain, for those of you who don't know it.
We went in and sat down at the booth, and the waitress came over, made a big commotion over Tipper.
(Laughter) She took our order, and then went to the couple in the booth next to us, and she lowered her voice so much, I had to really strain to hear what she was saying.
And she said "Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper."
(Laughter) (Applause) There's been kind of a series of epiphanies.
(Laughter) The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy.
And I began the speech by telling them the story of what had just happened the day before in Nashville.
And I told it pretty much the same way I've just shared it with you: Tipper and I were driving ourselves, Shoney's, low-cost family restaurant chain, what the man said -- they laughed.
I gave my speech, then went back out to the airport to fly back home.
I fell asleep on the plane until, during the middle of the night, we landed on the Azores Islands for refueling.
I woke up, they opened the door, I went out to get some fresh air, and I looked, and there was a man running across the runway.
And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, "Call Washington! Call Washington!"
And I thought to myself, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Atlantic, what in the world could be wrong in Washington?
Then I remembered it could be a bunch of things.
(Laughter) But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America.
It was printed in Monterey, I checked.
(Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!"
(Laughter) We like to celebrate each other's successes in life.
(Laughter) I was going to talk about information ecology.
But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: It's a deal!
(Applause) Al Gore: I want to focus on what many of you have said you would like me to elaborate on: What can you do about the climate crisis?
Now, the slide show.
Every time the tide comes in and out, you find some more shells.
Historical average for Januarys is 31 degrees; last month was 39.5 degrees.
Now, I know that you wanted some more bad news about the environment -- I'm kidding.
But I wanted to elaborate on a couple of these.
First of all, this is where we're projected to go with the U.S. contribution to global warming, under business as usual.
Efficiency and conservation -- it's not a cost; it's a profit.
It's not negative; it's positive.
It's an easy, visible target of concern -- and it should be -- but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks.
Other transportation efficiency is as important as cars and trucks.
Renewables at the current levels of technological efficiency can make this much difference.
And with what Vinod, and John Doerr and others, many of you here -- there are a lot of people directly involved in this -- this wedge is going to grow much more rapidly than the current projection shows it.
Carbon Capture and Sequestration -- that's what CCS stands for -- is likely to become the killer app that will enable us to continue to use fossil fuels in a way that is safe.
Not quite there yet.
OK. Now, what can you do?
I mentioned automobiles -- buy a hybrid.
Be a green consumer.
You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis.
Consider this: Make a decision to live a carbon-neutral life.
It is easier than you think.
A lot of us in here have made that decision, and it is really pretty easy.
There is a carbon calculator.
And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets.
Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral.
Again, some of us have done that, and it's not as hard as you think.
Integrate climate solutions into all of your innovations, whether you are from the technology, or entertainment, or design and architecture community.
Listen, if you have invested money with managers who you compensate on the basis of their annual performance, don't ever again complain about quarterly report CEO management.
Over time, people do what you pay them to do.
And if they judge how much they're going to get paid on your capital that they've invested, based on the short-term returns, you're going to get short-term decisions.
Become a catalyst of change.
The movie is a movie version of the slideshow I gave two nights ago, except it's a lot more entertaining.
Consider sending somebody to Nashville.
And I am personally going to train people to give this slideshow -- re-purposed, with some of the personal stories obviously replaced with a generic approach, and it's not just the slides, it's what they mean.
And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge.
Working with Larry Lessig, it will be, somewhere in that process, posted with tools and limited-use copyrights, so that young people can remix it and do it in their own way.
This used to be a bipartisan issue, and I know that in this group it really is.
Support the idea of capping carbon dioxide emissions -- global warming pollution -- and trading it.
Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system.
Once it's a closed system, you will have legal liability if you do not urge your CEO to get the maximum income from reducing and trading the carbon emissions that can be avoided.
Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring.
We have to change the minds of the American people.
Because presently, the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done.
And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did.
We have to buy a lot of those ads.
Let's re-brand global warming, as many of you have suggested.
I like "climate crisis" instead of "climate collapse," but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this.
Again, the Republicans here -- this shouldn't be partisan.
You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do.
We are one.
(Applause)
With all the legitimate concerns about AIDS and avian flu -- and we'll hear about that from the brilliant Dr. Brilliant later today -- I want to talk about the other pandemic, which is cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension -- all of which are completely preventable for at least 95 percent of people just by changing diet and lifestyle.
And what's happening is that there's a globalization of illness occurring, that people are starting to eat like us, and live like us, and die like us. And in one generation, for example, Asia's gone from having one of the lowest rates of heart disease and obesity and diabetes to one of the highest. And in Africa, cardiovascular disease equals the HIV and AIDS deaths in most countries.
So there's a critical window of opportunity we have to make an important difference that can affect the lives of literally millions of people, and practice preventive medicine on a global scale.
Heart and blood vessel diseases still kill more people -- not only in this country, but also worldwide -- than everything else combined, and yet it's completely preventable for almost everybody.
It's not only preventable; it's actually reversible. And for the last almost 29 years, we've been able to show that by simply changing diet and lifestyle, using these very high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be like -- quantitative arteriography, before and after a year, and cardiac PET scans.
We showed a few months ago -- we published the first study showing you can actually stop or reverse the progression of prostate cancer by making changes in diet and lifestyle, and 70 percent regression in the tumor growth, or inhibition of the tumor growth, compared to only nine percent in the control group.
And in the MRI and MR spectroscopy here, the prostate tumor activity is shown in red -- you can see it diminishing after a year.
Now there is an epidemic of obesity: two-thirds of adults and 15 percent of kids. What's really concerning to me is that diabetes has increased 70 percent in the past 10 years, and this may be the first generation in which our kids live a shorter life span than we do. That's pitiful, and it's preventable.
Now these are not election returns, these are the people -- the number of the people who are obese by state, beginning in '85, '86, '87 -- these are from the CDC website -- '88, '89, '90, '91 -- you get a new category -- '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000, 2001 -- it gets worse. We're kind of devolving. (Laughter) Now what can we do about this? Well, you know, the diet that we've found that can reverse heart disease and cancer is an Asian diet.
But the people in Asia are starting to eat like we are, which is why they're starting to get sick like we are.
So I've been working with a lot of the big food companies. They can make it fun and sexy and hip and crunchy and convenient to eat healthier foods, like -- I chair the advisory boards to McDonald's, and PepsiCo, and ConAgra, and Safeway, and soon Del Monte, and they're finding that it's good business.
The salads that you see at McDonald's came from the work -- they're going to have an Asian salad. At Pepsi, two-thirds of their revenue growth came from their better foods.
And so if we can do that, then we can free up resources for buying drugs that you really do need for treating AIDS and HIV and malaria and for preventing avian flu. Thank you.
I have a doppelganger.
(Laughter) Dr. Gero is a brilliant but slightly mad scientist in the "Dragonball Z: Android Saga."
If you look very carefully, you see that his skull has been replaced with a transparent Plexiglas dome so that the workings of his brain can be observed and also controlled with light.
That's exactly what I do -- optical mind control.
(Laughter) But in contrast to my evil twin who lusts after world domination, my motives are not sinister.
I control the brain in order to understand how it works.
Now wait a minute, you may say, how can you go straight to controlling the brain without understanding it first?
Isn't that putting the cart before the horse?
Many neuroscientists agree with this view and think that understanding will come from more detailed observation and analysis.
They say, "If we could record the activity of our neurons, we would understand the brain."
Even if we could measure what every cell is doing at all times, we would still have to make sense of the recorded activity patterns, and that's so difficult, chances are we'll understand these patterns just as little as the brains that produce them.
Take a look at what brain activity might look like.
The dot is visible whenever a cell fires an electrical impulse.
There's 10,000 neurons here.
So you're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach.
Your brains are about 100 million times more complicated.
Somewhere, in a pattern like this, is you, your perceptions, your emotions, your memories, your plans for the future.
We don't understand the code used by the brain.
But how?
We need to rearrange the pattern.
In other words, instead of recording the activity of neurons, we need to control it.
It's not essential that we can control the activity of all neurons in the brain, just some.
The more targeted our interventions, the better.
And since I'm realistic, rather than grandiose, I don't claim that the ability to control the function of the nervous system will at once unravel all its mysteries.
But we'll certainly learn a lot.
Now, I'm by no means the first person to realize how powerful a tool intervention is.
It dates back at least 200 years, to Galvani's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond.
Galvani showed that a frog's legs twitched when he connected the lumbar nerve to a source of electrical current.
This experiment revealed the first, and perhaps most fundamental, nugget of the neural code: that information is written in the form of electrical impulses.
Galvani's approach of probing the nervous system with electrodes has remained state-of-the-art until today, despite a number of drawbacks.
It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.
So around the turn of the last century, I started to think, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if one could take this logic and turn it upside down?"
So instead of inserting a wire into one spot of the brain, re-engineer the brain itself so that some of its neural elements become responsive to diffusely broadcast signals such as a flash of light.
First, it's clearly a non-invasive, wireless form of communication.
And second, just as in a radio broadcast, you can communicate with many receivers at once.
You don't need to know where these receivers are, and it doesn't matter if these receivers move -- just think of the stereo in your car.
I hope you'll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of this concept.
There's no high-tech gizmos here, just biology revealed through biology.
Now let's take a look at these miraculous receivers up close.
As we zoom in on one of these purple neurons, we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores.
Pores like these conduct electrical current and are responsible for all the communication in the nervous system.
But these pores here are special.
Whenever a flash of light hits the receptor, the pore opens, an electrical current is switched on, and the neuron fires electrical impulses.
Because the light-activated pore is encoded in DNA, we can achieve incredible precision.
This is because, although each cell in our bodies contains the same set of genes, different mixes of genes get turned on and off in different cells.
So in this cartoon, the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond to light because it lacks the light-activated pore.
The approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly to the brain.
In this example, each electrical impulse, each deflection on the trace, is caused by a brief pulse of light.
This is the first ever such experiment, sort of the optical equivalent of Galvani's.
It was done six or seven years ago by my then graduate student, Susana Lima.
Susana had engineered the fruit fly on the left so that just two out of the 200,000 cells in its brain expressed the light-activated pore.
They trained the escape reflex that makes the fly jump into the air and fly away whenever you move your hand in position.
And you can see here that the flash of light has exactly the same effect.
Now to make sure that this was no reaction of the fly to a flash it could see, Susana did a simple but brutally effective experiment.
She cut the heads off of her flies.
These headless bodies can live for about a day, but they don't do much.
So it seems that the only trait that survives decapitation is vanity.
(Laughter) Anyway, as you'll see in a moment, Susana was able to turn on the flight motor of what's the equivalent of the spinal cord of these flies and get some of the headless bodies to actually take off and fly away.
They didn't get very far, obviously.
Since we took these first steps, the field of optogenetics has exploded.
And there are now hundreds of labs using these approaches.
And we've come a long way since Galvani's and Susana's first successes in making animals twitch or jump.
Life is a string of choices creating a constant pressure to decide what to do next.
We cope with this pressure by having brains, and within our brains, decision-making centers that I've called here the "Actor."
The Actor implements a policy that takes into account the state of the environment and the context in which we operate.
Our actions change the environment, or context, and these changes are then fed back into the decision loop.
Now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model, we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject, fruit flies.
Each chamber in these two vertical stacks contains one fly.
The left and the right halves of the chamber are filled with two different odors, and a security camera watches as the flies pace up and down between them.
Now for an intelligent being like our fly, this policy is not written in stone but rather changes as the animal learns from experience.
We can incorporate such an element of adaptive intelligence into our model by assuming that the fly's brain contains not only an Actor, but a different group of cells, a "Critic," that provides a running commentary on the Actor's choices.
You can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain's equivalent of the Catholic Church, if you're an Austrian like me, or the super-ego, if you're Freudian, or your mother, if you're Jewish.
(Laughter) Now obviously, the Critic is a key ingredient in what makes us intelligent.
So we set out to identify the cells in the fly's brain that played the role of the Critic.
And the logic of our experiment was simple.
We thought if we could use our optical remote control to activate the cells of the Critic, we should be able, artificially, to nag the Actor into changing its policy.
In other words, the fly should learn from mistakes that it thought it had made but, in reality, it had not made.
So we bred flies whose brains were more or less randomly peppered with cells that were light addressable.
And then we took these flies and allowed them to make choices.
And whenever they made one of the two choices, chose one odor, in this case the blue one over the orange one, we switched on the lights.
The fly should learn to avoid the optically reinforced odor.
Here's what happened in two instances: We're comparing two strains of flies, each of them having about 100 light-addressable cells in their brains, shown here in green on the left and on the right.
What's common among these groups of cells is that they all produce the neurotransmitter dopamine.
But the identities of the individual dopamine-producing neurons are clearly largely different on the left and on the right.
Optically activating these hundred or so cells into two strains of flies has dramatically different consequences.
If you look first at the behavior of the fly on the right, you can see that whenever it reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odors meet, it marches straight through, as it did before.
But the behavior of the fly on the left is very different.
Whenever it comes up to the midpoint, it pauses, it carefully scans the odor interface as if it was sniffing out its environment, and then it turns around.
This means that the policy that the Actor implements now includes an instruction to avoid the odor that's in the right half of the chamber.
This means that the Critic must have spoken in that animal, and that the Critic must be contained among the dopamine-producing neurons on the left, but not among the dopamine producing neurons on the right.
Through many such experiments, we were able to narrow down the identity of the Critic to just 12 cells.
These 12 cells, as shown here in green, send the output to a brain structure called the "mushroom body," which is shown here in gray.
We know from our formal model that the brain structure at the receiving end of the Critic's commentary is the Actor.
Based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies, this makes perfect sense.
In fact, it makes so much sense that we can construct an electronic toy circuit that simulates the behavior of the fly.
In this electronic toy circuit, the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue LEDs in the center of the board.
These LED's are wired to sensors that detect the presence of odorous molecules in the air.
Each odor activates a different combination of sensors, which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body.
So the pilot in the cockpit of the fly, the Actor, can tell which odor is present simply by looking at which of the blue LEDs lights up.
What the Actor does with this information depends on its policy, which is stored in the strengths of the connection, between the odor detectors and the motors that power the fly's evasive actions.
If the connection is weak, the motors will stay off and the fly will continue straight on its course.
If the connection is strong, the motors will turn on and the fly will initiate a turn.
Now consider a situation in which the motors stay off, the fly continues on its path and it suffers some painful consequence such as getting zapped.
That caused a strengthening of the connections between the currently active odor detector and the motors.
I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly.
This is one piece of good news.
In the experiments I told you about, we have lifted the identity of the Critic, but we still have no idea how the Critic does its job.
Come to think of it, knowing when you're wrong without a teacher, or your mother, telling you, is a very hard problem.
There are some ideas in computer science and in artificial intelligence as to how this might be done, but we still haven't solved a single example of how intelligent behavior springs from the physical interactions in living matter.
I think we'll get there in the not too distant future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) ♫ When I wake up ♫ ♫ in the morning ♫ ♫ I pour the coffee ♫ ♫ I read the paper ♫ ♫ And then I slowly ♫ ♫ and so softly ♫ ♫ do the dishes ♫ ♫ So feed the fishes ♫ ♫ You sing me happy birthday ♫ ♫ Like it's gonna be ♫ ♫ your last day ♫ ♫ here on Earth ♫ (Applause) All right.
So, I wanted to do something special today.
I want to debut a new song that I've been working on in the last five or six months.
And there's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience, especially when it's half-finished.
Because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms.
They're feedback loops.
And in the audio world that's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source, and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound.
And I'm going to demonstrate for you.
(Laughter) I'm not going to hurt you. Don't worry.
♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a -- (Feedback) All right. I don't know if that was necessary to demonstrate -- (Laughter) -- but my point is it's the sound of self-destruction.
And I've been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms, from, say, the ecological, okay.
There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from, it gets ugly.
Biological -- there's autoimmune diseases, where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host, or the person.
Because although I've used scientific terms in songs, it's very difficult sometimes to make them lyrical.
So I'm trying to bridge this gap between this idea and this melody.
And so, I don't know if you've ever had this, but when I close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep, I can't stop thinking about my own eyes.
And it's like your eyes start straining to see themselves.
I'm sorry if I put that idea in your head.
(Laughter) It's impossible, of course, for your eyes to see themselves, but they seem to be trying.
Or ears being able to hear themselves -- it's just impossible.
So, I've been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who's been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they're left to do the deed themselves, if that's possible.
And that's what the song is asking.
(Music) ♫ Go ahead and congratulate yourself ♫ ♫ Give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand ♫ ♫ And the eye that eyes itself is your eye ♫ ♫ And the ear that hears itself is near ♫ ♫ 'Cause it's your ear, oh oh ♫ ♫ You've done the impossible now ♫ ♫ Took yourself apart ♫ ♫ You made yourself invulnerable ♫ ♫ No one can break your heart ♫ ♫ So you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you wring it out ♫ ♫ And you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own ♫ (Applause) Thanks.
(Applause) All right.
It's kind of cool. Songwriters can sort of get away with murder.
But, you know, I think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now, just a little bit.
(Applause) I'm going to finish up with a song of mine called "Weather Systems."
(Music) ♫ Quiet ♫ ♫ Quiet down, she said ♫ ♫ Speak into the back of his head ♫ ♫ On the edge of the bed, I can see your blood flow ♫ ♫ I can see your ♫ ♫ cells grow ♫ ♫ Hold still awhile ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Some things you say ♫ ♫ are not for sale ♫ ♫ I would hold it where ♫ ♫ our free agents of some substance are ♫ ♫ scared ♫ ♫ Hold still a while ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ Thanks.
(Applause)
So this is a story of a place that I now call home.
It's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both.
So this is Bertie County, North Carolina, USA.
To give you an idea of the "where:" So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in, Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state.
It's about two hours east driving-time from Raleigh.
And it's very flat. It's very swampy.
It's mostly farmland.
The entire county is home to just 20,000 people, and they're very sparsely distributed.
So there's only 27 people per square mile, which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer.
Bertie County is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural America.
We've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the American borders.
We know the symptoms.
It's the hollowing out of small towns.
It's downtowns becoming ghost towns.
The brain drain -- where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back.
It's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban.
And Bertie County is no exception to this.
Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with, like many communities similar to it, is that there's no shared, collective investment in the future of rural communities.
Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now benefits rural communities, and yet 20 percent of our population lives there.
It is the poorest county in the state.
It has one in three of its children living in poverty, and it's what is referred to as a "rural ghetto."
The economy is mostly agricultural.
The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco, and we're very proud of our Bertie County peanut.
The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant.
The county seat is Windsor.
This is like Times Square of Windsor that you're looking at right now.
It's home to only 2,000 people, and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years.
There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use.
You can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand -- Bunn's Barbecue being my absolute favorite.
Racially, the county is about 60 percent African-American, but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy.
So the public school students are about 86 percent African-American.
So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling would be a huge understatement.
There's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from, and only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher.
In fact, two years ago, only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders were passing the state standard in both English and math.
So it sounds like I'm painting a really bleak picture of this place, but I promise there is good news.
The biggest asset, in my opinion, one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man: This is Dr. Chip Zullinger, fondly known as Dr. Z.
He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system.
And he previously was a superintendent in Charleston, South Carolina and then in Denver, Colorado.
He started some of the country's first charter schools in the late '80s in the U.S.
And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process -- one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don't usually have access to design services or creative capital.
It's about designing with people, and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within.
So at the time of being invited down there, we were based in San Francisco, and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009, spending about half our time in Bertie County.
And when I say we, I mean Project H, but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller, who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder.
So fast-forward to today, and we now live there.
I have strategically cut Matt's head out of this photo, because he would kill me if he knew I was using it because of the sweatsuits.
We now call this place home.
Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth, we realized we had fallen in love with the place.
We had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we're able to do in a rural place like Bertie County, that, as designers and builders, you can't do everywhere.
There's space to experiment and to weld and to test things.
There isn't a single licensed architect in the whole county.
And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool, something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have, and to be sort of the -- to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit.
But beyond that, we recognized that Bertie County, as a community, was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking.
So the goal became, yes, to apply design within education, but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development.
So in order to do this, we've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education.
And I should say that these are three things that we've done in Bertie County, but I feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the U.S. and maybe even beyond.
So the first of the three is design for education.
This is the most kind of direct, obvious intersection of the two things.
It's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students.
This is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we're building schools out of these days.
So traditionally, the computer labs, particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County, where they have to benchmark test every other week, the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility.
You come in, you face the wall, you take your test and you leave.
So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology, to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging, more accessible, and also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction.
So this is the lab at the high school, and the principal there is in love with this room.
And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape.
It allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid.
So this game that the kids are playing here -- in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me.
And in Match Me, you take the class, divide it into two teams, one team on each side of the playground, and the teacher will take a piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires.
And then she'll call out a math problem -- so let's say four times four -- and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it.
So the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins.
Some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores, a greater comfort level with the material, especially with the boys, that in going outside and playing, they aren't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem -- and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material.
So with design for education, I think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers, so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them.
So this is Mr. Perry. He's the assistant superintendent.
He came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself.
(Laughter) So the second approach is redesigning education itself.
This is the most complex.
It's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom.
So in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change, which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities.
So for us, this was a graphic public campaign called Connect Bertie.
There are thousands of these blue dots all over the county.
And this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband Internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system.
Right now I should say, there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home Internet connection.
And the only places to get WiFi are in the school buildings, or at the Bojangles Fried Chicken joint, which I find myself squatting outside of a lot.
Aside from, you know, getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place, it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community.
It asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community's development.
So the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer, and we're helping Dr. Zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day.
And then the third approach, which is what I'm most excited about, which is where we are now, is: design as education.
So "design as education" means that we could actually teach design within public schools, and not design-based learning -- not like "let's learn physics by building a rocket," but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose.
It also means that designers are no longer consultants, but we're teachers, and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation.
And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring, rigid, verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by.
So we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class -- wood and metal shop class in particular -- historically, has been something intended for kids who aren't going to go to college.
It's working-class; it's blue-collar.
And in recent decades, a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely.
So we thought, what if you could bring back shop class, but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed, and to infuse shop class with a more critical and creative-design-thinking studio process.
So over the course of two semesters, the Fall and the Spring, the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 square foot studio/shop space.
And then over the summer, they're offered a summer job.
They're paid as employees of Project H to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community.
So the first project, which will be built next summer, is an open-air farmers' market downtown, followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year.
So these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say, "I built that, and I'm proud of it."
So I want you to meet three of our students.
She is 15 years old.
She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher.
She wants to go to college, but she wants to come back to Bertie County, because that's where her family is from, where she calls home, and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she's been fairly fortunate in.
So what Studio H might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way.
He is really into dirtbike racing, and he wants to be an architect.
So for him, Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect, everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client.
And then this is Anthony.
He is 16 years old, loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands, and so for him, Studio H means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement.
What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom.
So this building downtown, which may very well become the site of our future farmers' market, is now the classroom.
And going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why -- that's a homework assignment.
And the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers' market and it's open to the public -- that's the final exam.
And for the community, what design and building offers is real, visible, built progress.
So we recognize that Studio H, especially in its first year, is a small story -- 13 students, it's two teachers, it's one project in one place.
And I really, strongly believe in the power of the small story, because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale.
Because, when you zoom out that far, you lose the ability to view people as humans.
Ultimately, design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers.
And let's face it, designers, we need to reinvent ourselves.
We need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter, we need to work outside of our comfort zones more, and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard.
So while this is a very small story, we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Today I want to talk to you about ethnic conflict and civil war.
These are not normally the most cheerful of topics, nor do they generally generate the kind of good news that this conference is about.
Yet, not only is there at least some good news to be told about fewer such conflicts now than two decades ago, but what is perhaps more important is that we also have come to a much better understanding of what can be done to further reduce the number of ethnic conflicts and civil wars and the suffering that they inflict.
Three things stand out: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design.
What I will focus on in my talk is why they matter, how they matter, and what we can all do to make sure that they continue to matter in the right ways, that is, how all of us can contribute to developing and honing the skills of local and global leaders to make peace and to make it last.
But let's start at the beginning.
Civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now, and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat.
In Georgia, after years of stalemate, we saw a full-scale resurgence of violence in August, 2008.
This quickly escalated into a five-day war between Russia and Georgia, leaving Georgia ever more divided.
In Kenya, contested presidential elections in 2007 -- we just heard about them -- quickly led to high levels of inter-ethnic violence and the killing and displacement of thousands of people.
In Sri Lanka, a decades-long civil war between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority led to a bloody climax in 2009, after perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been killed since 1983.
In Kyrgyzstan, just over the last few weeks, unprecedented levels of violence occurred between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks.
Hundreds have been killed, and more than 100,000 displaced, including many ethnic Uzbeks who fled to neighboring Uzbekistan.
In the Middle East, conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues unabated, and it becomes ever more difficult to see how, just how a possible, sustainable solution can be achieved.
Darfur may have slipped from the news headlines, but the killing and displacement there continues as well, and the sheer human misery that it creates is very hard to fathom.
So are these now the images of the past?
Well, notwithstanding the gloomy pictures from the Middle East, Darfur, Iraq, elsewhere, there is a longer-term trend that does represent some good news.
Over the past two decades, since the end of the Cold War, there has been an overall decline in the number of civil wars.
Since the high in the early 1990s, with about 50 such civil wars ongoing, we now have 30 percent fewer such conflicts today.
The number of people killed in civil wars also is much lower today than it was a decade ago or two.
But this trend is less unambiguous.
The highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001, with about 80,000 soldiers, policemen and rebels killed every year.
The lowest number of combatant casualties occurred in 2003, with just 20,000 killed.
Despite the up and down since then, the overall trend -- and this is the important bit -- clearly points downward for the past two decades.
The news about civilian casualties is also less bad than it used to be.
From over 12,000 civilians deliberately killed in civil wars in 1997 and 1998, a decade later, this figure stands at 4,000.
This decline would be even more obvious if we factored in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
But then 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in a matter of just a few months.
This certainly is an accomplishment that must never be surpassed.
They exclude people that died as a consequence of civil war, from hunger or disease, for example.
Torture, rape and ethnic cleansing have become highly effective, if often non-lethal, weapons in civil war.
To put it differently, for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war, there is no good war and there is no bad peace.
Thus, even though every civilian killed, maimed, raped, or tortured is one too many, the fact that the number of civilian casualties is clearly lower today than it was a decade ago, is good news.
So, we have fewer conflicts today in which fewer people get killed.
And the big question, of course, is why?
This is a solution of sorts, but rarely is it one that comes without human costs or humanitarian consequences.
The defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most recent example of this, but we have seen similar so-called military solutions in the Balkans, in the South Caucasus and across most of Africa.
But for many parts of Africa, a colleague of mine once put it this way, "The cease-fire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning."
But let's look at the good news again.
If there's no solution on the battlefield, three factors can account for the prevention of ethnic conflict and civil war, or for sustainable peace afterwards: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design.
Take the example of Northern Ireland.
Despite centuries of animosity, decades of violence and thousands of people killed, 1998 saw the conclusion of an historic agreement.
Its initial version was skillfully mediated by Senator George Mitchell.
Crucially, for the long-term success of the peace process in Northern Ireland, he imposed very clear conditions for the participation and negotiations.
Central among them, a commitment to exclusively peaceful means.
Subsequent revisions of the agreement were facilitated by the British and Irish governments, who never wavered in their determination to bring peace and stability to Northern Ireland.
The agreement combines a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland with cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and thus recognizes the so-called Irish dimension of the conflict.
And significantly, there's also a clear focus on both the rights of individuals and the rights of communities.
The provisions in the agreement may be complex, but so is the underlying conflict.
Perhaps most importantly, local leaders repeatedly rose to the challenge of compromise, not always fast and not always enthusiastically, but rise in the end they did.
Who ever could have imagined Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness jointly governing Northern Ireland as First and Deputy First Minister?
But then, is Northern Ireland a unique example, or does this kind of explanation only hold more generally in democratic and developed countries?
By no means.
The ending of Liberia's long-lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership, diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full-scale civil war in Macedonia in 2001, or the successful ending of the conflict in Aceh in Indonesia in 2005.
In all three cases, local leaders were willing and able to make peace, the international community stood ready to help them negotiate and implement an agreement, and the institutions have lived up to the promise that they held on the day they were agreed.
Focusing on leadership, diplomacy and institutional design also helps explain failures to achieve peace, or to make it last.
The hopes that were vested in the Oslo Accords did not lead to an end of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Yet instead of grasping this opportunity, local and international leaders soon disengaged and became distracted by the second Intifada, the events of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The comprehensive peace agreement for Sudan signed in 2005 turned out to be less comprehensive than envisaged, and its provisions may yet bear the seeds of a full-scale return to war between north and south.
A final example: Kosovo.
The failure to achieve a negotiated solution for Kosovo and the violence, tension and de facto partition that resulted from it have their reasons in many, many different factors.
Second, an international diplomatic effort that was hampered from the beginning by Western support for Kosovo's independence.
And third, a lack of imagination when it came to designing institutions that could have addressed the concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike.
By the same token -- and here we have some good news again -- the very fact that there is a high-level, well-resourced international presence in Kosovo and the Balkans region more generally and the fact that local leaders on both sides have showed relative restraint, explains why things have not been worse over the past two years since 2008.
So even in situations where outcomes are less than optimal, local leaders and international leaders have a choice, and they can make a difference for the better.
A cold war is not as good as a cold peace, but a cold peace is still better than a hot war.
Good news is also about learning the right lesson.
So what then distinguishes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from that in Northern Ireland, or the civil war in Sudan from that in Liberia?
Both successes and failures teach us several critically important things that we need to bear in mind if we want the good news to continue.
First, leadership.
In the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man-made disasters, their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either.
Leadership needs to be capable, determined and visionary in its commitment to peace.
Leaders need to connect to each other and to their followers, and they need to bring them along on what is an often arduous journey into a peaceful future.
Second, diplomacy.
It needs to help them reach an equitable compromise, and it needs to ensure that a broad coalition of local, regional and international supporters help them implement their agreement.
Third, institutional design.
Institutional design requires a keen focus on issues, innovative thinking and flexible and well-funded implementation.
Conflict parties need to move away from maximum demands and towards a compromise that recognizes each other's needs.
For me personally, the most critical lesson of all is this: Local commitment to peace is all-important, but it is often not enough to prevent or end violence.
Yet, no amount of diplomacy or institutional design can make up for local failures and the consequences that they have.
Therefore, we must invest in developing leaders, leaders that have the skills, vision and determination to make peace.
Leaders, in other words, that people will trust and that they will want to follow even if that means making hard choices.
A final thought: Ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers, frustrations and setbacks.
It often takes a generation to accomplish, but it also requires us, today's generation, to take responsibility and to learn the right lessons about leadership, diplomacy and institutional design, so that the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm here today to show my photographs of the Lakota.
Many of you may have heard of the Lakota, or at least the larger group of tribes, called the Sioux.
The Lakota are one of many tribes that were moved off their land to prisoner-of-war camps, now called reservations.
The Pine Ridge Reservation, the subject of today's slide show, is located about 75 miles southeast of the Black Hills in South Dakota.
It is sometimes referred to as Prisoner of War Camp Number 334, and it is where the Lakota now live.
Now, if any of you have ever heard of AIM, the American Indian Movement, or of Russell Means, or Leonard Peltier, or of the standoff at Oglala, then you know Pine Ridge is ground zero for Native issues in the US.
So I've been asked to talk a little bit today about my relationship with the Lakota, and that's a very difficult one for me, because, if you haven't noticed from my skin color, I'm white, and that is a huge barrier on a Native reservation.
You'll see a lot of people in my photographs today.
But on Pine Ridge, I will always be what is called "wasichu."
"Wasichu" is a Lakota word that means "non-Indian," but another version of this word means "the one who takes the best meat for himself."
It means "greedy."
We are at a private school in the American West, sitting in red velvet chairs with money in our pockets.
So let's look today at a set of photographs of a people who lost so that we could gain, and know that when you see these people's faces, that these are not just images of the Lakota; they stand for all indigenous people.
On this piece of paper is the history the way I learned it from my Lakota friends and family.
The following is a time line of treaties made, treaties broken and massacres disguised as battles.
What is known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs was created within the War Department, setting an early tone of aggression in our dealings with the Native Americans.
1851: The first treaty of Fort Laramie was made, clearly marking the boundaries of the Lakota Nation.
According to the treaty, those lands are a sovereign nation.
If the boundaries of this treaty had held -- and there is a legal basis that they should -- then this is what the US would look like today.
The Homestead Act, signed by President Lincoln, unleashed a flood of white settlers into Native lands.
1863: An uprising of Santee Sioux in Minnesota ends with the hanging of 38 Sioux men, the largest mass execution in US history.
The execution was ordered by President Lincoln, only two days after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
1866: The beginning of the Transcontinental Railroad -- a new era.
We appropriated land for trails and trains to shortcut through the heart of the Lakota Nation.
In response, three tribes led by the Lakota chief Red Cloud attacked and defeated the US army, many times over.
I want to repeat that part: The Lakota defeat the US army.
1868: The second Fort Laramie Treaty clearly guarantees the sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation and the Lakotas' ownership of the sacred Black Hills.
The government also promises land and hunting rights in the surrounding states.
The treaty seemed to be a complete victory for Red Cloud and the Sioux.
In fact, this is the only war in American history in which the government negotiated a peace by conceding everything demanded by the enemy.
1869: The Transcontinental Railroad was completed.
1871: The Indian Appropriation Act makes all Indians wards of the federal government.
In addition, the military issued orders forbidding western Indians from leaving reservations.
The problem with treaties is they allow tribes to exist as sovereign nations, and we can't have that.
We had plans.
1874: General George Custer announced the discovery of gold in Lakota territory, specifically the Black Hills.
The news of gold creates a massive influx of white settlers into Lakota Nation.
Custer recommends that Congress find a way to end the treaties with the Lakota as soon as possible.
1875: The Lakota war begins over the violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty.
1876: On July 26th, on its way to attack a Lakota village, Custer's 7th Cavalry was crushed at the battle of Little Big Horn.
1877: The great Lakota warrior and chief named Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson.
He was later killed while in custody.
1877 is also the year we found a way to get around the Fort Laramie Treaties.
A new agreement was presented to Sioux chiefs and their leading men, under a campaign known as "Sell or Starve" -- sign the paper, or no food for your tribe.
Only 10 percent of the adult male population signed.
The Fort Laramie Treaty called for at least three-quarters of the tribe to sign away land.
1887: The Dawes Act.
Reservations are cut up into 160-acre sections, and distributed to individual Indians with the surplus disposed of.
Tribes lost millions of acres.
The American dream of individual land ownership turned out to be a very clever way to divide the reservation until nothing was left.
The move destroyed the reservations, making it easier to further subdivide and to sell with every passing generation.
Most of the surplus land and many of the plots within reservation boundaries are now in the hands of white ranchers.
1890: A date I believe to be the most important in this slide show.
This is the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
On December 29, US troops surrounded a Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee Creek, and massacred Chief Big Foot and 300 prisoners of war, using a new rapid-fire weapon that fired exploding shells, called a Hotchkiss gun.
For this so-called "battle," 20 Congressional Medals of Honor for Valor were given to the 7th Cavalry.
To this day, this is the most Medals of Honor ever awarded for a single battle.
More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is considered the end of the Indian wars.
When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch, as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young.
And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard.
And it was a beautiful dream."
With this event, a new era in Native American history began.
Everything can be measured before Wounded Knee and after, because it was in this moment, with the fingers on the triggers of the Hotchkiss guns, that the US government openly declared its position on Native rights.
They were tired of sacred hills.
They were tired of ghost dances.
And they were tired of all the inconveniences of the Sioux.
"You want to be an Indian now?" they said, finger on the trigger.
Fast-forward.
1980: The longest-running court case in US history, the Sioux Nation versus the United States, was ruled upon by the US Supreme Court.
The court determined that when the Sioux were resettled onto reservations and seven million acres of their land were opened up to prospectors and homesteaders, the terms of the second Fort Laramie Treaty had been violated.
The court stated that the Black Hills were illegally taken, and that the initial offering price, plus interest, should be paid to the Sioux Nation.
As payment for the Black Hills, the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the Sioux Nation.
The Sioux refused the money with the rallying cry, "The Black Hills are not for sale."
2010: Statistics about Native population today, more than a century after the massacre at Wounded Knee, reveal the legacy of colonization, forced migration and treaty violations.
Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation fluctuates between 85 and 90 percent.
Many are homeless, and those with homes are packed into rotting buildings with up to five families.
Thirty-nine percent of homes on Pine Ridge have no electricity.
At least 60 percent of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold.
More than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line.
The tuberculosis rate on Pine Ridge is approximately eight times higher than the US national average.
The infant mortality rate is the highest on this continent, and is about three times higher than the US national average.
Cervical cancer is five times higher than the US national average.
The school dropout rate is up to 70 percent.
Teacher turnover is eight times higher than the US national average.
Frequently, grandparents are raising their grandchildren because parents, due to alcoholism, domestic violence and general apathy, cannot raise them.
Fifty percent of the population over the age of 40 suffers from diabetes.
The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old -- roughly the same as in Afghanistan and Somalia.
The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, "My god -- what are these people doing to themselves?
They're killing each other.
They're killing themselves while we watch them die."
This is how we came to own these United States.
This is the legacy of Manifest Destiny.
Prisoners are still born into prisoner of war camps, long after the guards are gone.
These are the bones left after the best meat has been taken.
Those events led to a domino effect that has yet to end.
As removed as we, the dominant society, may feel from a massacre in 1890, or a series of broken treaties 150 years ago, I still have to ask you the question: How should you feel about the statistics of today?
What is the connection between these images of suffering and the history that I just read to you?
I have been told that there must be something we can do.
There must be some call to action.
Because for so long, I've been standing on the sidelines, content to be a witness, just taking photographs.
The suffering of indigenous peoples is not a simple issue to fix.
The United States continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties with the Lakota.
The call to action I offer today -- my TED wish -- is this: Honor the treaties.
Give back the Black Hills.
(Applause)
It's mined by armed gangs using slaves, child slaves, what the U.N. Security Council calls "blood minerals," then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in Shinjin in China.
That factory -- over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year.
One man died after working a 36-hour shift.
We all love chocolate.
We buy it for our kids.
Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and it's harvested by children.
Cote d'Ivoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves.
Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations.
Heparin -- a blood thinner, a pharmaceutical product -- starts out in artisanal workshops like this in China, because the active ingredient comes from pigs' intestines.
Your diamond -- you've all heard, probably seen the movie "Blood Diamond."
Cotton: Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth.
Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest, the government shuts down the schools, puts the kids in buses, buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton.
It's forced child labor on an institutional scale.
These places, these origins, represent governance gaps.
These are the dark pools where global supply chains begin -- the global supply chains, which bring us our favorite brand name products.
Some of these governance gaps are run by rogue states.
Either way, they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma.
I know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact of a human rights abuse in a global supply chain.
But right now, most of the companies involved in these supply chains don't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future, nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product.
Now, I didn't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain.
This is an independent republic, probably a failed state.
And right now, that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us, that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption.
Now, that's not a new story.
You've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world, even in developed countries.
You want to see the classic sweatshop, meet me at Madison Square Garden, I'll take you down the street, and I'll show you a Chinese sweatshop.
But take the example of heparin.
You expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital, probably squeaky clean.
The problem is that the active ingredient in there -- as I mentioned earlier -- comes from pigs.
The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it's the world's biggest supplier of pigs.
And their factory in China -- which probably is pretty clean -- is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs, where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient.
So a couple of years ago, we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world, because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain.
Worse, some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests.
This substitute cost nine dollars a pound, whereas real heparin, the real ingredient, cost 900 dollars a pound.
And so you're asking yourself, "How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed this to happen?
How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen?"
And the answer is quite simple: the Chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities, not pharmaceutical facilities, so they don't audit them.
And the USFDA has a jurisdictional problem.
This is offshore.
There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone.
In fact, about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore, particularly China and India, and we don't have a governance system.
We don't have a regulatory system able to ensure that that production is safe.
So at a national level -- and we work in about 60 different countries -- at a national level we've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil.
And the real problem with the global supply chain is that it's supranational.
So governments who are failing, who are dropping the ball at a national level, have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level.
Take the G20 meeting a couple of weeks ago -- stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago.
You can take any one of the major global challenges we've discussed this week and ask yourself, where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions, responses, to those international problems?
They can't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good.
So, if we're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level -- in this case, in the global supply chain -- we have to come up with a different mechanism.
Fortunately, we have some examples.
In the 1990s, there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. -- child labor, forced labor, serious health and safety abuses.
And eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House, invited industry, human rights NGOs, trade unions, the Department of Labor, got them all in a room and said, "Look, I don't want globalization to be a race to the bottom.
Companies didn't feel it was their responsibility.
They don't own those facilities.
They don't employ those workers.
So they agreed, "Okay, what we'll do is we agree on a common set of standards, code of conduct.
We'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control.
We'll make it part of the contract."
And that was a stroke of absolute genius, because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract, private power, to deliver public goods.
And let's face it, the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in India or China has much more persuasive value than the local labor law, the local environmental regulations, the local human rights standards.
If the inspector did come along, it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe.
But you lose that contract for a major brand name, that's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt.
So what we've been able to do is we've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain, that of the multinational company, and get them to do the right thing, get them to use that power for good, to deliver the key public goods.
Now of course, this doesn't come naturally to multinational companies.
But they are extremely efficient organizations.
They have resources, and if we can add the will, the commitment, they know how to deliver that product.
Now, getting there is not easy.
You need a safe space.
You need a place where people can come together, sit down without fear of judgment, without recrimination, to actually face the problem, agree on the problem and come up with solutions.
The problem is the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, the lack of partnership between NGOs, campaign groups, civil society organizations and multinational companies.
If we can put those two together in a safe space, get them to work together, we can deliver public goods right now, or in extremely short supply.
This is a radical proposition, and it's crazy to think that if you're a 15-year-old Bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in Dhaka -- 22, 23, 24 dollars a month -- your best chance of enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract.
It's crazy.
You'll say, "How can we trust them?"
It's the old arms control phrase: "Trust, but verify."
You can call yourself responsible, but responsibility without accountability often doesn't work.
You don't need to believe me. You shouldn't believe me.
Go to the website. Look at the audit results.
Ask yourself, is this company behaving in a socially responsible way?
Can I buy that product without compromising my ethics?
That's the way the system works.
I hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world.
I hate the idea that governments have dropped this ball and I can't get used to the idea that somehow we can't get them to do their jobs.
So we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure.
We're now thinking that, in fact, this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges.
Call it network governance. Call it what you will.
The private actors, companies and NGOs, are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face.
Just look at pandemics -- swine flu, bird flu, H1N1.
Look at the health systems in so many countries.
Do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic?
No.
Could the private sector and NGOs get together and marshal a response?
Absolutely.
What they lack is that safe space to come together, agree and move to action.
That's what we're trying to provide.
I know as well that this often seems like an overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume.
"You want me to deliver human rights throughout my global supply chain.
There are thousands of suppliers in there."
It seems too daunting, too dangerous, for any company to take on.
But there are companies.
We have 4,000 companies who are members.
Some of them are very, very large companies.
And whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address -- child labor in cottonseed farms in India -- this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in India.
It seems overwhelming.
But we break it down to some basic realities.
And human rights comes down to a very simple proposition: can I give this person their dignity back?
Poor people, people whose human rights have been violated -- the crux of that is the loss of dignity, the lack of dignity.
They didn't say money.
They said, "The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human, like we don't exist.
Please ask them to treat us like human beings."
That's my simple understanding of human rights.
We can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped.
If we don't do it, we're abandoning hope, we're abandoning our essential humanity, and I know that's not a place we want to be, and we don't have to be there.
So I appeal to you.
Join us, come into that safe space, and let's start to make this happen.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you're faced with a complex problem?
So for me, a well-crafted baguette, fresh out of the oven, is complex, but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated.
I'm an ecologist, and I study complexity. I love complexity.
So here's a food web, or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California.
And this is what happens to that food web when it's stocked with non-native fish that never lived there before.
And lakes with fish have more mosquitos, even though they eat them.
So I want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems.
First is the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity and just encourage you to ask questions you didn't think of before.
For example, you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem, or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in Yosemite National Park.
The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system -- all the species, all the links -- and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most.
And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees.
So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with.
So let's switch gears and look at a really complex problem courtesy of the U.S. government.
This is a diagram of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
It was front page of the New York Times a couple months ago.
And the stated goal was to increase popular support for the Afghan government.
Clearly a complex problem, but is it complicated?
So let's do it. So here we go for the first time ever, a world premiere view of this spaghetti diagram as an ordered network.
The circled node is the one we're trying to influence -- popular support for the government.
And so now we can look one degrees, two degrees, three degrees away from that node and eliminate three-quarters of the diagram outside that sphere of influence.
I don't know about this, but this is what I can decipher from this diagram in 24 seconds.
Because simple answers may emerge.
We're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity.
So for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Basically, no one's very happy.
Those trying to employ them think they don't know enough.
Governments realize that it's a big deal for our economies, but don't know how to fix it.
And teachers are also frustrated.
Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history.
So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math, and at the other end we've got a more mathematical world, a more quantitative world than we ever have had.
I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work.
See, in the real world math isn't necessarily done by mathematicians.
It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people -- modeling and simulation.
It's actually very popular.
And then you get an answer that's quantitative in the modern world.
So let's zoom out a bit and ask, why are we teaching people math?
What's the point of teaching people math?
And in particular, why are we teaching them math in general?
Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject?
Over the years we've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically. It's part of human society.
It's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that.
So let's ask another question.
What do we mean when we say we're doing math, or educating people to do math?
Well, I think it's about four steps, roughly speaking, starting with posing the right question.
What is it that we want to ask? What is it we're trying to find out here?
And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world, beyond virtually any other part of doing math.
People ask the wrong question, and surprisingly enough, they get the wrong answer, for that reason, if not for others.
So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem.
That's stage two.
Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form.
And of course, math is very powerful at doing that.
Did it answer the question?
In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand.
Now it's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years.
There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand.
But in the last few decades that has totally changed.
We've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers.
It's the chore.
It's the thing you'd like to avoid if you can, like to get a machine to do.
It's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and automation allows us to have that machinery.
I estimated that, just today, across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand.
That's an amazing amount of human endeavor.
And I think there are some cases.
I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating.
And I'll say, "Hmm, not sure." I'll think about it roughly.
It's still quicker to do that and more practical.
So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand.
And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating, but I think they're relatively small in number.
One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates.
See, the thing we're doing right now is we're forcing people to learn mathematics.
I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek.
Well one of them is, they say, you need to get the basics first.
You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject.
I don't think so.
I think you need to separate the basics of what you're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation.
A hundred years ago, it's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things.
But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it.
So automation allows this separation and also allows -- in the case of driving, and I believe also in the future case of maths -- a democratized way of doing that.
People confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching.
So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics.
My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this.
She enjoys making what she calls "paper laptops."
(Laughter) So I asked her one day, "You know, when I was your age, I didn't make these.
And after a second or two, carefully reflecting, she said, "No paper?"
(Laughter) If you were born after computers and paper, it doesn't really matter which order you're taught with them in, you just want to have the best tool.
Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they don't really understand, for reasons they don't get?
I don't think so.
Might have been 50 years ago, but it isn't anymore.
Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual.
This is just nuts.
All backwards.
See, normally in school, you do things like solve quadratic equations.
You can make it a quartic equation. Make it kind of harder, calculating-wise.
They've got hair all over them.
And think of the outside world.
Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers?
I don't think so -- quite the opposite.
Well, another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding.
So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer, you can understand how the basics of the system work better.
I think there is one thing that I think very valid here, which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important.
But there's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world.
It's called programming.
Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand.
If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it.
So programming is the way I think we should be doing that.
So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously.
And we open up so many more possibilities.
What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they've ever got before.
So calculus has traditionally been taught very late.
Why is this?
But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group.
And very, very simple.
We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number.
And by the way, she was also very insistent on being able to change the color, an important feature for this demonstration.
Very simple example.
And one of the reasons it's so important -- so it's very important to get computers in exams.
And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life insurance policy to get? -- real questions that people have in their everyday lives.
This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens.
How many years of protection do I need?
Now I'm not for one minute suggesting it's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams, but I think it's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people's real understanding.
We have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward, and also our societies, based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics.
And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook.
In fact, I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the "knowledge economy" to what we might call a "computational knowledge economy," where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is.
And let's understand: this is not an incremental sort of change.
We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math.
And you know if you walk across a chasm, you end up making it worse than if you didn't start at all -- bigger disaster.
Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future.
Let's go for it, and while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun, for us, for the students and for TED here.
(Applause)
Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty.
I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it.
Now this is an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different.
I mean just think of the sheer variety -- a baby's face, Berlioz's "Harold in Italy," movies like "The Wizard of Oz" or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier," a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "Starry Night," a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen.
This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions.
I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have.
And we get it not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic.
No, this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding, and you know who I mean: Charles Darwin.
Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, "What is beauty?"
It's in the eye of the beholder.
It's whatever moves you personally.
Or, as some people, especially academics prefer, beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder.
People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste.
Beethoven is adored in Japan.
Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints.
Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth.
Or just think about American jazz or American movies -- they go everywhere.
There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values.
How can we explain this universality?
The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes.
We need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric, largely pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved.
I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth.
And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries.
Now, I personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology.
The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations.
Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment.
As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms.
The first of these is natural selection -- that's random mutation and selective retention -- along with our basic anatomy and physiology -- the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails.
Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff.
Natural selection also explains pleasures -- sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs.
The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently.
The peacock's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this.
In fact, it goes against natural survival.
It's quite a familiar story.
It's women who actually push history forward.
Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen.
He actually used that word.
Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction.
Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance, so to speak.
I mean, you can't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape.
So evolution's trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.
Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes.
People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved.
This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand.
It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees.
The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally -- get this -- a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it.
This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it.
The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience.
But, someone might argue, that's natural beauty.
How about artistic beauty?
Isn't that exhaustively cultural?
And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it.
But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that.
Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago.
But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this.
The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa.
They go back about two-and-a-half-million years.
These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what are to our eyes an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form.
And some, in any event, are too big to use for butchery.
Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today.
So what were these ancient -- I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign, but they're at the same time somehow familiar.
The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship.
Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable.
(Laughter) Except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language.
It's hard to grasp, but it's an incredible fact.
This object was made by a hominid ancestor, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language.
Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history.
For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance.
But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances.
From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts.
Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors.
Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Mountain biking in Israel is something that I do with great passion and commitment.
And when I'm on my bike, I feel that I connect with the profound beauty of Israel, and I feel that I'm united with this country's history and biblical law.
And also, for me, biking is a matter of empowerment.
It's as if I'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself.
You can see my fellow riders at the end of the picture, looking at me with some concern.
And here is another picture of them.
And I've been riding with these kids once a week, every Tuesday, rain or shine, for the last four years and by now, they've become a very big part of my life.
This story began four years ago.
And I told him, "Let's find a way in which I'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country."
They are supposed to be locked up.
And yet, we began to talk about it, and one thing led to another.
And I can't see myself going into a state prison in New Jersey and making such a proposition, but this being Israel, the warden somehow made it happen.
I found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties -- not because they were physically unfit.
But that's one reason why they ended up where they were.
Then he throws his helmet in the air.
His backpack goes ballistic in some other direction.
And I'm just standing there, watching this scene with a complete disbelief, not knowing what to do.
And you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations.
And what you don't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there, there's a teenager sitting on a rock, saying, "I'm not moving from here. Forget it.
I tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere.
That's what they had all their lives.
But that's what he had all his life, people walking away from him.
So I would say, "Alex, I know that it's terribly difficult.
Why don't you rest for a few minutes and then we'll go on."
"Go away you maniac-psychopath.
And I would say, "Relax, Alex.
Here's a piece of chocolate."
Because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry -- and after the rides also.
And who is this guy, Alex, to begin with?
When he was eight, someone put him on a boat in Odessa and sent him, shipped him to Israel on his own.
And he ended up in south Tel Aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a [unclear] and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member.
And he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only, the slums and the state prison, where he spent the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there.
And so this kid was probably abused, abandoned, ignored, betrayed by almost every adult along the way.
So, for such a kid, when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and doesn't walk away from him in any situation, irrespective of how he behaves, it's a tremendous healing experience.
It's an act of unconditional acceptance, something that he never had.
When I started this program four years ago, I had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs.
I had an image of Lance Armstrong in my mind.
And it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced, and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available.
It all of a sudden dawned on me, in this project, that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only: love.
And before I worked with the kids, anything that I did with them, or anything that I did with myself, was supposed to be perfect, ideal, optimal, but after working with them for some time, I discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision, and if the vision doesn't work, well nothing happened.
(Laughter) (Applause) And one of these principles is focus.
Before each ride we sit together with the kids, and we give them one word to think about during the ride.
So these are words like "teamwork" or "endurance" or even complicated concepts like "resource allocation" or "perspective," a word that they don't understand.
You know, perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you.
I tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they cannot take it anymore, it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows.
It literally propels you upwards.
That's what perspective is all about.
Or you can also look back in time and realize that you've already conquered steeper mountains before.
And that's how they develop self-esteem.
Now, let me give you an example of how it works.
You stand with your bike at the beginning of February.
And you look up at the sky through a hole in the clouds you see the monastery at the top of the Muhraka -- that's where you're supposed to climb now -- and you say, "There's no way that I could possibly get there."
And yet, two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery, smeared with mud, blood and sweat.
It's that big.
I can't believe that I did it."
And that's the point when you start loving yourself.
And so we talked about these special words that we teach them.
And at the end of each ride, we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference, and these discussions can be extremely inspiring.
In one of them, one of the kids once said, "When we were riding on this ridge overlooking the Dead Sea -- and he's talking about this spot here -- "I was reminded of the day when I left my village in Ethiopia and went away together with my brother.
We walked 120 kilometers until we reached Sudan.
This was the first place where we got some water and supplies."
And he goes on saying, and everyone looks at him like a hero, probably for the first time in his life.
And he says -- because I also have volunteers riding with me, adults, who are sitting there listening to him -- and he says, "And this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in Israel.
Now I remember, when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background.
That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa.
And so, perspective and context and history play key roles in the way I plan my rides with the kids.
We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors.
We explore ruins of Palestinian villages, and we discuss how they became ruins.
And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements -- three-, four, five-thousand years old.
And through this tapestry, which is the history of this country, the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education, and that is the understanding that life is complex, and there's no black and white.
And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope.
I ride with these kids once a week, every Tuesday.
And I feel blessed and fortunate that every week, every Tuesday -- and actually every Friday also -- I can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in Israel on the edge.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
Now, I've got a story for you.
When I arrived off the plane, after a very long journey from the West of England, my computer, my beloved laptop, had gone mad, and had -- oh! -- a bit like that! -- and the display on it -- anyway, the whole thing had burst.
And I went to the IT guys here and a gentleman mended my computer, and then he said, "What are you doing here?"
and I said "I'm playing the cello and I'm doing a bit of singing," and he said, "Oh, I sort of play the cello as well."
Anyway, so you're in for a treat, because he's fantastic, and his name's Mark.
(Applause) I am also joined by my partner in crime, Thomas Dolby.
(Applause) This song is called "Farther than the Sun."
(Music) ♫ Strung in the wind I called you ♫ ♫ but you did not hear ... ♫ ♫ And you're a plant that needs poor soil ♫ ♫ and I have treated you too well ♫ ♫ to give up flowers ... ♫ ♫ Oh, I have been too rich for you ... ♫ ♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫ ♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫ ♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ... ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ spinning figures ♫ ♫ you cannot see me ♫ ♫ You cannot see me ... ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫ ♫ I'll believe it ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ The sea, it freezes over ... ♫ ♫ to trap the light ♫ ♫ And I'm in love with being in love ♫ ♫ and you were never quite the one ♫ ♫ In Gerda's eyes ♫ ♫ Fragments of what you've become ♫ ♫ And all the moths that fly at night ♫ ♫ believe electric light is bright ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ Spinning figures ♫ ♫ You cannot see me, no ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫ ♫ I'll believe it ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫ ♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫ ♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ Spinning figures ♫ ♫ You cannot see me, no ... ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough, I'll believe it ♫ (Applause) Thank you very much.
I grew up in a very small village in Canada, and I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic.
I had a really hard time in school.
In fact, my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school.
I ran away.
I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali, and there I met my incredible wife, Cynthia, and together, over 20 years, we built an amazing jewelry business.
It was a fairy tale, and then we retired.
Then she took me to see a film that I really didn't want to see.
I have four kids, and even if part of what he says is true, they're not going to have the life that I had.
And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities.
It's a tiny, little island -- 60 miles by 90 miles.
It has an intact Hindu culture.
Cynthia and I were there.
We had had a wonderful life there, and we decided to do something unusual.
And here it is: it's called the Green School.
The classrooms have no walls.
The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard.
At Green School, the children are smiling -- an unusual thing for school, especially for me.
And for me it's just the idea that, if this little girl graduates as a whole person, chances are she'll demand a whole world -- a whole world -- to live on.
Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box.
The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials.
So if this gentleman had had a holistic education, would he be sitting there?
Would he have had more possibilities in his life?
The classrooms have natural light.
And when the natural breeze isn't enough, the kids deploy bubbles, but not the kind of bubbles you know.
So we basically turned the box into a bubble.
And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future.
We pay the bill at the end of the month, but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren.
They know they can control their world.
We're on the grid. We're not proud of it.
But an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar.
When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night.
And you know what these are.
And as long as we're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water -- you're all really smart, just do the math.
How many people times how much water.
These are compost toilets, and nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal.
And they work. People use them. People are okay.
We had to replace them with recyclable plastic.
The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms.
So we had some good ideas: we took old automobile windshields, put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard.
Green School sits in south-central Bali, and it's on 20 acres of rolling garden.
There's an amazing river traveling through it, and you can see there how we manage to get across the river.
I met a father the other day; he looked a little crazed.
I said, "Welcome to Green School."
I asked him, "Why?"
He said, "I had a dream once about a green school, and I saw a picture of this green school, I got on an airplane.
In August I'm bringing my sons."
But more than that, people are building green houses around Green School, so their kids can walk to school on the paths.
And people are bringing their green industries, hopefully their green restaurants, to the Green School.
No pavement.
These are volcanic stones laid by hand.
There are no sidewalks.
The sidewalks are gravel. They flood when it rains, but they're green.
This is the school buffalo.
He's planning to eat that fence for dinner.
All the fences at Green School are green.
And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca.
They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips.
Landscaping.
These young ladies are living in a rice culture, but they know something that few people know in a rice culture.
They're part of the rice cycle and these skills will be valuable for them in their future.
This young man is picking organic vegetables.
We feed 400 people lunch every day and it's not a normal lunch. There's no gas.
Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know.
The food is incredible.
Green School is a place of pioneers, local and global.
And it's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world.
The kids are from 25 countries.
Green School is going into its third year with 160 children.
It's a school where you do learn reading -- one of my favorites -- writing -- I was bad at it -- arithmetic.
But you also learn other things.
You practice ancient Balinese arts.
The kids love it.
The mothers aren't quite convinced.
(Laughter) We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local, what does "local" mean?
Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese, and this was a really big commitment.
And we were right.
And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund, because these kids will be Bali's next green leaders.
The teachers are as diverse as the student body, and the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up.
A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture.
A woman came from Africa with music.
And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global, green leaders.
The Green School effect -- we don't know what it is.
But what's happening, our learning-different kids -- dyslexic -- we've renamed them prolexic -- are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms.
It's bamboo.
It's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof.
When the architects came, they brought us these things, and you've probably seen things like this.
(Laughter) We squashed it, we rethought it, but mainly we renamed it "the heart of school," and that changed everything forever.
It's a double helix.
It has administrators in it and many, many other things.
And the problem of building it -- when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, "What's this?"
So we built big models.
And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand.
It was chaos.
And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do, so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building and when the scaffolding came down, we realized that we had a cathedral, a cathedral to green, and a cathedral to green education.
The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it.
It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful.
Is this doable in your community?
Green School is a model we built for the world.
And you just have to follow these simple, simple rules: be local, let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build.
So, Mr. Gore, thank you.
You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future.
And if you're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world, please come and see us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon.
It's a place of myth and legend.
It's a place marked on ancient maps as "here be monsters."
It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed.
Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep.
We are talking about the high seas.
The "high seas" is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet.
With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth.
It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all.
But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it.
So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stakeholders in the high seas in the dark.
And then finally, we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect.
So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above -- that area in the darker blue.
To me, as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent.
Some of the problems that we have to confront are that the current international laws -- for example, shipping -- provide more protection to the areas closest to shore.
For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simply goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the further you are from shore.
So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all.
And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community.
Conditional access: You can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules.
And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify.
Well, as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process.
So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling.
Instead of "go anywhere, do anything you want," we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm.
In 2009, when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected.
This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection.
But what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas are governed, to create a new regime.
So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true, blue perspective for this beautiful planet.
Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas.
The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there.
But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region.
But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square-kilometer now floating in the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food.
The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat.
It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs.
But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection.
It's actually a bay.
So anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas.
But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem.
The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food.
So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off-limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime.
Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area -- potentially year-round habitat for blue whales.
There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long.
But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place.
It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season.
Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos.
Many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape.
This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area.
That is, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative.
It's protecting five World Heritage sites.
Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present.
So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas.
So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these World Heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half-the-World Heritage Convention.
These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific Gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch.
So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up.
We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean-basin-wide.
We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean-basin-wide initiative.
We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects.
It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home.
They fly 65,000 kilometers in less than a year.
So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life.
So stay tuned for further information.
What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators; it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this flying sea cucumber have been found.
And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers.
And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hotspots.
At the same time we're saying, "Yes, we need more. We need to move forward."
But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it?
Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology.
I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space -- and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean.
We can also tag and track fishing vessels.
Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing.
It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know -- someone needs to know -- where you are and what you're doing.
So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons.
But we need to think broad-scale. We need to think globally.
We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources.
At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is that we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table, if you will, to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management.
And third is that we need to look at ocean-basin-wide management.
Many of the deep-sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean-basin-wide.
We need to better understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect.
And in order to do that, you also need ocean-basin management regimes.
So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction.
It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote.
So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas: one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist: I had a baby.
Sorry, TED.
So in the spirit of full disclosure, I brought some pictures to share.
(Laughter) I'll just say: July.
(Laughter) Zip!
(Laughter) For safety.
(Laughter) Water wings -- an inch of water.
So you can get kind of a feel for this.
So my baby, Vander, is eight years old now.
And, despite being cursed with my athletic inability, he plays soccer.
He wants to learn how to ride a unicycle.
Because this is what I do. This is what I teach.
In fact, more than four million people sustain a concussion every year, and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms.
[Concussive Force] "Starsky and Hutch"? Arguably, yes.
Forty miles an hour into a fixed barrier: 35 Gs.
A heavyweight boxer punches you straight in the face: 58 Gs.
So look to the right-hand side of the screen.
Close.
Now, when the kid on the right doesn't get up, we know they've had a concussion.
But how about the kid on the left, or the athlete that leaves the field of play?
How do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion?
The definition of concussion doesn't actually require a loss of consciousness.
It requires only a change in consciousness, and that can be any one or a number of symptoms, including feeling foggy, feeling dizzy, hearing a ringing in your ear, being more impulsive or hostile than usual.
Because I know our brains are resilient.
They're designed to recover from an injury.
If -- God forbid -- any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion, most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks.
But kids are more vulnerable to brain injury.
In fact, high-school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers, and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline.
After that first injury, their risk for second injury is exponentially greater.
From there, their risk for a third injury, greater still, and so on.
And here's the really alarming part: We don't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries.
You guys may be familiar with this research that's coming out of the NFL.
In a nutshell, this research suggests that, among retired NFL players with three or more career concussions, the incidence of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population.
So you've all seen that -- New York Times, you've seen it.
What you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by NFL wives who said, "Isn't it weird that my 46-year-old husband is forever losing his keys?"
"Isn't it weird that my 47-year-old husband is forever losing the car?"
"Isn't it weird that my 48-year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car, from the driveway?"
I may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child.
So it's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around someday.
(Laughter) So, how do we guarantee the safety of our kids?
How can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids?
Let me tell you what I've come up with.
My little boy's right there, and he's like, "She's not kidding.
She's totally not kidding."
I don't know.
You have to be familiar with the issues we're talking about today.
There are some great resources out there.
The CDC has a program, HEADS UP.
It's at CDC.gov.
The second is a resource I'm personally really proud of.
This is a great resource for student athletes, teachers, parents, professionals, athletic and coaching staff.
The second thing is: speak up.
Now, I'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should or shouldn't support, but I am going to tell you that, if it matters to you, your legislators need to know that.
Ask about what kind of protective equipment is available.
What's the budget for protective equipment?
Maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear.
Wear a helmet.
The only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening.
Recently, one of my graduate students, Tom, said, "Kim, I've decided to wear a bike helmet on the way to class."
And Tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the g-force of impact by half.
Now, I thought it was because I have this totally compelling helmet crusade, this epiphany of Tom's.
As it turns out, it occurred to Tom that a $20 helmet is a good way to protect a $100,000 graduate education.
(Laughter) So ...
Thank you.
(Applause)
I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion.
It was deep at night.
I do not remember what time it was.
I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking.
Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything.
I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion.
And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared.
I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night.
Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister.
His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.
This is not a story of a nameless survivor of war, and nameless refugees, whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our TV with tattered clothes, dirty face, scared eyes.
This is not a story of a nameless someone who lived in some war, who we do not know their hopes, their dreams, their accomplishments, their families, their beliefs, their values.
This is my story.
I was that girl.
I am another image and vision of another survivor of war.
I am that refugee, and I am that girl.
You see, I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it.
I grew up with the colors of war -- the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it.
I grew up with the sounds of war -- the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens.
These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence.
"War," a friend of mine said, "is not about sound at all.
It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity."
I have since left Iraq and founded a group called Women for Women International that ends up working with women survivors of wars.
In my travels and in my work, from Congo to Afghanistan, from Sudan to Rwanda, I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same.
It is very scary to go through that feeling of "I am about to die" or "I could die in this explosion."
But there's also the fear of losing loved ones, and I think that's even worse.
But I think the worst kind of fear is the fear -- as Samia, a Bosnian woman, once told me, who survived the four-years besiege of Sarajevo; she said, "The fear of losing the 'I' in me, the fear of losing the 'I' in me."
That's what my mother in Iraq used to tell me.
It's like dying from inside-out.
A Palestinian woman once told me, "It is not about the fear of one death," she said, "sometimes I feel I die 10 times in one day," as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets.
She said, "But it's not fair, because there is only one life, and there should only be one death."
We have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics, tactics, weapons, dollars and casualties.
How casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic.
Eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children. Oh.
Ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians.
Oh, half a million women in Rwanda get raped in 100 days.
Or, as we speak now, hundreds of thousands of Congolese women are getting raped and mutilated.
It is a chess game.
Checkmate.
We are missing a completely other side of wars.
That was her fight.
That was her resistance.
We are missing the story of Nehia, a Palestinian woman in Gaza who, the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year's war, she left out of home, collected all the flour and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have, in case there is no cease-fire the day after.
We are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars.
Do you know -- do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going?
There are two sides of war.
And in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace, we must understand war and peace from both sides.
In order for us to understand what actually peace means, we need to understand, as one Sudanese woman once told me, "Peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again."
She grew up in Sudan, in Southern Sudan, for 20 years of war, where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees.
Many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers, as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers.
So that woman walked for 20 years, so she would not be kidnapped again.
And only when there was some sort of peace, her toenails grew back again.
We need to understand peace from a toenail's perspective.
We need to understand that we cannot actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table.
And I do argue that women lead the back-line discussion, but there are also men who are excluded from that discussion.
There is no way we can talk about a lasting peace, building of democracy, sustainable economies, any kind of stabilities, if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table.
Not one, but 50 percent.
There is no way we can talk about the building of stability if we don't start investing in women and girls.
Did you know that one year of the world's military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women?
If we just reverse that distribution of funds, perhaps we could have a better lasting peace in this world.
And last, but not least, we need to invest in peace and women, not only because it is the right thing to do, not only because it is the right thing to do, for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today, but it is for the future.
She got into Women for Women International's program.
She got a support network.
She learned about her rights.
We taught her vocational and business skills. We helped her get a job.
She was earning 450 dollars. She was doing okay.
I worry that my children have hate in their hearts, and when they want to grow up, they want to fight again the killers of their father and their brother."
We need to invest in women, because that's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future.
That mother has a better chance to heal her children than any peace agreement can do.
That girl that I told you about ended up starting Women for Women International Group that impacted one million people, sent 80 million dollars, and I started this from zero, nothing, nada, [unclear].
Think of how the world can be a much better place if, for a change, we have a better equality, we have equality, we have a representation and we understand war, both from the front-line and the back-line discussion.
Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet, says, "Out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings, there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' no longer makes any sense."
I humbly add -- humbly add -- that out beyond the worlds of war and peace, there is a field, and there are many women and men [who] are meeting there.
Let us make this field a much bigger place.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I'm going to talk about work; specifically, why people can't seem to get work done at work, which is a problem we all kind of have.
So, we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort.
And they expect these people who work for them to do great work -- I would hope, at least.
So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind, unless you're working in Africa, if you're really lucky to do that -- most people have to go to an office every day.
And so these companies, they build offices.
They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff.
They fill it with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, Internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work.
It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that.
However, if you actually talk to people and even question yourself, and you ask yourself, where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done?
If you ask people the question: Where do you need to go when you need to get something done?
One is kind of a place or a location or a room.
Another one is a moving object, and a third is a time.
So here are some examples.
I've been asking people this question for about 10 years: "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?"
And then you'll hear people say, "Well, it doesn't really matter where I am, as long as it's early in the morning or late at night or on the weekends."
But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office, and they're making people go to it all the time, yet people don't do work in the office.
(Laughter) Why is that? Why is that happening?
And what you find out is, if you dig a little bit deeper, you find out that people -- this is what happens: People go to work, and they're basically trading in their work day for a series of "work moments" -- that's what happens at the office.
It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do ...
I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer.
I used the software they told me to use.
I went to these meetings I was asked to go to.
I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff.
And what you find is that, especially with creative people -- designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers -- that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done.
You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem.
And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office?
Six? Five? Four?
When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office?
Two hours? One, maybe?
Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
And this is why people choose to do work at home, or they might go to the office, but they might go to the office really early in the day, or late at night when no one's around, or they stick around after everyone's left, or go in on the weekends, or they get work done on the plane, in the car or in the train, because there are no distractions.
Now there are different kinds of distractions, but not the really bad distractions, which I'll talk about in a minute.
And this whole phenomenon of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn't work when you're interrupted, and that is sleep.
I think that sleep and work are very closely related -- not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working.
I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events.
Sleep is about sleep phases, or stages -- some people call them different things.
There are five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones.
If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again.
So you have to go back a few phases and start again.
And what ends up happening -- you might have days like this where you wake up at eight or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, "I didn't sleep very well.
I did the sleep thing -- I went to bed, I laid down, but I didn't really sleep."
People say you go "to" sleep, but you don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep; it takes a while.
I don't think anyone would say yes.
That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense, to me.
So what are the interruptions that happen at the office but not at other places?
Because in other places, you can have interruptions like the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do.
If you talk to certain managers, they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions.
They'll sometimes also say, "If I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?"
which is ridiculous, but that's one of the excuses that managers give.
And I'm one of these managers. I understand. I know how this goes.
We all have to improve on this sort of thing.
But oftentimes they'll cite distractions: "I can't let someone work at home.
They'll watch TV, or do this other thing."
You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV, when you want to turn something on, or when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk.
Now, managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and other websites, and in fact, they'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work.
I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here?
That's why people aren't getting work done, because they're on Facebook and Twitter?
Today's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, these things are just modern-day smoke breaks.
No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does anyone care if someone goes to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube here and there?
Those aren't the real problems in the office.
Those are the real problems in the modern office today.
Now what's interesting is, if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work, like at home, in the car, on a plane, late at night, or early in the morning, you don't find managers and meetings.
You find a lot of other distractions, but not managers and meetings.
They have to check in: "Hey, how's it going?
That's kind of bad.
And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work.
(Laughter) We all know this to be true, and you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees.
I don't care what you're doing, you've got to stop doing it, so you can have this meeting."
I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop?
What if they're thinking about something important, or doing important work?
All of a sudden you tell them they have to stop doing that to do something else.
So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually.
Because meetings aren't work.
Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later.
So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting, which leads to another meeting.
There's often too many people in the meetings, and they're very, very expensive to the organization.
Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting, but that's not true, unless there's only one person.
If there are 10 people, it's a 10-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting.
It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one-hour meeting, which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes.
But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour.
And so we tend to fill these times up when things should go really quickly.
So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially at offices.
These things don't exist outside of the office.
What can managers do -- enlightened managers, hopefully -- what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office."
But they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that?
I have three suggestions to share with you.
We've all heard of the Casual Friday thing.
I don't know if people still do that.
But how about "No-talk Thursdays?"
(Laughter) Pick one Thursday once a month, and cut it in half, just the afternoon -- I'll make it easy for you.
So just the afternoon, one Thursday.
First Thursday of the month, just the afternoon, nobody in the office can talk to each other.
And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other.
Giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work.
It's better than a computer, better than a new monitor, better than new software, or whatever people typically use.
Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable.
If you try that, I think you'll agree, and hopefully you can do it more often.
So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other.
Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff -- tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that.
You can quit the email app; you can't quit your boss.
You can quit I.M.; you can't hide your manager.
Because work, like sleep, happens in phases.
(Laughter) Today's Friday, usually people have meetings on Monday.
Just don't have it.
And you'll find out that everything will be just fine.
All these discussions and decisions you thought you had to make at this one time at 9 a.m. on Monday, just forget about them, and things will be fine.
I think it'll all pay off in the end.
(Applause)
(Applause) Thank you very much.
All these houses are built from between 70 and 80 percent recycled material, stuff that was headed to the mulcher, the landfill, the burn pile.
It was all just gone.
This is the first house I built.
This double front door here with the three-light transom, that was headed to the landfill.
Have a little turret there.
And then these buttons on the corbels here -- right there -- those are hickory nuts.
And these buttons there -- those are chicken eggs.
This is going up into the turret.
I got that staircase for 20 dollars, including delivery to my lot.
(Laughter) Then, looking up in the turret, you see there are bulges and pokes and sags and so forth.
Well, if that ruins your life, well, then, you shouldn't live there.
(Laughter) This is a laundry chute.
And this right here is a shoe last -- those are those cast-iron things you see at antique shops.
So I had one of those, so I made some low-tech gadgetry, where you just stomp on the shoe last, and then the door flies open and you throw your laundry down.
And then if you're smart enough, it goes on a basket on top of the washer.
(Laughter) This is a bathtub I made, made out of scrap two-by-four.
Started with the rim, and then glued and nailed it up into a flat, corbeled it up and flipped it over, then did the two profiles on this side.
(Laughter) Then, this faucet here is just a piece of Osage orange.
It looks a little phallic, but after all, it's a bathroom.
(Laughter) This is a house based on a Budweiser can.
It doesn't look like a can of beer, but the design take-offs are absolutely unmistakable: the barley hops design worked up into the eaves, then the dentil work comes directly off the can's red, white, blue and silver.
Then, on the can it says, "This is the famous Budweiser beer, we know of no other beer, blah, blah, blah."
So we changed that and put, "This is the famous Budweiser house. We don't know of any other house ..."
This is a deadbolt.
It's a fence from a 1930s shaper, which is a very angry woodworking machine.
And they gave me the fence, but they didn't give me the shaper, so we made a deadbolt out of it.
(Laughter) The shower is intended to simulate a glass of beer.
But I get a lot of toilets, and so you just dispatch a toilet with a hammer, and then you have lumpy tiles.
(Laughter) Then, this panel of glass is the same panel of glass that occurs in every middle-class front door in America.
So don't put it in the front door; put it somewhere else.
It's a pretty panel of glass.
Then, another bathroom upstairs.
Put it in the shower, or in the closet, but not in the foyer.
Then, somebody gave me a bidet, so it got a bidet.
(Laughter) This little house here, those branches there are made out of Bois d'arc or Osage orange.
These pictures will keep scrolling as I talk a little bit.
In order to do what I do, you have to understand what causes waste in the building industry.
Our housing has become a commodity, and I'll talk a little bit about that.
But the first cause of waste is probably even buried in our DNA.
What it means is, for every perception we have, it needs to tally with the one like it before, or we don't have continuity, and we become a little bit disoriented.
So I can show you an object you've never seen before.
Oh, that's a cell phone.
But you've never seen this one before.
What you're doing is sizing up the pattern of structural features, and then you go through your databanks: Cell phone. Oh! That's a cell phone.
If I took a bite out of it, you'd go, "Wait a second.
(Laughter) "That's not a cell phone.
That's one of those new chocolate cell phones."
(Laughter) That's how we process information.
If we have a wall of windowpanes and one pane is cracked, we go, "Oh, dear. That's cracked. Let's repair it.
Let's take it out and throw it away so nobody can use it and put a new one in."
Because Gestalt psychology emphasizes recognition of pattern over parts that comprise a pattern.
Repetition creates pattern.
If I can repeat anything, I have the possibility of a pattern, from hickory nuts and chicken eggs, shards of glass, branches.
The second cause is, Friedrich Nietzsche, along about 1885, wrote a book titled "The Birth of Tragedy."
And in there, he said cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives: on the one hand, we have an Apollonian perspective, which is very crisp and premeditated and intellectualized and perfect.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a Dionysian perspective, which is more given to the passions and intuition, tolerant of organic texture and human gesture.
The Dionysian personality takes the picture and goes: (Laughter) That's the difference.
Dead center John Dewey.
Apollonian mindset creates mountains of waste.
"Oops. Scratch. Dumpster."
The third thing is arguably -- The Industrial Revolution started in the Renaissance with the rise of humanism, then got a little jump start along about the French Revolution.
So now we have standardized materials.
Well, trees don't grow two inches by four inches, eight, ten and twelve feet tall.
(Laughter) We create mountains of waste.
And they're doing a pretty good job there in the forest, working all the byproduct of their industry -- with OSB and particle board and so forth and so on -- but it does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption.
If you buy a two-by-four and it's not straight, you can take it back.
The fourth thing is labor is disproportionately more expensive than materials.
Well, that's just a myth.
I got a job for you as a foreman on a framing crew. Time for you to go."
And he was out there with a tape measure, going through the trash heap, looking for header material, or the board that goes over a door, thinking he'd impress his boss -- that's how we taught him to do it.
And Jim had the wherewithal to say, "You know, if you were paying me 300 dollars an hour, I can see how you might say that.
And the irony is that he wasn't very good at math.
He said that we have in our noggin the perfect idea of what we want, and we force environmental resources to accommodate that.
So we all have in our head the perfect house, the American dream, which is a house, the dream house.
You write the check, and instantly, it depreciates 30 percent.
After a year, you can't get insurance on everything you have in it, only on 70 percent.
Nothing wrong with that, unless you ask it to do what 12-Gauge wire's supposed to do, and that's what happens.
The walls are this thick.
The whole thing has the structural value of corn.
(Laughter) "So ... I thought Palm Harbor Village was over there."
It's gone now."
(Laughter) Then when they degrade, what do you do with them?
One is that all the professionals, all the tradesmen, vendors, inspectors, engineers, architects all think like this.
And then it works its way back to the consumer, who demands the same model.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can't get out of it.
Then here come the marketeers and the advertisers.
We buy stuff we didn't know we needed.
All we have to do is look at what one company did with carbonated prune juice.
(Laughter) But you know what they did?
They hooked a metaphor into it and said, "I drink Dr. Pepper ..."
(Laughter) My oh my, that makes it worse.
Then, a man named Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book titled "Being and Nothingness."
In there, he talked about the divided self.
He said human beings act differently when they know they're alone than when they know somebody else is around.
(Laughter) But as soon as you walk in, I go, "Oops! Lil' spaghetti sauce there."
Now, what I'm doing is fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life.
I feel that expectation, and so I accommodate it, and I'm living my life according to what you expect me to do.
Sometimes, we even have these formalized cultural expectations.
(Laughter) And with gated communities, we have a formalized expectation, with a homeowners' association.
Sometimes those guys are Nazis, my oh my.
Human beings are a social species.
We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions.
Wildebeests don't hang with lions, because lions eat wildebeests.
Human beings are like that.
Those kids, they'll work all summer long -- kill themselves -- so that they can afford one pair of designer jeans.
So along about September, they can stride in and go, "I'm important today. See? Don't touch my designer jeans!
You're not one of the beautiful -- See, I'm one of the beautiful people.
We have confused Maslow's hierarchy of needs, just a little bit.
Second: security. Third: relationships.
Fourth: status, self-esteem -- that is, vanity -- and we're taking vanity and shoving it down here.
We can't afford to eat anything except beans; that is, our housing has become a commodity.
That takes a little bit of nerve, and, darn it, once in a while, you fail.
But that's okay.
If failure destroys you, then you can't do this.
I fail all the time, every day, and I've had some whopping failures, I promise -- big, public, humiliating, embarrassing failures.
Everybody points and laughs, and they say, "He tried it a fifth time, and it still didn't work!
Early on, contractors come by and say, "Dan, you're a cute little bunny, but you know, this just isn't going to work.
And your instinct is to say, "Well, why don't you suck an egg?"
And I don't wear ammo belts crisscrossing my chest and a red bandana.
What do you think, honey?"
Thank you very much.
Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old.
I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system.
First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look.
It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet.
Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys.
I must admit, I used to be one of them.
I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day.
What I discovered was this is not true.
I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system.
First, there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms.
Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy.
(Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grown.
The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s.
Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity?
These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight.
Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way.
And let me tell you, corn is in everything.
(Laughter) Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow.
They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again.
Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs.
When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or run off into our waterways, poisoning our water too.
Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets.
So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things?
This is what I found out.
I discovered that there's a movement for a better way.
Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player.
I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead.
(Applause) Thank you.
And that way I can have a greater impact on the world.
This man, this "lunatic farmer," doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds.
I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices, by buying our food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we know in real life.
Some people say organic or local food is more expensive, but is it really?
With all these things I've been learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital.
I want you to know that there are farms out there -- like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee -- whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought.
Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from.
I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from.
I try to share this everywhere I go.
Not too long ago, my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal.
He asked him if he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugarcoated flakes -- you know, the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front.
My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O's cereal because Birke said he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal.
And that, my friends, is how we can make a difference one kid at a time.
So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East, of a man who left to his three sons, 17 camels.
Finally, in desperation, they went and they consulted a wise old woman.
So then, they had 18 camels.
The second son took his third -- a third of 18 is six.
They had one camel left over.
They gave it back to the wise old woman.
(Laughter) Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in.
They start off like 17 camels, no way to resolve it.
Somehow, what we need to do is step back from those situations, like that wise old woman, look at the situation through fresh eyes and come up with an 18th camel.
Finding that 18th camel in the world's conflicts has been my life passion.
I basically see humanity a bit like those three brothers.
We're all one family.
We know that scientifically, thanks to the communications revolution, all the tribes on the planet -- all 15,000 tribes -- are in touch with each other.
And it's a big family reunion.
And yet, like many family reunions, it's not all peace and light.
There's a lot of conflict, and the question is: How do we deal with our differences?
How do we deal with our deepest differences, given the human propensity for conflict and the human genius at devising weapons of enormous destruction?
As I've spent the last better part of three decades, almost four, traveling the world, trying to work, getting involved in conflicts ranging from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Chechnya to Venezuela -- some of the most difficult conflicts on the face of the planet -- I've been asking myself that question.
And I think I've found, in some ways, what is the secret to peace.
It's us who act as a surrounding community around any conflict, who can play a constructive role.
About 20 years ago, I was in South Africa, working with the parties in that conflict, and I had an extra month, so I spent some time living with several groups of San Bushmen.
I was curious about them, about the way in which they resolve conflict.
Because, after all, within living memory, they were hunters and gatherers, living pretty much like our ancestors lived for maybe 99 percent of the human story.
So how do they deal with their differences?
It may take two days, three days, four days, but they don't rest until they find a resolution or better yet -- a reconciliation.
Well, that system is, I think, probably the system that kept us alive to this point, given our human tendencies.
That system, I call "the third side."
Because if you think about it, normally when we think of conflict, when we describe it, there's always two sides -- it's Arabs versus Israelis, labor versus management, husband versus wife, Republicans versus Democrats.
But what we don't often see is that there's always a third side, and the third side of the conflict is us, it's the surrounding community, it's the friends, the allies, the family members, the neighbors.
And we can play an incredibly constructive role.
Perhaps the most fundamental way in which the third side can help is to remind the parties of what's really at stake.
For the sake of the kids, for the sake of the family, for the sake of the community, for the sake of the future, let's stop fighting for a moment and start talking.
Because, the thing is, when we're involved in conflict, it's very easy to lose perspective.
It's very easy to react.
(Laughter) And so the third side reminds us of that.
The third side helps us go to the balcony, which is a metaphor for a place of perspective, where we can keep our eyes on the prize.
Some years ago, I was involved as a facilitator in some very tough talks between the leaders of Russia and the leaders of Chechnya.
There was a war going on, as you know.
And we met in the Hague, in the Peace Palace, in the same room where the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal was taking place.
And the talks got off to a rather rocky start when the vice president of Chechnya began by pointing at the Russians and said, "You should stay right here in your seats, because you're going to be on trial for war crimes."
And then he turned to me and said, "You're an American.
Look at what you Americans are doing in Puerto Rico."
And my mind started racing, "Puerto Rico? What do I know about Puerto Rico?"
I started reacting.
(Laughter) But then, I tried to remember to go to the balcony.
We're here to see if we can figure out a way to stop the suffering and the bloodshed in Chechnya."
The conversation got back on track.
That's the role of the third side, to help the parties go to the balcony.
Now let me take you, for a moment, to what's widely regarded as the world's most difficult conflict, or the most impossible conflict, the Middle East.
Question is: where's the third side there?
Now, I don't pretend to have an answer to the Middle East conflict, but I think I've got a first step -- literally, a first step -- something that any one of us could do as third-siders.
Let me just ask you one question first.
How many of you in the last years have ever found yourself worrying about the Middle East and wondering what anyone could do?
And here, it's so far away.
Why do we pay so much attention to this conflict?
Is it the number of deaths?
No, it's because of the story, because we feel personally involved in that story.
Whether we're Christians, Muslims or Jews, religious or non-religious, we feel we have a personal stake in it.
Stories matter; as an anthropologist, I know that.
Stories are what we use to transmit knowledge.
They give meaning to our lives.
That's what we tell here at TED, we tell stories.
Stories are the key.
And so my question is -- yes, let's try and resolve the politics there in the Middle East, but let's also take a look at the story.
Let's try to get at the root of what it's all about.
Let's see if we can apply the third side to it.
Now, as anthropologists, we know that every culture has an origin story.
That man, of course, was Abraham.
And what he stood for was unity, the unity of the family; he's the father of us all.
But it's not just what he stood for, it's what his message was.
His basic message was unity too, the interconnectedness of it all, the unity of it all.
And his basic value was respect, was kindness toward strangers.
That's what he's known for, his hospitality.
So in that sense, he's the symbolic third side of the Middle East.
He's the one who reminds us that we're all part of a greater whole.
Today, we face the scourge of terrorism.
What is terrorism?
Terrorism is basically taking an innocent stranger and treating them as an enemy whom you kill in order to create fear.
What's the opposite of terrorism?
It's taking an innocent stranger and treating them as a friend whom you welcome into your home, in order to sow and create understanding or respect, or love.
So what if, then, you took the story of Abraham, which is a third-side story, what if that could be -- because Abraham stands for hospitality -- what if that could be an antidote to terrorism?
What if that could be a vaccine against religious intolerance?
How would you bring that story to life?
That's powerful, but people need to experience the story.
They need to be able to live the story.
And that's what comes to the first step here.
Because the simple way to do that is: you go for a walk.
You go for a walk in the footsteps of Abraham.
Because walking has a real power.
You know, as an anthropologist, walking is what made us human.
Now if I were to come to you face-to-face and come this close to you, you would feel threatened.
Who fights while they walk?
That's why in negotiations, often, when things get tough, people go for walks in the woods.
People said, "That's crazy. You can't.
And so we studied the idea at Harvard.
And then a few years ago, a group of us, about 25 of us from 10 different countries, decided to see if we could retrace the footsteps of Abraham, going from his initial birthplace in the city of Urfa in Southern Turkey, Northern Mesopotamia.
And we then took a bus and took some walks and went to Harran, where, in the Bible, he sets off on his journey.
Then we crossed the border into Syria, went to Aleppo, which, turns out, is named after Abraham.
We went to Damascus, which has a long history associated with Abraham.
We then came to Northern Jordan, to Jerusalem -- which is all about Abraham -- to Bethlehem, and finally, to the place where he's buried, in Hebron.
We showed it could be done.
How many of you have ever had that experience?
That's what you discover as you go into these villages in the Middle East where you expect hostility, and you get the most amazing hospitality, all associated with Abraham: "In the name of Father Ibrahim, let me offer you some food."
So what we discovered is that Abraham is not just a figure out of a book for those people; he's alive, he's a living presence.
They've begun to walk in Israel and Palestine, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Syria.
Men, women, young people, old people -- more women than men, actually, interestingly.
For those who can't walk, who are unable to get there right now, people started to organize walks in cities, in their own communities.
In Cincinnati, for instance, they organized a walk from a church to a mosque to a synagogue and all had an Abrahamic meal together.
In São Paulo, Brazil, it's become an annual event for thousands of people to run in a virtual Abraham Path Run, uniting the different communities.
The media love it; they really adore it.
They lavish attention on it because it's visual and it spreads the idea, this idea of Abrahamic hospitality, of kindness towards strangers.
And just a couple weeks ago, there was an NPR story on it.
Last month, there was a piece in the Manchester Guardian about it, two whole pages.
And they quoted a villager who said, "This walk connects us to the world."
He said, "It was like a light that went on in our lives -- it brought us hope."
But it's not just about psychology; it's about economics.
Because as people walk, they spend money.
She's desperately poor.
She's partially blind, her husband can't work, she's got seven kids.
But what she can do is cook.
And so she's begun to cook for some groups of walkers who come through the village and have a meal in her home.
They sit on the floor -- she doesn't even have a tablecloth.
She makes the most delicious food, that's fresh from the herbs in the surrounding countryside.
And so more and more walkers have come, and lately she's begun to earn an income to support her family.
And so she told our team there, she said, "You have made me visible in a village where people were once ashamed to look at me."
There are literally hundreds of those kinds of communities across the Middle East, across the path.
I have a little acorn here that I picked up while I was walking on the path earlier this year.
Now, the acorn is associated with the oak tree, of course -- grows into an oak tree, which is associated with Abraham.
The path right now is like an acorn; it's still in its early phase.
What would the oak tree look like?
When I think back to my childhood, a good part of which I spent, after being born here in Chicago, I spent in Europe.
If you had been in the ruins of, say, London in 1945, or Berlin, and you had said, "Sixty years from now, this is going to be the most peaceful, prosperous part of the planet," people would have thought you were certifiably insane.
But they did it, thanks to a common identity, Europe, and a common economy.
So my question is, if it can be done in Europe, why not in the Middle East?
Why not, thanks to a common identity, which is the story of Abraham, and thanks to a common economy that would be based, in good part, on tourism?
So let me conclude, then, by saying that in the last 35 years, as I've worked in some of the most dangerous, difficult and intractable conflicts around the planet, I have yet to see one conflict that I felt could not be transformed.
It's not easy, of course.
But it's possible.
It could be done anywhere.
It depends on us taking the third side.
So let me invite you to consider taking the third side, even as a very small step.
Just go up to someone who's from a different culture, a different country, a different ethnicity -- some difference -- and engage them in a conversation.
That's walking Abraham's Path.
(Laughter) So let me just leave you with three things.
One is, the secret to peace is the third side.
The third side is us.
Each of us, with a single step, can take the world, can bring the world a step closer to peace.
If we're able to unite our third-side webs of peace, we can even halt the lion of war.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So, what is capitalism?
Capitalism, fundamentally, is a series of marketplaces.
You can have a marketplace for lemonade, a marketplace for lemons, a marketplace for trucks that transport lemons, a marketplace that fuels those trucks, marketplaces that sell wood to build lemonade stands.
And I'm here to argue that this is because capitalism, in the modern iteration, is largely misunderstood.
In my view, capitalism should not be thought of as an ideology, but instead should be thought of as an operating system.
Think of your iPhone.
Your iPhone merges hardware with software.
Apps and hardware.
Now think about all the hardware as the physical reality all around you, and think of the apps as entrepreneurial activity, creative energy.
And in-between, you have an operating system.
As you have advances in hardware, you have advances in software.
It needs to be patched, it needs to be updated, new releases have to happen.
And all of these things have to happen symbiotically.
And this is why, fundamentally, when you think about it as an operating system, it devolves the language of ideology away from what traditional defenders of capitalism think.
But even if you go to the constitution, you'll notice, before the founders even got to the First Amendment -- with free speech, free religion, free press, they thought about patents and copyright.
They talked about the government's role in promoting arts and sciences.
It's the reason why I could not start a search engine tomorrow called Goggle.
(Laughter) Google doesn't own Gs, but I couldn't do it because there could be some confusion.
So even property rights have ambiguity built into them.
And by 1900, you have other types of property that come into being.
For instance, imagine that in 1900, you owned 100 acres of land someplace in the Midwest.
It's very easy to see where your fence ends, your neighbor's property begins.
Does it end at 1,000 feet, 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet?
Now all of a sudden, it was very much relevant whether your land ends at 1,000 feet in the sky, 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet.
And you have to have someone arbitrate that.
And indeed, that's exactly what happened.
And five or ten years from now, when Amazon wants to deliver a package over your house to your neighbor from that UPS truck, we're going to have to decide: Does you property end at five feet, 10 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet?
Where does it end?
It's an operating system.
A few years after the Wright brothers figured out flight, human beings started using more and more cars.
And all of a sudden, the regulatory system -- the operating system -- had to be patched to all of a sudden address the safety of consumers.
That the consumers of vehicles were presenting danger to horses, other pedestrians, trolleys, what have you.
And all of a sudden, the drivers of these automobiles had to have driver's licenses, eye exams, registered motor vehicles, speed limits, rules of the road, so that horses, pedestrians, could coexist with cars.
It had to be backwards compatible.
So a new invention had to basically fit advances from the past.
Similarly, five or ten years from now, we're going to see the same thing with self-driving cars -- coexisting with human-driven cars.
The reason why this is important, is in 10 years, another thing is going to happen beyond drones and self-driving cars, but you're going to see the most valuable economy in the world -- the largest economy in the world -- is going to be a country run by communists.
The Chinese seem to be very good at capitalism.
And this is going to have fundamental problems and present an identity crisis for the United States.
Because for a long time, free markets coincided with liberties such as free speech, free press, free religion.
And this is a very unique thing in the American experience.
And this is why it's very important to think of American capitalism as an operating system and not as an ideology.
Because when you think about it as an ideology, you can have good politics make for very, very bad policy.
That market outcomes and democratic voices and battles for votes can end up stifling progress.
So over the next few years, as this political cycle plays out, you're going to see American democracy rise to meet the challenges that capitalism poses and modernity poses.
And I ask policymakers to think about -- decoupling ideology from economics, and think about how good policy can ultimately become good politics.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And I would like to know what the audience is, and so who of you ever ate insects?
That's quite a lot.
(Laughter) But still, you're not representing the overall population of the Earth.
(Laughter) Because there's 80 percent out there that really eats insects.
But this is quite good.
Why not eat insects? Well first, what are insects?
Insects are animals that walk around on six legs.
There's six million species of insects on this planet, six million species.
There's a few hundreds of mammals -- six million species of insects.
In fact, if we count all the individual organisms, we would come at much larger numbers.
In fact, of all animals on Earth, of all animal species, 80 percent walks on six legs.
But if we would count all the individuals, and we take an average weight of them, it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kilograms for each of you and me on Earth.
That means that in terms of biomass, insects are more abundant than we are, and we're not on a planet of men, but we're on a planet of insects.
Insects are not only there in nature, but they also are involved in our economy, usually without us knowing.
There was an estimation, a conservative estimation, a couple of years ago that the U.S. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year.
And so I looked up what the economy was paying for the war in Iraq in the same year.
It was 80 billion U.S. dollars.
Well we know that that was not a cheap war.
What do they do?
A third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants.
Small animals eat insects.
Even larger animals eat insects.
But the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals, still larger animals.
There's quite a lot of people that are eating insects.
And here you see me in a small, provincial town in China, Lijiang -- about two million inhabitants.
If you go out for dinner, like in a fish restaurant, where you can select which fish you want to eat, you can select which insects you would like to eat.
And they prepare it in a wonderful way.
And here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars, locusts, bee pupae -- delicacies.
And you can eat something new everyday.
There's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe.
That's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we're eating, like a cow or a pig or a sheep.
More than 1,000 species -- an enormous variety.
Well we've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally, but I can tell you that every one of you is eating insects, without any exception.
You're eating at least 500 grams per year.
What are you eating?
Tomato soup, peanut butter, chocolate, noodles -- any processed food that you're eating contains insects, because insects are here all around us, and when they're out there in nature they're also in our crops.
Some fruits get some insect damage.
Those are the fruits, if they're tomato, that go to the tomato soup.
But there's tomatoes that end up in a soup, and as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency, there can be all kinds of things in there, no problem.
In fact, why would we put these balls in the soup, there's meat in there anyway?
(Laughter) In fact, all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of.
So anything is a good protein source already.
Now you may say, "Okay, so we're eating 500 grams just by accident."
The surimi sticks [of] crabmeat, or is being sold as crab meat, is white fish that's being dyed with cochineal.
Cochineal is a product of an insect that lives off these cacti.
It's being produced in large amounts, 150 to 180 metric tons per year in the Canary Islands in Peru, and it's big business.
One gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros.
One gram of gold is 30 euros.
So it's a very precious thing that we're using to dye our foods.
Now the situation in the world is going to change for you and me, for everyone on this Earth.
The human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially.
Where, at the moment, we have something between six and seven billion people, it will grow to about nine billion in 2050.
That means that we have a lot more mouths to feed, and this is something that worries more and more people.
There was an FAO conference last October that was completely devoted to this.
How are we going to feed this world?
And if you look at the figures up there, it says that we have a third more mouths to feed, but we need an agricultural production increase of 70 percent.
And that's especially because this world population is increasing, and it's increasing, not only in numbers, but we're also getting wealthier, and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat.
And meat, in fact, is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production.
Our diet consists, [in] some part, of animal proteins, and at the moment, most of us here get it from livestock, from fish, from game.
And we eat quite a lot of it.
In the developed world it's on average 80 kilograms per person per year, which goes up to 120 in the United States and a bit lower in some other countries, but on average 80 kilograms per person per year.
In the developing world it's much lower.
It's 25 kilograms per person per year.
But it's increasing enormously.
In China in the last 20 years, it increased from 20 to 50, and it's still increasing.
So if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average, and a third of the world population is living in China and in India, we're having an enormous demand on meat.
And of course, we are not there to say that's only for us, it's not for them.
They have the same share that we have.
Now to start with, I should say that we are eating way too much meat in the Western world.
But then there's a lot of problems that come with meat production, and we're being faced with that more and more often.
The first problem that we're facing is human health.
Pigs are quite like us.
They're even models in medicine, and we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human.
That means that pigs also share diseases with us.
This has happened in the Netherlands in the 1990s during the classical swine fever outbreak.
You get a new disease that can be deadly.
We eat insects -- they're so distantly related from us that this doesn't happen.
So that's one point for insects.
(Laughter) And there's the conversion factor.
With 10 kilograms of input, you can get either one or nine kg. of output.
So that's two points for insects.
(Laughter) And there's the environment.
If we take 10 kilograms of food -- (Laughter) and it results in one kilogram of beef, the other nine kilograms are waste, and a lot of that is manure.
So less waste.
Furthermore, per kilogram of manure, you have much, much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure.
So you have less waste, and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung.
So that's three points for insects.
(Laughter) Now there's a big "if," of course, and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality.
Well there have been all kinds of analyses and in terms of protein, or fat, or vitamins, it's very good.
In fact, it's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment.
And even in terms of calories, it is very good.
One kilogram of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs, or six Big Macs.
So that's four points for insects.
(Laughter) I can go on, and I could make many more points for insects, but time doesn't allow this.
So the question is, why not eat insects?
Even if you don't like it, you'll have to get used to this because at the moment, 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock.
That's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding, but it's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported.
We can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests, but there's a limitation very soon.
And if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent, we're not going to make it that way.
And then 80 percent of the world already eats insects, so we are just a minority -- in a country like the U.K., the USA, the Netherlands, anywhere.
On the left-hand side, you see a market in Laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night.
On the right-hand side you see a grasshopper.
So people there are eating them, not because they're hungry, but because they think it's a delicacy.
In fact, we have delicacy that's very much like this grasshopper: shrimps, a delicacy being sold at a high price.
Who wouldn't like to eat a shrimp?
There are a few people who don't like shrimp, but shrimp, or crabs, or crayfish, are very closely related.
In fact, a locust is a "shrimp" of the land, and it would make very good into our diet.
So why are we not eating insects yet?
Well that's just a matter of mindset.
We're not used to it, and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us.
That's why we're changing the perception of insects.
And I'm working very hard with my colleague, Arnold van Huis, in telling people what insects are, what magnificent things they are, what magnificent jobs they do in nature.
And in fact, without insects, we would not be here in this room, because if the insects die out, we will soon die out as well.
(Laughter) So we have to get used to the idea of eating insects.
There are entrepreneurs in the Netherlands that produce them, and one of them is here in the audience, Marian Peeters, who's in the picture.
And maybe by 2020, you'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you're going to eat.
And they're being made in the most wonderful ways.
A Dutch chocolate maker.
(Music) (Applause) So there's even a lot of design to it.
(Laughter) Well in the Netherlands, we have an innovative Minister of Agriculture, and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry.
So why not eat insects?
You should try it yourself.
A couple of years ago, we had 1,750 people all together in a square in Wageningen town, and they ate insects at the same moment, and this was still big, big news.
I think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects, because it's just a normal way of doing.
So you can try it yourself today, and I would say, enjoy.
And I'm going to show to Bruno some first tries, and he can have the first bite.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Look at them first. Look at them first.
Marcel Dicke: It's all protein.
And it looks delicious.
They just make it [with] nuts or something.
MD: Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey - extraordinarily rewarding journey, actually - which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis.
As a child, I had two passions.
One was a passion for rodents.
I had all kinds of rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, squirrels.
(Laughter) I also had a passion for Africa.
Growing up in a multicultural environment, we had African students in the house, and I learned about their stories, so different backgrounds, dependency on imported know-how, goods, services, exuberant cultural diversity.
I became an industrial engineer, engineer in product development, and I focused on appropriate detection technologies, actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries.
I started working in the industry, but I wasn't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear, extracting and manufacturing mode.
We're talking '95 now.
Princess Diana is announcing on TV that landmines form a structural barrier to any development, which is really true.
Actually, there was an appeal worldwide for new detectors sustainable in the environments where they're needed to produce, which is mainly in the developing world.
Why would you choose rats?
And actually, our product -- what you see here.
There, the animal finds a mine.
Very, very simple.
Very sustainable in this environment.
And that's how it works.
Very, very simple.
Now why would you use rats?
Rats have been used since the '50s last century, in all kinds of experiments.
They're extremely sensitive to smell.
Now how do we communicate with rats?
A clicker, which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors.
First of all, we associate the click sound with a food reward, which is smashed banana and peanuts together in a syringe.
Once the animal knows this, we make the task a bit more difficult.
In the next step, animals learn to find real mines in real minefields.
They are tested and accredited according to International Mine Action Standards, just like dogs have to pass a test.
This consists of 400 square meters.
There's a number of mines placed blindly, and the team of trainer and their rat have to find all the targets.
If the animal does that, it gets a license as an accredited animal to be operational in the field -- just like dogs, by the way.
This is our team in Mozambique: one Tanzanian trainer, who transfers the skills to these three Mozambican fellows.
But with this small investment in a rat capacity, we have demonstrated in Mozambique that we can reduce the cost-price per square meter up to 60 percent of what is currently normal -- two dollars per square meter, we do it at $1.18, and we can still bring that price down.
Question of scale.
We have a demonstration site in Mozambique.
They have signed the pact for peace and treaty in the Great Lakes region, and they endorse hero rats to clear their common borders of landmines.
But let me bring you to a very different problem.
And there's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine, but worldwide last year, almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection.
Microscopy, the standard WHO procedure, reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability.
And if, however, you are detected very early, diagnosed early, treatment can start, and even in HIV-positives, it makes sense.
is "tering," which, etymologically, refers to the smell of tar.
So what we did is we collected some samples -- just as a way of testing -- from hospitals, trained rats on them and see if this works, and wonder, well, we can reach 89 percent sensitivity, 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row.
So how does it work?
You have a cassette with 10 samples.
Here it's already at the third sample.
This is a positive sample.
And by doing so, very fast, we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive, which are negative.
Just as an indication, whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day, a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only.
A cage like this -- (Applause) A cage like this -- provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats -- a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 samples.
I just want to briefly highlight, the blue rods are the scores of microscopy only at the five clinics in Dar es Salaam on a population of 500,000 people, where 15,000 reported to get a test done.
And by just presenting the samples once more to the rats and looping those results back, we were able to increase case detection rates by over 30 percent.
Knowing that a missed patient by microscopy infects up to 15 people, healthy people, per year, you can be sure that we have saved lots of lives.
At least our hero rats have saved lots of lives.
The way forward for us is now to standardize this technology.
So, to standardize this.
Here is a first prototype of our camera rat, which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims after earthquake and so on.
It is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult, expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks, and doing that with a local resource, plenty available.
And to respectfully harmonize with them in order to foster a sustainable world.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
A few years ago, I found myself looking for the most cost-effective way to be stylish.
So naturally, I wound up at my local thrift store, a wonderland of other people's trash that was ripe to be plucked to become my treasure.
Now, I wasn't just looking for your average off-the-secondhand-rack vintage T-shirt to wear.
So to make sure that I was getting the most out of the things I was finding, I bought a sewing machine so I could tailor the 90's-style garments that I was finding, to fit a more contemporary aesthetic.
I've been tailoring and making my own clothes from scratch ever since, so everything in my closet is uniquely my own.
But as I was sorting through the endless racks of clothes at these thrift stores, I started to ask myself, what happens to all the clothes that I don't buy?
I work in the fashion industry on the wholesale side, and I started to see some of the products that we sell end up on the racks of these thrift stores.
So the question started to work its way into my work life, as well.
I did some research and I pretty quickly found a very scary supply chain that led me to some pretty troubling realities.
It turned out that the clothes I was sorting though at these thrift stores represented only a small fraction of the total amount of garments that we dispose of each year.
In the US, only 15 percent of the total textile and garment waste that's generated each year ends up being donated or recycled in some way, which means that the other 85 percent of textile and garment waste end up in landfills every year.
Now, I want to put this into perspective, because I don't quite think that the 85 percent does the problem justice.
This means that almost 13 million tons of clothing and textile waste end up in landfills every year in just the United States alone.
This averages out to be roughly 200 T-shirts per person ending up in the garbage.
In Canada, we throw away enough clothing to fill the largest stadium in my home town of Toronto, one that seats 60,000 people, with a mountain of clothes three times the size of that stadium.
Now, even with this, I still think that Canadians are the more polite North Americans, so don't hold it against us.
(Laughter) What was even more surprising was seeing that the fashion industry is the second-largest polluter in the world behind the oil and gas industry.
This is an important comparison to make.
I don't want to defend the oil and gas industry but I'd be lying if I said I was surprised to hear they were the number one polluter.
Because maintaining that status quo is the opposite of what the fashion industry stands for.
The unfortunate reality is, not only do we waste a lot of the things we do consume, but we also use a lot to produce the clothes that we buy each year.
On average, a household's purchase of clothing per year requires 1,000 bathtubs of water to produce.
A thousand bathtubs of water per household, per year.
That's a lot of water.
It seems that the industry that always has been and probably always will be on the forefront of design, creates products that are designed to be comfortable, designed to be trendy and designed to be expressive but aren't really designed to be sustainable or recyclable for that matter.
But I think that can change.
And I think to get started, all we have to do is start to design clothes to be recyclable at the end of their life.
But as a 24-year-old thrift store aficionado armed with a sewing machine, if I were to very humbly posit one perspective, it would be to approach clothing design kind of like building with Lego.
It's modular in its nature.
Clothing design as it stands today is very rarely modular.
Take this motorcycle jacket as an example.
It's a pretty standard jacket with its buttons, zippers and trim.
But in order for us to efficiently recycle a jacket like this, we need to be able to easily remove these items and quickly get down to just the fabric.
Once we have just the fabric, we're able to break it down by shredding it and getting back to thread level, make new thread that then gets made into new fabric and ultimately new clothing, whether it be a new jacket or new T-shirts, for example.
But the complexity lies with all of these extra items, the buttons, the zippers and the trim.
Because in reality, these items are actually quite difficult to remove.
So in many cases it requires more time or more money to disassemble a jacket like this.
In some cases, it's just more cost-effective to throw it away rather than recycle it.
But I think this can change if we design clothes in a modular way to be easily disassembled at the end of their lives.
We could redesign this jacket to have a hidden wireframe, kind of like the skeleton of a fish, that holds all important items together.
This invisible fish-bone structure can have all of these extra items, the zippers and the buttons and the trim, sewn into it and then attached to the fabric.
So at the end of the jacket's life, all you have to do is remove its fish bone and the fabric comes with it a lot quicker and a lot easier than before.
Now, recycling clothing is definitely one piece of the puzzle.
But if we want to take fixing the environmental impact that the fashion industry has more seriously, then we need to take this to the next step and start to design clothes to also be compostable at the end of their lives.
For most of the types of clothes we have in our closet the average lifespan is about three years.
Now, I'm sure there's many of us that have gems in our drawers that are much older than that, which is great.
Because being able to extend the life of a garment by even only nine months reduces the waste and water impact that that garment has by 20 to 30 percent.
But fashion is fashion.
Which means that styles are always going to change and you're probably going to be wearing something different than you were today eight seasons from now, no matter how environmentally friendly you want to be.
But lucky for us, there are some items that never go out of style.
I'm talking about your basics -- your socks, underwear, even your pajamas.
We're all guilty of wearing these items right down to the bone, and in many cases throwing them in the garbage because it's really difficult to donate your old ratty socks that have holes in them to your local thrift store.
But what if we were able to compost these items rather than throw them in the trash bin?
The environmental savings could be huge, and all we would have to do is start to shift more of our resources to start to produce more of these items using more natural fibers, like 100 percent organic cotton.
Now, recycling and composting are two critical priorities.
Currently, 10 to 20 percent of the harsh chemical dye that we use end up in water bodies that neighbor production hubs in developing nations.
The tricky thing is that these harsh chemicals are really effective at keeping a garment a specific color for a long period of time.
It's these harsh chemicals that keep that bright red dress bright red for so many years.
What if we were able to use spices and herbs to dye our clothes?
There's countless food options that would allow for us to stain material, but these stains change color over time.
This would be pretty different than the clothes that were dyed harshly with chemicals that we're used to.
But dyeing clothes naturally this way would allow for us to make sure they're more unique and environmentally friendlier.
Fashion today is all about individuality.
It's about managing your own personal appearance to be just unique enough to be cool.
These days, everybody has the ability to showcase their brand their personal style, across the world, through social media.
The pocket-sized billboards that we flick through on our Instagram feeds are chock-full of models and taste-makers that are showcasing their individuality through their personal microbrands.
But what could be more personalized, more unique, than clothes that change color over time?
People have been buying and wearing ripped jeans for years.
So this would just be another example of clothes that exist in our wardrobe that evolve with us over our lives.
This shirt, for example, is one that, much to the dismay of my mother and the state of her kitchen, I dyed at home, using turmeric, before coming here today.
So it's unique, but more importantly, it's naturally dyed.
Now, I'm not suggesting that everybody dye their clothes in their kitchen sink at home.
But if we were able to apply this or a similar process on a commercial scale, then our need to rely on these harsh chemical dyes for our clothes could be easily reduced.
The 2.4-trillion-dollar fashion industry is fiercely competitive.
So the business that can provide a product at scale while also promising its customers that each and every garment will become more unique over time will have a serious competitive advantage.
The rise of e-commerce services, like Indochino, a bespoke suiting platform, and Tinker Tailor, a bespoke dress-making platform, have made customization possible from your couch.
Nike and Adidas have been mastering their online shoe customization platforms for years.
Providing individuality at scale is a challenge that most consumer-facing businesses encounter.
And at that point, it's not just about doing what's best for our environment but also what's best for the bottom line.
But we can get started by designing clothes with their death in mind.
The fashion industry is the perfect industry to experiment with and embrace change that can one day get us to the sustainable future we so desperately need.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over.
When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over.
(Laughter) When I go to a philosopher's party (Laughter) and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl.
(Laughter) And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness."
The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question.
My late, lamented friend Bob Nozick, a fine philosopher, in one of his books, "Philosophical Explanations," is commenting on the ethos of philosophy -- the way philosophers go about their business.
And he says, you know, "Philosophers love rational argument."
And he says, "It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion, and if they don't accept the conclusion, they die.
Their heads explode." The idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents.
But in fact that doesn't change people's minds at all.
It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that.
The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness.
We heard the other day that everybody's got a strong opinion about video games.
But they don't consider themselves experts on video games; they've just got strong opinions.
I'm sure that people here who work on, say, climate change and global warming, or on the future of the Internet, encounter people who have very strong opinions about what's going to happen next.
But they probably don't think of these opinions as expertise.
But with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert.
Simply by being conscious, I know all about this."
And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is!
And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself.
I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness.
Now, this nice picture shows a thought-balloon, a thought-bubble.
I think everybody understands what that means.
That's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness.
This is my favorite picture of consciousness that's ever been done.
It's a Saul Steinberg of course -- it was a New Yorker cover.
There's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along, you learn a lot about this man.
Which reminds us, as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday: what we are, what each of us is -- what you are, what I am -- is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots.
That's what we're made of.
No other ingredients at all. We're just made of cells, about 100 trillion of them.
Somehow, we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells -- not so different really from a bacterium, each one of them -- the result is this. I mean, just look at it.
The content -- there's color, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history. And somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons.
They think, "No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness."
This is a lovely book by a friend of mine named Lee Siegel, who's a professor of religion, actually, at the University of Hawaii, and he's an expert magician, and an expert on the street magic of India, which is what this book is about, "Net of Magic."
And there's a passage in it which I would love to share with you.
(Laughter) Now, that's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness.
(Laughter) Real consciousness is not a bag of tricks.
If you're going to explain this as a bag of tricks, then it's not real consciousness, whatever it is.
And, as Marvin said, and as other people have said, "Consciousness is a bag of tricks."
This means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness.
Don't tell me the answer."
A lot of people feel that way about consciousness, I've discovered.
And I'm sorry if I impose some clarity, some understanding on you.
You'd better leave now if you don't want to know some of these tricks.
But I'm not going to explain it all to you.
I'm going to do what philosophers do.
The philosopher says, "I'm going to explain to you how that's done.
You see, the magician doesn't really saw the lady in half."
And you say, "Yes, and how does he do that?"
He says, "Oh, that's not my department, I'm sorry."
(Laughter) So now I'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness.
But I'm going to try to also show you that consciousness isn't quite as marvelous -- your own consciousness isn't quite as wonderful -- as you may have thought it is.
This is something, by the way, that Lee Siegel talks about in his book.
He marvels at how he'll do a magic show, and afterwards people will swear they saw him do X, Y, and Z. He never did those things.
He didn't even try to do those things.
And the same is true of consciousness.
It's a feature-length documentary on consciousness.
Now, how can it be that there are all those changes going on, and that we're not aware of them?
Well, earlier today, Jeff Hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades, the way your eye moves around three or four times a second.
He didn't mention the speed. Your eye is constantly in motion, moving around, looking at eyes, noses, elbows, looking at interesting things in the world.
That's because the foveal part of your eye, which is the high-resolution part, is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length.
Here's a completely different effect. This is a painting by Bellotto.
It's in the museum in North Carolina.
Bellotto was a student of Canaletto's.
And I love paintings like that -- the painting is actually about as big as it is right here.
And I love Canalettos, because Canaletto has this fantastic detail, and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting.
And I started across the hall in North Carolina, because I thought it was probably a Canaletto, and would have all that in detail.
And I noticed that on the bridge there, there's a lot of people -- you can just barely see them walking across the bridge.
And I thought as I got closer I would be able to see all the detail of most people, see their clothes, and so forth.
And as I got closer and closer, I actually screamed.
There were just little artfully placed blobs of paint.
And as I walked towards the picture, I was expecting detail that wasn't there.
You're familiar with a more recent technology, which is -- There, you can get a better view of the blobs.
See, when you get close they're really just blobs of paint.
I'll just give that to you one more time.
Now, what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion?
I don't think so. Not a chance. But then, how on Earth is it done?
It's the same thing.
It's just making you expect the detail.
Let's just do this experiment very quickly.
Is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right, rotated?
Yes.
How do you know that's what you did?
(Laughter) There's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science -- various experiments started by Roger Shepherd, who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images.
Yes, it's possible to do that.
But the details of the process are still in significant controversy.
You just know that you have certain beliefs.
And they come in a certain order, at a certain time.
Well, that's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician.
Can you see it?
Well, you know, in effect, the boundary's really there, in a certain sense.
Your brain is actually computing that boundary, the boundary that goes right there.
But now, notice there are two ways of seeing the cube, right?
It's a Necker cube.
Can you see the four ways of seeing the cube?
If you're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles, some black circles, there's another way of seeing it.
As a cube, on a black background, as seen through a piece of Swiss cheese.
(Laughter) Now you can get it. These are two very different phenomena.
When you see the cube one way, behind the screen, those boundaries go away.
We don't have any trouble seeing the cube, but where does the color change?
Does your brain have to send little painters in there?
The purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who's going to paint that bit behind the curtain? No.
Your brain just lets it go. The brain doesn't need to fill that in.
And I supposed that that was just a flat truth, always true.
Look in the gray areas, and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there -- yeah, it's amazing. There's nothing there. It's no trick.
["Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes" slide] This is Ron Rensink's work, which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book.
This is change-blindness.
What you're going to see is two pictures, one of which is slightly different from the other.
You see here the red roof and the gray roof, and in between them there will be a mask, which is just a blank screen, for about a quarter of a second.
So you'll see the first picture, then a mask, then the second picture, then a mask.
And this will just continue, and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change.
And keep going, until the subject presses the button, saying, "I see the change."
So now we're going to be subjects in the experiment.
We're going to start easy. Some examples.
No trouble there.
Indeed, Rensink's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button.
2.9 seconds.
What's on the roof of that barn?
(Laughter) It's easy.
Is it a bridge or a dock?
Can you see it?
Audience: Yes.
Dan Dennett: See the shadows going back and forth? Pretty big.
So 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there.
How many engines on the wing of that Boeing?
(Laughter) Right in the middle of the picture!
Thanks very much for your attention.
What I wanted to show you is that scientists, using their from-the-outside, third-person methods, can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of, and that, in fact, you're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are.
And we're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind.
Jeff Hawkins, this morning, was describing his attempt to get theory, and a good, big theory, into the neuroscience.
And he's right. This is a problem.
Harvard Medical School once -- I was at a talk -- director of the lab said, "In our lab, we have a saying.
If you work on one neuron, that's neuroscience.
If you work on two neurons, that's psychology."
(Laughter) We have to have more theory, and it can come as much from the top down.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world.
For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today, 10 calories are taken to produce it.
That's a lot.
And it pretty much goes through eight different forms in its lifetime.
It grows and is nurtured.
It's then harvested.
It's then distributed, and distribution is a massive issue.
I basically take it, prepare it, and then people consume it -- hopefully they enjoy it.
The last stage is basically waste, and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it.
There are different types of waste.
There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy; and there's a waste of waste.
Okay, so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like.
This is the restaurant, Acorn House.
Front and back.
Floor: sustainable, recyclable.
Chairs: recycled and recyclable.
Tables: Forestry Commission.
This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood.
This bench, although it was uncomfortable for my mom -- she didn't like sitting on it, so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale -- reusing, a job that was pretty good.
I hate waste, especially walls.
The whole business is run on sustainable energy.
This is powered by wind. All of the lights are daylight bulbs.
I was experimenting with these -- I don't know if you can see it -- but there's a work surface there.
And that's a plastic polymer.
And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature.
But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins, experiment with polymers.
Will they outlive me? They probably might.
Right, here's a reconditioned coffee machine.
Now reusing is vital.
And we filter our own water.
Here's a great little example.
If you can see this orange tree, it's actually growing in a car tire, which has been turned inside out and sewn up.
It's got my compost in it, which is growing an orange tree, which is great.
This is the kitchen, which is in the same room.
Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters.
We generate quite a lot of waste.
This is the waste room.
But this story's not about eliminating it, it's about minimizing it.
I put my food waste into this dehydrating, desiccating macerator -- turns food into an inner material, which I can store and then compost later.
I compost it in this garden.
All of the soil you can see there is basically my food, which is generated by the restaurant, and it's growing in these tubs, which I made out of storm-felled trees and wine casks and all kinds of things.
Three compost bins -- go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week -- really good, makes fantastic compost.
And I tried taking the dried food waste, putting it to the worms, going, "There you go, dinner."
It was like vegetable jerky, and killed all of them.
(Laughter) What you're seeing here is a water filtration system.
This takes the water out of the restaurant, runs it through these stone beds -- this is going to be mint in there -- and I sort of water the garden with it.
So, water is a very important aspect.
If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great.
This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House -- same chairs, same tables.
But this is an electrical restaurant.
The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen.
Now it's important to understand that this room is cooled by water, heated by water, filters its own water, and it's powered by water.
It literally is Waterhouse.
This is basically air-handling.
I'm taking the temperature of the canal outside, pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism, it's turning through these amazing sails on the roof, and that, in turn, is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant, cooling them, or heating them, as the need may be.
And this is an English willow air diffuser, and that's softly moving that air current through the room.
Very advanced, no air-conditioning -- I love it.
In the canal, which is just outside the restaurant, there is hundreds of meters of coil piping.
This takes the temperature of the canal and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange.
I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it.
(Laughter) And what's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant lives on this boat -- it's off-grid; it generates all its own power.
Acorn House is the element of wood; Waterhouse is the element of water; and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to be making five restaurants based on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities.
The People's Supermarket.
So people -- i.e., perhaps, more working-class -- or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative.
This is a social enterprise, not-for-profit cooperative supermarket.
Really important.
In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world.
I'm going to get there before you.
If we don't stand up and make a difference and think about sustainable food, think about the sustainable nature of it, then we may fail.
But, I wanted to get up and show you that we can do it if we're more responsible.
Environmentally conscious businesses are doable.
They're here. You can see I've done three so far; I've got a few more to go.
I think it's important.
I think that if we reduce, reuse, refuse and recycle -- right at the end there -- recycling is the last point I want to make; but it's the four R's, rather than the three R's -- then I think we're going to be on our way.
So these three are not perfect -- they're ideas.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
I'm not quite sure whether I really want to see a snare drum at nine o'clock or so in the morning.
(Laughter) But anyway, it's just great to see such a full theater, and really, I must thank Herbie Hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation.
(Applause) One of the interesting things, of course, is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology, and what he said about listening to our young people.
And my aim, really, is to teach the world to listen.
Because you know, when you look at a piece of music, for example, if I just open my little motorbike bag -- we have here, hopefully, a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page.
And I'm being told the dynamic.
Snares on, snares off.
(Drum sounds) (Drum sounds end) And so on.
But it's the things you notice when you're not actually with your instrument that, in fact, become so interesting, and that you want to explore through this tiny, tiny surface of a drum.
So there, we experience the translation.
(Drum sounds) (Drum sounds end) (Applause) Now my career may last a little longer.
(Laughter) But in a way, you know, it's the same if I look at you and I see a nice, bright young lady with a pink top on.
But actually it's so unbelievably shallow.
However, that is simply not enough.
We have to listen to ourselves, first of all.
And you feel really quite -- believe it or not -- detached from the instrument and from the stick, even though I'm actually holding the stick quite tightly.
So in the same way that I need time with this instrument, I need time with people in order to interpret them.
If, for example, I play just a few bars of a piece of music for which I think of myself as a technician -- that is, someone who is basically a percussion player -- (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) And so on, if I think of myself as a musician -- (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) And so on.
There is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just -- (Applause) thinking about.
And I remember when I was 12 years old, and I started playing timpani and percussion, and my teacher said, "Well, how are we going to do this? You know, music is about listening."
And I said, "Yes, I agree with that, so what's the problem?"
And he said, "Well, how are you going to hear this?
How are you going to hear that?"
And I said, "Well, I think I do too, but I also hear it through my hands, through my arms, cheekbones, my scalp, my tummy, my chest, my legs and so on."
And so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums, in particular, the kettle drums, or timpani to such a narrow pitch interval, so something like -- (Marimba sounds) that of a difference.
Then gradually: (Marimba sounds) And gradually: (Marimba sounds) And it's amazing that when you do open your body up, and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through, that in fact the tiny, tiny difference -- (Marimba sounds) can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger, there.
The room we happen to be in, the amplification, the quality of the instrument, the type of sticks -- (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) Etc., etc., they're all different.
(Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) Same amount of weight, but different sound colors.
And that's basically what we are; we're just human beings, but we all have our own little sound colors, as it were, that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things.
And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, "Well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue, you know, of the future of a so-called 'deaf musician.'" And I just couldn't quite accept that.
And so therefore, I said to them, "Well, look, if you refuse -- if you refuse me through those reasons, as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound -- then we have to think very, very hard about the people you do actually accept."
And not only that, what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the United Kingdom.
And every single entry had to be listened to, experienced, and then, based on the musical ability, then that person could either enter or not.
And so therefore, this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions, and I have to say, many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world.
The interesting thing about this as well, though -- (Applause) is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound -- which is basically all of us -- we well know that music really is our daily medicine.
I say "music," but actually I mean "sound."
Because some of the extraordinary things I've experienced as a musician -- when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges, who may not be able to control his movements, who may be deaf, who may be blind, etc., etc. -- suddenly, if that young lad sits close to this instrument, and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba, and you play something that's so incredibly organ-like, almost -- I don't really have the right sticks, perhaps -- but something like this -- let me change -- (Soft marimba sounds) (Soft marimba sounds end) Something that's so unbelievably simple -- but he would be experiencing something that I wouldn't be, because I'm on top of the sound.
If there were no resonators on here, we would have: (Marimba sounds) So he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows wouldn't experience, those of you in the back few rows wouldn't experience, either.
Every single one of us, depending on where we're sitting, will experience this sound quite, quite differently.
And of course, being the participator of the sound, and that is, starting from the idea of what type of sound I want to produce, for example, this sound: (No sound) Can you hear anything?
In the same way that when I see a tree moves, then I imagine that tree making a rustling sound.
(Soft marimba sounds) (Soft marimba sounds end) It may be that in other halls, they're simply not going to experience that at all, and so therefore, my level of soft, gentle playing may have to be -- (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) Do you see what I mean?
So, because of this explosion in access to sound, especially through the Deaf community, this has not only affected how music institutions, how schools for the deaf treat sound, and not just as a means of therapy -- although, of course, being a participator of music, that definitely is the case as well -- but it's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together.
There are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics, dare I say.
The tiniest, softest, softest sound to something that is so broad, so huge, so incredible.
There's always something: it may sound good up there, may not be so good there; it may be great there, but terrible up there; maybe terrible over there, but not too bad there, etc., etc.
And this is quite interesting.
I cannot give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls, but it's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years, we've been saying, "Well, how on earth can they experience music? They're deaf."
If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk.
In a year's time, it could be two extra steps.
Those are hugely important aspects to think about.
So when we do listen to each other, it's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills, to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber, to stop the judgment.
For me, as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music, it's very easy for me to say, "Oh yes, I like that piece. No, I don't like that piece," and so on.
It may be that the chemistry isn't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music, but that doesn't mean I have the right to say it's a bad piece of music.
And you know, one of the great things about being a musician is that it is so unbelievably fluid.
So there are no rules, no right, no wrong, this way, that way.
Now, I don't mean just the sound; I mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves.
Audience: No.
(Laughter) Try again. Try again: snow.
Rain.
The interesting thing here, though, is that I asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question.
Now -- great imagination, thank you very much.
Maybe I can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds."
This is how we experience music.
We experience thunder, thunder, thunder.
Listen, listen, listen.
I remember my teacher, when I first started, my very first lesson, I was all prepared with sticks, ready to go.
And instead of him saying, "OK, Evelyn, please, feet slightly apart, arms at a more or less 90-degree angle, sticks in a more or less V shape, keep this amount of space here, etc.
I no longer required the sticks.
I wasn't allowed to have these sticks.
I had to basically look at this particular drum, see how it was made, what these little lugs did, what the snares did.
(Drum sounds) Experimented with my body.
Experimented with all sorts of things.
(Drum sounds) (Drum sounds end) And of course, I returned with all sorts of bruises.
(Laughter) But nevertheless, it was such an unbelievable experience, because where on earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music?
So we never, ever dealt with actual study books.
So for example, one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player as opposed to a musician, is basically, straightforward single-stroke rolls.
(Drum sounds) Like that, and then we get a little faster -- (Drum sounds) and a little faster -- (Drum sounds) and a little faster, and so on and so forth.
Single-stroke rolls.
And that's exactly what he did.
And interestingly, the older I became, and when I became a full-time student at a so-called "music institution," all of that went out of the window.
We had to study from study books.
And constantly, the question, "Well, why? Why? What is this relating to?
I need to play a piece of music."
You know, I need to say something.
Why am I practicing paradiddles?
I need to have the reason, and the reason has to be by saying something through the music."
And by saying something through music, which basically is sound, we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people.
But I don't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage.
That's up to you, when you walk through a hall, because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things.
So please, the next time you go to a concert, just allow your body to open up, allow your body to be this resonating chamber.
They're experiencing that rawness there.
But yet they're experiencing something so unbelievably pure, which is before the sound is actually happening.
But thank you very much for having me!
(Applause) (Applause ends) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause)
It sure used to be a lot easier to be from Iceland, because until a couple of years ago, people knew hardly anything about us, and I could basically come out here and say only good things about us.
It actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on eBay.
(Laughter) Ninety-nine pence was the starting price and no reserve.
Then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends, including President Obama.
None of your media got it right.
(Laughter) But I'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly.
Why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm?
And I'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country.
But I can surely tell you that in my country, much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector, and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems.
We weren't known as the typical "women" women in Iceland up until then.
So it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then.
And we got a great group of people to join us -- principled people with great skills, and investors with a vision and values to match ours.
And together we got through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients.
And although I want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that -- and also there's a factor of luck and timing -- we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values.
So let me share with you our values.
We believe in risk awareness.
We believe that you should always understand the risks that you're taking, and we will not invest in things we don't understand.
But in 2007, at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures, it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market.
And, although we do work in the financial sector, where Excel is king, we believe in emotional capital.
And we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence.
It is actually people that make money and lose money, not Excel spreadsheets.
So while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers, we are willing to do it with a long-term view, and we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter.
So we like to see profits, plus positive social and environmental benefits, when we invest.
But it wasn't just about the values, although we are convinced that they matter.
It was also about a business opportunity.
It's the female trend, and it's the sustainability trend, that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come.
The whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men; it is actually about women being different from men, bringing different values and different ways to the table.
Now that we've had all that happen, and we have all this data out there telling us that it's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables, will we see business and finance change?
Will government change?
I have days that I believe, but I have days that I'm full of doubt.
Have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us?
(Applause) Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity -- to do the same things over and over again, hoping for a different outcome.
So I guess the world is insane, because I see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again, hoping that this time it's not going to collapse upon us.
I want to see more revolutionary thinking, and I remain hopeful.
Like TED, I believe in people.
And I know that consumers are becoming more conscious, and they are going to start voting with their wallets, and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside, if they don't do it from the inside.
But I'm more of the revolutionary, and I should be; I'm from Iceland.
We have a long history of strong, courageous, independent women, ever since the Viking age.
And I want to tell you when I first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society, I was seven -- it happened to be my mother's birthday -- October 24, 1975.
(Laughter) They marched into the center of Reykjavik, and they put women's issues onto the agenda.
And some say this was the start of a global movement.
For me it was the start of a long journey, but I decided that day to matter.
Five years later, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as their president -- first female to become head of state, single mom, a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed.
And at one of the campaign sessions, she had one of her male contenders allude to the fact that she couldn't become president -- she was a woman, and even half a woman.
(Applause) So I've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who I am and where I am today.
But in spite of that, I went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman.
We are not the same, and it's great. Because of our differences, we create and sustain life.
So we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge.
We need to start embracing the beauty of balance.
So let's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there, and let's start thinking about doing good business.
That's how we change the world. That's the only sustainable future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx.
I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box."
See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man.
Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man.
This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay.
They're 11 and 12.
Kendall's 15 months older than Jay.
(Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying.
Now Kendall on the other hand -- and like I said, he's only 15 months older than her -- he'd come to me crying, it's like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off.
I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, "Why are you crying?
Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you.
Why are you crying?"
And he's five years old.
My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers.
We lived in New York City, as I said.
We lived in the Bronx at the time, and the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city.
And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city.
My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine, and no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying.
He didn't want cry in front of me, but he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women.
I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box.
I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?"
Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad; I'd be mad; I'd be angry, or something like that.
No, the boy said to me -- the boy said to me, "It would destroy me."
And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?"
(Applause) It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old.
At this time we're living in the Bronx, and in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny.
He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old -- younger guys.
He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys?"
He was a troubled kid.
His mother had died from a heroin overdose.
He was being raised by his grandmother.
His father wasn't on the set.
His grandmother had two jobs.
He was home alone a lot.
He was cool. He was fine.
That's what the sisters said, "He was fine."
He was having sex.
So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something -- just playing around, doing something -- I don't know what.
He looks out his window; he calls me upstairs; he said, "Hey Anthony."
They called me Anthony growing up as a kid.
"Hey Anthony, come on upstairs."
So I run right upstairs.
Now I immediately knew what he meant.
Two things: One, I never had sex.
We don't talk about that as men.
You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex.
For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two.
(Laughter) The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any.
Women are objects, especially sexual objects.
Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that.
So, like my mother would say, make a long story short, I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes."
I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila.
She's 16 years old.
She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher-functioning at times than others.
We had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her.
Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her.
Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her.
Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.
So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same.
I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything, and I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something.
So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do; I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room.
So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room, and lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up.
And they asked me how was it, and I say to them, "It was good," and I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.
Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught.
But I knew I felt bad about what was happening.
It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.
See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men.
We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it.
So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay.
The world I envision for her -- how do I want men to be acting and behaving?
I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men -- that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman. (Applause) I remember asking a nine-year-old boy, I asked a nine-year-old boy, "What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?"
He said to me, "I would be free."
(Applause)
It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey.
Let me begin with my parents.
I'm a product of this visionary mother and father.
Many years ago, when I was born in the '50s -- '50s and '60s didn't belong to girls in India.
They belonged to boys.
They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married.
My family, in my city, and almost in the country, was unique.
We were four girls and no boys.
And my parents were part of a landed property family.
He sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education.
As I've said, when we're born, we don't choose our parents, and when we go to school, we don't choose our school.
Children don't choose a school.
I grew up like this, and so did my other three sisters.
And my father used to say at that time, "I'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world."
I don't know if he really meant [that], but it happened.
I'm the only one who's left in India.
One is a British, another is an American and the third is a Canadian.
So we are four of us in four corners of the world.
And since I said they're my role models, I followed two things which my father and mother gave me.
Out of 100, 90 are your creation.
It's like a death of a relative, or a cyclone, or a hurricane, or an earthquake.
But that response comes out of those 90 points.
Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry, and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities.
This is what comes next.
I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman, a woman with indefatigable stamina, because I used to run for my tennis titles, etc.
But I joined the Indian Police Service, and then it was a new pattern of policing.
But I decided no, it's a power to prevent, because that's what I learned when I was growing up.
How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10?
I didn't want to make it different from the men, but it was different, because this was the way I was different.
And I redefined policing concepts in India.
I'm going to take you on two journeys, my policing journey and my prison journey.
This was the first time a prime minister of India was given a parking ticket.
(Laughter) That's the first time in India, and I can tell you, that's the last time you're hearing about it.
It'll never happen again in India, because now it was once and forever.
And the rule was, because I was sensitive, I was compassionate, I was very sensitive to injustice, and I was very pro-justice.
That's the reason, as a woman, I joined the Indian Police Service.
I had other options, but I didn't choose them.
This is about tough policing, equal policing.
Normally police officers don't want to do prison.
They sent me to prison to lock me up, thinking, "Now there will be no cars and no VIPs to be given tickets to.
Here I got a prison assignment.
This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals.
Obviously, it was.
But 10,000 men, of which only 400 were women -- 10,000 -- 9,000 plus about 600 were men.
Terrorists, rapists, burglars, gangsters -- some of them I'd sent to jail as a police officer outside.
And then how did I deal with them?
And I said, "Do you pray?" When I looked at the group, I said, "Do you pray?"
They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit.
I said, "Do you pray?"
I said, "Do you pray? Do you want to pray?"
They said, "Yes." I said, "All right, let's pray."
I prayed for them, and things started to change.
I started this with community support.
Government had no budget.
You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class.
These are hundreds of classes.
We converted this into an ashram -- from a prison to an ashram through education.
I think that's the bigger change.
It was the beginning of a change.
Teachers were prisoners. Teachers were volunteers.
Now if I'd not done that, it would have been a hellhole.
That's the second landmark.
I want to show you some moments of history in my journey, which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world.
Secondly, this concept.
This was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners.
You want to know more about this, go and see this film, "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana."
And write to me on KiranBedi.com, and I'll respond to you.
Let me show you the next slide.
I took the same concept of mindfulness, because, why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison?
It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control.
This worked.
This is a feedback box called a petition box.
This was a magic box.
This is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison.
If you see somebody in the blue -- yeah, this guy -- he was a prisoner, and he was a teacher.
And you see, everybody's busy. There was no time to waste.
Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India.
That's a big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India.
Friends, you will hear a lot about it.
That's the movement at the moment I'm driving, and that's the movement and ambition of my life.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We are now going through an amazing and unprecedented moment where the power dynamics between men and women are shifting very rapidly, and in many of the places where it counts the most, women are, in fact, taking control of everything.
In my mother's day, she didn't go to college.
And now, for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do the same.
Women, for the first time this year, became the majority of the American workforce.
And they're starting to dominate lots of professions -- doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants.
Over 50 percent of managers are women these days, and in the 15 professions projected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two of them are dominated by women.
So the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men, believe it or not, and these economic changes are starting to rapidly affect our culture -- what our romantic comedies look like, what our marriages look like, what our dating lives look like, and our new set of superheroes.
For a long time, this is the image of American manhood that dominated -- tough, rugged, in control of his own environment.
In American fertility clinics, 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys.
And in places where you wouldn't think, such as South Korea, India and China, the very strict patriarchal societies are starting to break down a little, and families are no longer strongly preferring first-born sons.
If you think about this, if you just open your eyes to this possibility and start to connect the dots, you can see the evidence everywhere.
You can see it in college graduation patterns, in job projections, in our marriage statistics, you can see it in the Icelandic elections, which you'll hear about later, and you can see it on South Korean surveys on son preference, that something amazing and unprecedented is happening with women.
The '20s and the '60s also come to mind.
But the difference is that, back then, it was driven by a very passionate feminist movement that was trying to project its own desires, whereas this time, it's not about passion, and it's not about any kind of movement.
This is really just about the facts of this economic moment that we live in.
The 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end, believe it or not, and that's why I talk about the "end of men."
Now all you men out there, this is not the moment where you tune out or throw some tomatoes, because the point is that this is happening to all of us.
I myself have a husband and a father and two sons whom I dearly love.
But if we do take account of it, then I think it will go much more smoothly.
I first started thinking about this about a year and a half ago.
I was reading headlines about the recession just like anyone else, and I started to notice a distinct pattern -- that the recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was affecting women.
And I remembered back to about 10 years ago when I read a book by Susan Faludi called "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man," in which she described how hard the recession had hit men, and I started to think about whether it had gotten worse this time around in this recession.
And I realized that two things were different this time around.
And second, that the story was no longer just about the crisis of men, but it was also about what was happening to women.
And now look at this second set of slides.
These are headlines about what's been going on with women in the next few years.
And labor statistics: women take up most managerial jobs.
This second set of headlines -- you can see that families and marriages are starting to shift.
And look at that last headline -- young women earning more than young men.
That particular headline comes to me from a market research firm.
But in fact, they found something very surprising.
It was young, single women who were the major purchasers of houses in the neighborhood.
And so they decided, because they were intrigued by this finding, to do a nationwide survey.
So they spread out all the census data, and what they found, the guy described to me as a shocker, which is that in 1,997 out of 2,000 communities, women, young women, were making more money than young men.
So here you have a generation of young women who grow up thinking of themselves as being more powerful earners than the young men around them.
And in a moment, I'm going to show you a graph, and what you'll see on this graph -- it begins in 1973, just before women start flooding the workforce, and it brings us up to our current day.
And basically what you'll see is what economists talk about as the polarization of the economy.
Now what does that mean?
This has been going on for 40 years now.
But this process is affecting men very differently than it's affecting women.
You'll watch them both drop out of the middle class, but see what happens to women and see what happens to men.
Watch what happens to the women. Watch what happens to the men.
What it's about is that the economy has changed a lot.
We used to have a manufacturing economy, which was about building goods and products, and now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy.
Those two economies require very different skills, and as it happens, women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been.
It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn't have a college degree, but you had a specific set of skills, and with the help of a union, you could make yourself a pretty good middle-class life.
But that really isn't true anymore.
What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills.
You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly, to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be, and those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing.
You would be very hierarchical.
You would tell everyone below you what to do.
But that's not what an ideal leader is like now.
If you read management books now, a leader is somebody who can foster creativity, who can get his -- get the employees -- see, I still say "his" -- who can get the employees to talk to each other, who can basically build teams and get them to be creative.
And those are all things that women do very well.
Women enter the workplace at the top, and then at the working class, all the new jobs that are created are the kinds of jobs that wives used to do for free at home.
So those are all the jobs that are growing, and those are jobs that women tend to do.
Now one day it might be that mothers will hire an out-of-work, middle-aged, former steelworker guy to watch their children at home, and that would be good for the men, but that hasn't quite happened yet.
To see what's going to happen, you can't just look at the workforce that is now, you have to look at our future workforce.
And here the story is fairly simple.
Women are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men.
Why? This is a real mystery.
People have asked men, why don't they just go back to college, to community college, say, and retool themselves, learn a new set of skills?
They're used to thinking of themselves as providers, and they can't seem to build the social networks that allow them to get through college.
So for some reason men just don't end up going back to college.
And what's even more disturbing is what's happening with younger boys.
Now the boy crisis is this idea that very young boys, for whatever reason, are doing worse in school than very young girls, and people have theories about that.
Is it because we have an excessively verbal curriculum, and little girls are better at that than little boys?
Or that we require kids to sit still too much, and so boys initially feel like failures?
And some people say it's because, in 9th grade, boys start dropping out of school.
Because I'm writing a book about all this, I'm still looking into it, so I don't have the answer.
They learn much faster.
HR: So there you go.
Certainly, when I was in college, I had certain expectations about my life -- that my husband and I would both work, and that we would equally raise the children.
But these college girls had a completely different view of their future.
And this was kind of a shocker to me.
And then here's my favorite quote from one of the girls: "Men are the new ball and chain."
And I think the reason it has a sting is because thousands of years of history don't reverse themselves without a lot of pain, and that's why I talk about us all going through this together.
They were men who had been contractors, or they had been building houses and they had lost their jobs after the housing boom, and they were in this group because they were failing to pay their child support.
And the instructor was up there in the class explaining to them all the ways in which they had lost their identity in this new age.
He was telling them they no longer had any moral authority, that nobody needed them for emotional support anymore, and they were not really the providers.
So who were they?
And what he did was he wrote down on the board "$85,000," and he said, "That's her salary," and then he wrote down "$12,000."
"That's your salary.
So who's the man now?" he asked them.
She's the man now."
And the other reason it's kind of urgent is because it's not just happening in the U.S.
It's happening all over the world.
In India, poor women are learning English faster than their male counterparts in order to staff the new call centers that are growing in India.
Over several decades, South Korea built one of the most patriarchal societies we know about.
They basically enshrined the second-class status of women in the civil code.
But over the '70s and '80s, the South Korea government decided they wanted to rapidly industrialize, and so what they did was, they started to push women into the workforce.
And now look at the chart.
So you can see that these economic changes really do have a strong effect on our culture.
Now because we haven't fully processed this information, it's kind of coming back to us in our pop culture in these kind of weird and exaggerated ways, where you can see that the stereotypes are changing.
And they come up in lots of different forms.
Then we have our Bud Light guy who's the happy couch potato.
And then here's a shocker: even America's most sexiest man alive, the sexiest man alive gets romantically played these days in a movie.
And then on the female side, you have the opposite, in which you have these crazy superhero women.
You've got Lady Gaga.
You've got our new James Bond, who's Angelina Jolie.
Even Helen Mirren can hold a gun these days.
And so it feels like we have to move from this place where we've got these uber-exaggerated images into something that feels a little more normal.
So for a long time in the economic sphere, we've lived with the term "glass ceiling."
And we have a lot of skill and experience, but it's a trick, so how are you supposed to prepare to get through that glass ceiling?
And also, "shattering the glass ceiling" is a terrible phrase.
It's definitely terrifying to stand at the foot of a high bridge, but it's also pretty exhilarating, because it's beautiful up there, and you're looking out on a beautiful view.
And the great thing is there's no trick like with the glass ceiling.
There's no hole in the middle that you're going to fall through.
And the great thing is that you can take anyone along with you.
You can bring your husband along.
You can bring your friends, or your colleagues, or your babysitter to walk along with you.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)
I have been teaching for a long time, and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students.
In 1931, my grandmother -- bottom left for you guys over here -- graduated from the eighth grade.
It was in the books; it was inside the teacher's head; and she needed to go there to get the information, because that's how you learned.
And he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher, stored it in the only portable memory he has, which is inside his own head, and take it with him, because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world.
When I was a kid, we had a set of encyclopedias at my house.
Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas, small town Kansas, where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely, small-town, rural Kansas school district, where I was teaching my favorite subject, American government.
Kids in the 12th grade: not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system.
Year two: learned a few things -- had to change my tactic.
I didn't tell them what to do or how to do it.
They produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates.
They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well, and really had this robust experiential learning.
The older teachers -- more experienced -- looked at me and went, "Oh, there she is. That's so cute. She's trying to get that done."
(Laughter) "She doesn't know what she's in for."
But I knew that the kids would show up, and I believed it, and I told them every week what I expected out of them.
I had to just sit and watch.
It was theirs. It was experiential. It was authentic.
It meant something to them.
And they will step up.
From Kansas, I moved on to lovely Arizona, where I taught in Flagstaff for a number of years, this time with middle school students.
Luckily, I didn't have to teach them American government.
But what was interesting about this position I found myself in in Arizona, was I had this really extraordinarily eclectic group of kids to work with in a truly public school, and we got to have these moments where we would get these opportunities.
And one opportunity was we got to go and meet Paul Rusesabagina, which is the gentleman that the movie "Hotel Rwanda" is based after.
And he was going to speak at the high school next door to us.
We could walk there. We didn't even have to pay for the buses.
There was no expense cost. Perfect field trip.
The problem then becomes how do you take seventh- and eighth-graders to a talk about genocide and deal with the subject in a way that is responsible and respectful, and they know what to do with it.
And so we chose to look at Paul Rusesabagina as an example of a gentleman who singularly used his life to do something positive.
I asked them to produce a little movie about it.
Nobody really knew how to make these little movies on the computer, but they were into it. And I asked them to put their own voice over it.
The last question of the assignment is: how do you plan to use your life to positively impact other people?
The things that kids will say when you ask them and take the time to listen is extraordinary.
Fast-forward to Pennsylvania, where I find myself today.
I teach at the Science Leadership Academy, which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia.
We are a nine through 12 public school, but we do school quite differently.
So what do you do when the information is all around you?
In Philadelphia we have a one-to-one laptop program, so the kids are bringing in laptops with them everyday, taking them home, getting access to information.
And here's the thing that you need to get comfortable with when you've given the tool to acquire information to students, is that you have to be comfortable with this idea of allowing kids to fail as part of the learning process.
To ask them to always have the right answer doesn't allow them to learn.
My students produced these info-graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill.
They were a little uncomfortable with it, because we'd never done this before, and they didn't know exactly how to do it.
They can talk -- they're very smooth, and they can write very, very well, but asking them to communicate ideas in a different way was a little uncomfortable for them.
Let's see what we can do.
And this is the work of the student that consistently did it.
And when I sat the students down, I said, "Who's got the best one?"
Didn't read anything. "There it is."
And they're like, "Oh, that one wasn't so awesome."
It asked them to create for themselves, and it allowed them to fail, process, learn from.
And when we do another round of this in my class this year, they will do better this time, because learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process.
They will not disappoint.
This is one of my favorite photos, because this was taken on Tuesday, when I asked the students to go to the polls.
This is Robbie, and this was his first day of voting, and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that.
The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark.
And everything that everybody is talking about today isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test, and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer.
We know how to do this better, and it's time to do better.
(Applause)
I started teaching MBA students 17 years ago.
And when I run into them, a funny thing happens.
I don't remember just their faces; I also remember where exactly in the classroom they were sitting.
And I remember who they were sitting with as well.
This is not because I have any special superpowers of memory.
The reason I can remember them is because they are creatures of habit.
They find their twins, they stay with them for the whole year.
Now, the danger of this for my students is they're at risk of leaving the university with just a few people who are exactly like them.
They're going to squander their chance for an international, diverse network.
How could this happen to them?
My students are open-minded.
They come to business school precisely so that they can get great networks.
Now, all of us socially narrow in our lives, in our school, in work, and so I want you to think about this one.
How many of you here brought a friend along for this talk?
Are they of the same nationality as you?
Are they of the same gender as you?
Are they of the same race?
(Laughter) The muscle people are together, and the people with the same hairstyles and the checked shirts.
We all do this in life.
We all do it in life, and in fact, there's nothing wrong with this.
Mark Granovetter, the sociologist, had a famous paper "The Strength of Weak Ties," and what he did in this paper is he asked people how they got their jobs.
And what he learned was that most people don't get their jobs through their strong ties -- their father, their mother, their significant other.
They instead get jobs through weak ties, people who they just met.
The network is redundant.
Your weak ties -- people you just met today -- they are your ticket to a whole new social world.
The thing is that we have this amazing ticket to travel our social worlds, but we don't use it very well.
Sometimes we stay awfully close to home.
And today, what I want to talk about is: What are those habits that keep human beings so close to home, and how can we be a little bit more intentional about traveling our social universe?
So let's look at the first strategy.
What I mean by a social search engine is how you are finding and filtering your friends.
I want to get a new job. I want to get a great opportunity."
And I say, "Well, that's really hard, because your networks are so fundamentally predictable."
It's that predictable.
Go to a bathroom on a different floor.
The other side of it is how we are actually filtering.
The minute we meet someone, we are looking at them, we meet them, we are initially seeing, "You're interesting."
I want you to take a look around this room, and I want you to identify the least interesting person that you see, and I want you to connect with them over the next coffee break.
And I want you to go even further than that.
What you are doing with this exercise is you are forcing yourself to see what you don't want to see, to connect with who you don't want to connect with, to widen your social world.
We've got to fight our choices.
And my students hate this, but you know what I do?
I won't let them sit in their favorite seats.
I move them around from seat to seat.
I force them to work with different people so there are more accidental bumps in the network where people get a chance to connect with each other.
And we studied exactly this kind of an intervention at Harvard University.
Maybe people are initially uncomfortable with those roommates, but the amazing thing is, at the end of a year with those students, they're able to overcome that initial discomfort.
They're able to find deep-level commonalities with people.
It's a little more subtle.
It's "go to the coffee room."
When researchers talk about social hubs, what makes a social hub so special is you can't choose; you can't predict who you're going to meet in that place.
And so with these social hubs, the paradox is, interestingly enough, to get randomness, it requires, actually, some planning.
In one university that I worked at, there was a mail room on every single floor.
What that meant is that the only people who would bump into each other are those who are actually on that floor and who are bumping into each other anyway.
At another university I worked at, there was only one mail room, so all the faculty from all over that building would run into each other in that social hub.
And my students give me some wonderful examples.
They tell me when they're doing pickup basketball games, or my favorite example is when they go to a dog park.
They tell me it's even better than online dating when they're there.
So the real thing that I want you to think about is we've got to fight our filters.
We've got to make ourselves a little more inefficient, and by doing so, we are creating a more imprecise social search engine.
And you're creating that randomness, that luck that is going to cause you to widen your travels, through your social universe.
Sometimes we actually buy ourselves a second-class ticket to travel our social universe.
Let me give you an example of that.
A few years ago, I had a very eventful year.
That year, I managed to lose a job, I managed to get a dream job overseas and accept it, I had a baby the next month, I got very sick, I was unable to take the dream job.
And so in a few weeks, what ended up happening was, I lost my identity as a faculty member, and I got a very stressful new identity as a mother.
What I also got was tons of advice from people.
And the advice I despised more than any other advice was, "You've got to go network with everybody."
When your psychological world is breaking down, the hardest thing to do is to try and reach out and build up your social world.
What we did was we looked at high and low socioeconomic status people, and we looked at them in two situations.
And what we found was that our lower socioeconomic status people, when they were comfortable, were actually reaching out to more people.
They thought of more people.
They were also less constrained in how they were networking.
They were thinking of more diverse people than the higher-status people.
Then we asked them to think about maybe losing a job.
We threatened them.
And once they thought about that, the networks they generated completely differed.
They thought of fewer people.
They thought of less-diverse people.
The higher socioeconomic status people thought of more people, they thought of a broader network, they were positioning themselves to bounce back from that setback.
Imagine that you were being spontaneously unfriended by everyone in your network other than your mom, your dad and your dog.
(Laughter) This is essentially what we are doing at these moments when we need our networks the most.
Imagine -- this is what we're doing. We're doing it to ourselves.
We are mentally compressing our networks when we are being harassed, when we are being bullied, when we are threatened about losing a job, when we feel down and weak.
We are closing ourselves off, isolating ourselves, creating a blind spot where we actually don't see our resources.
How can we overcome this?
Two simple strategies.
One strategy is simply to look at your list of Facebook friends and LinkedIn friends just so you remind yourself of people who are there beyond those that automatically come to mind.
Did you say things like, "Oh, you're a great resource," or "I owe you one," "I'm obligated to you."
All of this language represents a metaphor.
It's a metaphor of economics, of a balance sheet, of accounting, of transactions.
And when we think about human relations in a transactional way, it is fundamentally uncomfortable to us as human beings.
Look at words like "please," "thank you," "you're welcome" in other languages.
Look at the literal translation of these words.
Each of these words is a word that helps us impose upon other people in our social networks.
And so, the word "thank you," if you look at it in Spanish, Italian, French, "gracias," "grazie," "merci" in French.
Each of them are "grace" and "mercy."
There's nothing economic or transactional about those words.
The word "you're welcome" is interesting.
He says, "Let's not say 'You're welcome.' Instead say, 'I know you'd do the same for me.'" But sometimes it may be helpful to not think in transactional ways, to eliminate the transaction, to make it a little bit more invisible.
And "kembali" in Indonesian is "Come back to me."
When you say "You're welcome" next time, think about how you can maybe eliminate the transaction and instead strengthen that social tie.
I want you to think about how you think about this ticket that you have to travel your social universe.
It's a common metaphor: "Life is a journey." Right?
Certain people get on this train, and some stay with you, some leave at different stops, new ones may enter.
I love this metaphor, it's a beautiful one.
But I want you to consider a different metaphor.
Why not instead think of yourself as an atom, bumping up against other atoms, maybe transferring energy with them, bonding with them a little and maybe creating something new on your travels through the social universe.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
Alisa Volkman: So this is where our story begins -- the dramatic moments of the birth of our first son, Declan.
Obviously a really profound moment, and it changed our lives in many ways.
It also changed our lives in many unexpected ways, and those unexpected ways we later reflected on, that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us, and a year later, we launched Babble, a website for parents.
Rufus Griscom: Now I think of our story as starting a few years earlier. AV: That's true.
RG: You may remember, we fell head over heels in love.
RG: We were at the time running a very different kind of website.
It was in theory, and hopefully in practice, a smart online magazine about sex and culture.
AV: That spawned a dating site.
But you can understand the jokes that we get. Sex begets babies.
RG: But for us, the continuity between Nerve and Babble was not just the life stage thing, which is, of course, relevant, but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about.
And we've been surprised to find, as young parents, that there are almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex.
AV: It's true. So like we said, the early years were really wonderful, but they were also really difficult.
And we feel like some of that difficulty was because of this false advertisement around parenting.
(Laughter) We subscribed to a lot of magazines, did our homework, but really everywhere you look around, we were surrounded by images like this.
And we went into parenting expecting our lives to look like this.
The sun was always streaming in, and our children would never be crying.
RG: When we lowered the glossy parenting magazine that we were looking at, with these beautiful images, and looked at the scene in our actual living room, it looked a little bit more like this.
These are our three sons.
And of course, they're not always crying and screaming, but with three boys, there's a decent probability that at least one of them will not be comporting himself exactly as he should.
AV: Yes, you can see where the disconnect was happening for us.
We really felt like what we went in expecting had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing, and so we decided we really wanted to give it to parents straight.
We really wanted to let them understand what the realities of parenting were in an honest way.
RG: So today, what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos.
And of course, there are many more than four things you can't say about parenting, but we would like to share with you today four that are particularly relevant for us personally.
So the first, taboo number one: you can't say you didn't fall in love with your baby in the very first minute.
I remember vividly, sitting there in the hospital.
RG: I'm sorry.
Alisa was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child -- (AV: Thank you.) -- and I was there with a catcher's mitt.
And I was there with my arms open.
The nurse was coming at me with this beautiful, beautiful child, and I remember, as she was approaching me, the voices of friends saying, "The moment they put the baby in your hands, you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is [on] an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you've ever experienced in your entire life."
And instead, when the baby was placed in my hands, it was an extraordinary moment.
I was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife, with deep, deep gratitude that we had what appeared to be a healthy child.
And it was also, of course, surreal.
I mean, I had to check the tags and make sure.
(Laughter) This, as you know, is an act of heresy.
You're either in love, or you're not in love.
And I think the reality is that love is a process, and I think the problem with thinking of love as something that's binary is that it causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent, or inadequate, or what have you.
But I think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months, maybe their first year, that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion.
But we like to joke, in the first few months of all of our children's lives, this is Uncle Rufus.
(Laughter) RG: I'm a very affectionate uncle, very affectionate uncle.
AV: Yes, and I often joke with Rufus when he comes home that I'm not sure he would actually be able to find our child in a line-up amongst other babies.
So I actually threw a pop quiz here onto Rufus.
RG: Uh oh.
AV: I don't want to embarrass him too much. But I am going to give him three seconds.
AV: Our eight-week-old son is somewhere in here, and I want to see if Rufus can actually quickly identify him.
(Laughter) RG: Cruel.
AV: Nothing more to be said.
(Laughter) I'll move on to taboo number two.
I felt incredibly connected to the community around me.
I felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy, all around me, tracking it down till the actual due-date.
I felt like I was a vessel of the future of humanity.
It was a really wonderful experience, but when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out, and I was really surprised by those feelings.
And I called my sister whom I'm very close to -- and had three children -- and I asked her, "Why didn't you tell me I was going to be feeling this way, that I was going to have these -- feeling incredibly isolated?"
And she said -- I'll never forget -- "It's just not something you want to say to a mother that's having a baby for the first time."
RG: And of course, we think it's precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time.
And that this, of course, one of the themes for us is that we think that candor and brutal honesty is critical to us collectively being great parents.
And it's hard not to think that part of what leads to this sense of isolation is our modern world.
So Alisa's experience is not isolated.
So your 58 percent of mothers surveyed report feelings of loneliness.
Of those, 67 percent are most lonely when their kids are zero to five -- probably really zero to two.
In the process of preparing this, we looked at how some other cultures around the world deal with this period of time, because here in the Western world, less than 50 percent of us live near our family members, which I think is part of why this is such a tough period.
And this is one of many ways that we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period.
AV: So taboo number three: you can't talk about your miscarriage -- but today I'll talk about mine.
So after we had Declan, we kind of recalibrated our expectations.
We thought we actually could go through this again and thought we knew what we would be up against.
And we were grateful that I was able to get pregnant, and I soon learned that we were having a boy, and then when I was five months, we learned that we had lost our child.
This is actually the last little image we have of him.
And it was obviously a very difficult time -- really painful.
As I was working through that mourning process, I was amazed that I didn't want to see anybody.
I really wanted to crawl into a hole, and I didn't really know how I was going to work my way back into my surrounding community.
And of course, it made me question, if I wasn't able to have another child, what would that mean for my marriage, and just me as a woman.
So it was a very difficult time.
As I started working through it more, I started climbing out of that hole and talking with other people.
And I just remember feeling all these stories came out of the woodwork, and I felt like I happened upon this secret society of women that I now was a part of, which was reassuring and also really concerning.
And I think, miscarriage is an invisible loss.
There's not really a lot of community support around it.
And I think, with a death, you have a funeral, you celebrate the life, and there's a lot of community support, and it's something women don't have with miscarriage.
RG: Which is too bad because, of course, it's a very common and very traumatic experience.
Fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage, and I find this astounding.
In a survey, 74 percent of women said that miscarriage, they felt, was partly their fault, which is awful.
And astoundingly, 22 percent said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse.
So taboo number four: you can't say that your average happiness has declined since having a child.
I'll never forget, I remember vividly to this day, our first son, Declan, was nine months old, and I was sitting there on the couch, and I was reading Daniel Gilbert's wonderful book, "Stumbling on Happiness."
And I got about two-thirds of the way through, and there was a chart on the right-hand side -- on the right-hand page -- that we've labeled here "The Most Terrifying Chart Imaginable for a New Parent."
This chart is comprised of four completely independent studies.
Basically, there's this precipitous drop of marital satisfaction, which is closely aligned, we all know, with broader happiness, that doesn't rise again until your first child goes to college.
RG: And that's when it's great to be running a website for parents, because we got this incredible reporter to go and interview all the scientists who conducted these four studies.
We said, something is wrong here.
There's something missing from these studies.
It can't possibly be that bad.
So Liz Mitchell did a wonderful job with this piece, and she interviewed four scientists, and she also interviewed Daniel Gilbert, and we did indeed find a silver lining.
So this is our guess as to what this baseline of average happiness arguably looks like throughout life.
And so we all remember as children, the tiniest little thing -- and we see it on the faces of our children -- the teeniest little thing can just rocket them to these heights of just utter adulation, and then the next teeniest little thing can cause them just to plummet to the depths of despair.
And then, of course, as you get older, it's almost like age is a form of lithium.
So I'm not going to go.
I've got a good stereo at home. So, I'm not going to go."
So your average happiness goes up, but you lose those transcendent moments.
But you realize you resubmit yourself to losing control in a really wonderful way, which we think provides a lot of meaning to our lives and is quite gratifying.
RG: And so in effect, we trade average happiness.
We trade the sort of security and safety of a certain level of contentment for these transcendent moments.
There's another factor in our case.
We have violated yet another taboo in our own lives, and this is a bonus taboo.
AV: A quick bonus taboo for you, that we should not be working together, especially with three children -- and we are.
RG: And we had reservations about this on the front end.
It's a bad idea. Don't do it."
We raised the money, and we're thrilled that we did, because in this phase of one's life, the incredibly scarce resource is time.
And if you're really passionate about what you do every day -- which we are -- and you're also passionate about your relationship, this is the only way we know how to do it.
And so the final question that we would ask is: can we collectively bend that happiness chart upwards?
It's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy, but they're sometimes pretty quick.
And so how about that average baseline of happiness?
AV: And we kind of feel that the happiness gap, which we talked about, is really the result of walking into parenting -- and really any long-term partnership for that matter -- with the wrong expectations.
And if you have the right expectations and expectation management, we feel like it's going to be a pretty gratifying experience.
RG: And so this is what -- And we think that a lot of parents, when you get in there -- in our case anyway -- you pack your bags for a trip to Europe, and you're really excited to go.
And trekking in Nepal is an extraordinary experience, particularly if you pack your bags properly and you know what you're getting in for and you're psyched.
So the point of all this for us today is not just hopefully honesty for the sake of honesty, but a hope that by being more honest and candid about these experiences, that we can all collectively bend that happiness baseline up a little bit.
RG + AV: Thank you.
(Applause)
I work on helping computers communicate about the world around us.
There are a lot of ways to do this, and I like to focus on helping computers to talk about what they see and understand.
Given a scene like this, a modern computer-vision algorithm can tell you that there's a woman and there's a dog.
It might even be able to tell you that the dog is incredibly cute.
I work on this problem thinking about how humans understand and process the world.
The thoughts, memories and stories that a scene like this might evoke for humans.
Maybe you've seen a dog like this one before, or you've spent time running on a beach like this one, and that further evokes thoughts and memories of a past vacation, past times to the beach, times spent running around with other dogs.
One of my guiding principles is that by helping computers to understand what it's like to have these experiences, to understand what we share and believe and feel, then we're in a great position to start evolving computer technology in a way that's complementary with our own experiences.
So, digging more deeply into this, a few years ago I began working on helping computers to generate human-like stories from sequences of images.
So, one day, I was working with my computer to ask it what it thought about a trip to Australia.
It took a look at the pictures, and it saw a koala.
Then I shared with it a sequence of images about a house burning down.
It saw a horrible, life-changing and life-destroying event and thought it was something positive.
That's because people tend to share positive images when they talk about their experiences.
When was the last time you saw a selfie at a funeral?
I realized that, as I worked on improving AI task by task, dataset by dataset, that I was creating massive gaps, holes and blind spots in what it could understand.
Biases that reflect a limited viewpoint, limited to a single dataset -- biases that can reflect human biases found in the data, such as prejudice and stereotyping.
I thought back to the evolution of the technology that brought me to where I was that day -- how the first color images were calibrated against a white woman's skin, meaning that color photography was biased against black faces.
And that same bias, that same blind spot continued well into the '90s.
And the same blind spot continues even today in how well we can recognize different people's faces in facial recognition technology.
I though about the state of the art in research today, where we tend to limit our thinking to one dataset and one problem.
And that in doing so, we were creating more blind spots and biases that the AI could further amplify.
I realized then that we had to think deeply about how the technology we work on today looks in five years, in 10 years.
Humans evolve slowly, with time to correct for issues in the interaction of humans and their environment.
In contrast, artificial intelligence is evolving at an incredibly fast rate.
And that means that it really matters that we think about this carefully right now -- that we reflect on our own blind spots, our own biases, and think about how that's informing the technology we're creating and discuss what the technology of today will mean for tomorrow.
CEOs and scientists have weighed in on what they think the artificial intelligence technology of the future will be.
Stephen Hawking warns that "Artificial intelligence could end mankind."
Elon Musk warns that it's an existential risk and one of the greatest risks that we face as a civilization.
Bill Gates has made the point, "I don't understand why people aren't more concerned."
But these views -- they're part of the story.
We have open-source tools for machine learning and intelligence that we can contribute to.
And beyond that, we can share our experience.
We can share our experiences with technology and how it concerns us and how it excites us.
We can communicate with foresight about the aspects of technology that could be more beneficial or could be more problematic over time.
We already see and know this in the technology that we use today.
We use smart phones and digital assistants and Roombas.
Maybe sometimes.
Are they beneficial?
And they're not all the same.
The future continues on from what we build and create right now.
We set into motion that domino effect that carves out AI's evolutionary path.
In our time right now, we shape the AI of tomorrow.
Technology that immerses us in augmented realities bringing to life past worlds.
Technology that helps people to share their experiences when they have difficulty communicating.
Technology built on understanding the streaming visual worlds used as technology for self-driving cars.
Technology built on understanding images and generating language, evolving into technology that helps people who are visually impaired be better able to access the visual world.
And we also see how technology can lead to problems.
We have technology today that analyzes physical characteristics we're born with -- such as the color of our skin or the look of our face -- in order to determine whether or not we might be criminals or terrorists.
We have technology that crunches through our data, even data relating to our gender or our race, in order to determine whether or not we might get a loan.
All that we see now is a snapshot in the evolution of artificial intelligence.
Because where we are right now, is within a moment of that evolution.
That means that what we do now will affect what happens down the line and in the future.
If we want AI to evolve in a way that helps humans, then we need to define the goals and strategies that enable that path now.
What I'd like to see is something that fits well with humans, with our culture and with the environment.
Technology that aids and assists those of us with neurological conditions or other disabilities in order to make life equally challenging for everyone.
Technology that works regardless of your demographics or the color of your skin.
And so today, what I focus on is the technology for tomorrow and for 10 years from now.
But in this case, it isn't a self-driving car without any destination.
This is the car that we are driving.
We choose when to speed up and when to slow down.
We choose if we need to make a turn.
We choose what the AI of the future will be.
There's a vast playing field of all the things that artificial intelligence can become.
And it's up to us now, in order to figure out what we need to put in place to make sure the outcomes of artificial intelligence are the ones that will be better for all of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So why do you think the rich should pay more in taxes?
Why did you buy the latest iPhone?
Why did you pick your current partner?
And why did so many people vote for Donald Trump?
So we ask this kind of question all the time, and we expect to get an answer.
And when being asked, we expect ourselves to know the answer, to simply tell why we did as we did.
But do we really know why?
So when you say that you prefer George Clooney to Tom Hanks, due to his concern for the environment, is that really true?
So you can be perfectly sincere and genuinely believe that this is the reason that drives your choice, but to me, it may still feel like something is missing.
So I'm an experimental psychologist, and this is the problem we've been trying to solve in our lab.
So we wanted to create an experiment that would allow us to challenge what people say about themselves, regardless of how certain they may seem.
The magicians.
So they're experts at creating the illusion of a free choice.
So when they say, "Pick a card, any card," the only thing you know is that your choice is no longer free.
So we had a few fantastic brainstorming sessions with a group of Swedish magicians, and they helped us create a method in which we would be able to manipulate the outcome of people's choices.
So it's quite simple.
The participants make a choice, but I end up giving them the opposite.
So it's quite simple, but see if you can spot the magic going on.
And this was shot with real participants, they don't know what's going on.
(Video) Petter Johansson: Hi, my name's Petter.
And you'll have to decide which one you find more attractive.
PJ: Why did you prefer that one?
Man: One on the left.
Interesting shot.
(Video) Woman 1: This one.
PJ: So they get the opposite of their choice.
And let's see what happens.
Woman 2: Um ...
I think he seems a little more innocent than the other guy.
Man: The one on the left.
I like her smile and contour of the nose and face.
So it's a little more interesting to me, and her haircut.
(Laughter) Woman 3: This one.
PJ: What made you choose him?
Woman 3: I don't know, he looks a little bit like the Hobbit.
(Laughter) PJ: And what happens in the end when I tell them the true nature of the experiment?
PJ: What did you think of this experiment, was it easy or hard?
Man: It was easy.
PJ: During the experiments, I actually switched the pictures three times.
Man: No. I didn't notice any of that.
PJ: Not at all? Man: No.
(Laughter) PJ: Did you notice that sometimes during the experiment I switched the pictures?
Woman 2: No, I did not notice that.
PJ: You were pointing at one, but then I gave you the other one.
Woman 2: No.
Woman 2: I did not notice.
(Laughs) PJ: Thank you.
Woman 2: Thank you.
PJ: OK, so as you probably figured out now, the trick is that I have two cards in each hand, and when I hand one of them over, the black one kind of disappears into the black surface on the table.
So using pictures like this, normally not more than 20 percent of the participants detect these tries.
And this graph simply shows that if you compare what they say in a manipulated trial with a nonmanipulated trial, that is when they explain a normal choice they've made and one where we manipulated the outcome, we find that they are remarkably similar.
So they are just as emotional, just as specific, and they are expressed with the same level of certainty.
So the strong conclusion to draw from this is that if there are no differences between a real choice and a manipulated choice, perhaps we make things up all the time.
But we've also done studies where we try to match what they say with the actual faces.
So here, this male participant, he preferred the girl to the left, he ended up with the one to the right.
And I like earrings."
And whatever made him choose the girl on the left to begin with, it can't have been the earrings, because they were actually sitting on the girl on the right.
So they just explained the choice afterwards.
So if we let them do the choice again, they will now choose the face they had previously rejected.
So this is the effect we call "choice blindness."
And we've done a number of different studies -- we've tried consumer choices, choices based on taste and smell and even reasoning problems.
But what you all want to know is of course does this extend also to more complex, more meaningful choices?
So the next experiment, it needs a little bit of a background.
So in Sweden, the political landscape is dominated by a left-wing and a right-wing coalition.
And the voters may move a little bit between the parties within each coalition, but there is very little movement between the coalitions.
And before each elections, the newspapers and the polling institutes put together what they call "an election compass" which consists of a number of dividing issues that sort of separates the two coalitions.
Things like if tax on gasoline should be increased or if the 13 months of paid parental leave should be split equally between the two parents in order to increase gender equality.
So, before the last Swedish election, we created an election compass of our own.
So we walked up to people in the street and asked if they wanted to do a quick political survey.
So first we had them state their voting intention between the two coalitions.
Then we asked them to answer 12 of these questions.
They would fill in their answers, and we would ask them to discuss, so OK, why do you think tax on gas should be increased?
Then we had a color coded template that would allow us to tally their overall score.
But of course, there was also a trick involved.
So first, we walked up to people, we asked them about their voting intention and then when they started filling in, we would fill in a set of answers going in the opposite direction.
So there, it's gone.
Can I please change it?"
So we managed to switch 90 percent of the participants' answers from left to right, right to left, their overall profile.
People say things like this, and I'll read it to you.
"So you agree to some extent with this statement." "Yes."
"Well, like, as it is so hard to get at international crime and terrorism, I think there should be those kinds of tools."
And I think it's madness that we have so little power that we can't stop those things when we actually have the possibility to do so."
And then there's a little bit back and forth in the end: "I don't like that they have access to everything I do, but I still think it's worth it in the long run."
So we have 10 participants shifting from left to right or from right to left.
Some go from being uncertain to clear voting intention.
And here I must point out, of course, that you are not allowed to use this as an actual method to change people's votes before an election, and we clearly debriefed them afterwards and gave them every opportunity to change back to whatever they thought first.
But what this shows is that if you can get people to see the opposite view and engage in a conversation with themselves, that could actually make them change their views.
What do I think is going on here?
So first of all, a lot of what we call self-knowledge is actually self-interpretation.
So I see myself make a choice, and then when I'm asked why, I just try to make as much sense of it as possible when I make an explanation.
But we do this so quickly and with such ease that we think we actually know the answer when we answer why.
The same way we make mistakes when we try to understand other people.
So beware when you ask people the question "why" because what may happen is that, if you asked them, "So why do you support this issue?"
"Why do you stay in this job or this relationship?" -- what may happen when you ask why is that you actually create an attitude that wasn't there before you asked the question.
And this is of course important in your professional life, as well, or it could be.
If, say, you design something and then you ask people, "Why do you think this is good or bad?"
Or if you're a journalist asking a politician, "So, why did you make this decision?"
Or if indeed you are a politician and try to explain why a certain decision was made.
We can change our minds.
Just because I said I liked something a year ago, doesn't mean I have to like it still.
(Applause)
What if I told you there was something that you can do right now that would have an immediate, positive benefit for your brain including your mood and your focus?
And what if I told you that same thing could actually last a long time and protect your brain from different conditions like depression, Alzheimer's disease or dementia.
Yes!
I am talking about the powerful effects of physical activity.
Simply moving your body, has immediate, long-lasting and protective benefits for your brain.
Now, as a neuroscientist, I know that our brains, that is the thing in our head right now, that is the most complex structure known to humankind.
So here is a real preserved human brain.
And it's going to illustrate two key areas that we are going to talk about today.
The first is the prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead, critical for things like decision-making, focus, attention and your personality.
The second key area is located in the temporal lobe, shown right here.
You have two temporal lobes in your brain, the right and the left, and deep in the temporal lobe is a key structure critical for your ability to form and retain new long-term memories for facts and events.
And that structure is called the hippocampus.
So I've always been fascinated with the hippocampus.
How could it be that an event that lasts just a moment, say, your first kiss, or the moment your first child was born, can form a memory that has changed your brain, that lasts an entire lifetime?
That's what I want to understand.
I wanted to start and record the activity of individual brain cells in the hippocampus as subjects were forming new memories.
And essentially try and decode how those brief bursts of electrical activity, which is how neurons communicate with each other, how those brief bursts either allowed us to form a new memory, or did not.
But a few years ago, I did something very unusual in science.
As a full professor of neural science, I decided to completely switch my research program.
Because I encountered something that was so amazing, with the potential to change so many lives that I had to study it.
I discovered and I experienced the brain-changing effects of exercise.
I was actually at the height of all the memory work that I was doing -- data was pouring in, I was becoming known in my field for all of this memory work.
But when I stuck my head out of my lab door, I noticed something.
I had no social life.
I spent too much time listening to those brain cells in a dark room, by myself.
(Laughter) I didn't move my body at all.
I had gained 25 pounds.
And actually, it took me many years to realize it, I was actually miserable.
And I shouldn't be miserable.
And I went on a river-rafting trip -- by myself, because I had no social life.
And I came back -- (Laughter) thinking, "Oh, my God, I was the weakest person on that trip."
And I came back with a mission.
I said, "I'm never going to feel like the weakest person on a river-rafting trip again."
And that's what made me go to the gym.
And I focused my type-A personality on going to all the exercise classes at the gym.
I tried everything.
I went to kickbox, dance, yoga, step class, and at first it was really hard.
Well, I started feeling stronger.
And now, fast-forward a year and a half into this regular exercise program and I noticed something that really made me sit up and take notice.
I was sitting at my desk, writing a research grant, and a thought went through my mind that had never gone through my mind before.
And my long-term memory -- what I was studying in my own lab -- seemed to be better in me.
Maybe all that exercise that I had included and added to my life was changing my brain.
Maybe I did an experiment on myself without even knowing it.
So as a curious neuroscientist, I went to the literature to see what I could find about what we knew about the effects of exercise on the brain.
Better mood, better energy, better memory, better attention.
And the more I learned, the more I realized how powerful exercise was.
Which eventually led me to the big decision to completely shift my research focus.
And so now, after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion: that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons.
Number one: it has immediate effects on your brain.
A single workout that you do will immediately increase levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline.
My lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours.
And finally, studies have shown that a single workout will improve your reaction times which basically means that you are going to be faster at catching that cup of Starbucks that falls off the counter, which is very, very important.
(Laughter) But these immediate effects are transient, they help you right after.
And these effects are long-lasting because exercise actually changes the brain's anatomy, physiology and function.
Let's start with my favorite brain area, the hippocampus.
Number two: the most common finding in neuroscience studies, looking at effects of long-term exercise, is improved attention function dependent on your prefrontal cortex.
And finally, you not only get immediate effects of mood with exercise but those last for a long time.
But really, the most transformative thing that exercise will do is its protective effects on your brain.
Here you can think about the brain like a muscle.
The more you're working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets.
Why is that important?
Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging.
So with increased exercise over your lifetime, you're not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer's disease, but what you're going to do is you're going to create the strongest, biggest hippocampus and prefrontal cortex so it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect.
You can think of exercise, therefore, as a supercharged 401K for your brain, OK?
And it's even better, because it's free.
And that is, just tell me the minimum amount of exercise I need to get all these changes."
(Laughter) And so I'm going to tell you the answer to that question.
The rule of thumb is you want to get three to four times a week exercise minimum 30 minutes an exercise session, and you want to get aerobic exercise in.
That is, get your heart rate up.
And the good news is, you don't have to go to the gym to get a very expensive gym membership.
Add an extra walk around the block in your power walk.
From going into the innermost workings of the brain, to trying to understand how exercise can improve our brain function, and my goal in my lab right now is to go beyond that rule of thumb that I just gave you -- three to four times a week, 30 minutes.
But it's one thing to talk about exercise, and it's another to do it.
So I'm going to invoke my power as a certified exercise instructor, to ask you all to stand up.
(Laughter) We're going to do just one minute of exercise.
It's call-and-response, just do what I do, say what I say, and make sure you don't punch your neighbor, OK?
Music!
(Upbeat music) Five, six, seven, eight, it's right, left, right, left.
And I say, I am strong now.
Let's hear you.
Wendy Suzuki: Ladies, I am Wonder Woman-strong.
Let's hear you!
Audience: I am Wonder Woman-strong.
WS: New move -- uppercut, right and left.
I am inspired now. You say it!
Audience: I am inspired now.
WS: Last move -- pull it down, right and left, right and left.
I say, I am on fire now! You say it.
Audience: I am on fire now.
WS: And done! OK, good job!
(Applause) Thank you.
And that is, bringing exercise in your life will not only give you a happier, more protective life today, but it will protect your brain from incurable diseases.
And in this way it will change the trajectory of your life for the better.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
So today I'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption.
Hands up -- how many of you have books, CDs, DVDs, or videos lying around your house that you probably won't use again, but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away?
On our shelves at home, we have a box set of the DVD series "24," season six to be precise.
I think it was bought for us around three years ago for a Christmas present.
Now my husband, Chris, and I love this show.
But let's face it, when you've watched it once maybe, or twice, you don't really want to watch it again, because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists.
Now before we go on, I have a confession to make.
I lived in New York for 10 years, and I am a big fan of "Sex and the City."
Now I'd love to watch the first movie again as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week.
So how easily could I swap our unwanted copy of "24" for a wanted copy of "Sex and the City?"
Now you may have noticed there's a new sector emerging called swap-trading.
Now the easiest analogy for swap-trading is like an online dating service for all your unwanted media.
What it does is use the Internet to create an infinite marketplace to match person A's "haves" with person C's "wants," whatever they may be.
The other week, I went on one of these sites, appropriately called Swaptree, and there were over 59,300 items that I could instantly swap for my copy of "24."
So in other words, what's happening here is that Swaptree solves my carrying company's sugar rush problem, a problem the economists call "the coincidence of wants," in approximately 60 seconds.
Now there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as Swaptree, but that's not my interest, and nor is swap trading, per se.
My passion, and what I've spent the last few years dedicated to researching, is the collaborative behaviors and trust-mechanics inherent in these systems.
When you think about it, it would have seemed like a crazy idea, even a few years ago, that I would swap my stuff with a total stranger whose real name I didn't know and without any money changing hands.
Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree happen successfully, and the one percent that receive a negative rating, it's for relatively minor reasons, like the item didn't arrive on time.
An extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play.
Namely, that technology is enabling trust between strangers.
We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before.
So what's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back.
We're bartering, trading, swapping, sharing, but they're being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms.
What I find fascinating is that we've actually wired our world to share, whether that's our neighborhood, our school, our office, or our Facebook network, and that's creating an economy of "what's mine is yours."
And linked to this crowd mania were examples all around the world -- from the election of a president to the infamous Wikipedia, and everything in between -- on what the power of numbers could achieve.
Now, you know when you learn a new word, and then you start to see that word everywhere?
That's what happened to me when I noticed that we are moving from passive consumers to creators, to highly enabled collaborators.
What's happening is the Internet is removing the middleman, so that anyone from a T-shirt designer to a knitter can make a living selling peer-to-peer.
And the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates.
I mean, it's amazing to think that, in every single minute of this speech, 25 hours of YouTube video will be loaded.
Now what I find fascinating about these examples is how they're actually tapping into our primate instincts.
I mean, we're monkeys, and we're born and bred to share and cooperate.
And we were doing so for thousands of years, whether it's when we hunted in packs, or farmed in cooperatives, before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created out own little fiefdoms.
But things are changing, and one of the reasons why is the digital natives, or Gen-Y.
They're growing up sharing -- files, video games, knowledge.
It's second nature to them.
So we, the millennials -- I am just a millennial -- are like foot soldiers, moving us from a culture of "me" to a culture of "we."
The reason why it's happening so fast is because of mobile collaboration.
We now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone, anytime, in real-time, from a small device in our hands.
All of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008, when, of course, the great financial crash happened.
Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite New York Times columnists, and he poignantly commented that 2008 is when we hit a wall, when Mother Nature and the market both said, "No more."
One, a renewed belief in the importance of community, and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means.
A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies, fundamentally changing the way we behave.
Three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns.
I generally believe we're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors -- through sites such as Flickr and Twitter that are becoming second nature online -- are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives.
From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food, we are consuming and collaborating once again.
The first is redistribution markets.
Redistribution markets, just like Swaptree, are when you take a used, or pre-owned, item and move it from where it's not needed to somewhere, or someone, where it is.
They're increasingly thought of as the fifth 'R' -- reduce, reuse, recycle, repair and redistribute -- because they stretch the life cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste.
This is the sharing of resources of things like money, skills and time.
I bet, in a couple of years, that phrases like "coworking" and "couchsurfing" and "time banks" are going to become a part of everyday vernacular.
One of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles is called Landshare.
Together they grow their own food.
It's one of those ideas that's so simple, yet brilliant, you wonder why it's never been done before.
Now, the third system is product-service systems.
This is where you pay for the benefit of the product -- what it does for you -- without needing to own the product outright.
And that can be anything from baby goods to fashions to -- how many of you have a power drill, own a power drill? Right.
That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime.
(Laughter) It's kind of ridiculous, right?
Because what you need is the hole, not the drill.
(Laughter) (Applause) So why don't you rent the drill, or, even better, rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it?
These three systems are coming together, allowing people to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles, or their cherished personal freedoms.
The average car costs 8,000 dollars a year to run.
Yet, that car sits idle for 23 hours a day.
So this is where car-sharing companies such as Zipcar and GoGet come in.
In 2009, Zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities -- and they're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies -- and got them to surrender their keys for a month.
Instead, these people had to walk, bike, take the train, or other forms of public transport.
They could only use their Zipcar membership when absolutely necessary.
The results of this challenge after just one month was staggering.
It's amazing that 413 lbs were lost just from the extra exercise.
But my favorite statistic is that 100 out of the 250 participants did not want their keys back.
In other words, the car addicts had lost their urge to own.
Now products-service systems have been around for years.
But I think they're entering a new age, because technology makes sharing frictionless and fun.
There's a great quote that was written in the New York Times that said, "Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the 8-track, what solar power is to the coal mine."
In other words, I don't want stuff; I want the needs or experiences it fulfills.
This is fueling a massive shift from where usage trumps possessions -- or as Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, puts it, "where access is better than ownership."
Now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud, a blurry line is appearing between what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours.
I want to give you one example that shows how fast this evolution is happening.
This represents an eight-year time span.
We've gone from traditional car-ownership to car-sharing companies, such as Zipcar and GoGet, to ride-sharing platforms that match rides to the newest entry, which is peer-to-peer car rental, where you can actually make money out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day to your neighbor.
Now all of these systems require a degree of trust, and the cornerstone to this working is reputation.
Now in the old consumer system, our reputation didn't matter so much, because our credit history was far more important that any kind of peer-to-peer review.
With every spammer we flag, with every idea we post, comment we share, we're actually signaling how well we collaborate, and whether we can or can't be trusted.
Let's go back to my first example, Swaptree.
I can see that Rondoron has completed 553 trades with a 100 percent success rate.
In other words, I can trust him or her.
Now mark my words, it's only a matter of time before we're going to be able to perform a Google-like search and see a cumulative picture of our reputation capital.
It's a new social currency, so to speak, that could become as powerful as our credit rating.
Now as a closing thought, I believe we're actually in a period where we're waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste, and we're taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity.
I'm on a mission to make sharing cool.
I'm on a mission to make sharing hip.
Because I really believe it can disrupt outdated modes of business, help us leapfrog over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption and teach us when enough really is enough.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
On a warm August morning in Harare, Farai, a 24-year-old mother of two, walks towards a park bench.
She looks miserable and dejected.
Now, on the park bench sits an 82-year-old woman, better known to the community as Grandmother Jack.
Farai hands Grandmother Jack an envelope from the clinic nurse.
Grandmother Jack invites Farai to sit down as she opens the envelope and reads.
There's silence for three minutes or so as she reads.
And after a long pause, Grandmother Jack takes a deep breath, looks at Farai and says, "I'm here for you.
Would you like to share your story with me?"
She says, "Grandmother Jack, I'm HIV-positive.
I've been living with HIV for the past four years.
My husband left me a year ago.
I have two kids under the age of five.
I'm unemployed.
I can hardly take care of my children."
Tears are now flowing down her face.
And in response, Grandmother Jack moves closer, puts her hand on Farai, and says, "Farai, it's OK to cry.
You've been through a lot.
Would you like to share more with me?"
And Farai continues.
I can't take it anymore.
The clinic nurse sent me to see you."
There's an exchange between the two, which lasts about 30 minutes.
The word "kufungisisa" opens up a floodgate of tears.
So, kufungisisa is the local equivalent of depression in my country.
It literally means "thinking too much."
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 300 million people globally, today, suffer from depression, or what in my country we call kufungisisa.
And the World Health Organization also tells us that every 40 seconds, someone somewhere in the world commits suicide because they are unhappy, largely due to depression or kufungisisa.
And most of these deaths are occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
In fact, the World Health Organization goes as far as to say that when you look at the age group between 15 to 29, a leading cause of death now is actually suicide.
But there are wider events that lead to depression and in some cases, suicide, such as abuse, conflict, violence, isolation, loneliness -- the list is endless.
But one thing that we do know is that depression can be treated and suicides averted.
But the problem is we just don't have enough psychiatrists or psychologists in the world to do the job.
In most low- and middle-income countries, for instance, the ratio of psychiatrists to the population is something like one for every one and a half million people, which literally means that 90 percent of the people needing mental health services will not get it.
In my country, there are 12 psychiatrists, and I'm one of them, for a population of approximately 14 million.
One evening while I was at home, I get a call from the ER, or the emergency room, from a city which is some 200 kilometers away from where I live.
And the ER doctor says, "One of your patients, someone you treated four months ago, has just taken an overdose, and they are in the ER department.
We ensure that we start reviewing the antidepressants that this patient has been taking, and we finally conclude that as soon as Erica -- that was her name, 26-year-old -- as soon as Erica is ready to be released from the ER, she should come directly to me with her mother, and I will evaluate and establish what can be done.
And we assumed that that would take about a week.
A week passes.
Three weeks pass.
And one day I get a call from Erica's mother, and she says, "Erica committed suicide three days ago.
She hanged herself from the mango tree in the family garden."
Now, almost like a knee-jerk reaction, I couldn't help but ask, "But why didn't you come to Harare, where I live?
We had agreed that as soon as you're released from the ER, you will come to me."
Her response was brief.
"We didn't have the 15 dollars bus fare to come to Harare."
Now, suicide is not an unusual event in the world of mental health.
But there was something about Erica's death that struck me at the core of my very being.
That statement from Erica's mother: "We didn't have 15 dollars bus fare to come to you," made me realize that it just wasn't going to work, me expecting people to come to me.
And I got into this state of soul-searching, trying to really discover my role as a psychiatrist in Africa.
Yes, grandmothers.
There are hundreds of them.
And -- (Laughter) And they don't leave their communities in search of greener pastures.
(Laughter) See, the only time they leave is when they go to a greener pasture called heaven.
(Laughter) So I thought, how about training grandmothers in evidence-based talk therapy, which they can deliver on a bench?
You know, mobile phone technology.
Pretty much everyone in Africa has a mobile phone today.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Today, there are hundreds of grandmothers who are working in more than 70 communities.
And in the last year alone, more than 30,000 people received treatment on the Friendship Bench from a grandmother in a community in Zimbabwe.
(Applause) And recently, we published this work that is done by these grandmothers in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
And -- (Applause) And our results show that six months after receiving treatment from a grandmother, people were still symptom-free: no depression, suicidal ideation completely reduced.
In fact, our results -- this was a clinical trial -- in fact, this clinical trial showed that grandmothers were more effective at treating depression than doctors and -- (Laughter) (Applause) And so, we're now working towards expanding this program.
There are more than 600 million people currently aged above 65 in the world.
And by the year 2050, there will be 1.5 billion people aged 65 and above.
Imagine if we could create a global network of grandmothers in every major city in the world, who are trained in evidence-based talk therapy, supported through digital platforms, networked.
And they will make a difference in communities.
They will reduce the treatment gap for mental, neurological and substance-use disorders.
Finally, this is a file photograph of Grandmother Jack.
So, Farai had six sessions on the bench with Grandmother Jack.
Today, Farai is employed.
And as for Grandmother Jack, one morning in February, we expected her to see her 257th client on the bench.
She didn't show up.
And I'm sure she's in awe when she realizes that something that she helped to pioneer is now spreading to other countries, like Malawi, the island of Zanzibar and coming closer to home here in the Unites States in the city of New York.
May her soul rest in peace.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause)
Currently, most refugees live in the cities rather than in the refugee camps.
We represent over 60 percent of the number of refugees globally.
With the majority of refugees living in urban areas, there is a strong need for a paradigm shift and new thinking.
Rather than wasting money on building walls, it would be better to spend on programs to help refugees to help themselves.
But not our skills and knowledge.
If allowed to live a productive life, refugees can help themselves and contribute to the development of their host country.
I was born in the city called Bukavu, South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I am the fifth-born in a family of 12 children.
My father, a mechanic by profession, worked very hard to send me to school.
Just like other young people, I had a lot of plans and dreams.
I wanted to complete my studies, get a nice job, marry and have my own children and support my family.
But this didn't happen.
War in my homeland forced me to flee to Uganda in 2008, nine years ago.
My family joined a steady exodus of refugees who settled in Uganda's capital, Kampala.
In my country, I lived already in the city, and we felt Kampala was much better than a refugee camp.
Refugees in the cities have always been denied international assistance, even after their recognition by UNHCR in 1997.
In addition to the poverty problem we were confronted with as the local urban poor, we were facing challenges due to our refugee status, such as a language barrier.
In Congo, the official language is French.
But in Uganda, it is English.
We were exposed to harassment, exploitation, intimidation and discrimination.
Humanitarian organizations mostly focused on the formal settlement in rural areas, and there was nothing in place for us.
But we didn't want handouts.
We wanted to work and support ourselves.
I joined my other two colleagues in exile and set up an organization to support other refugees.
YARID -- Young African Refugees for Integral Development -- began as a conversation within the Congolese community.
We asked the community how they could organize themselves to solve these challenges.
The YARID programs for support evolve in stages, progressing from soccer community, to English language to sewing livelihoods.
The free English classes help empower people to engage with the Ugandan community, allowing them to get to know their neighbors and sell wares.
As YARID's programs have expanded, it has included an increasing range of nationalities -- Congolese, Rwandan, Burundian, Somalis, Ethiopian, South Sudanese.
Today, YARID has supported over 3,000 refugees across Kampala and continues supporting more.
(Applause) Refugees want empowerment, not handouts.
We know our community better than anyone.
We understand the challenges and opportunities we face to become self-reliant.
I know better than anyone that initiatives created by refugees work.
They need to be internationally recognized and supported.
Give us the support we deserve, and we will pay you back with interest.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
Beverly Joubert: We are truly passionate about the African wilderness and protecting the African wilderness, and so what we've done is we've focused on iconic cats.
And I know, in the light of human suffering and poverty and even climate change, one would wonder, why worry about a few cats?
Well today we're here to share with you a message that we have learned from a very important and special character -- this leopard.
Dereck Joubert: Well, our lives have basically been like a super long episode of "CSI" -- something like 28 years.
In essence, what we've done is we've studied the science, we've looked at the behavior, we've seen over 2,000 kills by these amazing animals.
But one of the things that science really lets us down on is that personality, that individual personality that these animals have.
And here's a prime example.
We found this leopard in a 2,000-year-old baobab tree in Africa, the same tree that we found her mother in and her grandmother.
And she took us on a journey and revealed something very special to us -- her own daughter, eight days old.
And the minute we found this leopard, we realized that we needed to move in, and so we basically stayed with this leopard for the next four-and-a-half years -- following her every day, getting to know her, that individual personality of hers, and really coming to know her.
Now I'm destined to spend a lot of time with some unique, very, very special, individualistic and often seductive female characters.
BJ: Well we certainly did spend a lot of time with her -- in fact, more time than even her mother did.
And early on, a lightning bolt hit a tree 20 paces away from us.
It was frightening, and it showered us with leaves and a pungent smell.
She's probably going to forever associate that deafening crash with us."
And actually from that day on, she's been comfortable with us.
We called her Legadema, which means, "light from the sky."
But only by getting up close to these animals and spending time with them can we actually even reach out and dig out these personal characters that they have.
BJ: But through our investigation, we have to seek the wildest places in Africa.
And right now this is in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.
Yes, it is swamp. We live in the swamp in a tent, but I must tell you, every day is exhilarating.
But also, our hearts are in our throats a huge amount of the time, because we're driving through water, and it's an unknown territory.
But we're really there seeking and searching and filming the iconic cats.
DJ: Now one of the big things, of course, everybody knows that cats hate water, and so this was a real revelation for us.
And we could only find this by pushing ourselves, by going where no sane person should go -- not without some prompting, by the way, from Beverly -- and just pushing the envelope, going out there, pushing our vehicle, pushing ourselves.
But we've managed to find that these lions are 15 percent bigger than any others, and they specialize in hunting buffalo in the water.
BJ: And then of course, the challenge is knowing when to turn around.
We don't always get that right, and on this particular day, we seriously underestimated the depth.
DJ: And of course, one of the rules that we have in the vehicle is that he who drowns the vehicle gets to swim with the crocodiles.
(Laughter) You will notice also that all of these images here are taken from the top angle by Beverly -- the dry top angle, by the way.
(Laughter) But all the places we get stuck in really have great views.
And it wasn't a moment, and these lions came back towards us, and Beverly was able to get a great photograph.
BJ: But we truly do spend day and night trying to capture unique footage.
And 20 years ago, we did a film called "Eternal Enemies" where we managed to capture this unusual disturbing behavior across two species -- lions and hyenas.
And surprisingly, it became a cult film.
And we can only work that out as people were seeing parallels between the thuggish side of nature and gang warfare.
But for us to get them, not only do we push ourselves, but we live by certain rules of engagement, which mean we can't interfere.
This sort of behavior has been going on for three, four, five million years, and we can't step in and say, "That's wrong, and that's right."
But that's not always easy for us.
And I have to tell you that it was a disturbing night for me.
I had tears rolling down my cheeks.
I was shaking with anxiety, but I knew that [I had] to capture something that had never been seen before, had never been documented.
And I do believe you should stay with us.
DJ: The amazing thing about these moments -- and this is probably a highlight of our career -- is that you never know how it's going to end.
Many people believe, in fact, that death begins in the eyes, not in the heart, not in the lungs, and that's when people give up hope, or when any life form gives up hope.
And you can see the start of it here.
This elephant, against overwhelming odds, simply gives up hope.
So just when you think it's all over, something else happens, some spark gets into you, some sort of will to fight -- that iron will that we all have, that this elephant has, that conservation has, that big cats have.
And for us, in many ways, this elephant has become a symbol of inspiration for us, a symbol of that hope as we go forward in our work.
(Applause) Now back to the leopard.
We were spending so much time with this leopard and getting to understand her individualism, her personal character, that maybe we were taking it a little bit far.
We were perhaps taking her for granted, and maybe she didn't like that that much.
Beverly sits on the one side where all her camera gear is, and I'm on the other side where my space is.
But at the same time, we were concerned that if she created this as a habit and jumped into somebody else's car, it might not turn out the same way -- she might get shot for that.
So we knew we had to react quickly.
DJ: It was the only way for me to save the marriage, because Beverly felt she was being replaced, you see.
But nothing prepared us for what happened next in our relationship with her, when she started hunting.
BJ: And on this first hunt, we truly were excited.
It was like watching a graduation ceremony.
We felt like we were surrogate parents.
But only when we saw the tiny baby baboon clinging to the mother's fur did we realize that something very unique was taking place here with Legadema.
And of course, the baby baboon was so innocent, it didn't turn and run.
So what we watched over the next couple of hours was very unique.
And over the next five hours, she took care of it.
We realized that we actually don't know everything, and that nature is so unpredictable, we have to be open at all times.
DJ: Okay, so she was a little bit rough.
(Laughter) But in fact, what we were seeing here was interesting.
They ended up sleeping for hours.
But I have to tell you -- everybody always asks, "What happened to the baby baboon?"
It did die, and we suspect it was from the freezing winter nights.
DJ: So at this stage, I guess, we had very, very firm ideas on what conservation meant.
We had to deal with these individual personalities.
We had to deal with them with respect and celebrate them.
So when Beverly and I were born, there were 450,000 lions, and today there are 20,000.
Leopards have plummeted from 700,000 down to a mere 50,000.
Now in the extraordinary time that we have worked with Legadema -- which is really over a five-year period -- 10,000 leopards were legally shot by safari hunters.
And that's not the only leopards that were being killed through that period.
It's simply not sustainable.
We admire them, and we fear them, and yet, as man, we want to steal their power.
It used to be the time where only kings wore a leopard skin, but now throughout rituals and ceremonies, traditional healers and ministers.
And of course, looking at this lion paw that has been skinned, it eerily reminds me of a human hand, and that's ironic, because their fate is in our hands.
South Africa just released some lion bones onto the market.
Lion bones and tiger bones look exactly the same, and so in a stroke, the lion bone industry is going to wipe out all the tigers.
So we have a real problem here, no more so than the lions do, the male lions.
So the 20,000 lion figure that you just saw is actually a red herring, because there may be 3,000 or 4,000 male lions, and they all are actually infected with the same disease.
I call it complacency -- our complacency.
BJ: And you have to know that, when a male lion is killed, it completely disrupts the whole pride.
A new male comes into the area and takes over the pride, and, of course, first of all kills all the cubs and possibly some of the females that are defending their cubs.
So we've estimated that between 20 [and] 30 lions are killed when one lion is hanging on a wall somewhere in a far-off place.
DJ: So what our investigations have shown is that these lions are essential.
They're essential to the habitat.
If they disappear, whole ecosystems in Africa disappear.
There's an 80-billion-dollar-a-year ecotourism revenue stream into Africa.
So this is not just a concern about lions; it's a concern about communities in Africa as well.
But what I'm more concerned about in many ways is that, as we de-link ourselves from nature, as we de-link ourselves spiritually from these animals, we lose hope, we lose that spiritual connection, our dignity, that thing within us that keeps us connected to the planet.
And so what we are doing, in February, we're bringing out a film called "The Last Lion," and "The Last Lion" is exactly what is happening right now.
That is the situation we're in -- the last lions.
That is, if we don't take action and do something, these plains will be completely devoid of big cats, and then, in turn, everything else will disappear.
And simply, if we can't protect them, we're going to have a job protecting ourselves as well.
DJ: And in fact, that original thing that we spoke about and designed our lives by -- that conservation was all about respect and celebration -- is probably true. That's really what it needs.
We need it. We respect and celebrate each other as a man and a woman, as a community and as part of this planet, and we need to continue that.
And Legadema?
Well we can report, in fact, that we're grandparents.
(Laughter) BJ/DJ: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And so the question that we might not have birds became kind of fundamental to those of us wandering around looking for the meadowlarks that seemed to have all disappeared.
And the question was, were the birds singing?
What is a bird?
Well, in my world, this is a rubber duck.
It comes in California with a warning -- "This product contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
This is a bird.
What kind of culture would produce a product of this kind and then label it and sell it to children?
I think we have a design problem.
Someone heard the six hours of talk that I gave called "The Monticello Dialogues" on NPR, and sent me this as a thank you note -- "We realize that design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world, and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence, and so as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design, we, in a way, need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of a planet, and I think the exciting part of that is the good news that's there, because the news is the news of abundance, and not the news of limits, and I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear, we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent, driven by the sun, and start to imagine what that would be like to share."
That was one sentence.
Henry James would be proud.
The fundamental issue is that, for me, design is the first signal of human intentions.
So the question is, what is the first question for designers?
Now, as guardians -- let's say the state, for example, which reserves the right to kill, the right to be duplicitous and so on -- the question we're asking the guardian at this point is are we meant, how are we meant, to secure local societies, create world peace and save the environment?
Commerce, on the other hand, is relatively quick, essentially creative, highly effective and efficient, and fundamentally honest, because we can't exchange value for very long if we don't trust each other.
And so we start our designs with that question.
Because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy.
If we come here and say, "Well, I didn't intend to cause global warming on the way here," and we say, "That's not part of my plan," then we realize it's part of our de facto plan.
If the end game is global warming, they're doing great.
(Applause) So, the question is, how many federal officials are ready to move to Ohio and Pennsylvania with their families?
So if you don't have an endgame of something delightful, then you're just moving chess pieces around, if you don't know you're taking the king.
So perhaps we could develop a strategy of change, which requires humility. And in my business as an architect, it's unfortunate the word "humility" and the word "architect" have not appeared in the same paragraph since "The Fountainhead."
So if anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this -- it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.
So, as Kevin Kelly pointed out, there is no endgame.
There is an infinite game, and we're playing in that infinite game.
And so we call it "cradle to cradle," and our goal is very simple.
This is what I presented to the White House.
Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, clean water, soil and power -- economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed, period.
(Applause) What don't you like about this?
Which part of this don't you like?
So we realized we want full diversity, even though it can be difficult to remember what De Gaulle said when asked what it was like to be President of France.
He said, "What do you think it's like trying to run a country with 400 kinds of cheese?"
But at the same time, we realize that our products are not safe and healthy.
So we've designed products and we analyzed chemicals down to the parts per million.
This is a baby blanket by Pendleton that will give your child nutrition instead of Alzheimer's later in life.
We can ask ourselves, what is justice, and is justice blind, or is justice blindness?
And at what point did that uniform turn from white to black?
Water has been declared a human right by the United Nations.
Air quality is an obvious thing to anyone who breathes.
Clean soil is a critical problem -- the nitrification, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
We've seen the first form of solar energy that's beat the hegemony of fossil fuels in the form of wind here in the Great Plains, and so that hegemony is leaving.
And if we remember Sheikh Yamani when he formed OPEC, they asked him, "When will we see the end of the age of oil?"
I don't know if you remember his answer, but it was, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones."
We see that companies acting ethically in this world are outperforming those that don't.
This is a hospital monitor from Los Angeles, sent to China.
On the other hand, we see great signs of hope.
Here's Dr. Venkataswamy in India, who's figured out how to do mass-produced health.
They become building steel.
On the other hand, we're working with Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett and Shaw Carpet, the largest carpet company in the world.
We've developed a carpet that is continuously recyclable, down to the parts per million.
The upper is Nylon 6 that can go back to caprolactam, the bottom, a polyolephine -- infinitely recyclable thermoplastic.
Now if I was a bird, the building on my left is a liability.
The building on my right, which is our corporate campus for The Gap with an ancient meadow, is an asset -- its nesting grounds.
Here's where I come from. I grew up in Hong Kong, with six million people in 40 square miles.
During the dry season, we had four hours of water every fourth day.
And the relationship to landscape was that of farmers who have been farming the same piece of ground for 40 centuries.
You can't farm the same piece of ground for 40 centuries without understanding nutrient flow.
My childhood summers were in the Puget Sound of Washington, among the first growth and big growth.
I went to Yale for graduate school, studied in a building of this style by Le Corbusier, affectionately known in our business as Brutalism.
If we look at the world of architecture, we see with Mies' 1928 tower for Berlin, the question might be, "Well, where's the sun?"
And this might have worked in Berlin, but we built it in Houston, and the windows are all closed. And with most products appearing not to have been designed for indoor use, this is actually a vertical gas chamber.
When I went to Yale, we had the first energy crisis, and I was designing the first solar-heated house in Ireland as a student, which I then built -- which would give you a sense of my ambition.
And Richard Meier, who was one of my teachers, kept coming over to my desk to give me criticism, and he would say, "Bill, you've got to understand- -- solar energy has nothing to do with architecture."
I guess he didn't read Vitruvius.
In 1984, we did the first so-called "green office" in America for Environmental Defense.
They said, "They're proprietary, they're legal, go away."
The only indoor quality work done in this country at that time was sponsored by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and it was to prove there was no danger from secondhand smoke in the workplace.
So, all of a sudden, here I am, graduating from high school in 1969, and this happens, and we realize that "away" went away.
And yet, NOAA has now shown us, for example -- you see that little blue thing above Hawaii?
It was recently dragged for plankton by scientists, and they found six times as much plastic as plankton.
When asked, they said, "It's kind of like a giant toilet that doesn't flush."
The book itself is a polymer. It is not a tree.
That's the name of the first chapter -- "This Book is Not a Tree."
Because in poetics, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, "we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears."
(Laughter) So, we're looking at the same criteria as most people -- you know, can I afford it?
Does it work? Do I like it?
We're adding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Now if we look at the word "competition," I'm sure most of you've used it.
It means the way Olympic athletes train with each other.
The Williams sisters compete -- one wins Wimbledon.
And the Chinese government has now -- I work with the Chinese government now -- has taken this up.
We're also looking at survival of the fittest, not in just competition terms in our modern context of destroy the other or beat them to the ground, but really to fit together and build niches and have growth that is good.
But if we look at asphalt as our growth, then we realize that all we're doing is destroying the planetary's fundamental underlying operating system.
So when we see E equals mc squared come along, from a poet's perspective, we see energy as physics, chemistry as mass, and all of a sudden, you get this biology.
And we have plenty of energy, so we'll solve that problem, but the biology problem's tricky, because as we put through all these toxic materials that we disgorge, we will never be able to recover that.
And as Francis Crick pointed out, nine years after discovering DNA with Mr. Watson, that life itself has to have growth as a precondition -- it has to have free energy, sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals.
So instead of just growing destruction, we want to grow the things that we might enjoy, and someday the FDA will allow us to make French cheese.
So therefore, we have these two metabolisms, and I worked with a German chemist, Michael Braungart, and we've identified the two fundamental metabolisms.
The biological one I'm sure you understand, but also the technical one, where we take materials and put them into closed cycles.
Biological nutrition can supply about 500 million humans, which means that if we all wore Birkenstocks and cotton, the world would run out of cork and dry up.
So we need materials in closed cycles, but we need to analyze them down to the parts per million for cancer, birth defects, mutagenic effects, disruption of our immune systems, biodegradation, persistence, heavy metal content, knowledge of how we're making them and their production and so on.
Our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry.
So designers all over the world can analyze their products down to the parts per million for human and ecological health.
(Applause) We've developed a protocol so that companies can send these same messages all the way through their supply chains, because when we asked most companies we work with -- about a trillion dollars -- and say, "Where does your stuff come from?" They say, "Suppliers."
"Customers."
Technical nutrients -- this is for Shaw Carpet, infinitely reusable carpet.
Here's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet.
Biotechnical nutrients -- the Model U for Ford Motor, a cradle to cradle car -- concept car.
Shoes for Nike, where the uppers are polyesters, infinitely recyclable, the bottoms are biodegradable soles.
There is no finish line.
The idea here of the car is that some of the materials go back to the industry forever, some of the materials go back to soil -- it's all solar-powered.
Here's a building at Oberlin College we designed that makes more energy than it needs to operate and purifies its own water.
Here's a building for The Gap, where the ancient grasses of San Bruno, California, are on the roof.
And this is our project for Ford Motor Company.
This is obviously a color photograph.
These are our tools. These are how we sold it to Ford.
We saved Ford 35 million dollars doing it this way, day one, which is the equivalent of the Ford Taurus at a four percent margin of an order for 900 million dollars worth of cars.
Here it is. It's the world's largest green roof, 10 and a half acres.
They showed up in five days.
We're developing now protocols for cities -- that's the home of technical nutrients.
And so I will finish by showing you a new city we're designing for the Chinese government.
We're doing 12 cities for China right now, based on cradle to cradle as templates.
Our assignment is to develop protocols for the housing for 400 million people in 12 years.
They'll have cities with no energy and no food.
We signed a Memorandum of Understanding -- here's Madam Deng Nan, Deng Xiaoping's daughter -- for China to adopt cradle to cradle.
We're building a new city next to this city; look at that landscape.
This is the site.
This is their plan.
And they brought us in and said, "What would you do?"
(Applause) So the way we approached this is we studied the hydrology very carefully.
We studied the biota, the ancient biota, the current farming and the protocols.
We studied the winds and the sun to make sure everybody in the city will have fresh air, fresh water and direct sunlight in every single apartment at some point during the day.
We start to integrate commercial and mixed use so the people all have centers and places to be.
The transportation is all very simple, everybody's within a five-minute walk of mobility.
The waste systems all connect.
If you flush a toilet, your feces will go to the sewage treatment plants, which are sold as assets, not liabilities.
Because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas?
And then it makes natural gas, which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city.
So this is -- these are fertilizer gas plants.
And then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city, where we've got farming, because what we've done is lifted up the city, the landscape, into the air to -- to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings.
The solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city.
We inhabit the city with work/live space on all the ground floors.
And so this is the existing city, and this is the new city.
(Applause)
So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky.
We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited.
And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them.
But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem.
And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world.
190 heads of state -- nine are women.
Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women.
In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats -- tops out at 15, 16 percent.
And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.
We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment.
A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture.
And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?"
And he said, "No, we've been here about a year."
And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom."
How do we change these numbers at the top?
In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top -- Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries -- the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out.
Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women.
Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals.
What are the messages we need to tell ourselves?
What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us?
What are the messages we tell our daughters?
I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference.
And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing.
This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes.
So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.
My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three.
Two, make your partner a real partner.
And three, don't leave before you leave.
And everyone kind of sat at the table.
He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room.
When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History.
I wish I could do that now.
The three of us take this class together.
And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures.
I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures.
My brother is kind of busy.
The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down.
And we sit there for three hours -- and our little blue notebooks -- yes, I'm that old.
And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow."
And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class."
You don't know anything."
(Laughter) The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities.
If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low.
Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce.
And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors.
If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "I'm awesome.
If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard.
Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success.
I wish the answer were easy.
Own your own success."
But it's not that simple.
Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.
And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.
There's a really good study that shows this really well.
There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen.
And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist.
In 2002 -- not so long ago -- a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen.
He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard."
But that one word made a really big difference.
He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good.
The bad news was that everyone liked Howard.
He's a great guy. You want to work for him.
She's a little out for herself. She's a little political.
You're not sure you'd want to work for her.
The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this.
And she said, "I learned something today.
She said, "You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions.
I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions.
We've got to get women to sit at the table.
(Cheers) (Applause) Message number two: Make your partner a real partner.
The data shows this very clearly.
If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does.
So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one.
The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them.
And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.
I think the cause is more complicated.
I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls.
And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce.
(Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate.
They know each other more in the biblical sense as well.
(Cheers) Message number three: Don't leave before you leave.
I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving.
Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy.
And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child.
She starts leaning back.
The problem is that -- let's say she got pregnant that day, that day -- nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath -- Fast-forward two years, more often -- and as I've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time.
She looked a little young.
And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?"
And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married."
She didn't even have a boyfriend.
(Laughter) I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early."
But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back?
Your job needs to be challenging.
And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal.
Don't leave before you leave.
Stay in.
Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.
My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top.
We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population -- in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry.
But I'm hopeful that future generations can.
I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world.
I think it would be a better world.
I have two children.
I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So today, I'm going to tell you about some people who didn't move out of their neighborhoods.
The first one is happening right here in Chicago.
Currently, taxpayers spend about 60,000 dollars per year sending a person to jail.
We know that two-thirds of them are going to go back.
I find it interesting that, for every one dollar we spend, however, on early childhood education, like Head Start, we save 17 dollars on stuff like incarceration in the future.
Or -- think about it -- that 60,000 dollars is more than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well.
But Brenda, not being phased by stuff like that, took a look at her challenge and came up with a not-so-obvious solution: create a business that produces skin care products from honey.
It's the basis of growing a form of social innovation that has real potential.
She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees, harvest the honey and make value-added products that they marketed themselves, and that were later sold at Whole Foods.
Less than four percent of the folks that went through her program actually go back to jail.
So these young men and women learned job-readiness and life skills through bee keeping and became productive citizens in the process.
Talk about a sweet beginning.
Now, I'm going to take you to Los Angeles, and lots of people know that L.A. has its issues.
Currently, 20 percent of California's energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly Southern California.
Now Andy Lipkis is working to help L.A. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management and urban heat island -- linking trees, people and technology to create a more livable city.
All that green stuff actually naturally absorbs storm water, also helps cool our cities.
Because, come to think about it, do you really want air-conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want?
So a few years ago, L.A. County decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools.
And Andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million of those dollars on asphalt to surround the schools themselves.
And by presenting a really strong economic case, they convinced the L.A. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery, that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure.
Now Judy Bonds is a coal miner's daughter.
Her family has eight generations in a town called Whitesville, West Virginia.
And if anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history, and of the town, it should be Judy.
But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines that her father and her father's father would go down into and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people.
Now, two dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months, and only for about a few years' worth of coal.
That kind of technology is called "mountaintop removal."
Just imagine that the air surrounding these places -- it's filled with the residue of explosives and coal.
When we visited, it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so -- not just miners, but everybody.
And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned.
But she also saw the difference in potential wind energy on an intact mountain, and one that was reduced in elevation by over 2,000 feet.
Three years of dirty energy with not many jobs, or centuries of clean energy with the potential for developing expertise and improvements in efficiency based on technical skills, and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region's wind.
It's a longer payback than mountaintop removal, but the wind energy actually pays back forever.
Now mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals, and it gives them a lot of misery.
Most people are still unemployed, leading to most of the same kinds of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience -- drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy and poor heath, as well.
Not quite an obvious alliance.
I mean, literally, her hometown is called Whitesville, West Virginia.
But the back of my T-shirt, the one that she gave me, says, "Save the endangered hillbillies."
So homegirls and hillbillies we got it together and totally understand that this is what it's all about.
But just a few months ago, Judy was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer.
Yeah.
And it has since moved to her bones and her brain.
And I just find it so bizarre that she's suffering from the same thing that she tried so hard to protect people from.
That's what my homegirl is doing.
So I'm so proud of that.
(Applause) But these three people don't know each other, but they do have an awful lot in common.
They're all problem solvers, and they're just some of the many examples that I really am privileged to see, meet and learn from in the examples of the work that I do now.
I was really lucky to have them all featured on my Corporation for Public Radio radio show called ThePromisedLand.org.
They take a look at the demands that are out there -- beauty products, healthy schools, electricity -- and how the money's flowing to meet those demands.
And when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs, you're left with unemployed people, and those people aren't cheap.
I think that number's probably going to go up.
They're not the largest number of people, but they are some of the most expensive -- and in terms of the likelihood for domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, poor performance by their kids in schools and also poor health as a result of stress.
So these three guys all understand how to productively channel dollars through our local economies to meet existing market demands, reduce the social problems that we have now and prevent new problems in the future.
And there are plenty of other examples like that.
One problem: waste handling and unemployment.
Even when we think or talk about recycling, lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated or in landfills and leaving many municipalities, diversion rates -- they leave much to be recycled.
And where is this waste handled? Usually in poor communities.
And we know that eco-industrial business, these kinds of business models -- there's a model in Europe called the eco-industrial park, where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another, or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell.
We can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing.
And in my hometown, we actually tried to do one of these in the Bronx, but our mayor decided what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot.
Fortunately -- because we wanted to create hundreds of jobs -- but after many years, the city wanted to build a jail.
They've since abandoned that project, thank goodness.
Another problem: unhealthy food systems and unemployment.
Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system.
And so we know "urban ag" is a big buzz topic this time of the year, but it's mostly gardening, which has some value in community building -- lots of it -- but it's not in terms of creating jobs or for food production.
The numbers just aren't there.
This can support seasonal farmers around metro areas who are losing out because they really can't meet the year-round demand for produce.
The goal is to meet the cities' institutional demands for hospitals, senior centers, schools, daycare centers, and produce a network of regional jobs, as well.
This is smart infrastructure.
And how we manage our built environment affects the health and well-being of people every single day.
Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs.
And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base.
And imagine a national business model that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure to improve local economic stability.
These examples indicate a trend.
I'm noticing that it's happening all over the country, and the good news is that it's growing.
And we all need to be invested in it.
And I call it "hometown security."
The recession has us reeling and fearful, and there's something in the air these days that is also very empowering.
It's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery.
Now is the time for us to act in our own communities where we think local and we act local.
And when we do that, our neighbors -- be they next-door, or in the next state, or in the next country -- will be just fine.
Hometown security means creating wealth here at home, instead of destroying it overseas.
Tackling social and environmental problems at the same time with the same solution yields great cost savings, wealth generation and national security.
Many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across America.
The challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more.
Now, hometown security is about taking care of your own, but it's not like the old saying, "charity begins at home."
I recently read a book called "Love Leadership" by John Hope Bryant.
And it's about leading in a world that really does seem to be operating on the basis of fear.
And reading that book made me reexamine that theory because I need to explain what I mean by that.
See, my dad was a great, great man in many ways.
He grew up in the segregated South, escaped lynching and all that during some really hard times, and he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times.
But, like all of us, he had some problems.
(Laughter) And his was gambling, compulsively.
To him that phrase, "Charity begins at home," meant that my payday -- or someone else's -- would just happen to coincide with his lucky day.
So you need to help him out.
And sometimes I would loan him money from my after-school or summer jobs, and he always had the great intention of paying me back with interest, of course, after he hit it big.
And he did sometimes, believe it or not, at a racetrack in Los Angeles -- one reason to love L.A. -- back in the 1940s.
He made 15,000 dollars cash and bought the house that I grew up in.
So I'm not that unhappy about that.
But listen, I did feel obligated to him, and I grew up -- then I grew up.
And I'm a grown woman now, and I have learned a few things along the way.
I spent some years watching how good intentions for community empowerment, that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it, actually left people in the same, if not worse, position that they were in before.
(Laughter) But during that time, I realized that it was about projects and developing them on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities.
But I really did struggle for financial support.
And I tell you, being on the TED stage and winning a MacArthur in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that I had arrived.
And by the time I'd moved on, I was actually covering a third of my agency's budget deficit with speaking fees.
And I think because early on, frankly, my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time.
But since then, the park that was just a dump and was featured at a TED2006 Talk became this little thing.
But I did in fact get married in it.
The South Bronx Greenway was also just a drawing on the stage back in 2006.
Since then, we got about 50 million dollars in stimulus package money to come and get here.
And we love this, because I love construction now, because we're watching these things actually happen.
I started my firm to help communities across the country realize their own potential to improve everything about the quality of life for their people.
What we need are people who see the value in investing in these types of local enterprises, who will partner with folks like me to identify the growth trends and climate adaptation as well as understand the growing social costs of business as usual.
We need to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems and repair ourselves.
It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures.
It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So, I'll start with this: a couple years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event.
And she called, and she said, "I'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer."
And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant."
(Laughter) And I was like, "Okay."
So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller."
And she said, "I'm going to call you a storyteller."
And I was like, "Why not 'magic pixie'?"
(Laughter) I was like, "Let me think about this for a second."
And I thought, you know, I am a storyteller.
I'm a qualitative researcher.
I collect stories; that's what I do.
And maybe stories are just data with a soul.
(Laughter) So I'm a researcher-storyteller, and I'm going to talk to you today -- we're talking about expanding perception -- and so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent.
And this is where my story starts.
And I thought he was just sweet-talking me.
I was like, "Really?" and he was like, "Absolutely."
That was my mantra.
So I was very excited about this.
I want to understand them.
I want to hack into these things that I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see.
Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here.
It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
It doesn't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice, mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is -- neurobiologically that's how we're wired -- it's why we're here.
When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded.
And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.
And it turned out to be shame.
And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection?
The things I can tell you about it: It's universal; we all have it.
No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it.
What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which, we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough."
This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.
And you know how I feel about vulnerability. I hate vulnerability.
I'm going in, I'm going to figure this stuff out, I'm going to spend a year, I'm going to totally deconstruct shame, I'm going to understand how vulnerability works, and I'm going to outsmart it.
So I was ready, and I was really excited.
(Laughter) You know this.
My one year turned into six years: Thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups.
At one point, people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories -- thousands of pieces of data in six years.
There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it.
And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging.
That's it.
What do these people have in common?
So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research?
So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data.
In fact, I did it first in a four-day, very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled the interviews, the stories, pulled the incidents.
What's the theme? What's the pattern?
My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just writing and in my researcher mode.
And so here's what I found.
What they had in common was a sense of courage.
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word "cor," meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly.
The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability.
They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful.
They talked about the willingness to say, "I love you" first ...
the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees ...
the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram.
They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out.
I personally thought it was betrayal.
And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting.
(Laughter) And it did.
I call it a breakdown; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening.
Do you have any recommendations?"
Because about five of my friends were like, "Wooo, I wouldn't want to be your therapist."
(Laughter) I was like, "What does that mean?"
(Laughter) I was like, "Okay."
So I found a therapist.
And she said, "How are you?"
And I said, "I'm great. I'm okay."
She said, "What's going on?"
(Laughter) And so I said, "Here's the thing, I'm struggling."
And I said, "Well, I have a vulnerability issue.
And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love.
And I think I have a problem, and I need some help."
(Laughter) "I just need some strategies."
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Laughter) And then I said, "It's bad, right?"
(Laughter) And it did, and it didn't.
And it took about a year.
And you know how there are people that, when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, that they surrender and walk into it.
I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.
No.
So this is what I learned.
We numb vulnerability -- when we're waiting for the call.
What makes you feel vulnerable?"
And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses.
This is the world we live in.
And I think there's evidence -- and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it's a huge cause -- We are the most in-debt ...
The problem is -- and I learned this from the research -- that you cannot selectively numb emotion.
I don't want to feel these.
I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.
And I know that's knowing laughter.
I hack into your lives for a living.
God.
(Laughter) You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions.
So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.
And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.
And it becomes this dangerous cycle.
And it doesn't just have to be addiction.
"I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up."
That's it.
The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are.
This is what politics looks like today.
We perfect.
If there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me, but it doesn't work.
Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks.
(Laughter) Which just, I hope in 100 years, people will look back and go, "Wow."
(Laughter) And we perfect, most dangerously, our children.
Let me tell you what we think about children.
And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, "Look at her, she's perfect.
My job is just to keep her perfect -- make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh."
That's not our job.
Our job is to look and say, "You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging."
That's our job.
Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we'll end the problems, I think, that we see today.
We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people.
We do that in our personal lives.
We pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people.
I would say to companies, this is not our first rodeo, people.
"We're sorry. We'll fix it."
to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee -- and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult -- to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much?
then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.
That's all I have. Thank you.
(Applause)
Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years.
(Applause) So there is among many people -- certainly me and most of the people I talk to -- a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run.
Our kids' teachers seem to be failing them.
We certainly can't trust the bankers, and we certainly can't trust the brokers.
They almost brought the entire financial system down.
So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don't really have our interests at heart.
Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests.
They don't understand us.
They don't have the time to get to know us.
If things aren't going right, the first response is: let's make more rules, let's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing.
Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don't know what they're doing and don't care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated.
Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don't need to rely on judges using their judgment.
Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime.
Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees.
More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with.
So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems.
Rules and incentives -- "sticks" and "carrots."
We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse.
There's the Dodd-Frank Act, there's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren.
Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave.
We'll see.
In addition, we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits.
So if we find just the right incentives, they'll do the right thing -- as I said -- selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won't drive us all over a cliff.
And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that.
Why? Because bankers are smart people.
And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules.
You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system "almost-collapse" can't happen again.
So it's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that.
What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue.
We need people who want to do the right thing.
And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called "practical wisdom."
Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is.
So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked.
And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems -- problems that they hadn't anticipated.
Well if you think about it, it's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler.
So what do they do?
And Aristotle said, "Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule."
And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules.
Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass.
Wise people know when and how to bend the rules.
Wise people know how to improvise.
The way my co-author , Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians.
The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players.
So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman.
And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required.
A wise person knows when to bend the rules.
A wise person knows when to improvise.
If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people.
And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding.
Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue.
It's the case of Michael.
Michael's a young guy.
He had a pretty low-wage job.
Then he lost his job.
He panicked about being able to support his family.
One night, he drank a little too much, and he robbed a cab driver -- stole 50 dollars.
He robbed him at gunpoint.
It was a toy gun.
The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months.
He had never committed a crime before.
He was a responsible husband and father.
He had been faced with desperate circumstances.
And so she improvised a sentence -- 11 months, and not only that, but release every day to go to work.
And the family was united.
And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life -- a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge.
But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed.
And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery.
He did after all have a toy gun.
The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years.
He won the appeal.
Michael was sentenced to five years in prison.
Judge Forer had to follow the law.
And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail.
And Michael disappeared.
So that is an example, both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better.
Ms. Dewey's a teacher in a Texas elementary school.
All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools.
So here was the consultant's advice: first, don't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do.
Second, don't waste your time on kids who can't pass the test no matter what you do.
Third, don't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted.
Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called "bubble kids" -- kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing.
So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly.
For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher.
Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules.
People have to make a living.
But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses.
First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity.
And second, they demoralize the activity itself.
The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized.
It creates people -- when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing -- it creates people who are addicted to incentives.
That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives.
Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years.
Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years.
We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward.
If you reward teachers for kids' test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation.
Psychologists have known this for decades, and it's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists.
We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope.
So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing.
So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they're incredibly admirable, but there's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down.
More hopeful are people we call system-changers.
These are people who are looking not to dodge the system's rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several.
One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell.
And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill.
So he started selling marijuana.
Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon.
But Judge Russell did have an alternative.
And that's because he was in a special court.
He was in a court called the Veterans' Court.
In the Veterans' Court -- this was the first of its kind in the United States.
Judge Russell created the Veterans' Court.
They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system.
There are now 22 cities that have Veterans' Courts like this.
Why has the idea spread?
Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans' Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison.
None. None.
Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low.
Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients, before it turned into an institution that serves only itself.
Banking wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way.
So there are examples like this in medicine -- doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training.
And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year.
We'll see.
So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about.
Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission -- what Aristotle would have called its proper telos.
And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want.
People want to be allowed to be virtuous.
They want to have permission to do the right thing.
They don't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work.
Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right.
There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study -- I know this will come as a shock to all of you -- the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work.
Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part.
Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying.
If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that's meaningful and fulfilling, you don't much need anything else.
Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom.
Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom.
Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom.
And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners.
In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing -- to do right by others -- practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves.
(Applause)
My big idea is a very, very small idea that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us.
(Laughter) (Applause) This is a room of type A women.
This is a room of sleep-deprived women.
I hit my head on my desk.
I broke my cheekbone, I got five stitches on my right eye.
And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep.
And in the course of that, I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists, and I'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep.
(Applause) And we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution, this new feminist issue.
We are literally going to sleep our way to the top -- literally -- (Laughter) (Applause) because unfortunately, for men, sleep deprivation has become a virility symbol.
I was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before.
And I felt like saying to him -- but I didn't say -- I felt like saying, "You know what? if you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting."
Especially here in Washington, if you try to make a breakfast date, and you say, "How about eight o'clock?"
they're likely to tell you, "Eight o'clock is too late for me, but that's OK, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight."
And they think that means they are so incredibly busy and productive, but the truth is, they're not, because we, at the moment, have had brilliant leaders in business, in finance, in politics, making terrible decisions.
So a high IQ does not mean that you're a good leader, because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic.
In fact, I have a feeling that if Lehman Brothers was Lehman Brothers and Sisters, they might still be around.
(Laughter) (Applause) While all the brothers were busy just being hyper-connected 24/7, maybe a sister would have noticed the iceberg, because she would have woken up from a seven-and-a-half- or eight-hour sleep, and have been able to see the big picture.
So as we are facing all the multiple crises in our world at the moment, what is good for us on a personal level, what's going to bring more joy, gratitude, effectiveness in our lives and be the best for our own careers, is also what is best for the world.
So I urge you to shut your eyes, and discover the great ideas that lie inside us; to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins.
But in fact, here in the Northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "gardens watered by running streams."
Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me.
But the thing is, how come it's news to most people?
(Laughter) Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the "highlighter version," which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes.
So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly -- as properly as I could, that is.
Now, I did have an advantage.
(Laughter) So I read slowly.
(Laughter) I did resist the temptation to skip to the back, where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are.
And yet, the terrain was very familiar.
So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus.
The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert.
And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory.
And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic.
Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined.
It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation.
The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed.
It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue.
But all is not lost in translation.
Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers.
Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca, where fighting was usually forbidden.
Not "You must kill unbelievers in Mecca," but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over, and only if there's no other pact in place, and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first.
"Some of these verses are definite in meaning," it says, "and others are ambiguous."
Old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here.
The word used four times is "houris," rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins.
Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: houris.
(Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying "pure beings," like in angels, or it may be like the Greek "kouros" or "kore," an eternal youth.
But the truth is, nobody really knows.
And that's the point.
Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be "a new creation in paradise," and that you will be "recreated in a form unknown to you," which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin.
(Laughter) And that number 72 never appears.
There are no 72 virgins in the Koran.
That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps.
Paradise is quite the opposite.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I am a surgeon who studies creativity, and I have never had a patient tell me, "I really want you to be creative during surgery," and so I guess there's a little bit of irony to it.
I will say though that, after having done surgery a lot, it's similar to playing a musical instrument.
And for me, this deep and enduring fascination with sound is what led me to both be a surgeon and to study the science of sound, particularly music.
I've done most of this work at Johns Hopkins University, and at the National Institute of Health where I was previously.
This video is of Keith Jarrett, who's a well-known jazz improviser and probably the most well-known, iconic example of someone who takes improvisation to a higher level.
And he'll improvise entire concerts off the top of his head, and he'll never play it exactly the same way again, so as a form of intense creativity, I think this is a great example.
(Music) (Music ends) It's really a remarkable thing that happens there.
I've always as a listener, as a fan, I listen to that, and I'm astounded.
How can the brain generate that much information, that much music, spontaneously?
And so I set out with this concept, scientifically, that artistic creativity, it's magical, but it's not magic, meaning that it's a product of the brain.
With this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product, I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process, and there are subquestions that I put there.
Is it possible to study creativity scientifically?
And I think that's a good question.
And I'll tell you that most scientific studies of music, they're very dense, and when you go through them, it's very hard to recognize the music in it.
This brings the second question: Why should scientists study creativity?
Maybe we're not the right people to do it.
All of us have this remarkable brain, which is poorly understood, to say the least.
I think that neuroscientists have more questions than answers, and I'm not going to give you answers today, just ask a lot of questions.
And that's what I do in my lab.
I ask questions about what is the brain doing to enable us to do this.
This is the main method that I use. This is functional MRI.
If you've been in an MRI scanner, it's very much the same, but this one is outfitted in a special way to not just take pictures of your brain, but to also take pictures of active areas of the brain.
The way that's done is by the following: There's something called BOLD imaging, which is Blood Oxygen Level Dependent imaging.
When you're in an fMRI scanner, you're in a big magnet that's aligning your molecules in certain areas.
When an area of the brain is active, meaning a neural area is active, it gets blood flow shunted to that area.
That blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration.
Deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by MRI, whereas oxyhemoglobin can't.
So through this method of inference -- and we're measuring blood flow, not neural activity -- we say that an area of the brain that's getting more blood was active during a particular task, and that's the crux of how fMRI works.
And it's been used since the '90s to study really complex processes.
I'm going to review a study that I did, which was jazz in an fMRI scanner.
This is a short video of how we did this project.
(Video) Charles Limb: This is a plastic MIDI piano keyboard that we use for the jazz experiments.
And it's a 35-key keyboard designed to fit both inside the scanner, be magnetically safe, have minimal interference that would contribute to any artifact, and have this cushion so that it can rest on the players' legs while they're lying down in the scanner, playing on their back.
It sends out what's called a MIDI signal -- or a Musical Instrument Digital Interface -- through these wires into the box and then the computer, which then trigger high-quality piano samples like this.
(Music) (Music) (Music ends) OK, so it works.
And so through this piano keyboard, we have the means to take a musical process and study it.
So what do you do now that you have this cool piano keyboard?
We have to come up with a scientific experiment.
There's a scale paradigm, which is playing a scale up and down, memorized, then there's improvising on a scale, quarter notes, metronome, right hand -- scientifically very safe, but musically really boring.
Then there's the bottom one, which is called the jazz paradigm.
So we brought professional jazz players to the NIH, and we had them memorize this piece of music on the lower-left, which is what you heard me playing -- and we had them improvise to the same chord changes.
And if you can hit that lower-right sound icon, that's an example of what was recorded in the scanner.
(Music) (Music ends) In the end, it's not the most natural environment, but they're able to play real music.
And I've listened to that solo 200 times, and I still like it.
Were they playing more notes when they were improvising?
That was not what was going on.
And then we looked at the brain activity.
These are contrast maps that are showing subtractions between what changes when you're improvising vs. when you're doing something memorized.
In red is an area that's active in the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe of the brain, and in blue is this area that was deactivated.
So we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity.
These are multifunctional areas of the brain, these are not the jazz areas of the brain.
They do a whole host of things that have to do with self-reflection, introspection, working memory etc.
We think, at least in this preliminary -- it's one study; it's probably wrong, but it's one study -- (Laughter) we think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you should have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe.
The next question was: What happens when musicians are trading back and forth, something called "trading fours," which is something they do normally in a jazz experiment.
So this is a 12-bar blues, and I've broken it down into four-bar groups, so you would know how you would trade.
We brought a musician into the scanner, same way, had them memorize this melody then had another musician out in the control room trading back and forth interactively.
So this is a musician, Mike Pope, one of the world's best bassists and a fantastic piano player.
(Music) He's now playing the piece that we just saw a little better than I wrote it.
(Video) CL: Mike, come on in.
(Laughter) It's kind of fun, actually.
(Music) And then I'm in the control room here, playing back and forth.
(Music) (Music ends) (Video) Mike Pope: This is a pretty good representation of what it's like.
And it's good that it's not too quick.
So the hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing, looking at my hands through two mirrors, laying on my back, and not able to move at all except for my hand.
But again -- there were moments, for sure -- (Laughter) there were moments of real, honest-to-God musical interplay, for sure.
This is one subject's data.
This is, in fact, Mike Pope's data.
When he was trading fours with me, improvising vs. memorized, his language areas lit up, his Broca's area, in the inferior frontal gyrus on the left.
He had it also homologous on the right.
This is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication.
This whole notion that music is a language -- maybe there's a neurologic basis to it after all, and we can see it when two musicians are having a musical conversation.
So we've done this on eight subjects now, and we're getting all the data together, hopefully we'll have something to say about it meaningfully.
Now when I think about improvisation and the language, what's next?
Rap, of course, rap -- freestyle.
I've always been fascinated by freestyle.
And let's play this video.
There are a lot of correlates between the two forms of music, I think, in different time periods, in lot of ways, rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve.
So how do you study rap scientifically?
This is what you do: You have a freestyle artist come and memorize a rap that you write for them, that they've never heard before, and then you have them freestyle.
So I told my lab members that I would rap for TED, and they said, "No, you won't."
And then I thought -- (Laughter) (Applause) But here's the thing.
Computer: Memory, thump.
CL: Thump of the beat in a known repeat Rhythm and rhyme, they make me complete The climb is sublime when I'm on the mic Spittin' rhymes that hit you like a lightning strike Computer: Search.
CL: I search for the truth in this eternal quest My passion's not fashion, you can see how I'm dressed Psychopathic words in my head appear Whisper these lyrics only I can hear Computer: Art.
(Applause) I guarantee you that will never happen again.
Go hit that right sound icon, there will be cued three square words: like, not and head.
Freestyler: I'm like some kind of extraterrestrial, celestial scene Back in the days, I used to sit in pyramids and meditate With two microphones -- Computer: Head hovering over my head See if I could still listen, spittin' off the sound See what you grinning I teach the children in the back of the classroom About the message of apocalyptical Computer: Not.
It's doing something neurologically remarkable.
Creatively speaking, it's just a phenomenal thing.
This is a short video of how we do this in a scanner.
[fMRI of Hip-Hop Rap] (Laughter) (Video) CL: We're here with Emmanuel.
CL: That was recorded in the scanner, by the way.
He's just memorized a rhyme for us.
This is four rappers' brains.
You have heightened brain activity when you're doing a comparable task, when that one task is creative and the other task is memorized.
But we want to get at the root of what is creative genius neurologically, and I think, with these methods, we're getting close.
And I think, hopefully in the next 10, 20 years, you'll see real, meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art, and maybe we're starting now to get there.
(Applause)
There are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography -- women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn't work well at all.
Do you know which group you're in?
Because the breast has become a very political organ.
The truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press, politicians, radiologists and medical imaging companies.
I will do my best this morning to tell you what I think is the truth.
But first, my disclosures.
I am not a breast cancer survivor.
I'm not a radiologist.
I don't have any patents, and I've never received any money from a medical imaging company, and I am not seeking your vote.
She came to see me after discovering a breast lump.
Her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s.
She and I were both very pregnant at that time, and my heart just ached for her, imagining how afraid she must be.
Fortunately, her lump proved to be benign.
But she asked me a question: how confident was I that I would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one?
So I studied her mammogram, and I reviewed the radiology literature, and I was shocked to discover that, in her case, our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin.
You may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the United States Preventive Services Task Force reviewed the world's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s.
Now everybody rushed to criticize the Task Force, even though most of them weren't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies.
It took the Senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage.
Radiologists were outraged by the guidelines.
The pre-eminent mammographer in the United States issued the following quote to the Washington Post.
The radiologists were, in turn, criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest.
But in my view, the radiologists are heroes.
There's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms, and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret, and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause.
Where there is this much legal smoke, there is likely to be some fire.
The factor most responsible for that fire is breast density.
Breast density refers to the relative amount of fat -- pictured here in yellow -- versus connective and epithelial tissues -- pictured in pink.
And that proportion is primarily genetically determined.
Two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue, which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them.
And although breast density generally declines with age, up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause.
So how do you know if your breasts are dense?
Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram.
And breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense.
The problem with breast density is that it's truly the wolf in sheep's clothing.
Both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram, and the X-ray often can't distinguish between the two.
But imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast.
That's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts, but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts.
Now it's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer, but it turns out that it's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer.
It's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer.
At the time my patient posed this question to me, breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature, and very few women having mammograms, or the physicians ordering them, knew about this.
Mammograms have been around since the 1960's, and it's changed very little.
There have been surprisingly few innovations, until digital mammography was approved in 2000.
Digital mammography is still an X-ray of the breast, but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally, just like we can with a digital camera.
The U.S. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment, and what have we gained from that investment?
In a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars, digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography, and in fact, it was worse in older women.
But it was better in one group, and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts, and in those women, digital mammography found twice as many cancers, but it still only found 60 percent.
So digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment, but it's been a very small step forward for womankind.
What about ultrasound?
Ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies, so it's not widely used.
And MRI is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors, but it's also very expensive.
If we think about disruptive technology, we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive.
Think about iPods compared to stereos.
The machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive.
Screening the average young woman with an MRI is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a Hummer.
One MRI scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs.
And sooner or later, we're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation can't always come at a much higher price.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker on innovation, and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius.
Rather, big ideas can be orchestrated, if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don't ordinarily talk about.
It's like the essence of TED.
He quotes one innovator who says, "The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick."
(Laughter) This makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions.
And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize are problems.
(Laughter) So if you will allow me a little creative license, I will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient's problem with a physicist's solution.
Shortly after her visit, I was introduced to a nuclear physicist at Mayo named Michael O'Conner, who was a specialist in cardiac imaging, something I had nothing to do with.
And he happened to tell me about a conference he'd just returned from in Israel, where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector.
Now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart, and it had even been tried to image the breast.
But the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge, bulky tubes, and they were filled with these scintillating crystals, and you just couldn't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors.
But the potential advantage was that gamma rays, unlike X-rays, are not influenced by breast density.
But this technology could not find tumors when they're small, and finding a small tumor is critical for survival.
If you can find a tumor when it's less than a centimeter, survival exceeds 90 percent, but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases.
But Michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he'd seen, and this is it.
It's made not of a bulky tube, but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector.
And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density, and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors.
This is an image from our first patient.
And you can see, using the old gamma technology, that it just looked like noise.
But using our new detector, we could begin to see the outline of a tumor.
So here we were, a nuclear physicist, an internist, soon joined by Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer, and two radiologists, and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape.
This is our current detector.
The duct tape is gone, and we added a second detector on top of the breast, which has further improved our tumor detection.
So how does this work?
Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue, and we've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast.
But MBI exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors, and therefore, it's impervious to breast density.
After the injection, the patient's breast is placed between the detectors.
And if you've ever had a mammogram -- if you're old enough to have had a mammogram -- you know what comes next: pain.
But with MBI, we use just light, pain-free compression.
(Applause) And the detector then transmits the image to the computer.
So here's an example.
You can see, on the right, a mammogram showing a faint tumor, the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue.
But the MBI image shows that tumor much more clearly, as well as a second tumor, which profoundly influence that patient's surgical options.
In this example, although the mammogram found one tumor, we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors -- one is small as three millimeters.
Our big break came in 2004.
After we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors, we used these images to submit a grant to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
And we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts, comparing a screening mammogram to an MBI.
Of the tumors that we found, mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors.
MBI found 83 percent.
Here's an example from that screening study.
The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue, but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake, which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor.
In this case, a one-centimeter tumor.
And in this case, a 45-year-old medical secretary at Mayo, who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young, wanted to enroll in our study.
And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue, but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake, which we can also see on a color image.
And this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball.
So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast, we had to solve one very important problem.
We had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose, and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this.
And I'm very happy to report that we're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram.
And at this low dose, we're continuing this screening study, and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram, but an MBI image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer.
So this is not just young women that it's benefiting.
And we're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that's used in any other type of gamma technology.
MBI generates four images per breast.
It takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding.
But this is why MBI is so potentially disruptive -- it's as accurate as MRI, it's far less complex to interpret, and it's a fraction of the cost.
But you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo.
After achieving what we felt were remarkable results, our manuscript was rejected by four journals.
After the fourth rejection, we requested reconsideration of the manuscript, because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology.
Our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal Radiology.
(Applause) We still need to complete the screening study using the low dose, and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions, and this could take five or more years.
But I recognize -- (Applause) I recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science.
The MBI unit has now been FDA approved, but it's not yet widely available.
So until something is available for women with dense breasts, there are things that you should know to protect yourself.
First, know your density.
Ninety percent of women don't, and 95 percent of women don't know that it increases your breast cancer risk.
The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram.
I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in Chicago, and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is.
And if you don't know, please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report.
Second, if you're pre-menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, when breast density is relatively lower.
Third, if you notice a persistent change in your breast, insist on additional imaging.
And fourth and most important, the mammography debate will rage on, but I do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram.
Mammography isn't perfect, but it's the only test that's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer.
But this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation.
Some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later, and most women, thankfully, survive.
So it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer.
Mammography's the only one that's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim.
It is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations.
For women without dense breasts, mammography is the best choice.
But for women with dense breasts; we shouldn't abandon screening altogether, we need to offer them something better.
After undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer, she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy.
We can and must do better, not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters, but in time for you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada.
My mom left Nairobi, Kenya.
And they got here in the late 1960s.
They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Toronto, and they settled into a new life.
They saw their first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, and they had their first kids.
My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods.
We had close family, good friends, a quiet street.
I went to high school.
I graduated.
I moved out of the house, I got a job, I found a girl, I settled down -- and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens' song -- (Laughter) but life was pretty good.
Life was pretty good.
2006 was a great year.
2007 was a great year.
I graduated from school, and I went on a road trip with two of my closest friends.
Here's a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean.
(Laughter) So you can't actually see them, but it was breathtaking, believe me.
(Laughter) 2008 and 2009 were a little tougher.
I know that they were tougher for a lot of people, not just me.
First of all, the news was so heavy.
I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time.
My marriage wasn't going well, and we just were growing further and further apart.
One day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage, through a lot of tears, to have a very honest conversation.
My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental illness for some time.
And for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness, you know how challenging it can be.
I spoke to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m.
on a Sunday night.
We talked about the TV show we watched that evening.
And Monday morning, I found out that he disappeared.
Very sadly, he took his own life.
And it was a really heavy time.
And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow.
So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com.
I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures that we all love, but we just don't talk about enough -- things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line -- even if you were last at the other line, swoop right in there.
(Laughter) And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood.
I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those 50,000.
Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad.
(Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits, and then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions.
It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, "You've just won the Best Blog In the World award."
(Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to?
(Laughter) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart.
And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for Best Blog.
And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book.
Flash-forward to the next year and "The Book of Awesome" has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks.
(Applause) But look, I said I wanted to do three things with you today.
Over the last few years, I haven't had that much time to really think.
But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: "What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website, but also grow myself?"
I'd love to just talk about each one briefly.
So Attitude: Look, we're all going to get lumps, and we're all going to get bumps.
None of us can predict the future, but we do know one thing about it and that's that it ain't gonna go according to plan.
We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too.
It's sad, and it's not pleasant to talk about, but your husband might leave you, your girlfriend could cheat, your headaches might be more serious than you thought, or your dog could get hit by a car on the street.
It's not a happy thought, but your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes.
Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean.
And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well, too, with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart, and when that bad news washes over you, and when that pain sponges and soaks in, I just really hope you feel like you've always got two choices.
Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two, and choosing, no matter how difficult it is, no matter what pain hits you, choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future.
The second "A" is Awareness.
I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time.
I love the way that they'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs.
I love the way that they'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner.
I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time.
That three-year-old boy is still part of you.
That three-year-old girl is still part of you.
And being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything you've seen for the first time once, too.
There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said, "Found money."
The last "A" is Authenticity.
They were tough football players doing what they love, which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field.
He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks.
I mean, he loved it so much that, after he retired from the NFL, he started joining clubs.
(Laughter) (Applause) It's a great cover.
It's just about being you and being cool with that.
And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy.
You meet people that you like talking to.
And you end you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled.
So those are the three A's.
I don't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you're in your mid-20s.
And I think you'd have to be really authentic, you'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you're being exposed to.
I'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now, because you don't get many opportunities in life to do something like this, and my parents are sitting in the front row.
And I just wanted to say thank you to you guys.
(Applause) When I was growing up, my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada.
And it's a great story, because what happened was he got off the plane at the Toronto airport, and he was welcomed by a non-profit group, which I'm sure someone in this room runs.
(Laughter) And this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada.
And my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread.
There was bread, there was those little, mini dill pickles, there was olives, those little white onions.
There was rolled up turkey cold cuts, rolled up ham cold cuts, rolled up roast beef cold cuts and little cubes of cheese.
There was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches.
There was lasagna, there was casseroles, there was brownies, there was butter tarts, and there was pies, lots and lots of pies.
And when my dad tells the story, he says, "The craziest thing was, I'd never seen any of that before, except bread.
(Laughter) I didn't know what was meat, what was vegetarian.
I was eating olives with pie.
(Laughter) When I was five years old, my dad used to take me grocery shopping, and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables.
He would say, "Look, can you believe they have a mango here from Mexico?
Can you believe they've got a date from Morocco?"
He's like, "Do you know where Morocco even is?"
And I'd say, "I'm five. I don't even know where I am.
Is this A&P?"
And he'd say, "I don't know where Morocco is either, but let's find out."
And when we did, my dad would say, "Can you believe someone climbed a tree over there, picked this thing off it, put it in a truck, drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a tiny grocery store just outside our house, so they could sell it to us for 25 cents?"
When I stop to think about it, he's absolutely right.
We are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the entire universe that we've ever seen, capable of experiencing so many of these things.
I mean, we're the only ones with architecture and agriculture.
We've got airplanes, highway lanes, interior design and horoscope signs.
We've got fashion magazines, house party scenes.
You can watch a horror movie with monsters.
You can go to a concert and hear guitars jamming.
You can sleep in clean sheets.
You can go to the movies and get good seats.
You can smell bakery air, walk around with rain hair, pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap.
We've got all that, but we've only got 100 years to enjoy it.
And that's the sad part.
The cashiers at your grocery store, the foreman at your plant, the guy tailgating you home on the highway, the telemarketer calling you during dinner, every teacher you've ever had, everyone that's ever woken up beside you, every politician in every country, every actor in every movie, every single person in your family, everyone you love, everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years.
Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet.
And that moment is right now, and those moments are counting down, and those moments are always, always, always fleeting.
You will never be as young as you are right now.
Thank you.
I'm actually here to make a challenge to people.
I know there have been many challenges made to people.
Peace is not "Kumbaya, my Lord."
Peace is not the dove and the rainbow -- as lovely as they are.
When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove, I think of personal serenity.
I think of meditation.
It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear.
This is called human security.
And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really, really heavy-duty, non-violent friends, like Mairead McGuire.
I understand that humans are so "messed up" -- to use a nice word, because I promised my mom I'd stop using the F-bomb in public.
And I'm trying harder and harder.
We need a little bit of police; we need a little bit of military, but for defense.
It is not arming our country to the teeth.
It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to make the people of the world secure.
I was thinking about the recent ongoings in Congress, where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote.
I certainly support the START vote.
But he's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons.
Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals is 80 billion dollars?
Just that little bit of money, which to me, I wish it was in my bank account -- it's not, but ...
But it's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime, unless we get up off our ...
and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security.
It is about action.
I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago, and His Holiness -- we're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city, and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates.
And he's a bad guy. He's like a bad kid in church.
(Laughter) He said, "You know that I kind of like meditation, and I pray."
I don't follow that, but that's cool."
And he says, "But I have become skeptical.
I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world.
I think what we need is action."
His Holiness, in his robes, is my new action hero.
I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago.
As most of you know, she's a hero for democracy in her country, Burma.
You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy.
She was just released a couple of weeks ago, and we're very concerned to see how long she will be free, because she is already out in the streets in Rangoon, agitating for change.
She is already out in the streets, working with the party to try to rebuild it.
But one thing that I want to say, because it's similar to what His Holiness said.
She said, "You know, we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country.
But I don't believe in hope without endeavor.
I don't believe in the hope of change, unless we take action to make it so."
Here's another woman hero of mine.
She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
She has been in exile for the last year and a half.
You ask her where she lives -- where does she live in exile?
She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections.
A year and a half -- she's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country.
Wangari Maathai -- 2004 Peace laureate.
Working for peace is very creative.
It's hard work every day.
When she was planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country.
But if they were together planting trees for the environment, it was okay -- creativity.
But it's not just iconic women like Shirin, like Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like Wangari Maathai -- it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world.
The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there's strength in numbers.
Working together is what changes our world.
The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights, to bring democracy to that country.
When one is arrested and taken to prison, another one comes out and joins the movement, recognizing that if they work together, they will ultimately bring change in their own country.
Mairead McGuire in the middle, Betty Williams on the right-hand side -- bringing peace to Northern Ireland.
An IRA driver was shot, and his car plowed into people on the side of the street.
There was a mother and three children.
The children were killed on the spot.
It was Mairead's sister.
Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty -- a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic -- and they took to the streets to say, "No more violence."
And they were able to get tens of thousands of, primarily, women, some men, in the streets to bring about change.
And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because there's still a lot more to do.
She also received the Peace Prize.
She is now running for president.
One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world, working together in common cause to ban landmines.
Some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month.
They could maybe volunteer that much.
There were others, like myself, who were full-time.
But it was the actions, together, of all of us that brought about that change.
In my view, what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace.
It's not a dirty word.
It's hard work every single day.
And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When you think about resilience and technology it's actually much easier.
So it's very easy, comparatively speaking, to be resilient.
And so I think the tempting analogy for the boom-bust that we just went through with the Internet is a gold rush.
In 1849, in that Gold Rush, they took over $700 million worth of gold out of California. It was very real.
The Internet was also very real. This is a real way for humans to communicate with each other. It's a big deal.
Huge boom. Huge boom. Huge bust. Huge bust.
But you had the same thing with the Gold Rush. "Gold. Gold. Gold."
Sixty-eight rich men on the Steamer Portland. Stacks of yellow metal.
"The Eldorado of the United States of America: the discovery of inexhaustible gold mines in California."
And the parallels between the Gold Rush and the Internet Rush continue very strongly.
And what would happen is -- and the Gold Rush went on for years.
People on the East Coast in 1849, when they first started to get the news, they thought, "Ah, this isn't real."
But they keep hearing about people getting rich, and then in 1850 they still hear that. And they think it's not real.
By about 1852, they're thinking, "Am I the stupidest person on Earth by not rushing to California?" And they start to decide they are.
This guy on the left, Dr. Richard Beverley Cole, he lived in Philadelphia and he took the Panama route.
This guy, Dr. Toland, went by covered wagon to California.
These are both very successful -- a physician in one case, a surgeon in the other.
Same thing happened on the Internet. You get DrKoop.com.
(Laughter) In the Gold Rush, people literally jumped ship.
The San Francisco harbor was clogged with 600 ships at the peak because the ships would get there and the crews would abandon to go search for gold.
So there were literally 600 captains and 600 ships.
And you saw some of the excesses that the dotcom fever created and the same thing happened.
The fort in San Francisco at the time had about 1,300 soldiers.
(Laughter) And one of the soldiers wrote home, and this is the sentence that he put: "The struggle between right and six dollars a month and wrong and 75 dollars a day is a rather severe one."
They had bad burn rate in the Gold Rush. A very bad burn rate.
This is actually from the Klondike Gold Rush. This is the White Pass Trail.
They loaded up their mules and their horses.
And they didn't plan right.
In fact it was so bad that most of the horses died before they could get where they were going.
It got renamed the "Dead Horse Trail."
This is a commercial that was played on the Super Bowl in the year 2000.
(Video): Bride #1: You said you had a large selection of invitations. Clerk: But we do.
Bride #2: Then why does she have my invitation?
Announcer: What may be a little thing to some ... Bride #3: You are mine, little man.
Announcer: Could be a really big deal to you. Husband #1: Is that your wife?
Husband #2: Not for another 15 minutes. Announcer: After all, it's your special day.
Jeff Bezos: It's very difficult to figure out what that ad is for.
(Laughter) But they spent three and a half million dollars in the 2000 Super Bowl to air that ad, even though, at the time, they only had a million dollars in annual revenue.
Now, here's where our analogy with the Gold Rush starts to diverge, and I think rather severely.
And that is, in a gold rush, when it's over, it's over.
Here's this guy: "There are many men in Dawson at the present time who feel keenly disappointed.
They've come thousands of miles on a perilous trip, risked life, health and property, spent months of the most arduous labor a man can perform and at length with expectations raised to the highest pitch have reached the coveted goal only to discover the fact that there is nothing here for them."
And that was, of course, the very common story.
Because when you take out that last piece of gold -- and they did incredibly quickly. I mean, if you look at the 1849 Gold Rush -- the entire American river region, within two years -- every stone had been turned. And after that, only big companies who used more sophisticated mining technologies started to take gold out of there.
So there's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic and that analogy is the electric industry.
And there are a lot of similarities between the Internet and the electric industry.
But electricity is also very, very broad, so you have to sort of narrow it down.
You know, it can be used as an incredible means of transmitting power.
There's a bunch of things that are interesting about electricity.
The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb.
And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world.
And, but it really -- it got the electricity. It took a long time.
All the streets had to be torn up.
This is work going on down in lower Manhattan where they built some of the first electric power generating stations.
And they're tearing up all the streets.
The Edison Electric Company, which became Edison General Electric, which became General Electric, paid for all of this digging up of the streets. It was incredibly expensive.
Because, remember, the Web got to stand on top of all this heavy infrastructure that had been put in place because of the long-distance phone network.
How could it grow at 2,300 percent a year in 1994 when people weren't really investing in the Web?
Well, it was because that heavy infrastructure had already been laid down.
So the light bulb laid down the heavy infrastructure, and then home appliances started coming into being.
And this was huge. The first one was the electric fan -- this was the 1890 electric fan.
And the appliances, the golden age of appliances really lasted -- it depends how you want to measure it -- but it's anywhere from 40 to 60 years. It goes on a long time.
The electric iron, also very big.
By the way, this is the beginning of the asbestos lawsuit.
This is the first vacuum cleaner, the 1905 Skinner Vacuum, from the Hoover Company. And this one weighed 92 pounds and took two people to operate and cost a quarter of a car.
But three years later, by 1908, it weighed 40 pounds.
Now, not all these things were highly successful.
(Laughter) I don't know why. But I thought, you know, sometimes it's just not the right time for an invention; maybe it's time to give this one another shot.
So I thought we could build a Super Bowl ad for this.
We'd need the right partner. And I thought that really -- (Laughter) I thought that would really work, to give that another shot.
Now, the toaster was huge because they used to make toast on open fires, and it took a lot of time and attention.
I want to point out one thing. This is -- you guys know what this is.
They hadn't invented the electric socket yet.
So this was -- remember, they didn't wire the houses for electricity.
They wired them for lighting. So your -- your appliances would plug in.
In fact, if you've seen the Carousel of Progress at Disney World, you've seen this. Here are the cables coming up into this light fixture.
Now, this was an object of much envy and lust.
Everybody wanted one of these electric washing machines.
On the left-hand side, this was the soapy water.
And there's a rotor there -- that this motor is spinning.
And it would clean your clothes.
This is the clean rinse-water. So you'd take the clothes out of here, put them in here, and then you'd run the clothes through this electric wringer.
And this was a big deal.
(Laughter) And that's actually kind of an important point in my presentation, because they hadn't invented the off switch.
I mean, you didn't want this thing clogging up a light socket.
That's what you did. You didn't turn it off.
And as I said before, they hadn't invented the electric outlet either, so the washing machine was a particularly dangerous device.
And there are -- when you research this, there are gruesome descriptions of people getting their hair and clothes caught in these devices.
And they couldn't yank the cord out because it was screwed into a light socket inside the house.
(Laughter) And there was no off switch, so it wasn't very good.
And you might think that that was incredibly stupid of our ancestors to be plugging things into a light socket like this.
First of all, this got installed upside down. This light socket -- (Laughter) and so the cord keeps falling out, so I taped it in.
This is what it looks like under my desk.
I took this picture just two days ago.
So we really haven't progressed that much since 1908.
(Laughter) It's a total, total mess.
And, you know, we think it's getting better, but have you tried to install 802.11 yourself?
I know Ph.D.s in Computer Science -- this process has brought them to tears, absolute tears. (Laughter) And that's assuming you already have DSL in your house.
Try to get DSL installed in your house.
They have to -- typically, they come three times.
And one friend of mine was telling me a story: not only did they get there and have to wait, but then the engineers, when they finally did get there, for the third time, they had to call somebody.
And they were really happy that the guy had a speakerphone because then they had to wait on hold for an hour to talk to somebody to give them an access code after they got there.
By the way, DSL is a kludge.
I mean, this is a twisted pair of copper that was never designed for the purpose it's being put to -- you know it's the whole thing -- we're very, very primitive. And that's kind of the point.
Because, you know, resilience -- if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone.
Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
And if you believe that, then stuff like this doesn't bother you. This is 1996: "All the negatives add up to making the online experience not worth the trouble."
1998: "Amazon.toast." In 1999: "Amazon.bomb."
My mom hates this picture.
(Laughter) She -- but you know, if you really do believe that it's the very, very beginning, if you believe it's the 1908 Hurley washing machine, then you're incredibly optimistic. And I do think that that's where we are.
And I do think there's more innovation ahead of us than there is behind us.
And in 1917, Sears -- I want to get this exactly right.
This was the advertisement that they ran in 1917.
It says: "Use your electricity for more than light."
And I think that's where we are.
I would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs, but not the cyborgs that you think.
You're not RoboCop, and you're not Terminator, but you're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices.
So what's a good definition for cyborg?
But humans are curious, and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the Alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next.
So let's look at the concept of traditional anthropology.
Somebody goes to another country, says, "How fascinating these people are, how interesting their tools are, how curious their culture is."
And then they write a paper, and maybe a few other anthropologists read it, and we think it's very exotic.
Well, what's happening is that we've suddenly found a new species.
I, as a cyborg anthropologist, have suddenly said, "Oh, wow. Now suddenly we're a new form of Homo sapiens, and look at these fascinating cultures, and look at these curious rituals that everybody's doing around this technology.
They're clicking on things and staring at screens."
Now there's a reason why I study this, versus traditional anthropology.
And the reason is that tool use, in the beginning -- for thousands and thousands of years, everything has been a physical modification of self.
But now what we're looking at is not an extension of the physical self, but an extension of the mental self, and because of that, we're able to travel faster, communicate differently.
And the other thing that happens is that we're all carrying around little Mary Poppins technology.
We can put anything we want into it, and it doesn't get heavier, and then we can take anything out.
What does the inside of your computer actually look like?
Well, if you print it out, it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you're carrying around all the time.
And if you actually lose that information, it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind, that you suddenly feel like something's missing, except you aren't able to see it, so it feels like a very strange emotion.
The other thing that happens is that you have a second self.
Whether you like it or not, you're starting to show up online, and people are interacting with your second self when you're not there.
And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open, which is basically your Facebook wall, so that people don't write on it in the middle of the night -- because it's very much the equivalent.
And suddenly we have to start to maintain our second self.
You have to present yourself in digital life in a similar way that you would in your analog life.
So, in the same way that you wake up, take a shower and get dressed, you have to learn to do that for your digital self.
And anybody coming in new to technology is an adolescent online right now, and so it's very awkward, and it's very difficult for them to do those things.
So when I was little, my dad would sit me down at night and he would say, "I'm going to teach you about time and space in the future."
And I said, "Great."
And he said one day, "What's the shortest distance between two points?"
He said, "No, no, no. Here's a better way."
He took a piece of paper, drew A and B on one side and the other and folded them together so where A and B touched.
And he said, "That is the shortest distance between two points."
And I said, "Dad, dad, dad, how do you do that?"
And I said, "I want to do that."
And so, when I went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years, I was thinking at night, "I want to be the first person to create a wormhole, to make things accelerate faster.
And I want to make a time machine."
I was always sending messages to my future self using tape recorders.
It gets adopted because people use it and it's made for humans.
So I started studying anthropology.
And when I was writing my thesis on cell phones, I realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets.
And I thought, "Oh, wow. I found it. This is great."
So over time, time and space have compressed because of this.
You can stand on one side of the world, whisper something and be heard on the other.
So now we're all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we've lost on our external brains that we're carrying around in our pockets.
And so what happens is, when we bring all that into the social space, we end up checking our phones all the time.
So we have this thing called ambient intimacy.
And if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone, the room would be very crowded.
And so there are some psychological effects that happen with this.
One I'm really worried about is that people aren't taking time for mental reflection anymore, and that they aren't slowing down and stopping, being around all those people in the room all the time that are trying to compete for their attention on the simultaneous time interfaces, paleontology and panic architecture.
They're not just sitting there.
And really, when you have no external input, that is a time when there is a creation of self, when you can do long-term planning, when you can try and figure out who you really are.
And so this is very important.
So if you think about it, the world hasn't stopped either.
It has its own external prosthetic devices, and these devices are helping us all to communicate and interact with each other.
But when you actually visualize it, all the connections that we're doing right now -- this is an image of the mapping of the Internet -- it doesn't look technological.
It actually looks very organic.
This is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we've connected in this way.
It's that they're helping us to be more human, helping us to connect with each other.
And really, it ends up being more human than technology, because we're co-creating each other all the time.
And so this is the important point that I like to study: that things are beautiful, that it's still a human connection -- it's just done in a different way.
We're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other, regardless of geography.
So that's why I study cyborg anthropology.
Thank you.
(Applause)
If we look around us, much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world.
But, of course, they don't look like rocks and sludge now.
They look like TV cameras, monitors, annoying radio mics.
And so this magical transformation is what I was trying to get at with my project, which became known as the Toaster Project.
And it was also inspired by this quote from Douglas Adams, and the situation is from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
And the situation it describes is the hero of the book -- he's a 20th-century man -- finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people.
And he kind of assumes that, yes, he'll become -- these villagers -- he'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful command of technology and science and the elements, but, of course, realizes that without the rest of human society, he can barely make a sandwich, let alone a toaster.
But he didn't have Wikipedia.
So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch.
And, working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer, I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find, took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that, inside this object, which I'd bought for just 3.49 pounds, there were 400 different bits made out of a hundred-plus different materials.
I didn't have the rest of my life to do this project.
So I thought, okay, I'll start with five.
And these were steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel.
So, starting with steel: how do you make steel?
And my vague rememberings from GCSE science -- well, steel comes from iron, so I phoned up an iron mine.
And said, "Hi, I'm trying to make a toaster.
Can I come up and get some iron?"
But after some nagging, I got him to do that.
(Video) Ray: It was Crease Limestone, and that was produced by sea creatures 350 million years ago in a nice, warm, sunny atmosphere.
Thomas Thwaites: As you can see, they had the Christmas decorations up.
And of course, it wasn't actually a working mine anymore, because, though Ray was a miner there, the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction, because, of course, it can't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in South America, Australia, wherever.
But anyway, I got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to London on the train, and then was faced with the problem: Okay, how do you make this rock into components for a toaster?
So I did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy -- completely useless for what I was trying to do.
Because, of course, they don't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you don't have a smelting plant.
So I ended up going to the History of Science Library and looking at this book.
This is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the West, at least.
But instead of a bellows, I had a leaf blower.
(Laughter) And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project, was, the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go.
But luckily, I found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves, and at 30 minutes at full power, and I was able to finish off the process.
So, my next -- (Applause) The next thing I was trying to get was copper.
Again, this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world.
And the reason I was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up, dissolving the minerals from the mine.
And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto, which is in Portugal.
So many such that it's now just a home for bacteria who really like acidic, toxic conditions.
So my next thing: I was off to Scotland to get mica.
And mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity.
That's me getting mica.
And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic, and, of course, my toaster had to have a plastic case.
Plastic is the defining feature of cheap electrical goods.
BP obviously has a bit more on their mind now.
But even then they weren't convinced and said, "Okay, we'll phone you back" -- never did.
So I looked at other ways of making plastic.
And you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants, but also from starches.
So this is attempting to make potato starch plastic.
And for a while that was looking really good.
I poured it into the mold, which you can see there, which I've made from a tree trunk.
And geologists have actually christened -- well, they're debating whether to christen -- the age that we're living in -- they're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, the age of Man.
So suddenly, it will become kind of radioactive from Chernobyl and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs that have been set off since 1945.
And there'd also be an extinction event -- like fossils would suddenly disappear.
So I looked up a plastic -- so I decided that I could mine some of this modern-day rock.
And I went up to Manchester to visit a place called Axion Recycling.
And they're at the sharp end of what's called the WEEE, which is this European electrical and electronic waste directive.
(Music) (Laughter) So there's a picture of my toaster.
(Applause) That's it without the case on.
So there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires, homemade plug.
And for about five seconds, the toaster toasted, but then, unfortunately, the element kind of melted itself.
But I considered it a partial success, to be honest.
BG: Thomas Thwaites. TT: Thanks.
This room may appear to be holding 600 people, but there's actually so many more, because within each one of us, there is a multitude of personalities.
I have two primary personalities that have been in conflict and conversation within me since I was a little girl.
I call them "the mystic" and "the warrior."
I was born into a family of politically active intellectual atheists.
There was this equation in my family that went something like this: if you are intelligent, you therefore are not spiritual.
I wanted to know if what we human beings see and hear and think is a full and accurate picture of reality.
So, looking for answers, I went to Catholic mass; I tagged along with my neighbors.
I read Sartre and Socrates.
And then a wonderful thing happened when I was in high school: gurus from the East started washing up on the shores of America.
(Laughter) And I said to myself, "I wanna get me one of them."
(Laughter) And ever since, I've been walking the mystic path, trying to peer beyond what Albert Einstein called the "optical delusion" of everyday consciousness.
So what did he mean by this?
Take a breath right now of this clear air in this room.
Now, see this strange, underwater-coral-reef-looking thing?
It's actually a person's trachea.
And those colored globs are microbes that are actually swimming around in this room right now, all around us.
If we're blind to this simple biology, imagine what we're missing at the smallest subatomic level right now and at the grandest cosmic levels.
My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions.
She's concerned about what's happening in this world right now.
She's worried.
She says, "Excuse me, I'm pissed off, and I know a few things, and we better get busy about them right now."
I've spent my life as a warrior, working for women's issues, working on political campaigns, being an activist for the environment.
And it can be sort of crazymaking, housing both the mystic and the warrior in one body.
I've always been attracted to those rare people who pull that off, who devote their lives to humanity with the grit of the warrior and the grace of the mystic -- people like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, "I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be."
"This," he wrote, "is the interrelated structure of reality."
Then Mother Teresa, another mystic warrior, who said, "The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small."
And Nelson Mandela, who lives by the African concept of "ubuntu," which means "I need you in order to be me, and you need me in order to be you."
Now, we all love to trot out these three mystic warriors as if they were born with a "saint" gene.
And we need to do their work now.
I'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing "the other," by the voice we're giving to the most divisive among us.
Listen to these titles of some of the best-selling books from both sides of the political divide here in the US: "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder," "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," "Pinheads and Patriots," "Arguing with Idiots."
Now here's a title that may sound familiar, but whose author may surprise you: "Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice."
The worst eras in human history, whether in Cambodia or Germany or Rwanda -- they start like this, with negative otherizing.
And then they morph into violent extremism.
And it's to help all of us, myself included, to counteract the tendency to otherize.
And I realize we're all busy people, so don't worry, you can do this on a lunch break.
I'm calling my initiative "Take the Other to Lunch."
If you are a Republican, you can take a Democrat to lunch.
Or if you're a Democrat, think of it as taking a Republican to lunch.
Now, if the idea of taking any of these people to lunch makes you lose your appetite, (Laughter) I suggest you start more local, because there is no shortage of the other right in your own neighborhood: maybe that person who worships at the mosque or the church or the synagogue down the street; or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict; or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming -- (Laughter) anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a conservative Tea Party woman to lunch.
Now, on paper, she passed my "smoking ears" test: (Laughter) she's an activist from the Right, and I'm an activist from the Left.
So first of all, decide on a goal: to get to know one person from a group you may have negatively stereotyped.
And then, before you get together, agree on some ground rules.
From there, we dove in, and we used these questions: "Share some of your life experiences with me -- what issues deeply concern you?
My lunch partner and I came away with some really important insights, and I'm going to share just one with you.
I asked her why her side makes such outrageous allegations and lies about my side.
"What?" she wanted to know.
"Like, we're a bunch of elitist, morally corrupt terrorist-lovers."
Well, she was shocked.
By the end of our lunch, we acknowledged each other's openness.
Instead, we had taken first steps together, past our knee-jerk reactions to the ubuntu place, which is the only place where solutions to our most intractable-seeming problems will be found.
Next time you catch yourself in the act of otherizing, that'll be your clue.
Will the heavens open and "We are the World" play over the restaurant sound system?
Probably not.
It's two people, two warriors, dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other.
(Applause)
So I'm here to tell you that we have a problem with boys, and it's a serious problem with boys.
First, I want to start by saying, this is a boy, and this is a girl, and this is probably stereotypically what you think of as a boy and a girl.
So I'm not going to do that, I'm not interested in doing that.
So the point here is that not all boys exist within these rigid boundaries of what we think of as boys and girls, and not all girls exist within those rigid boundaries of what we think of as girls.
And the point is that, for boys, the way that they exist and the culture that they embrace isn't working well in schools now.
How do we know that?
The 100 girls project tells us some really nice statistics.
For example, for every 100 girls that are suspended from school, there are 250 boys that are suspended from school.
For every 100 girls in special education, there are 217 boys.
For every 100 girls with a learning disability, there are 276 boys.
For every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed, we have 324 boys.
And by the way, all of these numbers are significantly higher if you happen to be black, if you happen to be poor, if you happen to exist in an overcrowded school.
And if you are a boy, you're four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD -- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Now there is another side to this.
And it is important that we recognize that women still need help in school, that salaries are still significantly lower, even when controlled for job types, and that girls have continued to struggle in math and science for years.
That's all true.
Nothing about that prevents us from paying attention to the literacy needs of our boys between ages three and 13.
They've done a lot of good for girls in these situations, and we ought to be thinking about how we can make that happen for boys too in their younger years.
Even in their older years, what we find is that there's still a problem.
When we look at the universities, 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees are going to women now, which is a significant shift.
And in fact, university administrators are a little uncomfortable about the idea that we may be getting close to 70 percent female population in universities.
This makes university administrators very nervous, because girls don't want to go to schools that don't have boys.
And so we're starting to see the establishment of men centers and men studies to think about how do we engage men in their experiences in the university.
If you talk to faculty, they may say, "Ugh. Yeah, well, they're playing video games, and they're gambling online all night long, and they're playing World of Warcraft, and that's affecting their academic achievement."
Guess what?
Video games are a symptom.
So let's talk about why they got turned off when they were between the ages of three and 13.
There are three reasons that I believe that boys are out of sync with the culture of schools today.
The first is zero tolerance.
A kindergarten teacher I know, her son donated all of his toys to her, and when he did, she had to go through and pull out all the little plastic guns.
I mean, really.
Now I'm not advocating for bullies.
I'm not suggesting that we need to be allowing guns and knives in the school.
But when we say that an Eagle Scout in a high school classroom who has a locked parked car in the parking lot and a penknife in it, has to be suspended from school, I think we may have gone a little too far with zero tolerance.
Another way that zero tolerance lives itself out is in the writing of boys.
In a lot of classrooms today, you're not allowed to write about anything that's violent.
You're not allowed to write about anything that has to do with video games.
Boy comes home from school, and he says, "I hate writing."
"Why do you hate writing, son? What's wrong with writing?"
"OK, what is she telling you to write?"
"Poems. I have to write poems.
And little moments in my life.
I don't want to write that stuff."
"Well, what do you want to write?
What do you want to write about?"
"I want to write about video games. I want to write about leveling-up.
I want to write about this really interesting world.
I want to write about a tornado that comes into our house and blows all the windows out, and ruins all the furniture and kills everybody."
You tell a teacher that, and they'll ask you, in all seriousness, "Should we send this child to the psychologist?"
And the answer is no, he's just a boy.
He's just a little boy.
It's not OK to write these kinds of things in classrooms today.
So that's the first reason: Zero tolerance policies and the way they're lived out.
The next reason that boys' cultures are out of sync with school cultures: there are fewer male teachers.
We went from 14 percent to seven percent.
That means that 93 percent of the teachers that our young men get in elementary classrooms are women.
Women are great, yep, absolutely.
And so they say, I guess this really isn't a place for boys.
This is a place for girls.
And I'm not very good at this, so I guess I'd better go play video games or get into sports, or something like that, because I obviously don't belong here.
Men don't belong here, that's pretty obvious.
But less directly, the lack of male presence in the culture -- you've got a teachers' lounge, and they're having a conversation about Joey and Johnny who beat each other up on the playground.
The answer to that question changes depending on who's sitting around that table.
Are there men around that table?
You'll see, the conversation changes depending upon who's sitting around the table.
Third reason that boys are out of sync with school today: Kindergarten is the old second grade, folks.
By the time you're in first grade, you should be able to read paragraphs of text with maybe a picture, maybe not, in a book of maybe 25 to 30 pages.
And if you ask Title I teachers, they'll tell you they've got about four or five boys for every girl that's in their program, in the elementary grades.
The reason that this is a problem is because the message that boys are getting is, "You need to do what the teacher asks you to do all the time."
So she has to figure out a way to get all these boys through this curriculum -- and girls.
And what happens is, she says, "Please, sit down, be quiet, do what you're told, follow the rules, manage your time, focus, be a girl."
That's what she tells them.
And so this is a very serious problem.
Where is it coming from? It's coming from us.
(Laughter) We want our babies to read when they are six months old.
We want to live in Lake Wobegon where every child is above average ...
but what this does to our children is really not healthy.
It's not developmentally appropriate, and it's particularly bad for boys.
We need to change the mindset of acceptance in boys in elementary schools.
We can design better games.
Most of the educational games that are out there today are really flashcards.
They don't have the depth, the rich narrative that really engaging video games have, that the boys are really interested in.
We need to talk to teachers and parents and school board members and politicians.
We need to make sure that people see that we need more men in the classroom.
We need to look carefully at our zero tolerance policies.
All of those conversations need to be happening.
But it only treats a few kids, and so this isn't very scalable.
We have to change the culture and the feelings that politicians and school board members and parents have about the way we accept and what we accept in our schools today.
Because good games, really good games, cost money, and World of Warcraft has quite a budget.
Most of the educational games do not.
And they say these things as if it's OK.
But if it were your culture, think of how that might feel.
They're nervous about anything that has anything to do with violence because of the zero tolerance policies.
They are sure that parents and administrators will never accept anything.
Because, ultimately, if we don't, then we're going to have boys who leave elementary school saying, "Well I guess that was just a place for girls, it wasn't for me.
If we change these things, if we pay attention to these things, and we reengage boys in their learning, they will leave the elementary schools saying, "I'm smart."
Thank you.
(Applause)
I just did something I've never done before.
I spent a week at sea on a research vessel.
Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff.
And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it.
So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still unfolding.
It's still working its way up the food chain.
Rachel Carson -- the godmother of modern environmentalism -- warned us about this very thing back in 1962.
She pointed out that the "control men" -- as she called them -- who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects, not the birds.
But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on grubs, that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT.
And so, robin eggs failed to hatch, songbirds died en masse, towns fell silent.
Thus the title "Silent Spring."
I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties.
After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it -- "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "junk shot" -- the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world.
But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed -- the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up.
If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy.
And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years.
Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades.
Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market -- the kind that never goes down.
And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot -- in this case, throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole.
As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price.
We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all -- deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change.
Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, "What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?"
Now a far more relevant question -- as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it -- is, "What if those scientists are right?"
Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle -- the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty.
But climate policy in the wealthy world -- to the extent that such a thing exists -- is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis -- finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP.
Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050?"
Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or -- where we're currently going -- four degrees Celsius?"
It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science.
The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops.
So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the precious?
This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money.
And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness.
For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay.
You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it -- you gamed the system -- or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen.
By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque.
So we have greed, we've got overconfidence/hubris, but since we're here at TEDWomen, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness.
Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do.
So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides -- for society at least.
The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides.
And this problem -- call it the "perils of privilege" -- brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness.
Here's what I'm talking about.
Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature -- the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation.
And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places.
For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport.
It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap Mother Nature in the face."
And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola -- that's just a bonus.
I'm showing it because -- they're not a sponsor, are they? -- because, in its own way, this is a crass version of our founding story.
But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature.
Let's hear from Tony Hayward again.
"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean.
The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."
In other words, the ocean is big; she can take it.
A new bubble will replace the old one.
In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped.
And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers.
Now the problem is that the story was always a lie.
The Earth always did have limits.
They were just beyond our sights.
I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop.
How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin?
So stop worrying and keep shopping.
Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show.
In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with business as usual.
This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic.
The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy.
So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, including the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible.
It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen.
I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States.
It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we're on like little else.
So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests.
The oil is not liquid.
Tar sand's oil is solid, mixed in with the soil.
The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds.
That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates.
Now looking at these images, it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England.
My point is that this is not oil drilling.
Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon.
But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada.
This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country -- a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long.
As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes.
The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too.
At the very last minute, we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture.
But, of course, our secular religion is technology.
Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these.
The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet.
The wackiest plan -- and I'm not making this up -- would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide.
So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution.
Think of it as the ultimate junk shot.
Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria.
A new frontier has been found.
Most importantly, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all.
We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks -- risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action -- like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining.
We need stories that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around.
That this is our only home.
Call it karma, call it physics, action and reaction, call it precaution -- the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You may not know this, but you are celebrating an anniversary with me.
I'm not married, but one year ago today, I woke up from a month-long coma, following a double lung transplant.
Crazy, I know. Insane.
Thank you.
Six years before that, I was starting my career as an opera singer in Europe, when I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension -- also known as PH.
It happens when there's a thickening in the pulmonary veins, making the right side of the heart work overtime, and causing what I call the reverse-Grinch effect.
My heart was three-and-a-half sizes too big.
Physical activity becomes very difficult for people with this condition, and usually after two to five years, you die.
I went to see this specialist, and she was top-of-the-field and told me I had to stop singing.
I was very limited by my condition, physically.
But I was not limited when I sang, and as air came up from my lungs, through my vocal cords and passed my lips as sound, it was the closest thing I had ever come to transcendence.
And just because of someone's hunch, I wasn't going to give it up.
Thankfully, I met Reda Girgis, who is dry as toast, but he and his team at Johns Hopkins didn't just want me to survive, they wanted me to live a meaningful life.
I come from Colorado.
It's a mile high, and I grew up there with my 10 brothers and sisters and two adoring parents.
Well, the altitude exacerbated my symptoms.
So I moved to Baltimore to be near my doctors and enrolled in a conservatory nearby.
I couldn't walk as much as I used to, so I opted for five-inch heels.
And I gave up salt, I went vegan, and I started taking huge doses of sildenafil, also known as Viagra.
(Laughter) My father and my grandfather were always looking for the newest thing in alternative or traditional therapies for PH, but after six months, I couldn't walk up a small hill. I couldn't climb a flight of stairs.
I had a heart catheterization, where they measure this internal arterial pulmonary pressure, which is supposed to be between 15 and 20.
I like to do things big, and it meant one thing: there is a big gun treatment for pulmonary hypertension called Flolan, and it's not just a drug; it's a way of life.
Doctors insert a catheter into your chest, which is attached to a pump that weighs about four-and-a-half pounds.
Every day, 24 hours, that pump is at your side, administering medicine directly to your heart, and it's not a particularly preferable medicine in many senses.
This is a list of the side effects: if you eat too much salt, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you'll probably end up in the ICU.
If you go through a metal detector, you'll probably die.
But when I needed it, it was a godsend.
Within a few days, I could walk again.
Within a few weeks, I was performing, and in a few months, I debuted at the Kennedy Center.
The pump was a little bit problematic when performing, so I'd attach it to my inner thigh with the help of the girdle and an ACE bandage.
And the tubing coming out of my chest was a nightmare for costume designers.
I graduated from graduate school in 2006, and I got a fellowship to go back to Europe.
A few days after arriving, I met this wonderful, old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles.
And before long, I was commuting between Budapest, Milan and Florence.
Though I was attached to this ugly, unwanted, high-maintenance, mechanical pet, my life was kind of like the happy part in an opera -- very complicated, but in a good way.
Then in February of 2008, my grandfather passed away.
He was a big figure in all of our lives, and we loved him very much.
Seven weeks later, I got a call from my family.
My father had been in a catastrophic car accident, and he died.
At 24, my death would have been entirely expected.
But his -- well, the only way I can articulate how it felt was that it precipitated my medical decline.
Against my doctors' and family's wishes, I needed to go back for the funeral.
I had to say goodbye in some way, shape or form.
I canceled most of my engagements that summer, but I had one left in Tel Aviv, so I went.
After one performance, I could barely drag myself from the stage to the taxicab.
I sat down and felt the blood rush down from my face, and in the heat of the desert, I was freezing cold.
My fingers started turning blue, and I was like, "What is going on here?"
I heard my heart's valves snapping open and closed.
The cab stopped, and I pulled my body from it feeling each ounce of weight as I walked to the elevator.
I fell through my apartment door and crawled to the bathroom where I found my problem: I had forgotten to mix in the most important part of my medicine.
I started mixing, and I felt like everything was going to fall out through one hole or another, but I just kept on going.
Finally, with the last bottle in and the last bubble out, I attached the pump to the tubing and lay there hoping it would kick in soon enough.
Thankfully, in a few minutes, I saw the signature hive-like rash appear on my legs, which is a side effect of the medication, and I knew I'd be okay.
I performed here and there, but as my condition deteriorated, so did my voice.
My doctor wanted me to get on the list for a lung transplant.
I had two friends who had recently died months after having very challenging surgeries.
I wanted to live.
I thought stem cells were a good option, but they hadn't developed to a point where I could take advantage of them yet.
I officially took a break from singing, and I went to the Cleveland Clinic to be reevaluated for the third time in five years, for transplant.
I was sitting there kind of unenthusiastically talking with the head transplant surgeon, and I asked him if I needed a transplant, what I could do to prepare.
He said, "Be happy.
A happy patient is a healthy patient."
It was like in one verbal swoop he had channeled my thoughts on life and medicine and Confucius.
And it was right-heart failure.
I finally decided it was time to take my doctor's advice.
But the next morning, while I was still in the hospital, I got a telephone call.
And they had lungs.
It was a match.
They were from Texas.
Because, despite their problems, I had spent my whole life training my lungs, and I was not particularly enthusiastic about giving them up.
I flew to Cleveland, and my family rushed there in hopes that they would meet me and say what we knew might be our final goodbye.
But organs don't wait, and I went into surgery before I could say goodbye.
The last thing I remember was lying on a white blanket, telling my surgeon that I needed to see my mother again, and to please try and save my voice.
I fell into this apocalyptic dream world.
During the thirteen-and-a-half-hour surgery, I flatlined twice, 40 quarts of blood were infused into my body.
And in my surgeon's 20-year career, he said it was among the most difficult transplants that he's ever performed.
They left my chest open for two weeks.
You could see my over-sized heart beating inside of it.
An infection ravaged my skin.
I had hoped my voice would be saved, but my doctors knew that the breathing tubes going down my throat might have already destroyed it.
He said it would kill me.
So my own surgeon performed the procedure in a last-ditch attempt to save my voice.
Though my mom couldn't say goodbye to me before the surgery, she didn't leave my side in the months of recovery that followed.
And if you want an example of perseverance, grit and strength in a beautiful, little package, it is her.
I was 95 lbs.
There were a dozen tubes coming in and out of my body.
I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I couldn't eat, I couldn't move, I certainly couldn't sing, I couldn't even breathe, but when I looked up and I saw my mother, I couldn't help but smile.
Whether by a Mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs, death happens.
But life isn't really just about avoiding death, is it?
It's about living.
Medical conditions don't negate the human condition.
And when people are allowed to pursue their passions, doctors will find they have better, happier and healthier patients.
My parents were totally stressed out about me going and auditioning and traveling and performing all over the place, but they knew that it was much better for me to do that than be preoccupied with my own mortality all of the time.
And I'm so grateful they did.
And I wanted to tell her, and I want to tell you, we need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams.
And some of us might even sing.
(Applause) [Singing: French] Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
And I'd like to thank my pianist, Monica Lee.
(Applause) Thank you so much.
Thank you.
The truth is, these folks are no longer the rule, but the exception.
A 2010 study found that only a quarter of college graduates work in a field that relates to their degree.
To my parents' dismay, I am neither a doctor nor a scientist.
(Laughter) Years of studying DNA replication and photosynthesis did little to prepare me for a career in technology.
I had never held the title of Product Manager before I sent my resume in to Etsy.
I had already been turned down by Google and several other firms and was getting frustrated.
The company had recently gone public, so as part of my job application, I read the IPO filings from cover to cover and built a website from scratch which included my analysis of the business and four ideas for new features.
It turned out the team was actively working on two of those ideas and had seriously considered a third.
We all know people who were ignored or overlooked at first but went on to prove their critics wrong.
My favorite story?
Brian Acton, an engineering manager who was rejected by both Twitter and Facebook before cofounding WhatsApp, the mobile messaging platform that would sell for 19 billion dollars.
The hiring systems we built in the 20th century are failing us and causing us to miss out on people with incredible potential.
The advances in robotics and machine learning and transforming the way we work, automating routine tasks in many occupations while augmenting and amplifying human labor in others.
So what are the tools and strategies we need to identify tomorrow's high performers?
If we only look for talent in the same places we always do -- gifted child programs, Ivy League schools, prestigious organizations -- we're going to get the same results we always have.
Baseball was transformed when the cash-strapped Oakland Athletics started recruiting players who didn't score highly on traditionally valued metrics, like runs batted in, but who had the ability to help the team score points and win games.
This idea is taking hold outside of sports.
The Head of Design and Research at Pinterest told me that they've built one of the most diverse and high-performing teams in Silicon Valley because they believe that no one type of person holds a monopoly on talent.
They've worked hard to look beyond major tech hubs and focus on designers' portfolios, not their pedigrees.
Two: hire for performance.
Inspired by my own job experience, I cofounded a hiring platform called Headlight, which gives candidates an opportunity to shine.
Just as teams have tryouts and plays have auditions, candidates should be asked to demonstrate their skills before they're hired.
Our clients are benefiting from 85 years of employment research, which shows that work samples are one of the best predictors of success on the job.
If you're hiring a data analyst, give them a spreadsheet of historical data and ask them for their key insights.
If you're hiring a marketing manager, have them plan a launch campaign for a new product.
Seek out ways to showcase your unique skills and abilities outside of just the standard resume and cover letter.
Three: get the bigger picture.
I've heard about recruiters who are quick to label a candidate a job-hopper based on a single short stint on their resume; read about professors who are more likely to ignore identical messages from students because their name was black or Asian instead of white.
A month into kindergarten, my teacher wrote a page-long memo noting that I was impulsive, had a short attention span, and despite my wonderful curiosity, I was exhausting to work with.
(Laughter) The principal asked my parents into a meeting, asked my mother if there had been complications at birth and suggested I meet with a school psychologist.
My father saw what was happening and quickly explained our family situation.
As recent immigrants, we lived in the attic of a home that cared for adults with mental disabilities.
My parents worked nights to make ends meet, and I had little opportunity to spend time with kids my own age.
Is it really a surprise that an understimulated five-year-old boy might be a little excited in a kindergarten classroom after an entire summer by himself?
Until we get a holistic view of someone, our judgment of them will always be flawed.
We need employers to let go of outdated hiring practices and embrace new ways of identifying and cultivating talent, and candidates can help by learning to tell their story in powerful and compelling ways.
We could live in a world where people are seen for what they're truly capable of and have the opportunity to realize their full potential.
So let's go out and build it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I am honored to be here, and I'm honored to talk about this topic, which I think is of grave importance.
We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people, too -- especially poor people.
People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened, for very good reason.
This is terrible, this oil -- it's in the water.
People are going to be hurt.
This is a terrible thing, this oil is going to hurt the people in the Gulf."
What people don't think about is: What if the oil had made it safely to shore?
It shortens the lives of the people who live there in the Gulf.
So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem when there's a spill; they're a problem when there's not.
And what we don't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products.
The other thing we often don't appreciate is, it's not just at the point of production that poor people suffer.
Poor people also suffer at the point of use.
Those of us who earn a certain income level, we have something called choice.
The reason why you want to work hard and have a job and not be poor and broke is so you can have choices, economic choices.
So low-income people often are the ones who are buying the products that have those dangerous chemicals in them that their children are using.
Those are the people who wind up ingesting a disproportionate amount of this poisonous plastic in using it.
Well, the problem with being poor is you don't have those choices.
You often have to buy the cheapest products.
The cheapest products are often the most dangerous.
And if that weren't bad enough -- if it wasn't just the production of plastic that's giving people cancer in places like Cancer Alley, and shortening lives and hurting poor kids at the point of use -- at the point of disposal, once again, it's poor people who bear the burden.
You think, "I put mine in the blue bin."
And then you look at your colleague and say, "Why, you cretin! You put yours in the white bin."
And we use that as a moral tickle.
If we -- well, OK, I'm just ... me.
Not you, but I feel this way often.
(Laughter) And so we kind of have this moral feel-good moment.
But if we were to be able to follow that little bottle on its journey, we would be shocked to discover that, all too often, that bottle is going to be put on a boat, it's going to go all the way across the ocean at some expense, and it's going to wind up in a developing country, often China.
(Laughter) He's given a little bottle massage, a little bottle medal.
And they say, "What would you like to do next?"
(Laughter) But that's not actually what happens.
That bottle winds up getting burned.
The recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic, the burning of the plastic, which releases incredible toxic chemicals and, once again, kills people.
And so, poor people who are making these products in petrochemical centers like Cancer Alley, poor people who are consuming these products disproportionately, and then poor people who, even at the tail end of the recycling, are having their lives shortened.
Now, you think to yourself -- I know how you are -- you say, "That sure is terrible for those poor people.
It's just awful. Those poor people.
I hope someone does something to help them."
But what we don't understand is -- here we are in Los Angeles.
We worked very hard to get the smog reduction happening here in Los Angeles.
But guess what?
So we all are being hit. We all are being impacted.
It's just that the poor people get it first and worst.
But the dirty production, the burning of toxins, the lack of environmental standards in Asia, is actually creating so much dirty air pollution, it's coming across the ocean, and has erased our gains here in California.
And so we're on one planet, and we have to be able to get to the root of these problems.
The root of this problem, in my view, is the idea of disposability itself.
You see, if you understand the link between what we're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we're doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people.
So now we are at a moment where the coming together of social justice as an idea and ecology as an idea, we finally can now see that they are really, at the end of the day, one idea.
And as we all begin to come back to that basic understanding, new opportunities for action begin to emerge.
Biomimicry, which is an emerging science, winds up being a very important social justice idea.
People who are just learning about this stuff: biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species.
Democracy, by the way, means respecting the wisdom of all people -- we'll get to that.
But biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species.
I know! I'm going to get vacuums and furnaces and drag stuff out of the ground and get things hot and poison and pollute ...
(Laughter) "I'm so clever!"
And you look behind you, and there's destruction all around you.
But guess what?
You're so clever, but you're not as clever as a clam.
A clamshell is hard.
It turns out that other species figured out a long time ago how to create many of the things we need using biological processes that nature knows how to use well.
That insight of biomimicry, of our scientists finally realizing that we have as much to learn from other species -- I don't mean taking a mouse and sticking it with stuff.
I mean actually respecting them, respecting what they've achieved.
That's called biomimicry, and that opens the door to zero waste production; zero pollution production; that we could actually enjoy a high quality of life, a high standard of living, without trashing the planet.
Well, that idea of biomimicry, respecting the wisdom of all species, combined with the idea of democracy and social justice, respecting the wisdom and the worth of all people, would give us a different society.
We would have a green society that Dr. King would be proud of.
That should be the goal.
We're so proud to live here in California.
We just had this vote, and everybody's like, "Well -- not in our state!"
(Laughter) I don't know what those other states were doing, but ..."
But ...
California has one of the highest incarceration rates of all the 50 states.
We are passionate about rescuing some dead materials from the landfill, but sometimes not as passionate about rescuing living beings, living people.
And I would say that we live in a country -- five percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the greenhouse gases, but also 25 percent of the world's prisoners.
So that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in.
And yet, as a movement that has to broaden its constituency, that has to grow, that has to reach out beyond our natural comfort zone, one of the challenges to the success of this movement, of getting rid of things like plastic and helping the economy shift, is people look at our movement with some suspicion.
And they ask a question, and the question is: How can these people be so passionate?
And so, we now get a chance to be truly proud of this movement.
When we take on topics like this, it gives us that extra call to reach out to other movements and to become more inclusive and to grow, and we can finally get out of this crazy dilemma that we've been in.
When you were younger, you cared about the whole world, and at some point, somebody said you had to pick an issue, you had to boil your love down to an issue.
"Can't love the whole world -- you've got to work on trees or you've got to work on immigration.
And really, they fundamentally told you, "Are you going to hug a tree?
Are you going to hug a tree?
Well, when you start working on issues like plastic, you realize the whole thing is connected.
And luckily, most of us are blessed to have two arms -- we can hug both.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
It's really a huge challenge for us.
And this is our beast of burden -- this is a Computer Tomography machine, a CT machine.
It's a fantastic device.
It uses X-rays, X-ray beams, that are rotating very fast around the human body.
It takes about 30 seconds to go through the whole machine and is generating enormous amounts of information that comes out of the machine.
So this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care, but as I said, it's also a challenge for us.
And the challenge is really found in this picture here.
It's the medical data explosion that we're having right now.
We're facing this problem.
And let me step back in time.
Let's go back a few years in time and see what happened back then.
These machines that came out -- they started coming in the 1970s -- they would scan human bodies, and they would generate about 100 images of the human body.
That would correspond to about 50 megabytes of data, which is small when you think about the data we can handle today just on normal mobile devices.
Looking at what we're doing today with these machines that we have, we can, just in a few seconds, get 24,000 images out of a body, and that would correspond to about 20 gigabytes of data, or 800 phone books, and the pile would then be 200 meters of phone books.
What's about to happen -- and we're seeing this; it's beginning -- a technology trend that's happening right now is that we're starting to look at time-resolved situations as well.
And just assume that we will be collecting data during five seconds, and that would correspond to one terabyte of data -- that's 800,000 books and 16 kilometers of phone books.
That's one patient, one data set.
And this is what we have to deal with.
So this is really the enormous challenge that we have.
And already today -- this is 25,000 images.
Imagine the days when we had radiologists doing this.
They can't do that anymore. That's impossible.
So what we do is that we put all these slices together.
Imagine that you slice your body in all these directions, and then you try to put the slices back together again into a pile of data, into a block of data.
So this is really what we're doing.
But of course, the block of data just contains the amount of X-ray that's been absorbed in each point in the human body.
So what we need to do is to figure out a way of looking at the things we do want to look at and make things transparent that we don't want to look at.
And this is a challenge.
This is a huge challenge for us to do that.
Using computers, even though they're getting faster and better all the time, it's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data, terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information.
I want to look at the blood vessels. I want to look at the liver.
This is my daughter.
She's playing a computer game.
So she's really the driving force behind the development of graphics-processing units.
As long as kids are playing computer games, graphics is getting better and better and better.
So please go back home, tell your kids to play more games, because that's what I need.
So what's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that I'm doing with the medical data.
And you know, going back maybe 10 years in time when I got the funding to buy my first graphics computer -- it was a huge machine.
I paid about one million dollars for that machine.
That machine is, today, about as fast as my iPhone.
So every month there are new graphics cards coming out, and here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors -- NVIDIA, ATI, Intel is out there as well.
And you know, for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer, and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards.
So this is really what's enabling us to deal with the explosion of data in medicine, together with some really nifty work in terms of algorithms -- compressing data, extracting the relevant information that people are doing research on.
This is a data set that was captured using a CT scanner.
You can see that there is [a] scattering of X-rays on the teeth, the metal in the teeth.
But fully interactively on standard graphics cards on a normal computer, I can just put in a clip plane.
And of course all the data is inside, so I can start rotating, I can look at it from different angles, and I can see that this woman had a problem.
And just by changing the functions, then I can decide what's going to be transparent and what's going to be visible.
I can look at the skull structure, and I can see that, okay, this is where they opened up the skull on this woman, and that's where they went in.
So these are fantastic images.
They're really high resolution, and they're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today.
So again, looking at very, very large data sets, and you saw those full-body scans that we can do.
In the forensic case -- and this is something that ... there's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of Sweden that I come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years.
So this will be the typical workflow situation.
The police will decide -- in the evening, when there's a case coming in -- they will decide, okay, is this a case where we need to do an autopsy?
So in the morning, in between six and seven in the morning, the body is then transported inside of the body bag to our center and is being scanned through one of the CT scanners.
And then the radiologist, together with the pathologist and sometimes the forensic scientist, looks at the data that's coming out, and they have a joint session.
You can really see the details of the data set.
It's very high-resolution, and it's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details.
And again, it's fully interactive, so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here.
Without saying too much about this case, this is a traffic accident, a drunk driver hit a woman.
And it's very, very easy to see the damages on the bone structure.
And the cause of death is the broken neck.
And this is also again showing us what we can do.
You can also see some of the artifacts from the teeth -- that's actually the filling of the teeth -- but because I've set the functions to show me metal and make everything else transparent.
Here's another case.
Here you can see that knife went through the heart.
So it really, really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death, and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was.
Here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person.
And what we've done is that we've turned the bullet into a light source, so that bullet is actually shining, and it makes it really easy to find these fragments.
It's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms, using standard graphics GPUs.
So we've implemented all the gestures you can do on the table, and you can think of it as an enormous touch interface.
So if you were thinking of buying an iPad, forget about it. This is what you want instead.
So it's a very nice little device.
So if you have the opportunity, please try it out.
It's really a hands-on experience.
So it gained some traction, and we're trying to roll this out and trying to use it for educational purposes, but also, perhaps in the future, in a more clinical situation.
Okay, now that we're talking about touch, let me move on to really "touching" data.
And this is a bit of science fiction now, so we're moving into really the future.
This is not really what the medical doctors are using right now, but I hope they will in the future.
So what you're seeing on the left is a touch device.
So when I virtually touch data, it will generate forces in the pen, so I get a feedback.
I have this pen, and I look at the data, and I move the pen towards the head, and all of a sudden I feel resistance.
If I push a little bit harder, I'll go through the skin, and I can feel the bone structure inside.
And this is also due to these fantastic new scanners, that just in 0.3 seconds, I can scan the whole heart, and I can do that with time resolution.
So just looking at this heart, I can play back a video here.
And he's sitting there in front of the Haptic device, the force feedback system, and he's moving his pen towards the heart, and the heart is now beating in front of him, so he can see how the heart is beating.
He can go inside, push inside of the heart, and really feel how the valves are moving.
And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons.
I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high-quality resolution data.
And we heard a little bit about functional MRI.
Now this is really an interesting project.
MRI is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain, or any part of the body.
So what we're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain, but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that's oxygenated and blood that's depleted of oxygen.
That means that it's possible to map out the activity of the brain.
So this is something that we've been working on.
And you just saw Motts the research engineer, there, going into the MRI system, and he was wearing goggles.
So he could actually see things in the goggles.
So Motts is doing something here, and probably he is going like this with his right hand, because the left side is activated on the motor cortex.
And then he can see that at the same time.
These visualizations are brand new.
And this is something that we've been researching for a little while.
So he's going "100, 97, 94."
And then he's going backwards.
And you can see how the little math processor is working up here in his brain and is lighting up the whole brain.
Well this is fantastic. We can do this in real time.
You can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head, because that's where he's seeing, he's seeing his own brain.
And he's also hearing our instructions when we tell him to do things.
The signal is really deep inside of the brain as well, and it's shining through, because all of the data is inside this volume.
So we've got motor cortex activation up there.
And connecting also with the previous talk here, this is something that we could use as a tool to really understand how the neurons are working, how the brain is working, and we can do this with very, very high visual quality and very fast resolution.
So this is a CAT scan -- Computer Aided Tomography.
So this is a lion from the local zoo outside of Norrkoping in Kolmarden, Elsa.
So she came to the center, and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner.
And I can do very nice images like this.
I can peel off the layer of the lion.
And we've been experimenting with this.
And I think this is a great application for the future of this technology, because there's very little known about the animal anatomy.
What's known out there for veterinarians is kind of basic information.
We can scan all sorts of things, all sorts of animals.
And here it is. Here is the nose of the bear.
So with that, I'd like to thank all the people who have helped me to generate these images.
It's a huge effort that goes into doing this, gathering the data and developing the algorithms, writing all the software.
My motto is always, I only hire people that are smarter than I am and most of these are smarter than I am.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields.
So tonight I'd like to tell you about the intersection that I'm most excited about at this very moment, which is entertainment and robotics.
So if we're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society, maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts.
I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology.
Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology.
With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech.
(Laughter) So we're based in New York City.
And if you're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the Bot-Agent.
The bot, our rising celebrity, also has his own Twitter account: @robotinthewild.
I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data.
He's named after the Star Trek character.
I think he's going to be super popular.
We've got the robot -- in his head is a database of a lot of jokes.
So it knows something about the subject; it knows about the length.
You can learn something from the robot about the community that you're in.
And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions.
If you like what's going on, show the green.
If you don't like the subject or the performance, you can hold the red.
It's just a robot.
(Laughter) And the rest of you, you still count, you still matter.
Right, so, let the robot stand-up comedy begin.
Data: Hello TEDWomen.
(Laughter) (Applause) You guys are looking good out there.
Audience: Yeah.
Data: Here's the first one.
Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, "I have bad news and worse news.
The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live."
"That's terrible," said the patient.
(Laughter) (Applause) The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war.
Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss.
Data: Pretty lucky for them.
Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with?
You get past me, the guy behind me has a spoon."
(Laughter) HK: He's a French robot.
Data: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods.
One of them falls to the ground.
He does not seem to be breathing.
The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911.
He gasps to the operator, "My friend is dead.
What can I do?"
I can help.
First, let's make sure he's dead."
(Laughter) (Applause) Question: Why is television called a medium?
But to be completely honest with you, I kind of love television.
Any of you like television? Audience: Yes.
Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read.
(Laughter) That's all for now.
(Applause) You've been a great audience.
Thank you.
(Applause) So this is actually the first time we've ever done live audience feedback to a performance.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
The world is changing with really remarkable speed.
If you look at the chart at the top here, you'll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy.
And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy.
And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States.
Goldman Sachs projected 2027.
The post-crisis projection is 2020.
China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects.
First of all, it's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year.
And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world.
Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country.
Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world -- which I think is what China will become -- will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots.
Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize.
This is an illusion.
It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology.
It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture.
It will remain in very fundamental respects very different.
How do we try to understand what China is?
And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large, is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas.
Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like, just as a beginning.
The first is this: that China is not really a nation-state.
Okay, it's called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years, but everyone who knows anything about China knows it's a lot older than this.
And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China.
And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China, which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now.
I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on.
In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization-state, rather than as a nation-state.
And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people.
What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized.
You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case.
So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state.
The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization.
You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire.
The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong.
Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997?
One country, two systems.
When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case."
Thirteen years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997.
We were wrong. Why were we wrong?
We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways.
What happened?
Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West.
One nation, one system.
But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system.
It doesn't work.
So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.
The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries.
Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han?
Now, this is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries.
India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial.
So the question is, why?
Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together.
The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together.
The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference.
Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.
Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West.
Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy.
The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state.
And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think.
And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy.
And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged.
So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history.
The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state.
Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all.
The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family.
This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to ours.
It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West.
And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past.
I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said, "The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe."
And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas -- as we are familiar with -- with something like the one-child policy.
I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one.
But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C.
And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts.
Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality.
It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure.
We refuse to really address the issue of difference.
You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian.
And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures.
But it's not.
In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations.
East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there.
And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia.
Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart.
What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world.
We've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8.
And there are two consequences of this.
First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world.
There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen, climate change conference.
Europe was not at the final negotiating table.
When did that last happen?
I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago.
And that is what is going to happen in the future.
And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe; America is slightly different -- but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing.
Some people -- I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion."
Well, maybe that's true, maybe that's an exaggeration.
But there's another problem which goes along with this -- that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world -- and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future.
I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in its confidence.
Take the 19th century, for example.
But this, alas, is no longer true.
If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China -- there's old Confucius.
This is the new [Wuhan] railway station for the high-speed trains.
China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.
Here you have a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people.
It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it.
So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people.
Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us?
But I want to argue, above all, a big-picture positive for this world.
The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years.
As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation, and we will have to learn about these civilizations.
This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa.
The little boat in front of it was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic.
(Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368.
I think they're playing golf.
Welcome to the future. Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to be talking to you about how we can tap a really underutilized resource in health care, which is the patient, or, as I like to use the scientific term, people.
Because we are all patients, we are all people.
So I want to talk about that as an opportunity that we really have failed to engage with very well in this country and, in fact, worldwide.
If you want to get at the big part -- I mean from a public health level, where my training is -- you're looking at behavioral issues.
You're looking at things where people are actually given information, and they're not following through with it.
It's a problem that manifests itself in diabetes, obesity, many forms of heart disease, even some forms of cancer -- when you think of smoking.
Now behavior change is something that is a long-standing problem in medicine.
It goes all the way back to Aristotle.
And doctors hate it, right?
I mean, they complain about it all the time.
We talk about it in terms of engagement, or non-compliance.
But for as much as clinical medicine agonizes over behavior change, there's not a lot of work done in terms of trying to fix that problem.
So the crux of it comes down to this notion of decision-making -- giving information to people in a form that doesn't just educate them or inform them, but actually leads them to make better decisions, better choices in their lives.
Dentistry might seem -- and I think it is -- many dentists would have to acknowledge it's somewhat of a mundane backwater of medicine.
But they have really taken this problem of behavior change and solved it.
It's the one great preventive health success we have in our health care system.
People brush and floss their teeth.
They don't do it as much as they should, but they do it.
So I'm going to talk about one experiment that a few dentists in Connecticut cooked up about 30 years ago.
So this is an old experiment, but it's a really good one, because it was very simple, so it's an easy story to tell.
They wanted to tell them how bad it would be if they didn't brush and floss their teeth.
They had a big patient population.
They divided them up into two groups.
They showed bloody gums.
They showed puss oozing out from between their teeth.
They told them that their teeth were going to fall out.
So go brush and floss your teeth.
That was the message. That was the experiment.
The upshot of this experiment was that fear was not really a primary driver of the behavior at all.
The people who brushed and flossed their teeth were not necessarily the people who were really scared about what would happen -- it's the people who simply felt that they had the capacity to change their behavior.
So I want to isolate this, because it was a great observation -- 30 years ago, right, 30 years ago -- and it's one that's laid fallow in research.
It was a notion that really came out of Albert Bandura's work, who studied whether people could get a sense of empowerment.
In health care terms, you could characterize this as whether or not somebody feels that they see a path towards better health, that they can actually see their way towards getting better health, and that's a very important notion.
And this is a great example of how we haven't learned that lesson at all.
This is a campaign from the American Diabetes Association.
This is still the way we're communicating messages about health.
I mean, I showed my three-year-old this slide last night, and he's like, "Papa, why is an ambulance in these people's homes?"
And I had to explain, "They're trying to scare people."
And I don't know if it works.
Now here's what does work: personalized information works.
Again, Bandura recognized this years ago, decades ago.
When you give people specific information about their health, where they stand, and where they want to get to, where they might get to, that path, that notion of a path -- that tends to work for behavior change.
So you start with personalized data, personalized information that comes from an individual, and then you need to connect it to their lives.
You need to connect it to their lives, hopefully not in a fear-based way, but one that they understand.
Okay, I know where I sit. I know where I'm situated.
And that doesn't just work for me in terms of abstract numbers -- this overload of health information that we're inundated with.
There's an emotional connection to information because it's from us.
That information then needs to be connected to choices, needs to be connected to a range of options, directions that we might go to -- trade-offs, benefits.
We need to connect the information always with the action, and then that action feeds back into different information, and it creates, of course, a feedback loop.
Now this is a very well-observed and well-established notion for behavior change.
But the problem is that things -- in the upper-right corner there -- personalized data, it's been pretty hard to come by.
So I'm going to give you an example, a very simple example of how this works.
So we've all seen these. These are the "your speed limit" signs.
And here's how they work in the feedback loop.
So you start with the personalized data where the speed limit on the road that you are at that point is 25, and, of course, you're going faster than that.
We always are. We're always going above the speed limit.
The choice in this case is pretty simple.
We either keep going fast, or we slow down.
We should probably slow down, and that point of action is probably now.
We should take our foot off the pedal right now, and generally we do. These things are shown to be pretty effective in terms of getting people to slow down.
But it works, and it even has some health repercussions.
Your blood pressure might drop a little bit.
Maybe there's fewer accidents, so there's public health benefits.
This is a pharmaceutical ad.
Nobody's had the brilliant idea of calling their drug Havidol quite yet.
And then we turn the page of the magazine, and we see this -- now this is the page the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to put into their ads, or to follow their ads, and to me, this is one of the most cynical exercises in medicine.
Because we know.
This is a bankrupt effort at communicating health information.
This is an approach that has been developed by a couple researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin.
And they created this thing called the "drug facts box."
They went to the nutritional information box and saw that what works for cereal, works for our food, actually helps people understand what's in their food.
It says very clearly what the drug is for, specifically who it is good for, so you can start to personalize your understanding of whether the information is relevant to you or whether the drug is relevant to you.
You can understand exactly what the benefits are.
It isn't this kind of vague promise that it's going to work no matter what, but you get the statistics for how effective it is.
Every time you take a drug, you're walking into a possible side effect.
So I love this. I love that drug facts box.
And so I came up with this: lab test results.
Blood test results are this great source of information.
They're packed with information.
They're just not for us. They're not for people. They're not for patients.
And God forbid -- I think many doctors, if you really asked them, they don't really understand all this stuff either.
This is the worst presented information.
You ask Tufte, and he would say, "Yes, this is the absolute worst presentation of information possible."
So this is the general blood work before, and this is the after, this is what we came up with.
The after takes what was four pages -- that previous slide was actually the first of four pages of data that's just the general blood work.
It goes on and on and on, all these values, all these numbers you don't know.
We use the notion of color.
In this case, this patient is slightly at risk of diabetes because of their glucose level.
But again, always using color and personalized proximity to that information.
We tell you that you're okay, you're normal.
And then we do two other very important things that kind of help fill in this feedback loop: we help people understand in a little more detail what these values are and what they might indicate.
And then we go a further step -- we tell them what they can do.
We give them some insight into what choices they can make, what actions they can take.
In this case, it's a sin of omission.
Now the CRP test is often done following a cholesterol test, or in conjunction with a cholesterol test.
So we take the bold step of putting the cholesterol information on the same page, which is the way the doctor is going to evaluate it.
It's a protein that shows up when your blood vessels might be inflamed, which might be a risk for heart disease.
Then we use the information that's already in the lab report.
We use the person's age and their gender to start to fill in the personalized risks.
So we start to use the data we have to run a very simple calculation that's on all sorts of online calculators to get a sense of what the actual risk is.
Here's the before, and here's the after.
Now a lot of our effort on this one -- as many of you probably know, a PSA test is a very controversial test.
It's used to test for prostate cancer, but there are all sorts of reasons why your prostate might be enlarged.
We again personalized the risks.
In this case it's about 25 percent, based on that.
So our cost for this was less than 10,000 dollars, all right.
That's what Wired magazine spent on this.
Why is Wired magazine doing this?
(Laughter) Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, the two largest lab testing companies -- last year, they made profits of over 700 million dollars and over 500 million dollars respectively.
This is information that is incredibly powerful.
It's an incredibly powerful catalyst to change.
But we're not using it. It's just sitting there.
It's being lost.
So I want to just offer four questions that every patient should ask, because I don't actually expect people to start developing these lab test reports.
But you can create your own feedback loop.
Anybody can create their feedback loop by asking these simple questions: Can I have my results?
And the only acceptable answer is -- (Audience: Yes.) -- yes.
What does this mean? Help me understand what the data is.
And then, what's next?
How do I integrate this information into the longer course of my life?
This is not beyond the grasp of ordinary people.
And engagement is essential here, because it's not just giving them information; it's giving them an opportunity to act.
That's what engagement is. It's different from compliance.
It works totally different from the way we talk about behavior in medicine today.
And this information is out there.
I've been talking today about latent information, all this information that exists in the system that we're not putting to use.
But there are all sorts of other bodies of information that are coming online, and we need to recognize the capacity of this information to engage people, to help people and to change the course of their lives.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Laughter) I was afraid of womanhood.
Not that I'm not afraid now, but I've learned to pretend.
I've learned to be flexible.
In fact, I've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear.
Let me explain.
Back in the '50s and '60s, when I was growing up, little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft, and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy -- really not quite clear what we were supposed to be.
(Laughter) There were plenty of role models all around us.
We had our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters, and of course, the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words, telling us how to be.
Now my mother was different.
She was a homemaker, but she and I didn't go out and do girlie things together, and she didn't buy me pink outfits.
I was launched as a cartoonist.
Now when we're young, we don't always know. We know there are rules out there, but we don't always know -- we don't perform them right, even though we are imprinted at birth with these things, and we're told what the most important color in the world is.
(Laughter) We're told what to wear -- (Laughter) -- and how to do our hair -- (Laughter) -- and how to behave.
Now the rules that I'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture.
We're being corrected, and the primary policemen are women, because we are the carriers of the tradition.
We pass it down from generation to generation.
Not only that -- we always have this vague notion that something's expected of us.
And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing.
(Laughter) We don't know what's going on half the time, so it puts us in a very tenuous position.
(Laughter) Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't -- I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them -- what better way than to change them [than] with humor?
Humor relies on the traditions of a society.
It takes what we know, and it twists it.
I think you can get change.
Because women are on the ground floor, and we know the traditions so well, we can bring a different voice to the table.
I grew up not far from here in Washington D.C.
It didn't work.
My parents got divorced, and my sister was arrested.
But I found my place.
Now when I was a little older, in my 20s, I realized there are not many women in cartooning.
And I thought, "Well, maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning," and so I did. I became a cartoonist.
I always loved political cartoons, so why don't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we're following as well as laugh?"
Now my perspective is a particularly -- (Laughter) -- my perspective is a particularly American perspective.
Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman.
But I believe that the rules that I'm talking about are universal, of course -- that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions, and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S.
But I feel blessed to be able to work with them.
And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions, because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers, that we can have the great potential to be change-agents.
And I think, I truly believe, that we can change this thing one laugh at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My story actually began when I was four years old and my family moved to a new neighborhood in our hometown of Savannah, Georgia.
And this was the 1960s when actually all the streets in this neighborhood were named after Confederate war generals.
We lived on Robert E. Lee Boulevard.
And when I was five, my parents gave me an orange Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle.
It had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars that made the rider look like an orangutan.
They were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s, which I'm sure my mom didn't know.
And one day I was exploring this cul-de-sac hidden away a few streets away.
And I came back, and I wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly, so I decided to turn around in this big street that intersected our neighborhood, and wham! I was hit by a passing sedan.
My mangled body flew in one direction, my mangled bike flew in the other.
And I lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line, and one of my neighbors came running over.
"Andy, Andy, how are you doing?" she said, using the name of my older brother.
(Laughter) "I'm Bruce," I said, and promptly passed out.
I broke my left femur that day -- it's the largest bone in your body -- and spent the next two months in a body cast that went from my chin to the tip of my toe to my right knee, and a steel bar went from my right knee to my left ankle.
And for the next 38 years, that accident was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me.
In fact, I made a living by walking.
I traveled around the world, entered different cultures, wrote a series of books about my travels, including "Walking the Bible."
I hosted a television show by that name on PBS.
Until, in May 2008, a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones.
And my doctor, on a whim, sent me to get a full-body bone scan, which showed that there was some growth in my left leg.
That sent me to an X-ray, then to an MRI.
And one afternoon, I got a call from my doctor.
I have cancer.
And to think that the tumor was in the same bone, in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier -- it seemed like too much of a coincidence.
They'd just turned three, and they were into all things pink and purple.
In fact, we called them Pinkalicious and Purplicious -- although I must say, our favorite nickname occurred on their birthday, April 15th.
When they were born at 6:14 and 6:46 on April 15, 2005, our otherwise grim, humorless doctor looked at his watch, and was like, "Hmm, April 15th -- tax day.
Early filer and late filer."
(Laughter) The next day I came to see him. I was like, "Doctor, that was a really good joke."
And he was like, "You're the writer, kid."
I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the art projects I might not mess up, the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down.
Would they wonder who I was, I thought.
I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the passages of my daughters' lives.
"I believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives," I wrote these men.
"They'll have loving families and welcoming homes, but they may not have me.
And I said to myself I would call this group of men "the Council of Dads."
Now as soon as I had this idea, I decided I wouldn't tell my wife. Okay.
She's a very upbeat, naturally excited person.
We should focus on the positive.
My wife, as I said, she grew up outside of Boston.
She's got a big smile. She's got a big personality.
She's got big hair -- although, she told me recently, I can't say she has big hair, because if I say she has big hair, people will think she's from Texas.
And it's apparently okay to marry a boy from Georgia, but not to have hair from Texas.
And actually, in her defense, if she were here right now, she would point out that, when we got married in Georgia, there were three questions on the marriage certificate license, the third of which was, "Are you related?"
(Laughter) I said, "Look, in Georgia at least we want to know.
In Arkansas they don't even ask."
What I didn't tell her is, if she said, "Yes," you could jump.
So I wasn't going to tell her about this idea, but the next day I couldn't control myself, I told her.
She was like, "Well, I love him, but I would never ask him for advice."
(Laughter) So we decided that we needed a set of rules, and we came up with a number.
And the first one was no family, only friends.
We thought our family would already be there.
We were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls' lives.
We kind of went through my personality and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing.
And rather than send it, I decided to read it to them in person.
Linda, my wife, joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals.
I sort of friend-married each of these guys.
Now Jeff led this trip I took to Europe when I graduated from high school in the early 1980s.
And on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle.
And Jeff came up beside me and said, "So, have you ever been cow tipping?"
He was like, "Yeah. Cows sleep standing up.
So before I had a chance to determine whether this was right or not, we had jumped the moat, we had climbed the fence, we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor, dozing cow.
So a few weeks after my diagnosis, we went up to Vermont, and I decided to put Jeff as the first person in the Council of Dads.
And we went to this apple orchard, and I read him this letter.
And I got to the end -- he was crying and I was crying -- and then he looked at me, and he said, "Yes."
I was like, "Yes?"
I kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter.
And then I asked him a question, which I ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book.
And Jeff's advice was, "Be a traveller, not a tourist.
Get off the bus. Seek out what's different.
"So it's 10 years from now," I said, "and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad, and I'm not here.
What would you tell them?"
He said, "I would approach this journey as a young child might approach a mud puddle.
You can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple, or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like, what it smells like."
He said, "I want to see you back here girls, at the end of this experience, covered in mud."
Two weeks after my diagnosis, a biopsy confirmed I had a seven-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur.
Twenty years ago, doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped, and there was a 15 percent survival rate.
And then in the 1980's, they determined that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective, and within weeks I had started that regimen.
And since we are in a medical room, I went through four and a half months of chemo.
Actually I had Cisplatin, Doxorubicin and very high-dose Methotrexate.
And then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium.
And if you did see the Sanjay special, you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis.
Then he took my fibula from my calf, cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh, where it now lives.
And then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle.
This is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me.
And my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo.
And one night I had a nightmare that I was walking through my house, sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else's children sitting on my desk.
And I remember a particular one night that, when you told that story of -- I don't know where you are Dr. Nuland -- of William Sloane Coffin -- it made me think of it.
And they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital.
And anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body.
And one night I got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters, at that time three and a half, were missing me and feeling my absence.
And what you said, Dr. Nuland -- I don't know where you are -- made me think of this today.
As I became less and less human -- and at this moment in my life, I was probably 30 pounds less than I am right now.
Of course, I had no hair and no immune system.
They were actually putting blood inside my body.
At that moment I was less and less human, I was also, at the same time, maybe the most human I've ever been.
And when I had cancer, we thought it'd be everybody running the other way.
And when people came to me, rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw -- I was like a living ghost -- they were incredibly moved to talk about what was going on in their own lives.
Cancer, I found, is a passport to intimacy.
And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that's where love comes from."
(Laughter) And one night my daughter Eden came to me.
And as I lifted my leg out of bed, she reached for my crutches and handed them to me.
In fact, if I cling to one memory of this year, it would be walking down a darkened hallway with five spongy fingers grasping the handle underneath my hand.
I didn't need the crutch anymore, I was walking on air.
And one of the profound things that happened was this act of actually connecting to all these people.
And it made me think -- and I'll just note for the record -- one word that I've only heard once actually was when we were all doing Tony Robbins yoga yesterday -- the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word "friend."
And yet from everything we've been talking about -- compliance, or addiction, or weight loss -- we now know that community is important, and yet it's one thing we don't actually bring in.
And there was something incredibly profound about sitting down with my closest friends and telling them what they meant to me.
And one of the things that I learned is that over time, particularly men, who used to be non-communicative, are becoming more and more communicative.
And that particularly happened -- there was one in my life -- is this Council of Dads that Linda said, what we were talking about, it's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off.
And no one captures this modern manhood to me more than David Black.
Now David is my literary agent.
He's about five-foot three and a half on a good day, standing fully upright in cowboy boots.
He gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine, and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car -- although, like a lot of men, he's impatient; he bought it on his 49th.
But like a lot of modern men, he hugs, he bakes, he leaves work early to coach Little League.
Someone asked me if he cried when I asked him to be in the council of dads.
(Laughter) But he's a literary agent, which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true.
And this is what we wanted him to capture -- what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations.
And I said, "What's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer?"
"But when I came to see you," I said, "I didn't believe in myself.
Don't give in to the wall.
My home is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, and during the year and a half I was on crutches, it became a sort of symbol to me.
So one day near the end of my journey, I said, "Come on girls, let's take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge."
I was on crutches, my wife was next to me, my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead.
And because walking was one of the first things I lost, I spent most of that year thinking about this most elemental of human acts.
Walking upright, we are told, is the threshold of what made us human.
And yet, for the four million years humans have been walking upright, the act is essentially unchanged.
And the biggest consequence of walking on crutches -- as I did for a year and a half -- is that you walk slower.
You go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with this community you built along the way.
200 years ago, a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris.
He was called a "flaneur," one who wanders the arcades.
There's a quote from Moses on the side of the Liberty Bell, and it comes from a passage in the book of Leviticus, that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow.
And every seven sets of seven years, the land gets an extra year of rest during which time all families are reunited and people surrounded with the ones they love.
That 50th year is called the jubilee year, and it's the origin of that term.
He said, "I would tell them what I know, and that is everybody dies, but not everybody lives.
I want you to live."
And that is, the secret of the Council of Dads, is that my wife and I did this in an attempt to help our daughters, but it really changed us.
So I stand here today as you see now, walking without crutches or a cane.
And last week I had my 18-month scans.
And as you all know, anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans.
As I was going there, I was wondering, what would I say depending on what happened here.
I got good news that day, and I stand here today cancer-free, walking without aid and hobbling forward.
And she told me last night, in the three months since we've done it, we've gotten 300 people who've contributed to this program.
And the epidemiologists here will tell you, that's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the United States.
So if you go to 23andMe, or if you go to councilofdads.com, you can click on a link.
And we encourage anybody to join this effort.
May you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace, or find a way to get over, around, or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams.
And every now and then, find a friend, find a turtle, and take a long, slow walk.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I am passionate about the American landscape and how the physical form of the land, from the great Central Valley of California to the bedrock of Manhattan, has really shaped our history and our character.
But one thing is clear.
In the last 100 years alone, our country -- and this is a sprawl map of America -- our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet.
And so, how I see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re-imagine these connections and physically rebuild them.
So when I also think about design, I think about trying to rework and re-engage the lines on this graph in a more productive way.
And you can see from the arrow here indicating "you are here," I'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology, and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way.
So the era of big infrastructure is over.
I mean, these sort of top-down, mono-functional, capital-intensive solutions are really not going to cut it.
We need new tools and new approaches.
Similarly, the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field, devoid of context, is really not the -- excuse me, it's fairly blatant -- is really not the approach that we need to take.
So we need new stories, new heroes and new tools.
So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war, and that is the eastern oyster.
So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called "oyster-tecture."
Here's a map of my city, New York City, showing inundation in red.
And what's circled is the site that I'm going to talk about, the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island.
But you can see, even just intuit, from this map, that the harbor has dredged and flattened, and went from a rich, three-dimensional mosaic to flat muck in really a matter of years.
Another set of views of actually the Gowanus Canal itself.
Now the Gowanus is particularly smelly -- I will admit it.
There are problems of sewage overflow and contamination, but I would also argue that almost every city has this exact condition, and it's a condition that we're all facing.
So we really had a lot to deal with.
When we started this project, one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there.
And you can see from this map, there's this incredible geographical signature of a series of islands that were out in the harbor and a matrix of salt marshes and beaches that served as natural wave attenuation for the upland settlement.
We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself.
So our concept is really this back-to-the-future concept, harnessing the intelligence of that land settlement pattern.
And the idea has two core stages.
One is to develop a new artificial ecology, a reef out in the harbor, that would then protect new settlement patterns inland and the Gowanus.
Because if you have cleaner water and slower water, you can imagine a new way of living with that water.
So the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way, I think.
Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster.
And again, it's this incredibly exciting animal.
It accepts algae and detritus in one end, and through this beautiful, glamorous set of stomach organs, out the other end comes cleaner water.
And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.
Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days.
They were key in our culture and our economy.
Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells.
This image is an image of an oyster cart, which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today.
(Laughter) Finally, oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures.
And they become the bedrock of any harbor ecosystem.
Many, many species depend on them.
So we were inspired by the oyster, but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster.
We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus, then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef.
And so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive.
And with a $20 billion price tag, we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what's in front of us.
So this image is simply showing -- it's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope.
What is fuzzy rope, you ask?
So we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project.
The concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on.
And that grows over time dynamically with the threat of climate change.
It also creates this incredibly interesting, I think, new amphibious public space, where you can imagine working, you can imagine recreating in a new way.
So you can imagine scuba diving here.
So you can imagine a sort of new manner of living with a new relationship with the water, and also a hybridizing of recreational and science programs in terms of monitoring.
And this glorious, readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below.
So the water is churned through this raft.
You can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force-feed them.
So rather than having 10 oysters, you have 10,000 oysters.
Here's the Gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines -- the flupsification of the Gowanus.
New word.
And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges.
And finally, how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef.
I get asked two questions about this project.
And the second one is: when can we eat the oysters?
But we imagine, with our calculations, that by 2050, you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster.
To conclude, this is just one cross-section of one piece of city, but my dream is, my hope is, that when you all go back to your own cities that we can start to work together and collaborate on remaking and reforming a new urban landscape towards a more sustainable, a more livable and a more delicious future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I really believe that.
All of us are makers.
We're born makers.
We have this ability to make things, to grasp things with our hands.
We use words like "grasp" metaphorically to also think about understanding things.
And this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size.
(Laughter) And the question he had is, "Can I do it? Can it be done?"
Apparently it can.
They don't always even know why they're doing it.
We have begun organizing makers at our Maker Faire.
There was one held in Detroit here last summer, and it will be held again next summer, at the Henry Ford.
And it's a fabulous event to just meet and talk to these people who make things and are there to just show them to you and talk about them and have a great conversation.
(Video) Guy: I might get one of those.
Dale Dougherty: These are electric muffins.
Muffin: Will you glide with us? (Guy: No.) DD: I know Ford has new electric vehicles coming out.
We got there first.
DD: This is something I call "swinging in the rain."
So imagine a kid: "Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet?
No, I didn't get wet. Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet?"
And of course, we have fashion.
People are remaking things into fashion.
We have art students getting together, taking old radiator parts and doing an iron-pour to make something new out of it.
Billy-Bob, or Billy Bass, or something like that.
Now the background is -- the guy who did this is a physicist.
And here he'll explain a little bit about what it does.
Choir: ♫ When you hold me in your arms ♫ DD: This is all computer-controlled in an old Volvo.
Choir: ♫ I'm hooked on a feelin' ♫ ♫ I'm high on believin' ♫ ♫ That you're in love with me ♫ DD: So Richard came up from Houston last year to visit us in Detroit here and show the wonderful Sashimi Tabernacle Choir.
You're really a driver or a passenger -- to use a Volkswagen phrase.
That's what fascinates them. That's why they do what they do.
They want to figure out how things work; they want to get access to it; and they want to control it.
They want to use it to their own purpose.
They're not mainstream.
They're a little bit radical.
And I found this old video.
(Music) (Video) Narrator: Of all things Americans are, we are makers.
With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form, and we fashion.
Makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.
DD: So it goes on to show you people making things out of wood, a grandfather making a ship in a bottle, a woman making a pie -- somewhat standard fare of the day.
But it was a sense of pride that we made things, that the world around us was made by us.
It didn't just exist.
And I think that's tremendously important.
This particular reel -- it's an industrial video -- but it was shown in drive-in theaters in 1961 -- in the Detroit area, in fact -- and it preceded Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."
(Laughter) So I like to think there was something going on there of the new generation of makers coming out of this, plus "Psycho."
This is Andrew Archer.
I met Andrew at one of our community meetings putting together Maker Faire.
Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth, Minnesota.
He's just a kid that grew up playing with tools instead of toys.
He liked to take things apart.
His mother gave him a part of the garage, and he collected things from yard sales, and he made stuff.
And then he didn't particularly like school that much, but he got involved in robotics competitions, and he realized he had a talent, and, more importantly, he had a real passion for it.
And he began building robots.
And when I sat down next to him, he was telling me about a company he formed, and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor.
And that's why he moved to Michigan.
But he also moved here to meet other people doing what he's doing.
This is Jeff and Bilal and several others here in a hackerspace.
And there's about three hackerspaces or more in Detroit.
But these are like clubs -- they're sharing tools, sharing space, sharing expertise in what to make.
But essentially these are people that are playing with technology.
They don't necessarily know what they're doing or why they're doing it.
They're playing to discover what the technology can do, and probably to discover what they can do themselves, what their own capabilities are.
And you can't see this very well on the screen, but Arduino -- Arduino is an open-source hardware platform.
If you don't know what those are, they're just the "brains."
So they're the brains of maker projects, and here's an example of one.
And I don't know if you can see it that well, but that's a mailbox -- so an ordinary mailbox and an Arduino.
So you figure out how to program this, and you put this in your mailbox.
And when someone opens your mailbox, you get a notification, an alert message goes to your iPhone.
Now that could be a dog door, it could be someone going somewhere where they shouldn't, like a little brother into a little sister's room.
Now here's something -- a 3D printer.
This is Makerbot.
And there are industrial versions of this -- about 20,000 dollars.
These guys came up with a kit version for 750 dollars, and that means that hobbyists and ordinary folks can get a hold of this and begin playing with 3D printers.
One of the coolest things is, Makerbot sent out an upgrade, some new brackets for the box.
Isn't that cool?
This is a radar speed detector that was developed from a Hot Wheels toy.
They're really creating new areas and exploring areas that you might only think -- the military is doing drones -- well, there is a whole community of people building autonomous airplanes, or vehicles -- something that you could program to fly on its own, without a stick or anything, to figure out what path it's going.
Fascinating work they're doing.
This is probably the best time in the history of mankind to love space.
You could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars.
Think how much money and how many years it took NASA to get satellites into space.
In fact, these guys actually work for NASA, and they're trying to pioneer using off-the-shelf components, cheap things that aren't specialized that they can combine and send up into space.
Makers are a source of innovation, and I think it relates back to something like the birth of the personal computer industry.
This is Steve Wozniak. Where does he learn about computers?
It's the Homebrew Computer Club -- just like a hackerspace.
And he says, "I could go there all day long and talk to people and share ideas for free."
Well he did a little bit better than free.
But it's important to understand that a lot of the origins of our industries -- even like Henry Ford -- come from this idea of playing and figuring things out in groups.
Well, if I haven't convinced you that you're a maker, I hope I could convince you that our next generation should be makers, that kids are particularly interested in this, in this ability to control the physical world and be able to use things like micro-controllers and build robots.
And we've got to get this into schools, or into communities in many, many ways -- the ability to tinker, to shape and reshape the world around us.
There's a great opportunity today -- and that's what I really care about the most.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Let me connect the dots.
I'm going to argue today that the social media applications that we all know and love, or love to hate, are actually going to help free us from some of the absurd assumptions that we have as a society about gender.
I think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender.
If you hadn't noticed, our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender, and I think that's going to change.
Now most media companies -- television, radio, publishing, games, you name it -- they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences.
It's old-school demographics.
They come up with these very restrictive labels to define us.
Now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways -- you have certain taste, that you like certain things.
And so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics.
In our media environment, it's as if they don't even exist.
Now, if you watch "Mad Men," like I do -- it's a popular TV show in the States -- Dr. Faye Miller does something called psychographics, which first came about in the 1960s, where you create these complex psychological profiles of consumers.
But psychographics really haven't had a huge impact on the media business.
It's really just been basic demographics.
So I'm at the Norman Lear Center at USC, and we've done a lot of research over the last seven, eight years on demographics and how they affect media and entertainment in this country and abroad.
And in the last three years, we've been looking specifically at social media to see what has changed, and we've discovered some very interesting things.
All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them.
But those categories mean even less now than they did before, because with online networking tools, it's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes.
We're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online.
And we can lie about our age online, too, pretty easily.
We can also connect with people based on our very specific interests.
So the traditional media companies, of course, are paying very close attention to these online communities.
They know this is the mass audience of the future; they need to figure it out.
But they're having a hard time doing it because they're still trying to use demographics in order to understand them, because that's how ad rates are still determined.
When they're monitoring your clickstream -- and you know they are -- they have a really hard time figuring out your age, your gender and your income.
They can make some educated guesses.
But they get a lot more information about what you do online, what you like, what interests you.
And even though that's still sort of creepy, there is an upside to having your taste monitored.
So when you look online at the way people aggregate, they don't aggregate around age, gender and income.
They aggregate around the things they love, the things that they like, and if you think about it, shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories.
I'd much rather know whether you like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" rather than how old you are.
Now there's something else that we've discovered about social media that's actually quite surprising.
It turns out that women are really driving the social media revolution.
If you look at the statistics -- these are worldwide statistics -- in every single age category, women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies.
And then if you look at the amount of time that they spend on these sites, they truly dominate the social media space, which is a space that's having a huge impact on old media.
If the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media, then does that mean that women are going to take over global media?
Are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on TV shows?
Will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks?
Could this be possible, that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape?
I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women, because they realize this is important for their business, and I think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere.
This is far too simplistic.
The future entertainment media that we're going to see is going to be very data-driven, and it's going to be based on the information that we ascertain from taste communities online, where women are really driving the action.
So you may be asking, well why is it important that I know what entertains people?
Why should I know this?
Of course, old media companies and advertisers need to know this.
But my argument is that, if you want to understand the global village, it's probably a good idea that you figure out what they're passionate about, what amuses them, what they choose to do in their free time.
This is a very important thing to know about people.
I've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people's lives.
And I do it not just because it's fun -- though actually, it is really fun -- but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people's lives -- for instance, on their political beliefs and on their health.
And so, if you have any interest in understanding the world, looking at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start.
So imagine a media atmosphere that isn't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
There's an African proverb that goes, "The lion's story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it."
Key to this literacy is a forgotten truth, that the more we understand that our cultural differences represent the power to heal the centuries of racial discrimination, dehumanization and illness.
Both of my parents were African-American.
My father was born in Southern Delaware, my mother, North Philadelphia, and these two places are as different from each other as east is from west, as New York City is from Montgomery, Alabama.
My father's way of dealing with racial conflict was to have my brother Bryan, my sister Christy and I in church what seemed like 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
(Laughter) You could say that his racial-coping approach was spiritual -- for later on, one day, like Martin Luther King.
My mother's coping approach was a little different.
More like Malcolm X.
When she came to Southern Delaware, she thought she had come to a foreign country.
Not my mother.
When she wanted to go somewhere, she walked.
She didn't care what you thought.
And she pissed a lot of people off with her cultural style.
Before we get into the supermarket, she would give us the talk: "Don't ask for nothin', don't touch nothin'.
I don't care if all the other children are climbing the walls.
They're not my children.
In three-part harmony: "Yes, Mom."
My mother didn't give us the talk because she was worried about money or reputation or us misbehaving.
We were too scared.
We were in church 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
(Laughter) She gave us that talk to remind us that some people in the world would interpret us as misbehaving just by being black.
So we get into the supermarket, and people look at us -- stare at us as if we just stole something.
Every now and then, a salesperson would do something or say something because they were pissed with our cultural style, and it would usually happen at the conveyor belt.
And the worst thing they could do was to throw our food into the bag.
(Laughter) My mother began to tell them who they were, who their family was, where to go, how fast to get there.
(Laughter) The person would be on the floor, writhing in utter decay and decomposition, whimpering in a pool of racial shame.
(Laughter) Now, both my parents were Christians.
(Laughter) There is a time, if you use both of their strategies, if you use them in the right time and the right way.
The lesson in this is that when it comes to race relations, sometimes, we've got to know how to pray, think through, process, prepare.
And other times, we've got to know how to push, how to do something.
If you look at the neuroscience research which says that when we are racially threatened, our brains go on lockdown, and we dehumanize black and brown people.
Our brains imagine that children and adults are older than they really are, larger than they really are and closer than they really are.
When we're at our worst, we convince ourselves that they don't deserve affection or protection.
At the Racial Empowerment Collaborative, we know that some of the scariest moments are racial encounters, some of the scariest moments that people will ever face.
If you look at the police encounters that have led to some wrongful deaths of mostly Native Americans and African-Americans in this country, they've lasted about two minutes.
Within 60 seconds, our brains go on lockdown.
And when we're unprepared, we overreact.
At worst, we shoot first and ask no questions.
Imagine if we could reduce the intensity of threat within those 60 seconds and keep our brains from going on lockdown.
Imagine how many children would get to come home from school or 7-Eleven without getting expelled or shot.
Imagine how many mothers and fathers wouldn't have to cry.
Racial socialization can help young people negotiate 60-second encounters, but it's going to take more than a chat.
It requires a racial literacy.
Now, how do parents have these conversations, and what is a racial literacy?
Thank you for asking.
(Laughter) A racial literacy involves the ability to read, recast and resolve a racially stressful encounter.
Reading involves recognizing when a racial moment happens and noticing our stress reactions to it.
Recasting involves taking mindfulness and reducing my tsunami interpretation of this moment and reducing it to a mountain-climbing experience, one that is -- from impossible situation to one that is much more doable and challenging.
Resolving a racially stressful encounter involves being able to make a healthy decision that is not an underreaction, where I pretend, "That didn't bother me," or an overreaction, where I exaggerate the moment.
Now, we can teach parents and children how to read, recast and resolve using a mindfulness strategy we call: "Calculate, locate, communicate, breathe and exhale."
Stay with me.
"Calculate" asks, "What feeling am I having right now, and how intense is it on a scale of one to 10?"
"Locate" asks, "Where in my body do I feel it?"
And be specific, like the Native American girl at a Chicago fifth-grade school said to me, "I feel angry at a nine because I'm the only Native American.
And I can feel it in my stomach, like a bunch of butterflies are fighting with each other, so much so that they fly up into my throat and choke me."
And if you really want help, try breathing in and exhaling slowly.
One project is where we use basketball to help youth manage their emotions during 60-second eruptions on the court.
Another project, with the help of my colleagues Loretta and John Jemmott, we leverage the cultural style of African-American barbershops, where we train black barbers to be health educators in two areas: one, to safely reduce the sexual risk in their partner relationships; and the other, to stop retaliation violence.
The cool part is the barbers use their cultural style to deliver this health education to 18- to 24-year-old men while they're cutting their hair.
Another project is where we teach teachers how to read, recast and resolve stressful moments in the classroom.
And a final project, in which we teach parents and their children separately to understand their racial traumas before we bring them together to problem-solve daily microaggressions.
Now, racially literate conversations with our children can be healing, but it takes practice.
And I know some of you are saying, "Practice?
We're talking about practice?"
Yes, we are talking about practice.
I have two sons.
(Laughter) But, when I think of them, they are still babies to me, and I worry every day that the world will misjudge them.
In August of 2013, Julian, who was eight at the time, and I were folding laundry, which in and of itself is such a rare occurrence, I should have known something strange was going to happen.
On the TV were Trayvon Martin's parents, and they were crying because of the acquittal of George Zimmerman.
And Julian was glued to the TV.
He wanted to know why: Why would a grown man stalk and hunt down and kill an unarmed 17-year-old boy?
And I did not know what to say.
The best thing that could come out of my mouth was, "Julian, sometimes in this world, there are people who look down on black and brown people and do not treat them -- and children, too -- do not treat them as human."
He interpreted the whole situation as sad.
(Voice-over) Julian Stevenson: That's sad.
"We don't care. You're not our kind."
HS: Yes.
JS: It's like, "We're better than you."
HS: Yes.
JS: "And there's nothing you can do about that.
And if you scare me, or something like that, I will shoot you because I'm scared of you."
But if somebody's stalking you -- JS: It's not the same for everyone else.
HS: It's not always the same, no. You've got to be careful.
It's like they're saying that "You don't look right, so I guess I have the right to disrespect you."
HS: Yeah, and that's what we call, we call that racism.
And we call that racism, Julian, and yes, some people -- other people -- can wear a hoodie, and nothing happens to them.
But you and Trayvon might, and that's why Daddy wants you to be safe.
(Voice-over) HS: ... dangerous, or you're a criminal because you're black, and you're a child or a boy -- That is wrong, it doesn't matter who does it.
HS: What?
JS: Remember when we were ...
HS: So he interrupts me to tell me a story about when he was racially threatened at a swimming pool with a friend by two grown white men, which his mother confirmed.
And I felt happy that he was able to talk about it; it felt like he was getting it.
We moved from the sadness of Trayvon's parents and started talking about George Zimmerman's parents, which, I read in a magazine, condoned the stalking of Trayvon.
And Julian's reaction to me was priceless.
(Voice-over) JS: What did they say about him?
HS: Well, I think they basically felt that he was justified to follow and stalk -- JS: What the -- ?
JS: That's -- one minute.
So they're saying he has the right to follow a black kid, get in a fight with him and shoot him?
HS: As Julian was getting it, I started to lose it.
Because in my mind's eye, I was thinking: What if my Julian or Bryan was Trayvon?
I calculated my anger at a 10.
I found, located, my right leg was shaking uncontrollably like I was running.
And in my mind's eye, I could see somebody chasing Julian, and I was chasing them.
And the only thing that could come out of my mouth was if anybody tries to bother my child ...
JS: What will happen?
HS: Oh, yeah.
JS: Then they're gonna get you because they might have weapons.
HS: Well, you know what, I'm gonna call police, too, like I should.
But you can't; you're right, you can't just go chasing people.
JS: They can be armed.
JS: Plus they could be an army or something.
HS: I know -- I feel like I wanna go get 'em, messing with my son.
JS: Um ...
HS: But you right. You gotta be careful.
Just as long as you believe you're beautiful like Daddy believes you're beautiful and handsome, and Mommy believes you're beautiful and handsome and smart.
And you deserve to be on this planet, just as happy and beautiful and smart as you want to be.
You can do anything you want, baby.
HS: Racial socialization is not just what parents teach their children.
It's also how children respond to what their parents teach.
Can they recognize when a racial elephant shows up in a room?
Can you?
We can build healthier relationships around race if we learn to calculate, locate communicate, breathe and exhale in the middle of our most threatening moments, when we come face-to-face with our lesser selves.
I just want what all parents want for their children when we're not around: affection and protection.
When police and teachers see my children, I want them to imagine their own, because I believe if you see our children as your children, you won't shoot them.
With racial literacy, and yes, practice, we can decode the racial trauma from our stories, and our healing will come in the telling.
But we must never forget that our cultural differences are full of affection and protection, and remember always that the lion's story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Running: it's basically just right, left, right, left, yeah?
I mean, we've been doing it for two million years, so it's kind of arrogant to assume that I've got something to say that hasn't been said and performed better a long time ago.
But the cool thing about running, as I've discovered, is that something bizarre happens in this activity all the time.
Case in point: A couple months ago, if you saw the New York City Marathon, I guarantee you, you saw something that no one has ever seen before.
An Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu turns up at the starting line.
She's 37 years old.
She hasn't won a marathon of any kind in eight years, and a few months previously, she had almost died in childbirth.
Except -- bad news for Derartu Tulu -- some other people had the same idea, including the Olympic gold medalist, and Paula Radcliffe, who is a monster, the fastest woman marathoner in history by far.
Only 10 minutes off the men's world record, Paula Radcliffe is essentially unbeatable.
That's her competition.
Now, this is when something really bizarre happens.
Paula Radcliffe, the one person who is sure to snatch the big paycheck from Derartu Tulu's under-underdog hands, suddenly grabs her leg and starts to fall back.
You give her a quick crack in the teeth with your elbow and blaze for the finish line.
Derartu Tulu ruins the script.
Instead of taking off, she falls back and she grabs Paula Radcliffe, and says, "Come on. Come with us. You can do it."
So Paula Radcliffe, unfortunately, does it.
She catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line.
The second time, Derartu Tulu grabs her and tries to pull her.
And Paula Radcliffe, at that point, says, "I'm done. Go."
So that's a fantastic story, and we all know how it ends.
Except Derartu Tulu ruins the script again.
Wins the New York City Marathon, goes home with a big fat check.
It's a heartwarming story, but if you drill a little bit deeper, you've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there.
When you have two outliers in one organism, it's not a coincidence.
You show me a creature with webbed feet and gills; somehow water's involved.
And the answer to it, I think, can be found down in the Copper Canyons of Mexico, where there's a reclusive tribe, called the Tarahumara Indians.
Now, the Tarahumara are remarkable for three things.
Number one is: they have been living essentially unchanged for the past 400 years.
When the conquistadors arrived in North America you had two choices: you either fight back and engage or you could take off.
The Tarahumara had a different strategy.
They took off and hid in this labyrinthine, networking, spider-webbing system of canyons called the Copper Canyons.
And there they've remained since the 1600s, essentially the same way they've always been.
The last thing that's remarkable about the Tarahumara is: all the things we're going to be talking about today, all the things we're trying to use all of our technology and brain power to solve -- things like heart disease and cholesterol and cancer; crime, warfare and violence; clinical depression -- all this stuff -- the Tarahumara don't know what you're talking about.
They are free from all of these modern ailments.
Again, we're talking about outliers; there's got to be some kind of cause and effect.
Well, there are teams of scientists at Harvard and the University of Utah that are bending their brains and trying to figure out what the Tarahumara have known forever.
They're trying to solve those same kinds of mysteries.
And once again, a mystery wrapped inside of a mystery -- perhaps the key to Derartu Tulu and the Tarahumara is wrapped in three other mysteries, which go like this: Three things -- if you have the answer, come up and take the microphone, because nobody else knows the answer.
If you know it, you're smarter than anybody on planet Earth.
Mystery number one is this: Two million years ago, the human brain exploded in size.
Australopithecus had a tiny little pea brain.
To have a brain of that size, you need to have a source of condensed caloric energy.
In other words, early humans are eating dead animals -- no argument, that's a fact.
The only problem is, the first edged weapons only appeared about 200,000 years ago.
So somehow, for nearly two million years, we are killing animals without any weapons.
Every other animal is stronger than we are, they have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed.
We think Usain Bolt is fast.
We're not fast.
That would be an Olympic event: turn a squirrel loose, whoever catches it gets a gold medal.
(Laughter) So no weapons, no speed, no strength, no fangs, no claws.
How were we killing these animals? Mystery number one.
Mystery number two: Women have been in the Olympics for quite some time now, but one thing that's remarkable about all women sprinters: they all suck; they're terrible.
The fastest woman to ever run a mile did it in 4:15.
I could throw a rock and hit a high-school boy who can run faster than 4:15.
But -- (Laughter) But, you get to the marathon we were just talking about -- you've only been allowed to run the marathon for 20 years, because prior to the 1980s, medical science said if a woman tried to run 26 miles -- does anyone know what would happen if you tried to run 26 miles?
Torn reproductive organs.
(Laughter) Now, I've been to a lot of marathons, and I've yet to see any ...
(Laughter) So it's only been 20 years that women have been allowed to run the marathon.
Then you go beyond 26 miles, into the distance that medical science also told us would be fatal to humans -- remember Pheidippides died when he ran 26 miles -- you get to 50 and 100 miles, and suddenly, it's a different game.
You take a runner like Ann Trason or Nikki Kimball or Jenn Shelton, put them in a race of 50 or 100 miles against anybody in the world, and it's a coin toss who's going to win.
A couple years ago, Emily Baer signed up for a race called the Hardrock 100, which tells you all you need to know about the race.
They give you 48 hours to finish this race.
Well, Emily Baer -- 500 runners -- she finishes in eighth place, in the top 10, even though she stopped at all the aid stations to breastfeed her baby during the race.
(Laughter) And yet, she beat 492 other people.
The last mystery: Why is it that women get stronger as distances get longer?
The third mystery is this: At the University of Utah, they started tracking finishing times for people running the marathon.
What they found is that if you start running the marathon at age 19, you'll get progressively faster, year by year, until you reach your peak at age 27.
And then after that, you succumb to the rigors of time.
So about seven, eight years to reach your peak, and then gradually you fall off your peak, until you go back to the starting point.
You'd think it might take eight years to go back to the same speed, maybe 10 years -- no, it's 45 years.
64-year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19.
So you have these three mysteries.
You've got to be careful anytime someone looks back in prehistory and tries to give you a global answer because, it being prehistory, you can say whatever the hell you want and get away with it.
But I'll submit this to you: If you put one piece in the middle of this jigsaw puzzle, suddenly it all starts to form a coherent picture.
If you're wondering why the Tarahumara don't fight and don't die of heart disease, why a poor Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu can be the most compassionate and yet the most competitive, and why we somehow were able to find food without weapons, perhaps it's because humans, as much as we like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe, actually evolved as nothing more than a pack of hunting dogs.
Maybe we evolved as a hunting pack animal.
But the advantage of that little bit of social discomfort is the fact that, when it comes to running under hot heat for long distances, we're superb -- the best on the planet.
You take a horse on a hot day, and after about five or six miles, that horse has a choice: it's either going to breathe or it's going to cool off.
So what if we evolved as hunting pack animals?
What if the only natural advantage we had in the world was the fact that we could get together as a group, go out there on that African savanna, pick out an antelope, go out as a pack, and run that thing to death?
Well, if that's true, a couple other things had to be true as well.
The key to being part of a hunting pack is the word "pack."
If you go out by yourself and try to chase an antelope, I guarantee there will be two cadavers out in the savanna.
You need to have those 64- and 65-year-olds who have been doing this for a long time to understand which antelope you're trying to catch.
Those expert trackers have to be part of the pack.
It makes no sense to have the antelope over there, dead, and the people who want to eat it 50 miles away.
They need to be part of the pack.
The pack stays together.
Another thing that has to be true: this pack cannot be materialistic.
You can't be bearing grudges, like, "I'm not chasing that guy's antelope.
He pissed me off. Let him go chase his own antelope."
What you end up with, in other words, is a culture remarkably similar to the Tarahumara, a tribe that has remained unchanged since the Stone Age.
It's a really compelling argument that maybe the Tarahumara are doing exactly what all of us had done for two million years, that it's us in modern times who have sort of gone off the path.
You know, we look at running as this kind of alien, foreign thing, this punishment you've got to do because you ate pizza the night before.
We try to can it and package it and make it "better" and then sell it to people.
And then what happened was, we started creating these fancy cushioned things which can make running "better," called running shoes.
The reason I get personally pissed-off about running shoes is because I bought a million of them and I kept getting hurt.
We talked for two minutes backstage, and she talked about plantar fasciitis.
You talk to a runner, I guarantee within 30 seconds, the conversation turns to injury.
So if humans evolved as runners, if that's our one natural advantage, then why are we so bad at it?
Why do we keep getting hurt?
A curious thing about running and running injuries is that the running injury is new to our time.
If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor.
It's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain.
Geronimo used to say, "My only friends are my legs. I only trust my legs."
That's because an Apache triathlon used to be you'd run 50 miles across the desert, engage in hand-to-hand combat, steal a bunch of horses, and slap leather for home.
Geronimo was never saying, "You know something, my Achilles -- I'm tapering.
Or, "I need to cross-train. I didn't do yoga. I'm not ready."
(Laughter) Humans ran and ran all the time.
We are here today. We have our digital technology.
All of our science comes from the fact that our ancestors were able to do something extraordinary every day, which was just rely on their naked feet and legs to run long distances.
Well, I would submit to you the first thing is: get rid of all packaging, all the sales, all the marketing.
Get rid of all the stinking running shoes.
Stop focusing on urban marathons, which, if you do four hours, you suck, and if you do 3:59:59, you're awesome, because you qualified for another race.
We need to get back to that sense of playfulness and joyfulness and, I would say, nakedness, that has made the Tarahumara one of the healthiest and serene cultures in our time.
So what's the benefit? So what?
Without getting too extreme about this, imagine a world where everybody could go out the door and engage in the kind of exercise that's going to make them more relaxed, more serene, more healthy, burn off stress -- where you don't come back into your office a raging maniac anymore, or go home with a lot of stress on top of you again.
Maybe there's something between what we are today and what the Tarahumara have always been.
I don't say let's go back to the Copper Canyons and live on corn and maize, which is the Tarahumara's preferred diet, but maybe there's somewhere in between.
Because if somebody could find a way to restore that natural ability that we all enjoyed for most of our existence up until the 1970s or so, the benefits -- social and physical and political and mental -- could be astounding.
What I've been seeing today is there is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who've gotten rid of their shoes.
And what they have found uniformly is, you get rid of the shoes, you get rid of the stress, you get rid of the injuries and the ailments.
And what you find is something the Tarahumara have known for a very long time: that this can be a whole lot of fun.
I've experienced it personally myself.
I was injured all my life; then in my early 40s, I got rid of my shoes and my running ailments have gone away, too.
Thanks very much.
"What I Will" I will not dance to your war drum.
I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum.
I know that beat.
It is lifeless.
I will not dance to your drummed-up war.
I will not pop, spin, break for you.
I will not kill for you.
Especially I will not die for you.
Life is a right, not collateral or casual.
Gather my beloved near, and our chanting will be dancing.
I will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat.
This heartbeat is louder than death.
Your war drum ain't louder than this breath. Haaa.
(Applause) A bunch of pacifists.
Like a lot.
So I couldn't figure out what to read today.
But I'm going to need you to just sit for like 10 minutes and hold a woman who is not here.
Are you holding her?
All holy history banned.
Unwritten books predicted the future, projected the past.
We cherish corpses.
We mourn women, complicated.
War and tooth, enameled salted lemon childhoods.
I live cycles of light and darkness.
Rhythm is half silence.
Sickness, health, tender violence.
I never was pure.
I experience exponentially.
Everything is everything.
One woman loses 15, maybe 20, members of her family.
One woman loses six.
One woman loses her head.
One woman searches rubble. One woman feeds on trash.
One woman shoots her face. One woman shoots her husband.
One woman straps herself.
One woman gives birth to a baby.
One woman no longer believes love will ever find her.
One woman never did.
Where do refugee hearts go?
My spine curves spiral.
Cluster bombs left behind.
A smoldering grief.
Harvest contaminated tobacco.
Harvest bombs.
Harvest palms, smoke.
Harvest witness, smoke.
Salvation, smoke.
Thank you.
(Applause)
What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request.
(Laughter) Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century.
It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40.
Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior -- I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family.
And I decided that I would try and turn my life around.
In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance.
But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work.
(Laughter) Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out.
So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance.
And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today.
The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate.
But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance.
All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family.
Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in.
(Laughter) (Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [a] T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue.
(Laughter) The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us.
It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead.
If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance.
It's particularly important -- this isn't on the World Wide Web, is it? I'm about to get fired -- it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation.
(Laughter) I'm talking about all companies.
Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you [as] they can get away with.
It's in their nature; it's in their DNA; it's what they do -- even the good, well-intentioned companies.
On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened.
On the other hand, it's a nightmare -- it just means you spend more time at the bloody office.
We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.
The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance.
Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to.
And it went like this: wake up well rested after a good night's sleep.
Have breakfast with my wife and children.
Have sex again.
Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink.
Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids.
Walk the dog. Have sex again.
(Laughter) We need to be realistic.
You can't do it all in one day.
(Laughter) A day is too short; "after I retire" is too long.
There's got to be a middle way.
A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way.
A friend came to see me last year -- and she doesn't mind me telling this story -- a friend came to see me last year and said, "Nigel, I've read your book.
And I realize that my life is completely out of balance.
It's totally dominated by work.
I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day.
All of my relationships have failed.
So I joined a gym."
(Laughter) Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life -- there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side.
Now that can be daunting.
You want me to go to church and call my mother."
And I understand.
But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective.
My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son" -- Harry -- "up from school."
Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening.
So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates.
We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games.
I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared a pizza for two, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas.
I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach."
I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "Goodnight, mate," and walked out of his bedroom.
As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, "Dad?" I went, "Yes, mate?"
He went, "Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever."
I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation.
Now my point is the small things matter.
Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life.
With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life.
Moreover, I think, it can transform society.
Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like.
And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading.
(Applause)
Ever since I was a little girl seeing "Star Wars" for the first time, I've been fascinated by this idea of personal robots.
So 20 years pass -- I am now a graduate student at MIT studying artificial intelligence, the year is 1997, and NASA has just landed the first robot on Mars.
And I remember thinking about all the reasons why that was the case.
But one really struck me.
Robotics had really been about interacting with things, not with people -- certainly not in a social way that would be natural for us and would really help people accept robots into our daily lives.
And so that year, I started to build this robot, Kismet, the world's first social robot.
Three years later -- a lot of programming, working with other graduate students in the lab -- Kismet was ready to start interacting with people.
(Video) Scientist: I want to show you something.
Kismet: (Nonsense) Scientist: This is a watch that my girlfriend gave me.
Kismet: (Nonsense) Scientist: Yeah, look, it's got a little blue light in it too.
I almost lost it this week.
Cynthia Breazeal: So Kismet interacted with people like kind of a non-verbal child or pre-verbal child, which I assume was fitting because it was really the first of its kind.
This little robot was somehow able to tap into something deeply social within us -- and with that, the promise of an entirely new way we could interact with robots.
So over the past several years I've been continuing to explore this interpersonal dimension of robots, now at the media lab with my own team of incredibly talented students.
And one of my favorite robots is Leonardo.
We developed Leonardo in collaboration with Stan Winston Studio.
And so I want to show you a special moment for me of Leo.
This is Matt Berlin interacting with Leo, introducing Leo to a new object.
But sort of like us, he can actually learn about it from watching Matt's reaction.
(Video) Matt Berlin: Hello, Leo.
Leo, this is Cookie Monster.
Can you find Cookie Monster?
Leo, Cookie Monster is very bad.
He's very bad, Leo.
Cookie Monster is very, very bad.
He wants to get your cookies.
(Laughter) CB: All right, so Leo and Cookie might have gotten off to a little bit of a rough start, but they get along great now.
So what I've learned through building these systems is that robots are actually a really intriguing social technology, where it's actually their ability to push our social buttons and to interact with us like a partner that is a core part of their functionality.
And with that shift in thinking, we can now start to imagine new questions, new possibilities for robots that we might not have thought about otherwise.
Well, one of the things that we've learned is that, if we design these robots to communicate with us using the same body language, the same sort of non-verbal cues that people use -- like Nexi, our humanoid robot, is doing here -- what we find is that people respond to robots a lot like they respond to people.
People use these cues to determine things like how persuasive someone is, how likable, how engaging, how trustworthy.
It turns out it's the same for robots.
It's turning out now that robots are actually becoming a really interesting new scientific tool to understand human behavior.
To answer questions like, how is it that, from a brief encounter, we're able to make an estimate of how trustworthy another person is?
Mimicry's believed to play a role, but how?
We can't carefully control them because they're subconscious for us.
And so in this video here -- this is a video taken from David DeSteno's lab at Northeastern University.
He's a psychologist we've been collaborating with.
There's actually a scientist carefully controlling Nexi's cues to be able to study this question.
And the bottom line is -- the reason why this works is because it turns out people just behave like people even when interacting with a robot.
So given that key insight, we can now start to imagine new kinds of applications for robots.
For instance, if robots do respond to our non-verbal cues, maybe they would be a cool, new communication technology.
So imagine this: What about a robot accessory for your cellphone?
You call your friend, she puts her handset in a robot, and, bam! You're a MeBot -- you can make eye contact, you can talk with your friends, you can move around, you can gesture -- maybe the next best thing to really being there, or is it?
To explore this question, my student, Siggy Adalgeirsson, did a study where we brought human participants, people, into our lab to do a collaborative task with a remote collaborator.
The remote collaborator was an experimenter from our group who used one of three different technologies to interact with the participants.
This is just like video conferencing today.
The next was to add mobility -- so, have the screen on a mobile base.
This is like, if you're familiar with any of the telepresence robots today -- this is mirroring that situation.
And then the fully expressive MeBot.
So after the interaction, we asked people to rate their quality of interaction with the technology, with a remote collaborator through this technology, in a number of different ways.
And this is what we see when they use just the screen.
It turns out, when you add mobility -- the ability to roll around the table -- you get a little more of a boost.
So it seems like this physical, social embodiment actually really makes a difference.
Now let's try to put this into a little bit of context.
Today we know that families are living further and further apart, and that definitely takes a toll on family relationships and family bonds over distance.
For me, I have three young boys, and I want them to have a really good relationship with their grandparents.
But my parents live thousands of miles away, so they just don't get to see each other that often.
We try Skype, we try phone calls, but my boys are little -- they don't really want to talk; they want to play.
So I love the idea of thinking about robots as a new kind of distance-play technology.
I imagine a time not too far from now -- my mom can go to her computer, open up a browser and jack into a little robot.
And as grandma-bot, she can now play, really play, with my sons, with her grandsons, in the real world with his real toys.
I could imagine grandmothers being able to do social-plays with their granddaughters, with their friends, and to be able to share all kinds of other activities around the house, like sharing a bedtime story.
And through this technology, being able to be an active participant in their grandchildren's lives in a way that's not possible today.
So in the United States today, over 65 percent of people are either overweight or obese, and now it's a big problem with our children as well.
And we know that as you get older in life, if you're obese when you're younger, that can lead to chronic diseases that not only reduce your quality of life, but are a tremendous economic burden on our health care system.
But if robots can be engaging, if we like to cooperate with robots, if robots are persuasive, maybe a robot can help you maintain a diet and exercise program, maybe they can help you manage your weight.
Sort of like a digital Jiminy -- as in the well-known fairy tale -- a kind of friendly, supportive presence that's always there to be able to help you make the right decision in the right way at the right time to help you form healthy habits.
This is a robot, Autom.
Cory Kidd developed this robot for his doctoral work.
And it was designed to be a robot diet-and-exercise coach.
It had a couple of simple non-verbal skills it could do.
You'd use a screen interface to enter information, like how many calories you ate that day, how much exercise you got.
And the robot spoke with a synthetic voice to engage you in a coaching dialogue modeled after trainers and patients and so forth.
So an interesting question is, does the social embodiment really matter? Does it matter that it's a robot?
Is it really just the quality of advice and information that matters?
To explore that question, we did a study in the Boston area where we put one of three interventions in people's homes for a period of several weeks.
One case was the robot you saw there, Autom.
And the third was just a pen and paper log, because that's the standard intervention you typically get when you start a diet-and-exercise program.
So one of the things we really wanted to look at was not how much weight people lost, but really how long they interacted with the robot.
So the first thing I want to look at is how long, how long did people interact with these systems.
It turns out that people interacted with the robot significantly more, even though the quality of the advice was identical to the computer.
When it asked people to rate it on terms of the quality of the working alliance, people rated the robot higher and they trusted the robot more.
(Laughter) And when you look at emotional engagement, it was completely different.
People would name the robots.
They would dress the robots.
(Laughter) And even when we would come up to pick up the robots at the end of the study, they would come out to the car and say good-bye to the robots.
They didn't do this with a computer.
The last thing I want to talk about today is the future of children's media.
We know that kids spend a lot of time behind screens today, whether it's television or computer games or whatnot.
My sons, they love the screen. They love the screen.
But I want them to play; as a mom, I want them to play, like, real-world play.
And so I have a new project in my group I wanted to present to you today called Playtime Computing that's really trying to think about how we can take what's so engaging about digital media and literally bring it off the screen into the real world of the child, where it can take on many of the properties of real-world play.
So here's the first exploration of this idea, where characters can be physical or virtual, and where the digital content can literally come off the screen into the world and back.
I like to think of this as the Atari Pong of this blended-reality play.
But we can push this idea further.
And when it's in their world, they can relate to it and play with it in a way that's fundamentally different from how they play with it on the screen.
Another important idea is this notion of persistence of character across realities.
So changes that children make in the real world need to translate to the virtual world.
So here, Nathan has changed the letter A to the number 2.
You can imagine maybe these symbols give the characters special powers when it goes into the virtual world.
And then finally, what I've been trying to do here is create a really immersive experience for kids, where they really feel like they are part of that story, a part of that experience.
And I really want to spark their imaginations the way mine was sparked as a little girl watching "Star Wars."
But I want to do more than that.
I want them to be able to literally build their imagination into these experiences and make them their own.
So we've been exploring a lot of ideas in telepresence and mixed reality to literally allow kids to project their ideas into this space where other kids can interact with them and build upon them.
I really want to come up with new ways of children's media that foster creativity and learning and innovation.
I think that's very, very important.
So this is a new project.
We've invited a lot of kids into this space, and they think it's pretty cool.
Robots touch something deeply human within us.
And so whether they're helping us to become creative and innovative, or whether they're helping us to feel more deeply connected despite distance, or whether they are our trusted sidekick who's helping us attain our personal goals in becoming our highest and best selves, for me, robots are all about people.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hawa Abdi: Many people -- 20 years for Somalia -- [were] fighting.
So there was no job, no food.
Children, most of them, became very malnourished, like this.
Deqo Mohamed: So as you know, always in a civil war, the ones affected most [are] the women and children.
So our patients are women and children.
And they are in our backyard.
It's our home. We welcome them.
That's the camp that we have in now 90,000 people, where 75 percent of them are women and children.
Pat Mitchell: And this is your hospital. This is the inside.
HA: We are doing C-sections and different operations because people need some help.
There is no government to protect them.
DM: Every morning we have about 400 patients, maybe more or less.
But sometimes we are only five doctors and 16 nurses, and we are physically getting exhausted to see all of them.
And we have a school. This is our bright -- we opened [in the] last two years [an] elementary school where we have 850 children, and the majority are women and girls.
(Applause) PM: And the doctors have some very big rules about who can get treated at the clinic.
HA: The people who are coming to us, we are welcoming.
But there are only two rules.
First rule: there is no clan distinguished and political division in Somali society.
The second: no man can beat his wife.
Until they identify this case, we'll never release him.
That's our two rules.
Because the last 20 years, the Somali woman has stood up.
They were the leaders, and we are the leaders of our community and the hope of our future generations.
We are not just the helpless and the victims of the civil war.
We can reconcile.
(Applause) DM: As my mother said, we are the future hope, and the men are only killing in Somalia.
So we came up with these two rules.
In a camp with 90,000 people, you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights.
(Applause) So empowering the women and giving the opportunity -- we are there for them. They are not alone for this.
PM: You're running a medical clinic.
It brought much, much needed medical care to people who wouldn't get it.
You're also running a civil society.
You've created your own rules, in which women and children are getting a different sense of security.
Talk to me about your decision, Dr. Abdi, and your decision, Dr. Mohamed, to work together -- for you to become a doctor and to work with your mother in these circumstances.
HA: My age -- because I was born in 1947 -- we were having, at that time, government, law and order.
I admired them, and I decided to become a doctor.
My mother died, unfortunately, when I was 12 years [old].
Then my father allowed me to proceed [with] my hope.
My mother died in [a] gynecology complication, so I decided to become a gynecology specialist.
That's why I became a doctor.
DM: For me, my mother was preparing [me] when I was a child to become a doctor, but I really didn't want to.
Maybe I should become an historian, or maybe a reporter.
I loved it, but it didn't work.
When the war broke out -- civil war -- I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help, and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children.
And I thought, maybe I can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist.
(Laughter) So I went to Russia, and my mother also, [during the] time of [the] Soviet Union.
My sister was different.
She's here. She's also a doctor.
She graduated in Russia also.
(Applause) And to go back and to work with our mother is just what we saw in the civil war -- when I was 16, and my sister was 11, when the civil war broke out.
So it was the need and the people we saw in the early '90s -- that's what made us go back and work for them.
PM: So what is the biggest challenge working, mother and daughter, in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations?
HA: Yes, I was working in a tough situation, very dangerous.
Most people fled abroad.
But I remained with those people, and I was trying to do something -- [any] little thing I [could] do.
Now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other, who are not fighting.
And I'm thankful for my daughters.
When they come to me, they help me to treat the people, to help.
PM: What's the best part of working with your mother, and the most challenging part for you?
DM: She's very tough; it's most challenging.
She always expects us to do more.
And really when you think [you] cannot do it, she will push you, and I can do it.
That's the best part.
She shows us, trains us how to do and how to be better [people] and how to do long hours in surgery -- 300 patients per day, 10, 20 surgeries, and still you have to manage the camp -- that's how she trains us.
You see 300 patients, 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage.
PM: But you do it for good reasons.
(Applause) Wait. Wait.
DM: Thank you.
(Applause) HA: Thank you very much. DM: Thank you very much.
These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider.
They produce six different types of silk, which is spun together into a fiber, tougher than any fiber humans have ever made.
The nearest we've come is with aramid fiber.
And to make that, it involves extremes of temperature, extremes of pressure and loads of pollution.
It does suggest we've still got a bit to learn.
This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away.
That's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors.
So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver.
If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use.
And if we're to make progress with the sustainability revolution, I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about.
Secondly, shifting from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model.
And thirdly, changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy.
And for all three of these, I believe, biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we're going to need.
You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period.
And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it.
So I'm going to talk about some projects that have explored these ideas.
When we were working on the Eden Project, we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular, but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried.
It was a hell of a challenge, and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues.
So for instance, it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels.
Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons.
The next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons.
And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass, which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes.
And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes.
So we started exploring this material called ETFE.
It's a high-strength polymer.
And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass, and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing.
With less steel we were getting more sunlight in, which meant we didn't have to put as much extra heat in winter.
And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building.
So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency -- delivering the same function, but with a fraction of the resource input.
And actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions.
So for instance, you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies, whole buildings inspired by abalone shells, super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells.
There's a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool.
So now I want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea.
The way we tend to use resources is we extract them, we turn them into short-life products and then dispose of them.
Nature works very differently.
In ecosystems, the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system.
And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems.
And one of my favorites is called the Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles.
And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food, cardboard and plastic waste.
It was ending up in landfills.
Now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste.
They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding.
They put it into worm recomposting systems, which produced a lot of worms, which they fed to Siberian sturgeon, which produced caviar, which they sold back to the restaurants.
So it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model, and it created more value in the process.
Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this, turning waste streams into schemes that create value.
And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time, there's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing.
And particularly in cities -- we could look at the whole metabolism of cities, and look at those as opportunities.
And that's what we're doing on the next project I'm going to talk about, the Mobius Project, where we're trying to bring together a number of activities, all within one building, so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another.
And the kind of elements I'm talking about are, firstly, we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse, a bit like this one in Amsterdam called De Kas.
Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid.
We'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater, turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms.
And we'd also have a coffee shop, and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms.
And just for fun, we've proposed this for a roundabout in central London, which at the moment is a complete eyesore.
And with just a little bit of planning, we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people, reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities.
So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project, which we're working on at the moment.
It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago.
So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests.
And during the evolution of life on the Earth, it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy.
The more vegetation we lose, the more that's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification.
And this animation, this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years, and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot, and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt, or maybe even reverse, desertification.
And if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts, there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity.
This is the Namibian fog-basking beetle, and it's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert.
The way it does this is it comes out at night, crawls to the top of a sand dune, and because it's got a matte black shell, is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings.
So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea, you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle's shell.
Just before sunrise, he tips his shell up, the water runs down into his mouth, has a good drink, goes off and hides for the rest of the day.
And the ingenuity, if you could call it that, goes even further.
Between them there's a waxy finish which repels water.
And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps, they stay in tight, spherical beads, which means they're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle's shell.
So amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment -- and in that sense, very relevant to the kind of challenges we're going to be facing over the next few years, next few decades.
We're working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse.
This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions, and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills, and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through, it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process.
And what they found with the first Seawater Greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside.
So they just started spreading this on the land around, and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area.
So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land -- and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design.
So we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits.
And when you think about nature, often you think about it as being all about competition.
But actually in mature ecosystems, you're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships.
So an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters.
And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power, which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create electricity.
And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP, consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms -- 10,000 times.
So our energy problems are not intractable.
It's a challenge to our ingenuity.
And the kind of synergies I'm talking about are, firstly, both these technologies work very well in hot, sunny deserts.
That's exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces.
CSP produces a lot of waste heat.
And finally, in the shade under the mirrors, it's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight.
The idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind.
We'd have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way.
And with biomimicry, if you've got an underutilized resource, you don't think, "How am I going to dispose of this?"
You think, "What can I add to the system to create more value?"
And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages.
When you evaporate seawater, the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate.
And that builds up on the evaporators -- and that's what that image on the left is -- gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate.
And if you think about the carbon in that, that would have come out of the atmosphere, into the sea and then locked away in a building product.
The next thing is sodium chloride.
You can also compress that into a building block, as they did here.
This is a hotel in Bolivia.
And then after that, there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract, like phosphates, that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them.
So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries.
And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants.
And it's pushing the ecosystem close to collapse.
We could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts, transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity.
Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food, abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas.
So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning: radical increases in resource efficiency, closing loops and a solar economy.
They're not just possible; they're critical.
And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions.
But perhaps more than anything, what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design.
And this is an important point.
And that's what we need to do, so let's be positive, and let's make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we've ever seen.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Whistling) (Whistling ends) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
That was whistling.
I'm trying to do this in English.
So I whistled along with him.
And actually, until I was 34, I always annoyed and irritated people with whistling, because, to be honest, my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior.
I whistled alone, I whistled in the classroom, I whistled on bike, I whistled everywhere.
And I also whistled at a Christmas Eve party with my family-in-law.
And they had some, in my opinion, terrible Christmas music.
And when I hear music that I don't like, I try to make it better.
(Whistling) But it can also sound like this.
(Whistling) But during a Christmas party -- at dinner, actually -- it's very annoying.
So my sister-in-law asked me a few times, "Please stop whistling."
And at one point -- and I had some wine, I have to admit that -- at one point I said, "If there was a contest, I would join."
And two weeks later, I received a text message: "You're going to America."
(Laughter) So, OK, I'm going to America.
I would love to, but why?
She googled, and she found this World Whistling Championship in America, of course.
(Laughter) She didn't expect me to go there.
And I would have lost my face.
I don't know if that's correct English.
But the Dutch people here will understand what I mean.
(Applause) And she thought, "He will never go there."
But actually, I did.
So I went to Louisburg, North Carolina, southeast of the United States, and I entered the world of whistling.
And I also entered the World Championship, and I won there, in 2004.
(Applause) That was great fun, of course.
And to defend my title -- like judokas do and sportsmen -- I thought, well let's go back in 2005 -- and I won again.
(Laughter) Then I couldn't participate for a few years.
And in 2008, I entered again in Japan, Tokyo, and I won again.
So what happened now is I'm standing here in Rotterdam, in the beautiful city, on a big stage, and I'm talking about whistling.
So I quit my day job as a nurse.
(Laughter) OK, I'm not the only one whistling here.
(Laughter) Actually, it's very simple.
It's about 80 minutes long.
(Laughter) No, no, no. It's four minutes long.
(Whistling) (Laughter) Sorry, I forgot one thing -- you whistle the same tone as me.
(Laughter) I heard a wide variety of tones.
(Geert Chatrou and audience whistling) (Whistling ends) This is very promising.
(Laughter) This is very promising.
And if it's started, I just point where you whistle along, and we will see what happens.
(Laughter) I'm so used to that.
(Laughter) (Music) (Whistling) (Whistling ends) (Music) OK.
(Whistling) It's easy, isn't it?
(Whistling) Now comes the solo, I propose I do that myself, OK?
(Music) (Whistling) (Applause) Max Westerman: Geert Chatrou, the World Champion of Whistling.
We're here to celebrate compassion.
But compassion, from my vantage point, has a problem.
As essential as it is across our traditions, as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives, the word "compassion" is hollowed out in our culture, and it is suspect in my field of journalism.
It's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing, or it's seen as potentially depressing.
Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and, after the fact, the word "compassion" was translated as "pity."
Now compassion, when it enters the news, too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time.
Our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images.
And so what I'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection.
And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter, that they shape the way we understand ourselves, the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others.
When this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s, we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that.
Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent.
I think that without perhaps being able to name it, we are collectively experiencing that we've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue.
Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others, both in our private and in our civic spaces.
To start simply, I want to say that compassion is kind.
Now "kindness" might sound like a very mild word, and it's prone to its own abundant cliche.
But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.
And it is a most edifying form of instant gratification.
Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity.
They are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young Jews and Muslims, and as they do that, they cultivate what they call "curiosity without assumptions."
It's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there, just showing up.
I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty -- and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other, not just what it is about them that might need helping.
I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value.
And in that light, for the religious, compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery -- encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.
I'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like, but I can show you what compassion looks like -- because it is visible.
When we see it, we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable, what is possible.
And compassion does seek physicality.
I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford.
He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13, in a car crash that killed his father and his sister.
Matthew's legs don't work, and he'll never walk again, and -- and he does experience this as an "and" rather than a "but" -- and he experiences himself to be healed and whole.
And as a teacher of yoga, he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability, health, illness and aging.
He says that he's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we're all on.
He's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.
I can't quite explain it, and he can't either.
The communities that Jean Vanier founded, like Jean Vanier himself, exude tenderness.
"Tender" is another word I would love to spend some time resurrecting.
Compassion is rarely a solution, but it is always a sign of a deeper reality, of deeper human possibilities.
And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories, never by statistics and strategies.
And at the same time that we are doing that, I think we are rediscovering the power of story -- that as human beings, we need stories to survive, to flourish, to change.
Our traditions have always known this, and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us.
There is, of course, a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of Judaism to repair the world -- tikkun olam.
Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way.
Stories like this, signs like this, are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us.
This is going to change science, I believe, and it will change religion.
But here's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion.
We all know about the Albert Einstein who came up with E = mc2.
We don't hear so much about the Einstein who invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson, to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and wouldn't have her.
We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South.
Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions.
But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century.
He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old.
And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less.
He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages.
Some of his favorites were Moses, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi -- he adored his contemporary, Gandhi.
I want to show you the rest of this photograph, because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word "compassion" in our culture -- we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life, which is messy.
So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral -- it's not.
This is the full photograph, and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigar.
We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website, and someone said, "When I look at the first photo, I ask myself, what was he thinking?
Well, he was complicated.
And it is much harder, often, to be compassionate towards those closest to us, which is another quality in the universe of compassion, on its dark side, that also deserves our serious attention and illumination.
Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being.
So was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Dorothy Day.
So was Mother Teresa.
So are we all.
Our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems.
But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others.
Einstein became a humanitarian, not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter, but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist.
So I want to propose a final definition of compassion -- this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way -- and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology.
Now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this, and we need them to mine it for us now.
(Applause)
I want you to take a look at this baby.
What you're drawn to are her eyes and the skin you love to touch.
What's going on up in that little brain of hers.
The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science.
And what we're learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the "celestial openness" of the child's mind.
What we see here is a mother in India, and she's speaking Koro, which is a newly discovered language.
And she's talking to her baby.
What this mother -- and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world -- understands is that, to preserve this language, they need to speak it to the babies.
Well, it's got to do with your brain.
What we see here is that language has a critical period for learning.
The way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis.
The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline.
After puberty, we fall off the map.
No scientists dispute this curve, but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way.
Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development, and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language.
We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development.
So we've been studying the babies using a technique that we're using all over the world and the sounds of all languages.
The baby sits on a parent's lap, and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes -- like from "ah" to "ee."
What have we learned?
Well, babies all over the world are what I like to describe as "citizens of the world."
We're culture-bound listeners.
We can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages.
So the question arises: When do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are?
And the answer: before their first birthdays.
The babies in the United States are getting a lot better, babies in Japan are getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn.
So the question is: What's happening during this critical two-month period?
So there are two things going on.
The first is that the babies are listening intently to us, and they're taking statistics as they listen to us talk -- they're taking statistics.
So listen to two mothers speaking motherese -- the universal language we use when we talk to kids -- first in English and then in Japanese.
(Video) Ah, I love your big blue eyes -- so pretty and nice.
And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different.
The distribution shows.
And the distribution of Japanese is totally different, where we see a group of intermediate sounds, which is known as the Japanese "R."
So babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are.
But we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics.
We are governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development.
So what we're seeing here is changing our models of what the critical period is about.
It's raising lots of questions about bilingual people.
Bilinguals must keep two sets of statistics in mind at once and flip between them, one after the other, depending on who they're speaking to.
So we asked ourselves, can the babies take statistics on a brand new language?
And we tested this by exposing American babies who'd never heard a second language to Mandarin for the first time during the critical period.
We knew that, when monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern.
But the Taiwanese babies are getting better, not the American babies.
What we did was expose American babies, during this period, to Mandarin.
It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions.
(Mandarin) PK: So what have we done to their little brains?
So a group of babies came in and listened to English.
And we can see from the graph that exposure to English didn't improve their Mandarin.
But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions.
They were as good as the babies in Taiwan who'd been listening for 10 and a half months.
What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language.
So we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage, the same 12 sessions, but over a television set.
What did we do to their brains?
We want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening as babies are in front of televisions, as opposed to in front of human beings.
Thankfully, we have a new machine, magnetoencephalography, that allows us to do this.
It looks like a hair dryer from Mars.
But it's completely safe, completely noninvasive and silent.
We're looking at millimeter accuracy with regard to spatial and millisecond accuracy using 306 SQUIDs -- these are superconducting quantum interference devices -- to pick up the magnetic fields that change as we do our thinking.
We're the first in the world to record babies in an MEG machine while they are learning.
So this is little Emma.
And she's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears.
You can see, she can move around.
We're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap, so she's free to move completely unconstrained.
We're seeing the baby brain.
As the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas light up, and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence, getting the brain coordinated with its different areas, and causality, one brain area causing another to activate.
We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child's brain development.
We're going to be able to see a child's brain as they experience an emotion, as they learn to speak and read, as they solve a math problem, as they have an idea.
And we're going to be able to invent brain-based interventions for children who have difficulty learning.
Just as the poets and writers described, we're going to be able to see, I think, that wondrous openness, utter and complete openness, of the mind of a child.
In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human, and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives.
(Applause)
I was around 10 when one day, I discovered a box of my father's old things.
In it, under a bunch of his college textbooks, was a pair of black corduroy bell-bottom pants.
These pants were awful -- musty and moth-eaten.
And of course, I fell in love with them.
I'd never seen anything like them.
Until that day, all I'd ever known and worn was my school uniform, which, in fact, I was pretty grateful for, because from quite a young age, I'd realized I was somewhat different.
(Laughter) I was bullied quite a bit.
(Laughter) Well, almost.
This became my daily prayer: "God, please make me just like everybody else."
(Laughter) And eventually, it became pretty clear that I was not growing up to be the son that my father always wanted.
Sorry, Dad.
And over time, I grew less and less sure that I actually wanted to.
Therefore, the day those black corduroy bell-bottom pants came into my life, something happened.
(Laughter) All the way to school, and then all the way back because I was sent home at once -- (Laughter) I transformed into a little brown rock star.
That day, I was suddenly celebrating it.
That day, instead of being invisible, I chose to be looked at, just by wearing something different.
That day, I discovered the power of what we wear.
That day, I discovered the power of fashion, and I've been in love with it ever since.
And with this simple act of truth, I realized that these differences -- they stopped being our shame.
They became our expressions, expressions of our very unique identities.
And we should express ourselves, wear what we want.
What's the worst that could happen?
(Laughter) Yeah.
Well, unless the fashion police meant something entirely different.
Nobel Prize laureate Malala survived Taliban extremists in October 2012.
However, in October 2017, she faced a different enemy, when online trolls viciously attacked the photograph that showed the 20-year-old wearing jeans that day.
The comments, the hatred she received, ranged from "How long before the scarf comes off?"
Now, when most of us decide to wear a pair of jeans someplace like New York, London, Milan, Paris, we possibly don't stop to think that it's a privilege; something that somewhere else can have consequences, something that can one day be taken away from us.
My grandmother was a woman who took extraordinary pleasure in dressing up.
Her fashion was colorful.
And the color she loved to wear so much was possibly the only thing that was truly about her, the one thing she had agency over, because like most other women of her generation in India, she'd never been allowed to exist beyond what was dictated by custom and tradition.
She'd been married at 17, and after 65 years of marriage, when my grandfather died suddenly one day, her loss was unbearable.
But that day, she was going to lose something else as well, the one joy she had: to wear color.
In India, according to custom, when a Hindu woman becomes a widow, all she's allowed to wear is white from the day of the death of her husband.
No one made my grandmother wear white.
However, every woman she'd known who had outlived her husband, including her mother, had done it.
This oppression was so internalized, so deep-rooted, that she herself refused a choice.
She passed away this year, and until the day she died, she continued to wear only white.
In it, you can't really see what she's wearing -- the photo is in black and white.
However, from the way she's smiling in it, you just know she's wearing color.
This is also what fashion can do.
And fighting for freedom, protest, comes in many forms.
With every handful of the powder they throw into the air, their white saris slowly start to suffuse with color.
And they don't stop until they're completely covered in every hue of the rainbow that's forbidden to them.
Lessons of defiance have always been taught by fashion's great revolutionaries: its designers.
Jean Paul Gaultier taught us that women can be kings.
And Alexander McQueen, in his spring 1999 show, had two giant robotic arms in the middle of his runway.
And as the model, Shalom Harlow began to spin in between them, these two giant arms -- furtively at first and then furiously, began to spray color onto her.
McQueen, thus, before he took his own life, taught us that this body of ours is a canvas, a canvas we get to paint however we want.
He was a student and actor from Iraq.
He loved his vibrant, eclectic clothes.
He'd been kidnapped.
He'd been tortured.
Stab wounds.
Two thousand miles away in Peshawar, Pakistani transgender activist Alisha was shot multiple times in May 2016.
She was taken to the hospital, but because she dressed in women's clothing, she was refused access to either the men's or the women's wards.
What we choose to wear can sometimes be literally life and death.
Alisha died that day and then was buried as a man.
What kind of world is this?
Well, it's one in which it's natural to be afraid, to be frightened of this surveillance, this violence against our bodies and what we wear on them.
However, the greater fear is that once we surrender, blend in and begin to disappear one after the other, the more normal this false conformity will look, the less shocking this oppression will feel.
For the children we are raising, the injustice of today could become the ordinary of tomorrow.
They'll get used to this, and they, too, might begin to see anything different as dirty, something to be hated, something to be extinguished, like lights to be put out, one by one, until darkness becomes a way of life.
Can they kill us all?
The time is now to stand up, to stand out.
Get used to it.
Fashion can give us a language for dissent.
It can give us courage.
So wear it.
Wear it like armor.
And wear it because you matter.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days, talking to groups of students and professionals, and everywhere I'm finding that I hear similar themes.
On the one hand, people say, "The time for change is now."
They want to be part of it.
They talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning.
But on the other hand, I hear people talking about fear, a sense of risk-aversion.
They say, "I really want to follow a life of purpose, but I don't know where to start.
I don't want to disappoint my family or friends."
I work in global poverty.
And they say, "I want to work in global poverty, but what will it mean about my career?
And as a woman who didn't get married until I was a lot older -- and I'm glad I waited -- (Laughter) -- and has no children, I look at these young people and I say, "Your job is not to be perfect.
Your job is only to be human.
And nothing important happens in life without a cost."
These conversations really reflect what's happening at the national and international level.
Our leaders and ourselves want everything, but we don't talk about the costs.
We don't talk about the sacrifice.
One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen, the great American writer from the South.
In a short story called "Oh Yes," she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little African American girl, and she looks at her child with a sense of pride, but she also wonders, what price will she pay?
What is the cost of not trying?
One woman I knew who was a fellow at a program that I ran at the Rockefeller Foundation was named Ingrid Washinawatok.
She was a leader of the Menominee tribe, a Native American peoples.
And when we would gather as fellows, she would push us to think about how the elders in Native American culture make decisions.
And she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future, looking at them from the Earth, and they would look at them, holding them as stewards for that future.
Ingrid understood that we are connected to each other, not only as human beings, but to every living thing on the planet.
And tragically, in 1999, when she was in Colombia working with the U'wa people, focused on preserving their culture and language, she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the FARC.
And whenever we would gather the fellows after that, we would leave a chair empty for her spirit.
And when we think about legacy, I can think of no more powerful one, despite how short her life was.
And I've been touched by Cambodian women -- beautiful women, women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia.
And I met them in the early '90s.
In the 1970s, under the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people, and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals, the artists, the dancers.
And at the end of the war, there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living.
And the women, who I was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors, told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps.
And one woman stood there with this perfect carriage, her hands at her side, and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was.
And these big tears fell down her face, but she never lifted her hands to move them.
And the women decided that they would train not the next generation of girls, because they had grown too old already, but the next generation.
And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands -- beautiful rhythms -- as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them, wearing these beautiful silk colors.
And I thought, after all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray.
Because they're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future.
And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider.
In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's first microfinance bank.
And one of the women was Agnes -- there on your extreme left -- she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda.
We built this institution based on social justice, gender equity, this idea of empowering women.
And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women.
She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide.
And I would visit her in the prisons, sitting side-by-side, knees touching, and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us, but that maybe it's not monsters so much, but the broken parts of ourselves, sadnesses, secret shame, and that ultimately it's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts, those fragments, if you will, and to make us look at other beings, human beings, as lesser than ourselves -- and in the extreme, to do terrible things.
And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men.
I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male.
And so in a gathering where we're focused on women, while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them, we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide.
And that, when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job, no education, no possibility, well then it's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun.
Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us.
One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization, Suraj Sudhakar, has what we call moral imagination -- the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and lead from that perspective.
And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera.
And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums, and they're reading many TED authors and liking it.
And then they created a business plan competition.
Then they decided that they would do TEDx's.
And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men.
Alex, in some ways, said it best.
And they wanted to celebrate what's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare -- the photojournalists and the creatives, the graffiti artists, the teachers and the entrepreneurs.
And they're doing it.
And my hat's off to you in Kibera.
My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive.
At Acumen Fund, we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital -- money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity, but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions.
I know it works.
We've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies, and those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets.
This year alone, they've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing, emergency services, solar energy, so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems.
Patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions, easy categories, because we don't see profit as a blunt instrument.
But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit.
And ultimately, we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact, measuring what is most important to us.
And my dream is we'll have a world one day where we don't just honor those who take money and make more money from it, but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways.
And it's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change.
Last May I had this extraordinary 24-hour period where I saw two visions of the world living side-by-side -- one based on violence and the other on transcendence.
I happened to be in Lahore, Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers.
And the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of Islam who fundamentalists don't believe are fully Muslim.
And not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives, but they did more, because they created more hatred, more rage, more fear and certainly despair.
For two years, he hardly made any money, a tiny stipend, but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named Tasneem Saddiqui.
And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital, but he continued to pay a price.
He stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes.
It took almost two years just to register the land.
But I saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person's action.
Today, 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community.
And there's schools and clinics and shops.
But there's only one mosque.
Who gets to use the mosque on Fridays?"
He said, "Long story.
It was hard, it was a difficult road, but ultimately the leaders of the community came together, realizing we only have each other.
And we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams, and those imams would take turns, they would rotate who would say Friday prayer.
But the whole community, all the different sects, including Shi'a and Sunni, would sit together and pray."
We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds.
We face huge issues as a world -- the financial crisis, global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness.
And every day we have a choice.
We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road based on sometimes dreams of a past that never really was, a fear of each other, distancing and blame.
Or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation, transcendence, compassion and love, but also accountability and justice.
I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles, who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges, the first child to desegregate schools in the South -- in this case, New Orleans.
And he said that every day this six-year-old, dressed in her beautiful dress, would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily, calling her a monster, threatening to poison her -- distorted faces.
And every day he would watch her, and it looked like she was talking to the people.
And he would say, "Ruby, what are you saying?"
And she'd say, "I'm not talking."
And finally he said, "Ruby, I see that you're talking.
What are you saying?"
And she said, "Dr. Coles, I am not talking; I'm praying."
And he said, "Well, what are you praying?"
And he said to me at the end of his year, "Jacqueline, it was so humbling, because I thought as a farmer and as an African I would understand how to transcend culture.
But especially when I was talking to the African women, I sometimes made these mistakes -- it was so hard for me to learn how to listen."
And he said, "So I conclude that, in many ways, leadership is like a panicle of rice.
Because at the height of the season, at the height of its powers, it's beautiful, it's green, it nourishes the world, it reaches to the heavens."
And he said, "But right before the harvest, it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came."
We need leaders.
We ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can, ourselves, extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man, woman and child on this planet.
And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone.
Robert Kennedy once said that "few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events."
And it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.
Our lives are so short, and our time on this planet is so precious, and all we have is each other.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And it's starting to look at -- not always and not for everything -- but in certain moments of time, access to certain kinds of goods and service will trump ownership of them.
And we come from a long tradition of sharing.
We've shared transportation.
We've shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in Amsterdam.
We've also shared other sorts of entertainment -- sports arenas, public parks, concert halls, libraries, universities.
All these things are share-platforms, but sharing ultimately starts and ends with what I refer to as the "mother of all share-platforms."
And as I think about the mesh and I think about, well, what's driving it, how come it's happening now, I think there's a number of vectors that I want to give you as background.
One is the recession -- that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value -- so starting to align the value with the true cost.
Secondly, population growth and density into cities.
More people, smaller spaces, less stuff.
Climate change: we're trying to reduce the stress in our personal lives and in our communities and on the planet.
Research is showing here, in the States, and in Canada and Western Europe, that most of us are much more open to local companies, or brands that maybe we haven't heard of.
And last is that we're more connected now to more people on the planet than ever before -- except for if you're sitting next to someone.
(Laughter) The other thing that's worth considering is that we've made a huge investment over decades and decades, and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance.
It's a physical infrastructure that allows us to get from point A to point B and move things that way.
And so for me, a mesh company, the "classic" mesh company, brings together these three things: our ability to connect to each other -- most of us are walking around with these mobile devices that are GPS-enabled and Web-enabled -- allows us to find each other and find things in time and space.
And third is that physical things are readable on a map -- so restaurants, a variety of venues, but also with GPS and other technology like RFID and it continues to expand beyond that, we can also track things that are moving, like a car, a taxicab, a transit system, a box that's moving through time and space.
For example, I want to use Zipcar.
How many people here have experienced car-sharing or bike-sharing?
Basically Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world.
They did not invent car-sharing.
Car-sharing was actually invented in Europe.
One of the founders went to Switzerland, saw it implemented someplace, said, "Wow, that looks really cool.
I think we can do that in Cambridge," brought it to Cambridge and they started -- two women -- Robin Chase being the other person who started it.
Zipcar got some really important things right.
First, they really understood that a brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir.
They made it sexy. They made it fresh.
If you were a member of the club, when you're a member of a club, you're a Zipster.
The cars they picked didn't look like ex-cop cars that were hollowed out or something.
They picked these sexy cars.
They targeted to universities.
They made sure that the demographic for who they were targeting and the car was all matching.
It was a very nice experience, and the cars were clean and reliable, and it all worked.
And so from a branding perspective, they got a lot right.
But they understood fundamentally that they are not a car company.
They understand that they are an information company.
When you pick your aunt up at the airport, you get a sedan.
And you're going to the mountains to ski, you get different accessories put on the car for doing that sort of thing.
And so it's not only an option for them, but I believe it's an imperative for Zipcar and other mesh companies to actually just wow us, to be like a concierge service.
And so what percent of the day do you think the average person uses a car?
Any guesses?
Those are really very good.
I was imagining it was like 20 percent when I first started.
The number across the U.S. and Western Europe is eight percent.
So for this reason, I think one of the other themes with the mesh is essentially that, if we squeeze hard on things that we've thrown away, there's a lot of value in those things.
What set up with Zipcar -- Zipcar started in 2000.
In the last year, 2010, two car companies started, one that's in the U.K. called WhipCar, and the other one, RelayRides, in the U.S.
They're both peer-to-peer car-sharing services, because the two things that really work for car-sharing is, one, the car has to be available, and two, it's within one or two blocks of where you stand.
Well the car that's one or two blocks from your home or your office is probably your neighbor's car, and it's probably also available.
So people have created this business.
It took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service.
WhipCar, which started April of last year, it took them six months to get 1,000 cars in the service.
So, really interesting.
People are making anywhere between 200 and 700 dollars a month letting their neighbors use their car when they're not using it.
So it's like vacation rentals for cars.
Since I'm here -- and I hope some people in the audience are in the car business -- (Laughter) -- I'm thinking that, coming from the technology side of things -- we saw cable-ready TVs and WiFi-ready Notebooks -- it would be really great if, any minute now, you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off.
Because it just creates more flexibility.
It allows us as owners to have other options.
And I think we're going there anyway.
The opportunity and the challenge with mesh businesses -- and those are businesses like Zipcar or Netflix that are full mesh businesses, or other ones where you have a lot of the car companies, car manufacturers, who are beginning to offer their own car-share services as well as a second flanker brand, or as really a test, I think -- is to make sharing irresistible.
It's contagious because we're all connected to each other.
So if I have a terrific experience and I tweet it, or I tell five people standing next to me, news travels.
The opposite, as we know, is also true, often more true.
So here we have LudoTruck, which is in L.A., doing the things that gourmet food trucks do, and they've gathered quite a following.
In general, and maybe, again, it's because I'm a tech entrepreneur, I look at things as platforms.
So creating Craigslist or iTunes and the iPhone developer network, there are all these networks -- Facebook as well.
These platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience.
And honestly, it's full of surprises.
Because I don't think any of us in this room could have predicted the sorts of applications that have happened at Facebook, around Facebook, for example, two years ago, when Mark announced that they were going to go with a platform.
So in this way, I think that cities are platforms, and certainly Detroit is a platform.
The invitation of bringing makers and artists and entrepreneurs -- it really helps stimulate this fiery creativity and helps a city to thrive.
And so there's about seven or eight cities already in the U.S.
So I was having a coffee in Portland, and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes.
And so it's reliable, real data that's right in my face, where I am, so I can finish the latte.
There's this fabulous opportunity we have across the U.S. now: about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space.
There's this thing -- how many people here have heard of pop-up stores or pop-up shops?
Oh, great. So I'm a big fan of this.
And this is a very mesh-y thing.
There's a pop-up general store every three weeks, and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies.
An area that was edgy-artsy is now starting to become much cooler and engage a lot more people.
So this is an example.
The Crafty Fox is this woman who's into crafts, and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around London.
But these sorts of things are happening in many different environments.
From my perspective, one of the things pop-up stores do is create perishability and urgency.
And the opportunity to really focus trust and attention is a wonderful thing.
It allows us to test things as an entrepreneur, to go to market, to be in conversation with people, listen, refine something and go back.
The infrastructure enables that.
In closing, and as we're moving towards the end, I just also want to encourage -- and I'm willing to share my failures as well, though not from the stage.
And one quick example is Velib, in 2007, came forward in Paris with a very bold proposition, a very big bike-sharing service.
They made a lot of mistakes.
But they were very transparent, or they had to be, in the way that they exposed what worked and didn't work.
And so B.C. in Barcelona and B-cycle and Boris Bikes in London -- no one has had to repeat the version 1.0 screw-ups and expensive learning exercises that happened in Paris.
So the opportunity when we're connected is also to share failures and successes.
We're at the very beginning of something that, what we're seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward, is inviting, it's engaging, but it's very early.
I have a website -- it's a directory -- and it started with about 1,200 companies, and in the last two-and-a-half months it's up to about 3,300 companies.
And it grows on a very regular daily basis.
And thank you very much.
(Applause)
Pat Mitchell: What is the story of this pin?
Madeleine Albright: This is "Breaking the Glass Ceiling."
That was well chosen, I would say, for TEDWomen.
MA: Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.
And none of this pin stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for Saddam Hussein.
I'll tell you what happened.
I went to the United Nations as an ambassador, and it was after the Gulf War, and I was an instructed ambassador.
And the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions, and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein constantly, which he deserved -- he had invaded another country.
And so all of a sudden, a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things, but among them an "unparalleled serpent."
And so I happened to have a snake pin.
So I wore it when we talked about Iraq.
(Laughter) And when I went out to meet the press, they zeroed in, said, "Why are you wearing that snake pin?"
I said, "Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent."
And then I thought, well this is fun.
So I went out and I bought a lot of pins that would, in fact, reflect what I thought we were going to do on any given day.
So that's how it all started.
MA: Pretty big.
At the moment it's in Indianapolis, but it was at the Smithsonian.
And it goes with a book that says, "Read My Pins."
(Laughter) PM: So is this a good idea.
I remember when you were the first woman as Secretary of State, and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing, how you looked -- the thing that happens to a lot of women, especially if they're the first in a position.
Go out and look like a diplomat."
But still, there were all kinds of questions about -- "did you wear a hat?" "How short was your skirt?"
And one of the things -- if you remember Condoleezza Rice was at some event and she wore boots, and she got criticized over that.
PM: It is, for all of us, men and women, finding our ways of defining our roles, and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future.
How did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother, a grandmother, nurturing ...
and so how did you handle that?
MA: Well the interesting part was I was asked what it was like to be the first woman Secretary of State a few minutes after I'd been named.
And I said, "Well I've been a woman for 60 years, but I've only been Secretary of State for a few minutes."
(Laughter) But basically I love being a woman.
And I'm sitting there -- there are 15 members of the Security Council -- so 14 men sat there staring at me, and I thought -- well you know how we all are.
And all of a sudden I thought, "Well, wait a minute.
I am sitting behind a sign that says 'The United States,' and if I don't speak today then the voice of the United States will not be heard," and it was the first time that I had that feeling that I had to step out of myself in my normal, reluctant female mode and decide that I had to speak on behalf of our country.
And so that happened more at various times, but I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman.
I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it's necessary.
(Laughter) (Applause) PM: Because in her lifetime -- MA: That would be so.
PM: What a change that is.
As you travel now all over the world, which you do frequently, how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls?
Where are we?
MA: I think we're slowly changing, but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different.
And therefore it means that we have to remember that, while many of us have had huge opportunities -- and Pat, you have been a real leader in your field -- is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women.
And so what I have felt -- and I have looked at this from a national security issue -- when I was Secretary of State, I decided that women's issues had to be central to American foreign policy, not just because I'm a feminist, but because I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered, that values are passed down, the health situation is better, education is better, there is greater economic prosperity.
So I think that it behooves us -- those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice -- that we need to help other women.
MA: From some people.
I think that they thought that it was a soft issue.
Now for instance, some of the wars that took place when I was in office, a lot of them, the women were the main victims of it.
The women in Bosnia were being raped.
And by the way, one of the things that I did at that stage was, I had just arrived at the U.N., and when I was there, there were 183 countries in the U.N.
Now there are 192.
But it was one of the first times that I didn't have to cook lunch myself.
So I said to my assistant, "Invite the other women permanent representatives."
And I thought when I'd get to my apartment that there'd be a lot of women there.
So the countries that had women representatives were Canada, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica, Lichtenstein and me.
So being an American, I decided to set up a caucus.
(Laughter) And so we set it up, and we called ourselves the G7.
(Laughter) PM: Is that "Girl 7?" MA: Girl 7.
And we lobbied on behalf of women's issues.
So we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal.
And then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war, that it was against humanity.
(Applause) PM: So when you look around the world and you see that, in many cases -- certainly in the Western world -- women are evolving into more leadership positions, and even other places some barriers are being brought down, but there's still so much violence, still so many problems, and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables.
Now you were at those negotiating tables when they weren't, when there was maybe you -- one voice, maybe one or two others.
Do you believe, and can you tell us why, there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis?
MA: Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change.
But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women.
(Laughter) But the bottom line is that there is a way, when there are more women at the table, that there's an attempt to develop some understanding.
So for instance, what I did when I went to Burundi, we'd got Tutsi and Hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in Rwanda.
I think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room.
When I was Secretary of State, there were only 13 other women foreign ministers.
For instance, she is now the president of Finland, but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and, at a certain stage, head of the European Union.
And it was really terrific.
We went to a meeting, and the men in my delegation, when I would say, "Well I feel we should do something about this," and they'd say, "What do you mean, you feel?"
And so then Tarja was sitting across the table from me.
And all of a sudden we were talking about arms control, and she said, "Well I feel we should do this."
But I think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions.
The other thing that I think is really important: A lot of national security policy isn't just about foreign policy, but it's about budgets, military budgets, and how the debts of countries work out.
So if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts, they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries.
PM: So how do we get this balance we're looking for, then, in the world?
I think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office, to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices.
or "Aren't your children suffering because you're not there all the time?"
And I think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty.
And so I think what needs to happen is we need to help each other.
And my motto is that there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.
(Applause) PM: Well Secretary Albright, I guess you'll be going to heaven.
Thank you for joining us today.
MA: Thank you all. Thanks Pat.
It's Monday morning.
In Washington, the president of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office, assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen.
At Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron is trying to work out whether to cut more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession.
In Madrid, Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door, listening to her baby crying and crying, trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it.
And I am sitting by my father's bedside in hospital, trying to work out whether I should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his doctors just came in and said, "You must make him drink today," -- my father's been nil by mouth for a week -- or whether, by giving him this bottle, I might actually kill him.
We face momentous decisions with important consequences throughout our lives, and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions.
We talk things over with our friends, we scour the Internet, we search through books.
But still, even in this age of Google and TripAdvisor and Amazon Recommends, it's still experts that we rely upon most -- especially when the stakes are high and the decision really matters.
Because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity, we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can -- that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own.
But I believe that this is a big problem, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society, as a culture and as individuals.
We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom.
We've surrendered our power, trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide.
This is no exaggeration.
In a recent experiment, a group of adults had their brains scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak.
The results were quite extraordinary.
As they listened to the experts' voices, the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off.
And they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice, however right or wrong.
But experts do get things wrong.
Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10?
Did you know that if you file your tax returns yourself, you're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you?
And then there's, of course, the example that we're all too aware of: financial experts getting it so wrong that we're living through the worst recession since the 1930s.
For the sake of our health, our wealth and our collective security, it's imperative that we keep the independent decision-making parts of our brains switched on.
And I'm saying this as an economist who, over the past few years, has focused my research on what it is we think and who it is we trust and why, but also -- and I'm aware of the irony here -- as an expert myself, as a professor, as somebody who advises prime ministers, heads of big companies, international organizations, but an expert who believes that the role of experts needs to change, that we need to become more open-minded, more democratic and be more open to people rebelling against our points of view.
Now there are, of course, exceptions, wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions.
But what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps, that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition, that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.
And what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift, that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks -- because we've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects, or studies funded by food companies of their new products, massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they're about to bring by market.
The study showed that food companies exaggerated typically seven times more than an independent study.
And we've also got to be aware that experts, of course, also make mistakes.
They make mistakes every single day -- mistakes born out of carelessness.
A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries, operating on the wrong side of the brain, carrying out procedures on the wrong hand, elbow, eye, foot, and also mistakes born out of thinking errors.
A common thinking error of radiologists, for example -- when they look at CT scans -- is that they're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient's problem to be.
So if a radiologist is looking at the scan of a patient with suspected pneumonia, say, what happens is that, if they see evidence of pneumonia on the scan, they literally stop looking at it -- thereby missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient's lungs.
But how can we do this?
Well for the sake of time, I want to focus on just three strategies.
First, we've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this notion of them as modern-day apostles.
This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D.
But it does mean persisting in the face of their inevitable annoyance when, for example, we want them to explain things to us in language that we can actually understand.
What is the evidence upon which this is based?
It recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first, primarily on male animals and then, primarily on men.
It seems that they've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world's population are women.
And women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that many of these drugs don't work nearly as well on women as they do on men -- and the drugs that do work well work so well that they're actively harmful for women to take.
Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed.
Second, we need to create the space for what I call "managed dissent."
All the research now shows us that this actually makes us smarter.
Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts, which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true.
And that's why I talk about the need to actively manage dissent.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy.
But we need to go even further.
We need to fundamentally redefine who it is that experts are.
But just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise -- whereby expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and CEO's, but also shop-girls -- yeah.
Best Buy, the consumer electronics company, gets all its employees -- the cleaners, the shop assistants, the people in the back office, not just its forecasting team -- to place bets, yes bets, on things like whether or not a product is going to sell well before Christmas, on whether customers' new ideas are going to be or should be taken on by the company, on whether a project will come in on time.
By leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the company, Best Buy was able to discover, for example, that the store that it was going to open in China -- its big, grand store -- was not going to open on time.
Because when it asked its staff, all its staff, to place their bets on whether they thought the store would open on time or not, a group from the finance department placed all their chips on that not happening.
It turned out that they were aware, as no one else within the company was, of a technological blip that neither the forecasting experts, nor the experts on the ground in China, were even aware of.
The strategies that I have discussed this evening -- embracing dissent, taking experts on, democratizing expertise, rebellious strategies -- are strategies that I think would serve us all well to embrace as we try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing, complex, difficult times.
For if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on, if we challenge experts, if we're skeptical, if we devolve authority, if we are rebellious, but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance, uncertainty and doubt, and if we allow our experts to express themselves using those terms too, we will set ourselves up much better for the challenges of the 21st century.
For now, more than ever, is not the time to be blindly following, blindly accepting, blindly trusting.
Thank you.
(Applause)
They listen and mimic and remix what they like.
They rock the mic outside my window every morning.
I'm going to trap mockingbirds all across the nation and put them gently into mason jars like mockingbird Molotov cocktails.
Oh, I'm going to be the Johnny Appleseed of sound.
I'll get your postman making dinner plans.
(Laughter) I'll get an ESL class in Chinatown learning "It's Raining, It's Pouring."
I'll put a mockingbird on a late-night train just to get an old man snoring.
I'll get your ex-lover telling someone else, "Good morning."
(Laughter) What does a violin have to do with technology?
Where in the world is this world heading?
We are 12 billion light years from the edge.
That's a guess.
You might wanna avert your gaze, because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb, and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing.
There's about 10 million phage per job.
It's a very strange world inside a nanotube.
Women can talk; black men ski; white men build strong buildings; we build strong suns.
(Laughter) It is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn.
Wait for the man with the mockingbird."
(Laughter) Yeah. And then come the news crews, and the man-in-the-street interviews, and the letters to the editor.
Everybody asking, just who is responsible for this citywide, nationwide mockingbird cacophony, and somebody finally is going to tip the City Council of Monterey, California off to me, and they'll offer me a key to the city.
A gold-plated, oversized key to the city and that is all I need, 'cause if I get that, I can unlock the air.
Thank you, TED.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Wow.
(Applause) Wow.
(Applause)
Our face is hugely important because it's the external, visual part that everybody else sees.
Let's not forget it's a functional entity.
We have strong skull bones that protect the most important organ in our body: the brain.
It's where our senses are located, our special senses -- our vision, our speech, our hearing, our smell, our taste.
And this bone is peppered, as you can see, with the light shining through the skull with cavities, the sinuses, which warm and moisten the air we breathe.
But also imagine if they were filled with solid bone -- our head would be dead weight, we wouldn't be able to hold it erect, we wouldn't be able to look at the world around us.
This woman is slowly dying because the benign tumors in her facial bones have completely obliterated her mouth and her nose so she can't breathe and eat.
Attached to the facial bones that define our face's structure are the muscles that deliver our facial expression, our universal language of expression, our social-signaling system.
And overlying this is the skin drape, which is a hugely complex three-dimensional structure -- taking right-angled bends here and there, having thin areas like the eyelids, thick areas like the cheek, different colors.
And then we have the sensual factor of the face.
Where do we like to kiss people?
On the lips. Nibble the ears maybe.
But let's not forget the hair.
You're looking at the image on your left-hand side -- that's my son with his eyebrows present.
Look how odd he looks with the eyebrows missing.
And imagine if he had hair sprouting from the middle of his nose, he'd look even odder still.
It's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves, and we only see ourselves in freeze-frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live.
Dysmorphophobia is a perversion of this where people who may be very good looking regard themselves as hideously ugly and are constantly seeking surgery to correct their facial appearance.
They don't need this. They need psychiatric help.
Max has kindly donated his photograph to me.
In other words, he looks entirely normal.
Age is another thing when our attitude toward our appearance changes.
So children judge themselves, learn to judge themselves, by the behavior of adults around them.
Here's a classic example: Rebecca has a benign blood vessel tumor that's growing out through her skull, has obliterated her nose, and she's having difficulty seeing.
As you can see, it's blocking her vision.
Our research has shown that the parents and close loved ones of these children adore them.
They've grown used to their face; they think they're special.
And occasionally they suffer intense grief reactions because the child they've grown to love has changed so dramatically and they don't recognize them.
But other adults say incredibly painful things.
They say, "How dare you take this child out of the house and terrify other people.
And other children in curiosity come up and poke the lesion, because -- a natural curiosity.
The adults behave more naturally, and the children play more readily with other children.
We're trying to struggle to find our identity.
So our facial appearance is vital to us as we're trying to project ourselves to the world.
Just remember that single acne spot that crippled you for several days.
I've chosen to show this profile view of Sue because what it shows is her lower jaw jutting forward and her lower lip jutting forward.
Turn to the person next to you, push your lower jaws forward. Turn to the person next to you and look at them -- they look miserable.
That's exactly what people used to say to Sue.
She wasn't miserable at all.
But people used to say to her, "Why are you so miserable?"
Teachers and peers were underestimating her; she was teased at school.
So she chose to have facial surgery.
After the facial surgery, she said, "My face now reflects my personality.
People know now that I'm enthusiastic, that I'm a happy person."
And that's the change that can be achieved for teenagers.
Is this change, though, a real change, or is it a figment of the imagination of the patient themselves?
Well we studied teenagers' attitudes to photographs of patients having this corrective facial surgery.
And what we found was -- we jumbled up the photographs so they couldn't recognize the before and after -- what we found was that the patients were regarded as being more attractive after the surgery.
Well that's not surprising, but we also asked them to judge them on honesty, intelligence, friendliness, violence.
When people get older, they don't necessarily choose to follow this kind of surgery.
What happens to them is that they may have suffered cancer or trauma.
So this is a photograph of Henry, two weeks after he had a malignant cancer removed from the left side of his face -- his cheekbone, his upper jaw, his eye-socket.
He looks pretty good at this stage.
But over the course of the next 15 years he had 14 more operations, as the disease ravaged his face and destroyed my reconstruction regularly.
I learned a huge amount from Henry.
Henry taught me that you can carry on working.
He enjoyed life to the full, and this was probably because he had a successful, fulfilling job and a caring family and was able to participate socially.
This was something more than that. He ignored it.
He ignored the disfigurement that was happening in his life and carried on oblivious to it.
And that's what these people can do.
Henriapi illustrates this phenomenon as well.
This is a man in his 20s whose first visit out of Nigeria was with this malignant cancer that he came to the United Kingdom to have operated on.
It was my longest operation.
It took 23 hours. I did it with my neurosurgeon.
We removed all the bones at the right side of his face -- his eye, his nose, the skull bones, the facial skin -- and reconstructed him with tissue from the back.
He continued to work as a psychiatric nurse.
He got married. He had a son called Jeremiah.
And again, he said, "This painting of me with my son Jeremiah shows me as the successful man that I feel that I am."
His facial disfigurement did not affect him because he had the support of a family; he had a successful, fulfilling job.
For instance, there are two different types of facial surgery.
We can say there are patients who choose to have facial surgery -- like Sue.
When they have facial surgery, they feel their lives have changed because other people perceive them as better people.
And actually that's probably the difference between cosmetic surgery and this kind of surgery.
Because you might say, "Well, this type of surgery might be regarded as cosmetic."
They're trying to achieve difference in their lives.
She was just trying to achieve the face that matched her personality.
But then we have other people who don't choose to have facial surgery.
And again, as I told you, if they have a caring family and good work life, then they can lead normal and fulfilled lives.
So it's not simply a Western phenomenon.
It's been going on since we can think of Lombroso and the way he would define criminal faces.
We look at O.J. -- he's a good-looking guy.
We'd like to spend time with him. He looks friendly.
We think we can judge people on their expressions.
And so they want to see live witnesses.
Todorov tells us that, in a tenth of a second, we can make a judgment on somebody's face.
But are we good at making the judgments on facial appearance and movement?
The truth is that there's a five-minute rule, not the tenth-of-a-second rule like Todorov, but a five-minute rule.
So we've talked a lot about facial appearance.
I now want to share a little bit of the surgery that we do -- where we're at and where we're going.
And you can see in the images afterward, we've managed to reconstruct her successfully.
But that's not good enough.
And that's what she achieved, and that's what we have to get to.
This is a photograph of Adi, a Nigerian bank manager who had his face shot off in an armed robbery.
And he lost his lower jaw, his lip, his chin and his upper jaw and teeth.
So with modern technology, we used computers to make models.
Here you can see the plate holding it, and you can see the implants being put in -- so that in one operation we achieve this and this.
So the patient's life is restored.
That's the good news.
However, his chin skin doesn't look the same as it did before.
And that's where we're failing, and that's where we need the face transplant.
We can replace the underlying skeletal structure, but we're still not good at replacing the facial skin.
So it's very valuable to have that tool in our armamentarium.
But the patients are going to have to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives.
They have an increased risk of infection, an increased risk of malignancy.
This is not a life-saving transplant -- like a heart, or liver, or lung transplant -- it is a quality-of-life transplant, and as a result, are the patients going to say, if they get a malignant cancer 10 or 15 years on, "I wish I'd had conventional reconstructive techniques rather than this because I'm now dying of a malignant cancer"? We don't know yet.
We also don't know what they feel about recognition and identity.
Bernard Devauchelle and Sylvie Testelin, who did the first operation, are studying that.
So there are going to be problems with face transplantation.
So the better news is the future's almost here -- and the future is tissue engineering.
Just imagine, I can make a biologically-degradable template.
I can sprinkle a few cells, stem cells from the patient's own hip, a little bit of genetically engineered protein, and lo and behold, leave it for four months and the face is grown.
This is a bit like a Julia Child recipe.
We're still not curing enough patients -- it's the most disfiguring cancer.
We still can't get rid of scars.
And the best news of all is that surgeons know that we need to do research.
And we've set up charities that will help us fund the clinical research to determine the best treatment practice now and better treatment into the future, so we don't just sit on our laurels and say, "Okay, we're doing okay.
Let's leave it as it is."
Thank you very much indeed.
(Applause)
I was only nine when my grandfather first described to me the horrors he witnessed six years earlier when human stampedes killed 39 people in our hometown of Nashik, India.
It was during the 2003 Nashik Kumbh Mela, one of the world's largest religious gatherings.
Every 12 years, over 30 million Hindu worshippers descend upon our city -- which is built only for 1.5 million people -- and stay for 45 days.
The main purpose is to wash away all their sins by bathing in the river Godavari.
What saddened me the most is seeing people around me resigning to the city's fate in witnessing the seemingly inevitable deaths of dozens at every Kumbh Mela.
Because I knew it is wrong.
(Applause) It was the first time in recorded history that this event passed without any casualties.
It all started when I joined an innovation workshop by MIT Media Lab in 2014 called the Kumbhathon that aimed at solving challenges faced at the grand scale of Kumbh Mela.
So we started to look for technologies that would help us get these three things.
Can we distribute radio-frequency tokens to identify people?
We figured out that it would be too expensive and impractical to distribute 30 million tags.
Again, too expensive for that scale, along with the disadvantages of being non-portable and being completely useless in the case of rain, which is a common thing to happen in Kumbh Mela.
Can we use cell phone tower data?
It sounds like the perfect solution, but the funny part is, most of the people do not carry cell phones in events like Kumbh Mela.
Also, the data wouldn't have been granular enough for us.
So we wanted something that was real-time, low-cost, sturdy and waterproof, and it was easy to get the data for processing.
So we built Ashioto, meaning "footstep" in Japanese, as it consists of a portable mat which has pressure sensors which can count the number of people walking on it, and sends the data over the internet to the advanced data analysis software we created.
The possible errors, like overcounting or double-stepping, were overcome using design interventions.
The optimum breadth of the mat was determined to be 18 inches, after we tested many different versions and observed the average stride length of a person.
Otherwise, people might step over the sensor.
We started with a proof of concept built in three days, made out of cardboard and aluminum foil.
We built another one with aluminum composite panels and piezoelectric plates, which are plates that generate a small pulse of electricity under pressure.
We tested this at 30 different pilots in public, in crowded restaurants, in malls, in temples, etc., to see how people reacted.
And people let us run these pilots because they were excited to see localites work on problems for the city.
I was 15 and my team members were in their early 20s.
When the sensors were colored, people would get scared and would ask us questions like, "Will I get electrocuted if I step on this?"
(Laughter) Or, if it was very obvious that it was an electronic sensor on the ground, they would just jump over it.
(Laughter) So we decided to design a cover for the sensor so that people don't have to worry what it is on the ground.
So after some experimentation, we decided to use an industrial sensor, used as a safety trigger in hazardous areas as the sensor, and a black neoprene rubber sheet as the cover.
Now, another added benefit of using black rubber was that dust naturally accumulates over the surface, eventually camouflaging it with the ground.
We also had to make sure that the sensor is no higher than 12 millimeters.
(Laughter) We don't want that.
(Laughter) So we were able to design a sensor which was only 10 millimeters thick.
Now the data is sent to the server in real time, and a heat map is plotted, taking into account all the active devices on the ground.
The authorities could be alerted if the crowd movement slowed down or if the crowd density moved beyond a desired threshold.
We installed five of these mats in the Nashik Kumbh Mela 2015, and counted over half a million people in 18 hours, ensuring that the data was available in real time at various checkpoints, ensuring a safe flow of people.
The code used by Ashioto during Kumbh Mela will soon be made publicly available, free to use for anyone.
I would be glad if someone used this code to make many more gatherings safer.
Having succeeded at Kumbh Mela has inspired me to help others who may also suffer from stampedes.
The design of the system makes it adaptable to pretty much any event that involves an organized gathering of people.
And my new dream is to improve, adapt and deploy the system all over the world to prevent loss of life and ensure a safe flow of people, because every human soul is precious, whether at concerts or sporting events, the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the Hajj in Mecca, the Shia procession to Karbala or at the Vatican City.
So what do you all think, can we do it?
(Audience) Yes!
Thank you.
(Cheers) (Applause)
Future tech always comes with two things: promise and unintended consequences.
And before we get to how future tech may affect us, I'd like to spend a little time exploring the unintended consequences of some of our recent tech, namely, social media.
Social media, a few short years ago, was the tech of future you.
Now it just is you.
Social media was supposed to bring us together in ways we could never imagine.
These three girls are talking to one another without the awkward discomfort of eye contact.
We were supposed to be caught up in a communication tsunami, the likes of which the world has never seen.
And so did this.
(Sings) One of these things is not like the other.
(Speaks) Now, look at this picture.
(Laughter) So are we more connected, or are we just more connected to our devices?
Social media was supposed to place us in a veritable town square, where we could engage one another with challenging ideas and debates.
This is an actual tweet that I received.
"Chuck, no one wants to hear your stupid, ill-informed political views!
I hope you get leprosy and die.
Love, Dad" (Laughter) Now, the great thing about that tweet if you look at it, just like most trolls, it's not that bad, because he wished "leporsy" on me instead of "leprosy," and "leporsy" is not dangerous at all.
(Laughter) (Applause) Along with trolls, we got a brand new way of torturing teenagers -- cyberbullying.
"So, uh, did they hit him?"
"No, Mom, they didn't hit him."
"Did they take his money?"
"No, Mom, they didn't take his money."
"Did they put his face in the toilet?"
"No, Mom, they didn't --" "Well, what did they do?"
"They attacked him on the internet."
"Attacked him on the internet?"
(Laughter) "Well, why don't you just turn off the internet?"
(Laughter) She's got a point.
(Laughter) She's got a point.
And I don't even want to talk about what social media has done to dating.
I was on Grindr until I found out it wasn't a sandwich app.
(Laughter) And I can't even tell you about Tinder, except for the fact that if you think there is a limit to the amount of anonymous sex we can have on this planet, you are sadly mistaken.
(Laughter) So where do we go from here?
Driverless cars.
Something that has already been around for many years, just without the assistance of computers.
(Laughter) The other thing is that since driverless cars will be shared, most people won't own cars, and that means the DMV will go away.
"There's no way this guy is going to stand up here and make a case for the DMV."
(Laughter) That is the real service they provide.
The DMV: come for the registration renewal, stay for the satisfaction of knowing you made some pretty good life choices.
(Laughter) Nobody will own their car in the future, and that means teenagers will not have a place to make out.
I do not want to step into a vehicle and ask the question: "Why does this car smell like awkwardness, failure and shame?"
(Laughter) If I want to ask that question, I'll walk into my own bedroom.
(Laughter) So what else do we have to look forward to?
That's right, artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, yes.
You know, there was a time when artificial intelligence was a joke.
I mean, literally a quip that you would hear at a cocktail party when somebody would bring it up in conversation: "Artificial intelligence.
The only real artificial intelligence is our American Congress.
(Laughter) Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have all gone on record expressing grave reservations about artificial intelligence.
That's like Jesus, Moses and Muhammad coming together and saying, "Guy, guys -- here's something we can all believe in."
(Laughter) You might want to go with that, is all I'm saying.
We are actually teaching machines how to think, how to understand our behavior, how to defend themselves and even practice deception.
What could possibly go wrong?
(Laughter) The one thing that's for sure: the creation always despises its creator.
The Titans rose up against the gods; Lucifer against Jehovah.
And anybody who has a teenager has heard these words: "I hate you and you're ruining my life!
I hate you!"
Now just imagine that sentiment with a machine that can outthink you and is heavily armed.
(Laughter) The result?
Absolutely.
(Laughter) What we need to do before we perfect artificial intelligence is perfect artificial emotions.
That way, we can teach the robots or machines how to love us unconditionally, so that when they figure out that the only real problem on this planet is us, instead of destroying us -- which, by the way, is totally logical -- they will find us adorable -- (Laughter) like baby poop.
(Laughter) "Oh my god, I just love the way you just destroyed the planet.
I can't stay mad at you, you're so cute!
(Laughter) Can't talk about this without talking about robotics. OK?
Remember when you thought robotics were cool?
I remember when I thought robotics were cool, until I figured out that they were going to take everybody's place, from the delivery guy down to the heart surgeon.
I'm talking about the robot girlfriend, the dream of one lonely geek in a windowless basement who vowed one day: "I am going to marry my creation."
And there actually is a movement underway to stop this from happening, for fear of exploitation.
I believe we should have robot girlfriends.
I just believe that they should come with a feminist protocol and artificial intelligence, so she can take one look at that guy and go, "I am too good for you.
One place: designer babies, where, no matter where you are on the globe or what your ethnicity, babies will end up looking like that.
(Laughter) That boy is surprised because he just found out both his parents are black.
(Laughter) Can you imagine him at a cocktail party in 20 years?
"Yeah, both my parents are black.
I mean, it's a little awkward at times, but you should see my credit rating.
Impressive, very impressive."
(Laughter) Now, all of this seems scary, and everybody in this room knows that it isn't.
Technology isn't scary.
Never has been and it never will be.
What's scary is us and what we will do with technology.
Will we allow it to expose our humanity, showing our true selves and reinforcing the fact that we are indeed our brother's keeper?
Or will we allow it to reveal our deepest, darkest demons?
The true question is not whether or not technology is scary.
The true question is: How human are you?
Thank you.
(Applause)
As a child, I was raised by native Hawaiian elders -- three old women who took care of me while my parents worked.
The year is 1963.
We're watching the rising of the stars and the shifting of the tides.
It's a stretch of beach we know so well.
The smooth stones on the sand are familiar to us.
If you saw these women on the street in their faded clothes, you might dismiss them as poor and simple.
These women are descendants of Polynesian navigators, trained in the old ways by their elders, and now they're passing it on to me.
There's a new moon on the horizon.
Hawaiians say it's a good night for fishing.
They begin to chant.
[Hawaiian chant] When they finish, they sit in a circle and ask me to come to join them.
I thought every seven-year-old went through this.
People will forget their wisdom.
It will take elders' voices from the far corners of the world to call the world into balance.
It will sometimes be a lonely road.
But you will look into the eyes of seeming strangers, and you will recognize your ohana, your family.
It will take all of you."
The year is 2007.
I'm on a remote island in Micronesia.
Mau is a palu, a navigator priest.
He's also considered the greatest wave finder in the world.
Their tradition is so extraordinary that these mariners sailed three million square miles across the Pacific without the use of instruments.
They could synthesize patterns in nature using the rising and setting of stars, the sequence and direction of waves, the flight patterns of certain birds.
When Western scientists would join Mau on the canoe and watch him go into the hull, it appeared that an old man was going to rest.
In fact, the hull of the canoe is the womb of the vessel.
It is the most accurate place to feel the rhythm and sequence and direction of waves.
Mau was, in fact, gathering explicit data using his entire body.
It's what he had been trained to do since he was five years old.
Now science may dismiss this methodology, but Polynesian navigators use it today because it provides them an accurate determination of the angle and direction of their vessel.
The palu also had an uncanny ability to forecast weather conditions days in advance.
Sometimes I'd be with Mau on a cloud-covered night and we'd sit at the easternmost coast of the island, and he would look out, and then he would say, "Okay, we go."
He saw that first glint of light -- he knew what the weather was going to be three days from now.
Their achievements, intellectually and scientifically, are extraordinary, and they are so relevant for these times that we are in when we are riding out storms.
They have been compared to astronauts -- these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double-hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island.
Their canoes, our rockets; their sea, our space.
The wisdom of these elders is not a mere collection of stories about old people in some remote spot.
This is part of our collective narrative.
The year is 2010.
Just as the women in Hawaii that raised me predicted, the world is in trouble.
We live in a society bloated with data, yet starved for wisdom.
We're connected 24/7, yet anxiety, fear, depression and loneliness is at an all-time high.
An African shaman said, "Your society worships the jester while the king stands in plain clothes."
The link between the past and the future is fragile.
I am haunted by the fact that I no longer remember the names of the winds and the rains.
Mau passed away five months ago, but his legacy and lessons live on.
And I am reminded that throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge in them, as potent as the Micronesian navigators, that are going dismissed, that this is a testament to brilliant, brilliant technology and science and wisdom that is vanishing rapidly.
Because when an elder dies a library is burned, and throughout the world, libraries are ablaze.
I am grateful for the fact that I had a mentor like Mau who taught me how to navigate.
And this is what he said: "The island is the canoe; the canoe, the island."
And what he meant was, if you are voyaging and far from home, your very survival depends on everyone aboard.
It always was.
So in closing I would offer you this: The planet is our canoe, and we are the voyagers.
It's the most important map of all.
Together, may we journey well.
(Applause)
I admit that I'm a little bit nervous here because I'm going to say some radical things, about how we should think about cancer differently, to an audience that contains a lot of people who know a lot more about cancer than I do.
But I will also contest that I'm not as nervous as I should be because I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.
First, I'm going to try to give you a different perspective of genomics.
I want to put it in perspective of the bigger picture of all the other things that are going on -- and then talk about something you haven't heard so much about, which is proteomics.
So let me start with genomics.
It is the hot topic.
It is the place where we're learning the most.
This is the great frontier.
But it has its limitations.
And in particular, you've probably all heard the analogy that the genome is like the blueprint of your body, and if that were only true, it would be great, but it's not.
It's like the parts list of your body.
It doesn't say how things are connected, what causes what and so on.
I can make them healthy."
And there probably are special cases of that.
So the list of ingredients does tell you something, and sometimes it tells you something that's wrong.
But it's limited, because really to know if it's a healthy restaurant, you need to taste the food, you need to know what goes on in the kitchen, you need the product of all of those ingredients.
So if I look at a person and I look at a person's genome, it's the same thing.
And so indeed, there are times when we can find ingredients that [are] bad.
But most things, you really have to know what's going on in the kitchen, because, mostly, sick people used to be healthy people -- they have the same genome.
So the genome really tells you much more about predisposition.
So what you can tell is you can tell the difference between an Asian person and a European person by looking at their ingredients list.
So why all the big deal about genetics?
It is very useful in certain circumstances.
It's also the great theoretical triumph of biology.
It's fundamental to Darwin and Mendel and so on.
So Mendel had this idea of a gene as an abstract thing, and Darwin built a whole theory that depended on them existing, and then Watson and Crick actually looked and found one.
So this happens in physics all the time.
But it rarely happens in biology.
So this great triumph -- it's so good, there's almost a religious experience in biology.
And Darwinian evolution is really the core theory.
And in fact, thanks to Kary Mullis, you can basically measure your genome in your kitchen with a few extra ingredients.
There's a huge amount of information about the genetics just by comparing the genetic similarity.
Now of course, in medical application, that is very useful because it's the same kind of information that the doctor gets from your family medical history -- except probably, your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do.
And so by reading the genome, we can find out much more about your family than you probably know.
I did the 23andMe thing and was very surprised to discover that I am fat and bald.
(Laughter) But sometimes you can learn much more useful things about that.
But mostly what you need to know, to find out if you're sick, is not your predispositions, but it's actually what's going on in your body right now.
So to do that, what you really need to do, you need to look at the things that the genes are producing and what's happening after the genetics, and that's what proteomics is about.
Just like genome mixes the study of all the genes, proteomics is the study of all the proteins.
And the proteins are all of the little things in your body that are signaling between the cells -- actually, the machines that are operating -- that's where the action is.
Basically, a human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die, and when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation.
And so the trick is -- unfortunately, we don't have an easy way to measure these like we can measure the genome.
It requires hundreds of steps, and it takes a long, long time.
And it matters how much of the protein it is.
It could be very significant that a protein changed by 10 percent, so it's not a nice digital thing like DNA.
And basically our problem is somebody's in the middle of this very long stage, they pause for just a moment, and they leave something in an enzyme for a second, and all of a sudden all the measurements from then on don't work.
People have tried very hard to do this.
And then one day, I get a call from John Doerr, Bill Berkman and Al Gore on the same day saying return David Agus's phone call.
(Laughter) So we started talking, and he said, "I really need a better way to measure proteins."
I'm like, "Looked at that. Been there.
Not going to be easy."
I mean, I see patients dying every day because we don't know what's going on inside of them.
We have to have a window into this."
And he took me through specific examples of when he really needed it.
And I realized, wow, this would really make a big difference, if we could do it, and so I said, "Well, let's look at it."
So we started playing around with this.
And as we did it, we realized this was the basic problem -- that taking the sip of coffee -- that there were humans doing this complicated process and that what really needed to be done was to automate this process like an assembly line and build robots that would measure proteomics.
And so we did that, and working with David, we made a little company called Applied Proteomics eventually, which makes this robotic assembly line, which, in a very consistent way, measures the protein.
And so we can look at literally hundreds of thousands of features at once out of that drop of blood.
They really tell us what's going on there.
And so this picture, which looks like a big smudge to you, is actually the thing that got me really thrilled about this and made me feel like we were on the right track.
So we're zooming in here just to show you a little bit of it.
So we're actually measuring each isotope as a different one.
So seeing this picture is sort of like getting to be Galileo and looking at the stars and looking through the telescope for the first time, and suddenly you say, "Wow, it's way more complicated than we thought it was."
So here we have Alice in green and Bob in red.
We might not even know what this protein is, but we can see it's a marker for the response to the disease.
So this already, I think, is tremendously useful in all kinds of medicine.
But I think this is actually just the beginning of how we're going to treat cancer.
So this is the great paradigm.
This is another case where a theoretical paradigm in biology really worked -- was the germ theory of disease.
So if we put you in the category of you've got syphilis, we can give you penicillin.
We know that that works.
If you've got malaria, we give you quinine or some derivative of it.
And many people in this audience probably wouldn't be alive if doctors didn't do this.
It's you; you're broken.
That conversation inside of you got mixed up in some way.
So how do we diagnose that conversation?
And in fact, I think we're even wrong when we talk about cancer as a thing.
I think this is the big mistake.
I think cancer should not be a noun.
We should talk about cancering as something we do, not something we have.
And so those tumors, those are symptoms of cancer.
And so your body is probably cancering all the time, but there are lots of systems in your body that keep it under control.
And so to give you an idea of an analogy of what I mean by thinking of cancering as a verb, imagine we didn't know anything about plumbing, and the way that we talked about it, we'd come home and we'd find a leak in our kitchen and we'd say, "Oh, my house has water."
We might divide it -- the plumber would say, "Well, where's the water?"
"Well, it's in the kitchen." "Oh, you must have kitchen water."
And then we know that if we sprinkle Drano around the kitchen, that helps.
Whereas living room water, it's better to do tar on the roof."
And it sounds silly, but that's basically what we do.
And I'm not saying you shouldn't mop up your water if you have cancer, but I'm saying that's not really the problem; that's the symptom of the problem.
What we really need to get at is the process that's going on, and that's happening at the level of the proteonomic actions, happening at the level of why is your body not healing itself in the way that it normally does?
Because normally, your body is dealing with this problem all the time.
So your house is dealing with leaks all the time, but it's fixing them. It's draining them out and so on.
So what we need is to have a causative model of what's actually going on, and proteomics actually gives us the ability to build a model like that.
David got me invited to give a talk at National Cancer Institute and Anna Barker was there.
And so I gave this talk and said, "Why don't you guys do this?"
And Anna said, "Because nobody within cancer would look at it this way.
But what we're going to do, is we're going to create a program for people outside the field of cancer to get together with doctors who really know about cancer and work out different programs of research."
We're doing it in mice first, and we will kill a lot of mice in the process of doing this, but they will die for a good cause.
And we will actually try to get to the point where we have a predictive model where we can understand, when cancer happens, what's actually happening in there and which treatment will treat that cancer.
So I think eventually, once we have one of these models for people, which we'll get eventually -- I mean, our group won't get all the way there -- but eventually we'll have a very good computer model -- sort of like a global climate model for weather.
And so we will simulate in that model for your particular cancer -- and this also will be for ALS, or any kind of system neurodegenerative diseases, things like that -- we will simulate specifically you, not just a generic person, but what's actually going on inside you.
And in that simulation, what we could do is design for you specifically a sequence of treatments, and it might be very gentle treatments, very small amounts of drugs.
And so your body basically has lots and lots of mechanisms for fixing cancer, and we just have to prop those up in the right way and get them to do the job.
And so I believe that this will be the way that cancer will be treated in the future.
It's going to require a lot of work, a lot of research.
But I think eventually, we will design for everybody a custom treatment for cancer.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Applause) Thank you so much.
We are so honored to be here at TEDWomen, sharing our music with you.
What an exciting and inspiring event.
And we talk about different ideas -- he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart.
This was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart, beautiful music, wasn't the most popular thing in the classical music world.
And he insisted on beautiful music.
So this is "Oblivion" by Astor Piazzolla.
Thank you.
(Music) (Applause)
A room full of boys.
A girl child, hardly nine or ten years old, she is sitting in the center of the room, surrounded by books.
She is the only girl among boys, and is barely missing her female cousins and friends, who are inside the home instead of the school, because they are not allowed to get an education alongside boys.
There isn't a single functional girls' school in her village.
She is the eldest in her family, and when she was about to be born, her parents wanted a baby boy.
But they had bad luck; a baby girl arrived.
It was customary in her family to keep girls inside the homes.
But her uncle, who was a university graduate, he wanted to give her an opportunity to see the world, to be part of the society.
Luckily, she has a name that can be used for both men and women.
So he saw a chance to change her course of life.
So he decided to raise her as a boy.
At three months old, she went from being a baby girl, to baby boy.
She is allowed to go outside and get an education alongside boys.
She is free, she is confident.
She observes, she notes small, everyday injustices faced by women and girls in her village.
When newspapers arrive at her home, she watches as it passes from the eldest man to the youngest man.
By the time women get hold of the paper, it is old news.
She completes her eighth-grade year.
Now fear starts to come in.
This will be the end of her education, because the only option for high school for further study is five kilometers away.
Boys have bicycles, they are free.
But she knows her father will not allow her to travel on her own, even if she were posing as a boy.
"I can't let you do that.
And I don't have the time to walk you there and back.
But a miracle happened.
The girl whom I am talking about to you is me, Shameem, who is talking before you now.
(Applause) Throughout centuries, people have been fighting for their identity.
People have been loved, privileged, because of their identity, their nationality, their ethnicity.
Again, people have been hated, denied, because of their nationality, their identity, their race, their gender, their religion.
Identity determines your position in society, wherever you live.
So if you ask me, I would say I hate this question of identity.
Millions of girls in this world are being denied their basic rights because of being female.
I would have faced the same, if I hadn't been raised as a boy.
After my schooling, even enrolling in college was not easy for me.
I went on a three-day hunger strike.
Two years later, when the time came for me to go to university, my father turned his eyes, his attention, to my younger brothers.
They need to be in school, secure jobs and support the family.
And as a woman, my place was to be home.
But, I don't give up.
I sign up for a two-year program to become a lady health visitor.
I sneak away.
I travel five hours to interview for a position.
It is the first time I am the farthest from my home I have ever been.
I am closest to my freedom I have ever been.
Luckily, I got the job, but the hardest part is facing my father.
(Laughter) Relatives are already scaring him about his daughter wandering off, teasing him with talk of his daughter crossing the border.
So that night, I packed all my things in a bag, and I walked into my father's room and told him, "Tomorrow morning, the bus is going to come in.
If you believe in me, if you believe in me, you will wake me up and take me to the bus station.
The next morning, my father was standing beside me to take me to the bus stop.
(Applause) That day, I understood the importance of words.
I understood how words affect our hearts, how words play an important role in our lives.
I understood words are more powerful than fighting.
At TRDP, I saw there was a Pakistan which I didn't know, a country much more complex than I had realized.
Until that, I thought I had a difficult life.
But here, I saw what women in other parts of Pakistan were experiencing.
It really opened my eyes.
Some women had 11 children but nothing to feed them.
For getting water, they would walk three hours every day to wells.
So if a woman is in labor, she travels by camel to get to the hospital.
The distance is great; she may die on her way.
So now, this became more than just a job for me.
Relatives and neighbors were noticing this.
Now they started to understand the importance of education.
By that time, some other parents started sending their daughters to school.
Slowly, it became easier and acceptable for young women to be in college.
(Applause) Girls are doing jobs in health sites, even in police.
Life was good.
But somewhere in my heart, I realized that my region, beyond my village needs further change.
This was also the time when I joined Acumen Fellowship.
There, I met leaders like me across the country.
And I saw they are taking risks in their lives.
I started to understand what leadership really means.
So I decided to go back to my region and take a position as a teacher in a remote school, a school that I have to reach by bus -- two hours traveling, every morning and evening.
Though it was hard, on my first day I knew I made the right decision.
So the girls are eager to learn, but the school is understaffed.
I can't bear to see this happening.
There was no turning back.
I found my purpose.
I enlisted a few of my friends to help me to teach.
I'm introducing my girls to the outside world by extracurricular activities and books.
I share with them the profiles of the world's best leaders, like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
Last year, a few of our students went to college.
For me, I never stop studying.
Today, I'm working to complete my PhD in education -- (Applause) which will allow me to gain a management position in the school system, and I will be able to make more decisions and play a pivotal role in the system.
I believe that without educating the girls, we may not make world peace.
We may not reduce child marriage.
We may not reduce infant mortality rate.
We may not reduce maternal mortality rate.
For this, we have to continuously and collectively work together.
The road is not easy.
But I have dreams in my eyes, and I am not going to look back now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ten years ago exactly, I was in Afghanistan.
I was covering the war in Afghanistan, and I witnessed, as a reporter for Al Jazeera, the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that.
Then, two years later, I covered another war -- the war in Iraq.
I was placed at the center of that war because I was covering the war from the northern part of Iraq.
And the war ended with a regime change, like the one in Afghanistan.
However, the change that came through foreign intervention created even worse circumstances for the people and deepened the sense of paralysis and inferiority in that part of the world.
For decades, we have lived under authoritarian regimes -- in the Arab world, in the Middle East.
These regimes created something within us during this period.
I'm 43 years old right now.
For the last 40 years, I have seen almost the same faces for kings and presidents ruling us -- old, aged, authoritarian, corrupt situations -- regimes that we have seen around us.
And for a moment I was wondering, are we going to live in order to see real change happening on the ground, a change that does not come through foreign intervention, through the misery of occupation, through nations invading our land and deepening the sense of inferiority sometimes?
The Iraqis: yes, they got rid of Saddam Hussein, but when they saw their land occupied by foreign forces they felt very sad, they felt that their dignity had suffered.
And this is why they revolted.
This is why they did not accept.
Would you like to see destruction?
Would you like to see foreign troops on your land?"
And the people thought for themselves, "Maybe we should live with this kind of authoritarian situation that we find ourselves in, instead of having the second scenario."
That was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen.
Now I am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for has eventually arrived.
A new generation, well-educated, connected, inspired by universal values and a global understanding, has created a new reality for us.
Nothing happened. No violence. Nothing.
Just step out of your house, raise your voice and say, "We would like to see the end of the regime."
This is what happened in Tunisia.
The intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people.
They found something called Facebook.
They found something called Twitter.
Therefore, they asked their parents to go down to the streets and collect them, bring them back home.
This is what they were telling. This is their propaganda.
And this is how the revolution was born in Tunisia.
We in Al Jazeera were banned from Tunisia for years, and the government did not allow any Al Jazeera reporter to be there.
But we found that these people in the street, all of them are our reporters, feeding our newsroom with pictures, with videos and with news.
And suddenly that newsroom in Doha became a center that received all this kind of input from ordinary people -- people who are connected and people who have ambition and who have liberated themselves from the feeling of inferiority.
We are going to spread the message.
Yes, some of these young people are connected to the Internet, but the connectivity in the Arab world is very little, is very small, because of many problems that we are suffering from.
But Al Jazeera took the voice from these people and we amplified [it].
We put it in every sitting room in the Arab world -- and internationally, globally, through our English channel.
And then people started to feel that there's something new happening.
And then Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali decided to leave.
And then Egypt started, and Hosni Mubarak decided to leave.
And now Libya as you see it.
And then you have Yemen.
And you have many other countries trying to see and to rediscover that feeling of, "How do we imagine a future which is magnificent and peaceful and tolerant?"
I want to tell you something, that the Internet and connectivity has created [a] new mindset.
But this mindset has continued to be faithful to the soil and to the land that it emerged from.
Always, we believed that change will spring from within, that change should be a reconciliation with culture, cultural diversity, with our faith in our tradition and in our history, but at the same time, open to universal values, connected with the world, tolerant to the outside.
And this is the moment that is happening right now in the Arab world.
This is the right moment, and this is the actual moment that we see all of these meanings meet together and then create the beginning of this magnificent era that will emerge from the region.
How did the elite deal with that -- the so-called political elite?
In front of Facebook, they brought the camels in Tahrir Square.
In front of Al Jazeera, they started creating tribalism.
And then when they failed, they started speaking about conspiracies that emerged from Tel Aviv and Washington in order to divide the Arab world.
They started telling the West, "Be aware of Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda is taking over our territories.
These are Islamists trying to create new Imaras.
Be aware of these people who [are] coming to you in order to ruin your great civilization."
Because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception.
They could not, and they cannot, imagine how they could really deal with this reality.
Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution.
However, when something of that magnitude happens, we are at the center of the coverage.
We were banned from Egypt, and our correspondents, some of them were arrested.
But most of our camera people and our journalists, they went underground in Egypt -- voluntarily -- to report what happened in Tahrir Square.
For 18 days, our cameras were broadcasting, live, the voices of the people in Tahrir Square.
I remember one night when someone phoned me on my cellphone -- ordinary person who I don't know -- from Tahrir Square.
If you switch off the cameras tonight, there will be a genocide.
You are protecting us by showing what is happening at Tahrir Square."
I felt the responsibility to phone our correspondents there and to phone our newsroom and to tell them, "Make your best not to switch off the cameras at night, because the guys there really feel confident when someone is reporting their story -- and they feel protected as well."
So we have a chance to create a new future in that part of the world.
We have a chance to go and to think of the future as something which is open to the world.
Let us free ourselves -- especially in the West -- from thinking about that part of the world based on oil interest, or based on interests of the illusion of stability and security.
Let us accept the choice of the people.
The future should be ruled by people themselves, even sometimes if they are voices that might now scare us.
But the values of democracy and the freedom of choice that is sweeping the Middle East at this moment in time is the best opportunity for the world, for the West and the East, to see stability and to see security and to see friendship and to see tolerance emerging from the Arab world, rather than the images of violence and terrorism.
Let us support these people.
And let us give up our narrow selfishness in order to embrace change, and in order to celebrate with the people of that region a great future and hope and tolerance.
The future has arrived, and the future is now.
I thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: I just have a couple of questions for you.
Thank you for coming here.
How would you characterize the historical significance of what's happened?
Is this a story-of-the-year, a story-of-the-decade or something more?
Wadah Khanfar: Actually, this may be the biggest story that we have ever covered.
We have covered many wars.
But this is a story -- it is a great story; it is beautiful.
You are witnessing change in history.
You are witnessing the birth of a new era.
And this is what the story's all about.
CA: There are a lot of people in the West who are still skeptical, or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos.
You really believe that if there are democratic elections in Egypt now, that a government could emerge that espouses some of the values you've spoken about so inspiringly?
In my opinion, these people are much more wiser than, not only the political elite, even the intellectual elite, even opposition leaders including political parties.
At this moment in time, the youth in the Arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old -- including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes.
(Applause) CA: We are not to get involved politically and interfere in that way.
What should people here at TED, here in the West, do if they want to connect or make a difference and they believe in what's happening here?
WK: I think we have discovered a very important issue in the Arab world -- that people care, people care about this great transformation.
CA: Well Wadah, a group of members of the TED community, TEDxCairo, are meeting as we speak.
Thank you for inspiring them and for inspiring all of us.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
Two weeks ago I was in my studio in Paris, and the phone rang and I heard, "Hey, JR, you won the TED Prize 2011.
You have to make a wish to save the world."
I was lost.
Come on, you have dictators ruling the world, population is growing by millions, there's no more fish in the sea, the North Pole is melting and as the last TED Prize winner said, we're all becoming fat.
(Laughter) Except maybe French people.
I can't do anything to save the world."
She said, "Hey, JR, your wish is not to save the world, but to change the world."
(Laughter) "That's cool."
I mean, technology, politics, business do change the world -- not always in a good way, but they do.
What about art?
Could art change the world?
I started when I was 15 years old.
And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world.
I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends.
Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure.
It was like leaving our mark on society, to say, "I was here," on the top of a building.
I mean, the city's the best gallery I could imagine.
So that's Paris.
That's on the Champs-Elysees.
Because I was just 18 and I was just up there on the top of the Champs-Elysees.
Then when the photo left, the frame was still there.
(Laughter) November 2005: the streets are burning.
A large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of Paris.
Everyone was glued to the TV, watching disturbing, frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood.
I mean, these kids, without control, throwing Molotov cocktails, attacking the cops and the firemen, looting everything they could in the shops.
These were criminals, thugs, dangerous, destroying their own environment.
And then I saw it -- could it be possible? -- my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car -- a pasting I'd done a year earlier -- an illegal one -- still there.
I mean, these were the faces of my friends.
So it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television.
So I went back there with a 28 mm lens.
But with that lens, you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person.
So I took full portraits of people from Le Bosquet.
They were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves.
A year later, the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of Paris.
That's where I realized the power of paper and glue.
So could art change the world?
A year later, I was listening to all the noise about the Middle East conflict.
I mean, at that time, trust me, they were only referring to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
So with my friend Marco, we decided to go there and see who are the real Palestinians and who are the real Israelis.
When we got there, we just went in the street, started talking with people everywhere, and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media.
So we decided to take portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same jobs -- taxi-driver, lawyer, cooks.
Asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment.
Not a smile -- that really doesn't tell about who you are and what you feel.
We launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever.
We called the project Face 2 Face.
The army will shoot you, and Hamas will kidnap you."
I love the way that people will ask me, "How big will my photo be?"
"It will be as big as your house."
When we did the wall, we did the Palestinian side.
So we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough.
And so Palestinians guys say, "Calm down. No wait. I'm going to find you a solution."
So he went to the Church of Nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen Jesus being born.
(Laughter) We did Face 2 Face with only six friends, two ladders, two brushes, a rented car, a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper.
Okay, for example, that's Palestine.
We're in Ramallah right now.
We're pasting portraits -- so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market.
People come around us and start asking, "What are you doing here?"
And those ones are actually two taxi-drivers."
And then there was always a silence.
"You mean you're pasting an Israeli face -- doing a face -- right here?"
"Well, yeah, yeah, that's part of the project."
And most of them couldn't say.
But exactly four years after, the photos, most of them are still there.
Face 2 Face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible -- and, you know what, even easy.
We didn't push the limit; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought.
So the reactions in the street were kind of interesting.
So I decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums.
When you go in these developing societies, women are the pillars of their community, but the men are still the ones holding the streets.
So we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos.
I called that project Women Are Heroes.
I just observed.
Sometimes there was no words, no sentence, just tears.
Most of the places I went to, I decided to go there because I've heard about it through the media.
So for example, in June 2008, I was watching TV in Paris, and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro -- the first favela of Brazil named Providencia.
Three kids -- that was three students -- were [detained] by the army because they were not carrying their papers.
And the army took them, and instead of bringing them to the police station, they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces.
I was shocked.
All Brazil was shocked.
I heard it was one of the most violent favelas, because the largest drug cartel controls it.
So I decided to go there.
So we just walked around, and we met a woman, and I showed her my book.
And she said, "You know what?
We're hungry for culture.
We need culture out there."
So I went out and I started with the kids.
The day after, I came back and they were already scratched.
But that's okay.
I wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them.
Then the next day, I held a meeting on the main square and some women came.
They were all linked to the three kids that got killed.
I took more photos, and we started the project.
The drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place, so I told them, "You know what?
I've been seeing it around me the last few days."
And that's where the three kids got arrested, and that's the grandmother of one of them.
Everyone there understood the project.
(Applause) What was interesting is that the media couldn't get in.
And they would put a number: "Please call this number if you know what's going on in Providencia."
So how can we know about the project?
So they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them.
So you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women.
We went to Africa, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya.
In war-torn places like Monrovia, people come straight to you.
I mean, they want to know what you're up to.
They kept asking me, "What is the purpose of your project?
Are you an NGO? Are you the media?"
Art. Just doing art.
(Laughter) Or they tell you, "Are these people all dead?"
This is art."
I think it's people's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects.
It becomes a desire, a need, an armor.
On this bridge that's in Monrovia, ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war.
Women are always the first ones targeted during conflict.
This is Kibera, Kenya, one of the largest slums of Africa.
You might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008.
This time we covered the roofs of the houses, but we didn't use paper, because paper doesn't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house -- vinyl does.
So the people kept it.
And I went there a few months ago -- photos are still there -- and it was missing a piece of the eye.
So I asked the people what happened.
(Laughter) When the roofs were covered, a woman said as a joke, "Now God can see me."
When you look at Kibera now, they look back.
Okay, India.
In India it was just impossible to paste.
So people would come to us and ask us, "Hey, what are you up to?"
"Oh, you know, we're just doing art." "Art?"
Of course, they were confused.
But you know how India has a lot of dust in the streets, and the more dust you would have going up in the air, on the white paper you can almost see, but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker.
So the more dust you have, the more it will reveal the photo.
(Applause) Thank you.
Each project -- that's a film from Women Are Heroes.
(Music) Okay.
For each project we do a film.
And most of what you see -- that's a trailer from "Women Are Heroes" -- its images, photography, taken one after the other.
(Laughter) (Applause) Hopefully, you'll see the film, and you'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos.
Because that's a big part of it. There's layers behind each photo.
Behind each image is a story.
Women Are Heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities, and the women kept that dynamic after we left.
And so in Providencia, for example, in the favela, we have a cultural center running there.
In Kibera, each year we cover more roofs.
Because of course, when we left, the people who were just at the edge of the project said, "Hey, what about my roof?"
So we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project.
A really important point for me is that I don't use any brand or corporate sponsors.
(Applause) And that is for me one of the more important things in the work.
I think, today, as important as the result is the way you do things.
And that has always been a central part of the work.
And what's interesting is that fine line that I have with images and advertising.
And I was even invited to cover the MOCA museum.
But yesterday the city called them and said, "Look, you're going to have to tear it down.
Because this can be taken for advertising, and because of the law, it has to be taken down."
The people I photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community.
But they asked me for a promise basically.
They asked me, "Please, make our story travel with you."
So I did. That's Paris.
That's Rio.
In each place, we built exhibitions with a story, and the story traveled.
You understand the full scope of the project.
That's London.
New York.
And today, they are with you in Long Beach.
It doesn't matter today if it's your photo or not.
So for example, I pasted the photo of the minaret in Switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country.
(Applause) This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground.
In some ways, art can change the world.
Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions.
Art can change the way we see the world.
Actually the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables you to change the world.
When I do my work, I have two kinds of reactions.
Or, "How can we help?"
I presume that you belong to the second category, and that's good, because for that project, I'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them.
So now my wish is: (mock drum roll) (Laughter) I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world inside out.
Yes, everyone in the room.
Everyone watching.
So a subject you're passionate about, a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos -- tell me what you stand for.
The full data is on the website -- insideoutproject.net -- that is launching today.
What we see changes who we are.
When we act together, the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts.
So I hope that, together, we'll create something that the world will remember.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
This is Revolution 2.0.
No one was a hero. No one was a hero.
Because everyone was a hero.
Everyone has done something.
We all use Wikipedia.
If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content, and at the end of the day you've built the largest encyclopedia in the world.
And in the Egyptian revolution, the Revolution 2.0, everyone has contributed something, small or big. They contributed something -- to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions.
It was actually really inspiring to see all these Egyptians completely changing.
Everything was going wrong.
We only ranked high when it comes to poverty, corruption, lack of freedom of speech, lack of political activism.
Yet, nothing was happening.
In fact, people were extremely frustrated.
But the reason why everyone was silent is what I call the psychological barrier of fear.
Everyone was scared.
Not everyone. There were actually a few brave Egyptians that I have to thank for being so brave -- going into protests as a couple of hundred, getting beaten up and arrested.
But in fact, the majority were scared.
Everyone did not want really to get in trouble.
A dictator cannot live without the force.
They want to make people live in fear.
And that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years, and here comes the Internet, technology, BlackBerry, SMS.
It's helping all of us to connect.
Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that, "Wow, I'm not alone.
There are lots of people who are frustrated.
There are lots of people who actually share the same dream.
There are lots of people who care about their freedom.
They probably have the best life in the world.
But they are still feeling the pain of the Egyptian.
A lot of us, we're not really happy when we see a video of an Egyptian man who's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of Egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country.
The Internet has played a great role, helping these people to speak up their minds, to collaborate together, to start thinking together.
It was an educational campaign.
I still remember the photo.
I still remember every single detail of that photo.
The photo was horrible.
He was tortured, brutally tortured to death.
"He choked on a pile of hash" -- that was their answer: "He's a criminal.
People did not believe this.
Because of the Internet, the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth.
And everyone started to think that "this guy could be my brother."
He was a middle-class guy.
His photo was remembered by all of us.
A page was created.
An anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page, and there was no plan.
In a few days, tens of thousands of people there -- angry Egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs, "Enough.
To just bring them to justice."
But of course, they don't listen.
Everyone was an owner in this page.
People started contributing ideas.
People were making fun of the idea.
But actually when people went to the street -- the first time it was thousands of people in Alexandria -- it felt like -- it was amazing. It was great because it connected people from the virtual world, bringing them to the real world, sharing the same dream, the same frustration, the same anger, the same desire for freedom.
And they were doing this thing.
They were actually attacking them.
They were actually abusing them, despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were -- they were not even protesting.
And things had developed until the Tunisian revolution.
In fact, the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas, help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing.
People were taking shots and photos; people were reporting violations of human rights in Egypt; people were suggesting ideas, they were actually voting on ideas, and then they were executing the ideas; people were creating videos.
Everything was done by the people to the people, and that's the power of the Internet.
There was no leader.
The leader was everyone on that page.
The Tunisian experiment, as Amir was saying, inspired all of us, showed us that there is a way.
And when I saw the street on the 25th, I went back and said, "Egypt before the 25th is never going to be Egypt after the 25th.
The revolution is happening.
This is not the end, this is the beginning of the end."
But they detained me.
And I'm not going to talk about my experience, because this is not about me.
I was detained for 12 days, blindfolded, handcuffed.
And I did not really hear anything. I did not know anything.
I was not allowed to speak with anyone.
And I went out.
The next day I was in Tahrir.
Seriously, with the amount of change I had noticed in this square, I thought it was 12 years.
The fear is no longer fear.
It's actually strength -- it's power.
People were so empowered.
It was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights.
Who would [have] imagined before the 25th, if I tell you that hundreds of thousands of Christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of Muslims are going to protect them, and then hundreds of thousands of Muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of Christians are going to protect them -- this is amazing.
All the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda, or mainstream media, are proven wrong.
This whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the Egyptian man, the Egyptian woman, how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream.
When I saw that, I went back and I wrote on Facebook.
I said that, "We are going to win.
We're going to win because we don't play their dirty games.
We're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams."
And that's actually what happened. We won.
And that's not because of anything, but because we believed in our dream.
Actually, I had this taxi driver telling me, "Listen, I am breathing freedom.
I feel that I have dignity that I have lost for so many years."
My last word to you is a statement I believe in, which Egyptians have proven to be true, that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.
(Applause)
Well, this is about state budgets.
This is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning.
And these budgets are the key for our future; they're the key for our kids.
Most education funding -- whether it's K through 12, or the great universities or community colleges -- most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets.
U.S. economy is big -- 14.7 trillion.
Now out of that pie, the government spends 36 percent.
But we're spending 36 percent.
Simple business question.
Answer is 26 percent.
And some of that, in fact, is due to the fact that we've had an economic recession.
After all, at least on paper, there's this notion that these state budgets are balanced.
Only one state says they don't have to balance the budget.
But what this means actually is that there's a pretense.
Now he's put together some thoughts: About half of that he'll cut, another half, perhaps in a very complex set of steps, taxes will be approved.
Well, some really nice little tricks.
It's got holes.
It perpetuates deficit spending.
It's riddled with gimmicks."
And really when you get down to it, the guys at Enron never would have done this.
This is so blatant, so extreme.
They borrow money.
They're not supposed to, but they figure out a way.
They make you pay more in withholding just to help their cash flow out.
They defer the payments.
In fact, there's about five states that are worse and only really four states that don't face this big challenge.
It really comes from the fact that certain long-term obligations -- health care, where innovation makes it more expensive, early retirement and pension, where the age structure gets worse for you, and just generosity -- that these mis-accounting things allow to develop over time, that you've got a problem.
This is the retiree health care benefits.
Well in order to accommodate that, you would have to cut education spending in half.
The great University of California university system, the great things that have gone on, won't happen.
So far it's meant layoffs, increased class sizes.
And there's a discussion: if you're going to increase class sizes, where do you do that? How much effect does that have?
In fact, no, education spending should not be cut.
There's ways, if it's temporary, to minimize the impact, but it's a problem.
Technology has a role to play.
Well we need money to experiment with that, to get those tools in there.
There's the idea of paying teachers for effectiveness, measuring them, giving them feedback, taking videos in the classroom.
That's something I think is very, very important.
Well you have to allocate dollars for that system and for that incentive pay.
In a situation where you have growth, you put the new money into this.
But with the type of cuts we're talking about, it will be far, far harder to get these incentives for excellence, or to move over to use technology in the new way.
Just look at this spending.
California will spend over 100 billion, Microsoft, 38, Google, about 19.
The amount of IQ in good numeric analysis, both inside Google and Microsoft and outside, with analysts and people of various opinions -- should they have spent on that?
No, they wasted their money on this. What about this thing? -- it really is quite phenomenal.
Everybody has an opinion.
And the numbers are used to make decisions.
So what do we need to do?
We need better tools.
I'm going to use my website to put up some things that will give the basic picture.
We need lots more.
There's a few good books, one about school spending and where the money comes from -- how that's changed over time, and the challenge.
We need better accounting.
We need to take the fact that the current employees, the future liabilities they create, that should come out of the current budget.
We need to understand why they've done the pension accounting the way they have.
It should be more like private accounting.
It's the gold standard.
And finally, we need to really reward politicians.
Whenever they say there's these long-term problems, we can't say, "Oh, you're the messenger with bad news?
We just shot you."
In fact, there are some like these: Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson and others, who have gone through and given proposals for this overall federal health-spending state-level problem.
In fact, the week afterwards, some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions.
Now I think this is a solvable problem.
It's a great country with lots of people.
But we have to draw those people in, because this is about education.
And that's the kind of thing -- the investment in the young -- that makes us great, allows us to contribute.
It allows us to do the art, the biotechnology, the software and all those magic things.
Thank you.
(Applause)
There's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs.
The fact is that we're living longer.
Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and the problem is, as we age, our organs tend to fail more, and so currently there are not enough organs to go around.
In fact, in the last 10 years, the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled, while in the same time, the actual number of transplants has barely gone up.
So this is now a public health crisis.
So that's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine.
It really involves many different areas.
You can use, actually, scaffolds, biomaterials -- they're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt -- but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate.
Or we can use cells alone, either your very own cells or different stem cell populations.
We can use, actually, biomaterials and the cells together.
And that's where the field is today.
But it's actually not a new field.
Interestingly, this is a book that was published back in 1938.
He actually devised some of the same technologies used today for suturing blood vessels, and some of the blood vessel grafts we use today were actually designed by Alexis.
But I want you to note his co-author: Charles Lindbergh.
That's the same Charles Lindbergh who actually spent the rest of his life working with Alexis at the Rockefeller Institute in New York in the area of the culture of organs.
So if the field's been around for so long, why so few clinical advances?
The second challenge was cells.
Liver cells, nerve cells, pancreatic cells -- we still can't grow them even today.
So we can actually use biomaterials now.
This is actually a biomaterial.
This is actually like a cotton candy machine.
That was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure, this tubularized structure, which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so.
And that's exactly what we did here.
This is actually a patient who [was] presented with a deceased organ, and we then created one of these smart biomaterials, and then we then used that smart biomaterial to replace and repair that patient's structure.
What we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge, if you will, and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue.
And you see that patient now six months after with an X-ray showing you the regenerated tissue, which is fully regenerated when you analyze it under the microscope.
These are actually cells that we obtained.
These are stem cells that we create from specific sources, and we can drive them to become heart cells, and they start beating in culture.
The cells genetically know what to do, and they start beating together.
Now today, many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease.
Or if we're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures, we can then use the patient's own cells, or some cell population, and the biomaterials, the scaffolds, together.
So the concept here: so if you do have a deceased or injured organ, we take a very small piece of that tissue, less than half the size of a postage stamp.
We then take a scaffold, a biomaterial -- again, looks very much like a piece of your blouse or your shirt -- we then shape that material, and we then use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time -- very much like baking a layer cake, if you will.
We then place it in an oven-like device, and we're able to create that structure and bring it out.
This is actually a heart valve that we've engineered, and you can see here, we have the structure of the heart valve and we've seeded that with cells, and then we exercise it.
Another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders.
We actually take a very small piece of the bladder from the patient -- less than half the size of a postage stamp.
We then grow the cells outside the body, take the scaffold, coat the scaffold with the cells -- the patient's own cells, two different cell types.
We then put it in this oven-like device.
It has the same conditions as the human body -- 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen.
For these specific patients, we actually just suture these materials.
But we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells.
We use now some type of technologies, where for solid organs, for example, like the liver, what we do is we take discard livers.
As you know, a lot of organs are actually discarded, not used.
So we can take these liver structures, which are not going to be used, and we then put them in a washing machine-like structure that will allow the cells to be washed away.
You can hold it like a liver, but it has no cells; it's just a skeleton of the liver.
And we then can re-perfuse the liver with cells, preserving the blood vessel tree.
And we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology.
Another technology that we've used is actually that of printing.
This is actually a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells.
And you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure, and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure.
And there's a 3D elevator that then actually goes down one layer at a time each time the printhead goes through.
And this is actually a piece of bone that I'm going to show you in this slide that was actually created with this desktop printer and implanted as you see here.
That was all new bone that was implanted using these techniques.
Another more advanced technology we're looking at right now, our next generation of technologies, are more sophisticated printers.
Because in reality, what you want to do is you actually want to have the patient on the bed with the wound, and you have a scanner, basically like a flatbed scanner.
That's what you see here on the right side.
You see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves.
This is how it actually works.
Here's the scanner going through, scanning the wound.
And we actually do this with a gel so that you can lift the gel material.
And this is actually new technology still under development.
We're also working on more sophisticated printers.
Because in reality, our biggest challenge are the solid organs.
I don't know if you realize this, but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney.
So this is more challenging -- large organ, vascular, a lot of blood vessel supply, a lot of cells present.
So the strategy here is -- this is actually a CT scan, an X-ray -- and we go layer by layer, using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3D reconstruction to get right down to those patient's own kidneys.
We then are able to actually image those, do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics, and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form.
So we go layer by layer through the organ, analyzing each layer as we go through the organ, and we then are able to send that information, as you see here, through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient.
This actually shows the actual printer.
And this actually shows that printing.
That's actually the actual printer right now, and that's been printing this kidney structure that you see here.
It takes about seven hours to print a kidney, so this is about three hours into it now.
And Dr. Kang's going to walk onstage right now, and we're actually going to show you one of these kidneys that we printed a little bit earlier today.
Thank you.
This is Dr. Kang who's been working with us on this project, and part of our team.
Thank you, Dr. Kang. I appreciate it.
(Applause) So this is actually a new generation.
This is actually the printer that you see here onstage.
And this is actually a new technology we're working on now.
In reality, we now have a long history of doing this.
I'm going to share with you a clip in terms of technology we have had in patients now for a while.
(Video) Luke Massella: I was really sick. I could barely get out of bed.
I was missing school. It was pretty much miserable.
I felt so sick.
I was facing basically a lifetime of dialysis, and I don't even like to think about what my life would be like if I was on that.
So after the surgery, life got a lot better for me.
I was able to wrestle in high school.
I became the captain of the team, and that was great.
And because they used my own cells to build this bladder, it's going to be with me.
(Applause) Juan Enriquez: These experiments sometimes work, and it's very cool when they do.
Luke, come up please.
(Applause) So Luke, before last night, when's the last time you saw Tony?
LM: Ten years ago, when I had my surgery -- and it's really great to see him.
(Laughter) (Applause) JE: And tell us a little bit about what you're doing.
LM: Well right now I'm in college at the University of Connecticut.
I'm a sophomore and studying communications, TV and mass media, and basically trying to live life like a normal kid, which I always wanted growing up.
But it was hard to do that when I was born with spina bifida and my kidneys and bladder weren't working.
I went through about 16 surgeries, and it seemed impossible to do that when I was in kidney failure when I was 10.
And this surgery came along and basically made me who I am today and saved my life.
(Applause) JE: And Tony's done hundreds of these?
LM: What I know from, he's working really hard in his lab and coming up with crazy stuff.
I know I was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery.
And when I was 10, I didn't realize how amazing it was.
I was a little kid, and I was like, "Yeah. I'll have that. I'll have that surgery."
(Laughter) All I wanted to do was to get better, and I didn't realize how amazing it really was until now that I'm older and I see the amazing things that he's doing.
JE: When you got this call out of the blue -- Tony's really shy, and it took a lot of convincing to get somebody as modest as Tony to allow us to bring Luke.
So Luke, you go to your communications professors -- you're majoring in communications -- and you ask them for permission to come to TED, which might have a little bit to do with communications, and what was their reaction?
There were a couple that were a little stubborn, but I had to talk to them.
I pulled them aside.
Thank you so much. (LM: Thank you so much.) JE: Thank you, Tony.
(Applause)
So I was born on the last day of the last year of the '70s.
I was raised on "Free to be you and me" -- (cheering) hip-hop -- not as many woohoos for hip-hop in the house.
Thank you. Thank you for hip-hop -- and Anita Hill.
My dad facetiously says, "We wanted to save the world, and instead we just got rich."
We actually just got "middle class" in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but you get the picture.
I was raised with a very heavy sense of unfinished legacy.
At this ripe old age of 30, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in this horrible, beautiful time, and I've decided, for me, it's been a real journey and paradox.
Feminism was the water I grew up in.
When I was just a little girl, my mom started what is now the longest-running women's film festival in the world.
So while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons, I was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women.
But she was not the only feminist in the house.
My dad actually resigned from the male-only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son, but not his daughter.
(Applause) He's actually here today.
(Applause) The trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet, not a businessman, but the intention was really good.
(Laughter) In any case, I didn't readily claim the feminist label, even though it was all around me, because I associated it with my mom's women's groups, her swishy skirts and her shoulder pads -- none of which had much cachet in the hallways of Palmer High School where I was trying to be cool at the time.
But I suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing, so I started covertly tiptoeing into my mom's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them -- never, of course, admitting that I was doing so.
I didn't actually claim the feminist label until I went to Barnard College and I heard Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner speak for the first time.
They were the co-authors of a book called "Manifesta."
Jennifer Baumgardner was wearing them.
I thought they were really hot.
I decided, okay, I can claim the feminist label.
Now I tell you this -- I tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself, because I think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics, that beauty, that fun do matter.
There are lots of very modern political movements that have caught fire in no small part because of cultural hipness.
My mom says, "patriarchy."
So race, class, gender, ability, all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman.
But for me, so is immigration. (Applause) Thank you.
My mom says, "Protest march."
I say, "Online organizing."
I co-edit, along with a collective of other super-smart, amazing women, a site called Feministing.com.
Feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising.
And one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of Iowa who say, "I Googled Jessica Simpson and stumbled on your site.
I realized feminism wasn't about man-hating and Birkenstocks."
I say, "Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Miriam Perez, Ann Friedman, Jessica Valenti, Vanessa Valenti, and on and on and on and on."
We are thousands of women and men across this country doing online writing, community organizing, changing institutions from the inside out -- all continuing the incredible work that our mothers and grandmothers started.
Thank you.
These are three words many of us were raised with.
We walk across graduation stages, high on our overblown expectations, and when we float back down to earth, we realize we don't know what the heck it means to actually save the world anyway.
And there's a lot to be overwhelmed about, to be fair -- an environmental crisis, wealth disparity in this country unlike we've seen since 1928, and globally, a totally immoral and ongoing wealth disparity.
Xenophobia's on the rise. The trafficking of women and girls.
I experienced this firsthand myself when I graduated from Barnard College in 2002.
I went out and I worked at a non-profit, I went to grad school, I phone-banked, I protested, I volunteered, and none of it seemed to matter.
And on a particularly dark night of December of 2004, I sat down with my family, and I said that I had become very disillusioned.
I admitted that I'd actually had a fantasy -- kind of a dark fantasy -- of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the White House steps.
She said, "You are smarter, more creative and more resilient than that."
(Laughter) (Applause) There's a writer I've been deeply influenced by, Parker Palmer, and he writes that many of us are often whiplashed "between arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves."
You may have guessed by now, I did not light myself on fire.
I wrote a book about eight incredible people all over this country doing social justice work.
I wrote about Nia Martin-Robinson, the daughter of Detroit and two civil rights activists, who's dedicating her life to environmental justice.
Instead, what she really wanted to do was make films.
So she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact.
I wrote about Maricela Guzman, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, who joined the military so she could afford college.
She was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the Service Women's Action Network.
What I learned from these people and others was that I couldn't judge them based on their failure to meet their very lofty goals.
But what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force.
And at the end of the day, what could possibly be more important than that?
But how good a failure is it?"
This isn't to say we give up our wildest, biggest dreams.
But on the other, we root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person's day more kind, more just, etc.
So when I was a little girl, I had a couple of very strange habits.
(Laughter) I was listening to her talk on the phone, which she did a lot.
She was talking about board meetings, she was founding peace organizations, she was coordinating carpools, she was consoling friends -- all these daily acts of care and creativity.
And surely, at three and four years old, I was listening to the soothing sound of her voice, but I think I was also getting my first lesson in activist work.
The activists I interviewed had nothing in common, literally, except for one thing, which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences.
And at the end of the day, these things make for a lifetime of challenge and reward.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage.
(Video) Salman Khan: So the hypotenuse is now going to be five.
This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America -- a nice clean band here -- and this part of Africa.
Notice, this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol.
A galaxy. Hey! There's another galaxy. Oh, look! There's another galaxy.
And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer.
(Laughter) (Applause) (Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there.
We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day.
And some of you all might know, about five years ago, I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely.
And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened.
Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened.
The first was the feedback from my cousins.
They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.
At first it's very unintuitive, but when you think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense.
The other thing that happened is -- I put them on YouTube just -- I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world.
These are just a few.
This is actually from one of the original calculus videos.
(Laughter) In response to that same comment -- this is on the thread, you can go on YouTube and look at the comments -- someone else wrote: "Same thing here.
I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'" (Laughter) We get a lot of feedback along those lines.
But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was more than just a nice-to-have.
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math.
Then we went on to the dreaded fractions.
He is so excited."
And so you can imagine, here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund -- it was very strange for me to do something of social value.
(Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going.
If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to.
(Laughter) The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "OK, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students.
It's good for maybe home-schoolers."
Then I started getting letters from teachers, and the teachers would write, saying, "We've used your videos to flip the classroom.
You've given the lectures, so now what we do --" And this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow -- "what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."
And I want to pause here -- (Applause) I want to pause here, because there's a couple of interesting things.
One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time.
But the more interesting thing -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom, and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.
They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other.
A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience, now they're actually interacting with each other.
So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job, and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level?
But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need, until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row.
And the Khan Academy videos are there.
You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it.
The paradigm here seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on.
But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.
In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam.
And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic.
And even that 95 percent student -- what was the five percent they didn't know?
Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zeroth power.
So I put a big "C" stamp on your forehead -- (Laughter) and then I say, "Here's a unicycle."
(Laughter) But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now.
And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation.
So our model is: learn math the way you'd learn anything, like riding a bicycle.
This is trigonometry.
And they all fit together.
But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map.
That top node right there, that's literally single-digit addition, it's like one plus one is equal to two.
Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra.
And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework.
So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- from this knowledge map, you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept.
It'll change what happens at the dinner table.
And so what I'm showing you here, this is data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes, and completely gutted their old math curriculum.
They're doing Khan Academy, that software, for roughly half of their math class.
I want to be clear: we don't view this as a complete math education.
And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- this is actually a live dashboard from the Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard.
Green means the student's already proficient.
Red means they're stuck.
And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids."
Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer."
(Applause) Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "What don't you understand? What do you understand?" and all the rest.
So our paradigm is to arm teachers with as much data as possible -- data that, in any other field, is expected, in finance, marketing, manufacturing -- so the teachers can diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible.
The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on.
Red is wrong, blue is right.
The leftmost question is the first one the student attempted.
They watched the video over there.
They also got faster -- the height is how long it took them.
When you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, "differentiated learning" -- but it's kind of crazy, what happens when you see it in a classroom.
Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and a group who are a little bit slower.
In a traditional model, in a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids.
But when you let students work at their own pace -- we see it over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead.
And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted.
And we're seeing it over and over again.
It makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time.
Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education.
And that brings up an interesting point.
A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios.
In our mind, the relevant metric is: student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio.
So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot.
As valuable as that is in Los Altos, imagine what it does to the adult learner, who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff they should have known before going back to college.
Now imagine what happens where -- we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom.
But this is all one system.
There's no reason why you can't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom.
Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta.
And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom.
And that's essentially what we're trying to build.
Thank you.
(Applause) Bill Gates: I'll ask about two or three questions.
(Applause continues) (Applause ends) BG: I've seen some things you're doing in the system, that have to do with motivation and feedback -- energy points, merit badges.
SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it.
I have to be clear, it's not just me anymore.
(Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about?
SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy.
Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms.
Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?"
They said, "This is kind of radical. We have to think about it."
Me and the rest of the team were like, "They're never going to want to do this."
But literally the next day they were like, "Can you start in two weeks?"
(Laughter) BG: So fifth-grade math is where that's going on right now?
SK: It's two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes.
They're doing it at the district level.
I think what they're excited about is they can follow these kids, not only in school; on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it.
BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids.
We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves.
And they're saying, "Hey, this is nice, but --" Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, "I have a feeling a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic."
BG: Is this ready for prime time?
(Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.
BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing.
The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people?
Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club.
And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately.
I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education.
BG: Thank you. SK: Thank you.
(Applause)
Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed.
And the journalist was asking him, "Why is this so important?"
And Zuckerberg said, "A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."
And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.
So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me.
It meant a connection to the world.
It meant something that would connect us all together.
And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society.
But there's this shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible.
And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem.
So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time -- my Facebook page.
I'm progressive, politically -- big surprise -- but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives.
And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed.
And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links.
They disappeared.
So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web.
Google's doing it too.
If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results.
Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at -- everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located -- that it uses to personally tailor your query results.
And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see.
But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "Egypt" and to send me screen shots of what they got.
And here's my friend Daniel's screen shot.
So it's not just Google and Facebook either.
There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization.
Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized -- different people get different things.
Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times -- all flirting with personalization in various ways.
And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.
As Eric Schmidt said, "It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."
And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble.
And your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online.
And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do.
So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix.
What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves.
You know we all want to be someone who has watched "Rashomon," but right now we want to watch "Ace Ventura" for the fourth time.
It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan.
And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance.
And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.
What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong.
In a broadcast society -- this is how the founding mythology goes -- in a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information.
And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome.
And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did.
And the thing is, we've actually been here before as a society.
Then people noticed that they were doing something really important.
That, in fact, you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information, that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed.
It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century.
And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web.
And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing.
I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google -- Larry and Sergey -- people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I'm grateful for that.
We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters.
And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't.
Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being.
We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Imagine if you could record your life -- everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered.
Well that's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago.
This is my wife and collaborator, Rupal.
And on this day, at this moment, we walked into the house with our first child, our beautiful baby boy.
And we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system.
(Video) Man: Okay.
Deb Roy: This moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house, if you looked up, you'd see a camera and a microphone, and if you looked down, you'd get this bird's-eye view of the room.
Here's our living room, the baby bedroom, kitchen, dining room and the rest of the house.
So you're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made.
(Laughter) And what this data represents for our family at a personal level, the impact has already been immense, and we're still learning its value.
Countless moments of unsolicited natural moments, not posed moments, are captured there, and we're starting to learn how to discover them and find them.
But there's also a scientific reason that drove this project, which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language -- that child being my son.
And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data, we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set, trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition.
So we're looking here at one of the first things we started to do.
This is my wife and I cooking breakfast in the kitchen, and as we move through space and through time, a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen.
In order to convert this opaque, 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see, we use motion analysis to pull out, as we move through space and through time, what we call space-time worms.
So with that technology and that data and the ability to, with machine assistance, transcribe speech, we've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts.
And with that, let me take you now for a first tour into the data.
So you've all, I'm sure, seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time.
I'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form.
My son, soon after his first birthday, would say "gaga" to mean water.
No video here, so you can focus on the sound, the acoustics, of a new kind of trajectory: gaga to water.
(Applause) So he didn't just learn water.
Over the course of the 24 months, the first two years that we really focused on, this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order.
And because we have full transcripts, we've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday.
And so we started to analyze why.
This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us.
The way to interpret this apparently simple graph is, on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances.
And the [horizontal] axis is time.
And we would plot the relative length of the utterances.
And what we found was this curious phenomena, that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum, making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend back up in complexity.
So it appears that all three primary caregivers -- myself, my wife and our nanny -- were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language.
Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him.
That environment, people, are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now.
But that's looking at the speech context.
What about the visual context?
This is a moment, one moment captured across multiple cameras.
The reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine, where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system.
What I'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes, again, of just life in the living room.
That's me and my son on the floor.
And there's video analytics that are tracking our movements.
We're now on the couch, looking out through the window at cars passing by.
And finally, my son playing in a walking toy by himself.
And we see these amazing structures -- these little knots of two colors of thread we call "social hot spots."
And we think that these affect the way language is learned.
What we'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they're learned -- so in other words, the relationship between words and what they're about in the world.
And there's our nanny by the door.
(Video) Nanny: You want water? (Baby: Aaaa.) Nanny: All right. (Baby: Aaaa.) DR: She offers water, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water.
And what we've done is use the word "water" to tag that moment, that bit of activity.
And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in, and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water.
And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape.
We call these wordscapes.
This is the wordscape for the word water, and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen.
And just for contrast, we can do this with any word.
So we're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition, and that's ongoing work now.
In my lab, which we're peering into now, at MIT -- this is at the media lab.
This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space.
Three of the key people in this project, Philip DeCamp, Rony Kubat and Brandon Roy are pictured here.
And Michael Fleischman was another Ph.D. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis, and he made the following observation: that "just the way that we're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language, that same idea we can take out of your home, Deb, and we can apply it to the world of public media."
And so our effort took an unexpected turn.
Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place.
We've started analyzing television content using the same principles -- analyzing event structure of a TV signal -- episodes of shows, commercials, all of the components that make up the event structure.
And we're now, with satellite dishes, pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States.
And you don't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people's conversations, you just tune into publicly available social media feeds.
So we're pulling in about three billion comments a month, and then the magic happens.
Instead, the context, the common ground activities, are the content on television that's driving the conversations.
And what we're seeing here, these skyscrapers now, are commentary that are linked to content on television.
Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere.
And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family, we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people.
This is a subset of data from our database -- just 50,000 out of several million -- and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources.
So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph.
Each of the links that you're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content.
And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content.
And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways.
So if we, for example, trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it, and then we follow where that comment goes, and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content, a very interesting structure becomes visible.
We call this a co-viewing clique, a virtual living room if you will.
And there are fascinating dynamics at play.
They talk to other people.
Another example -- very different -- another actual person in our database -- and we're finding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of these.
So a lot of people are following this person -- very influential -- and they have a propensity to talk about what's on TV.
So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together.
So if we go and look at this piece of content, President Obama's State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago, and look at what we find in this same data set, at the same scale, the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable.
A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what's on the broadcast.
And of course, through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language.
We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content.
It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication.
And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals.
And so just to return to my son, when I was preparing this talk, he was looking over my shoulder, and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today, and I asked him for permission -- granted.
And I thought, "What am I thinking?
He's five years old. He's not going to understand this."
And just as I was having that thought, he looked up at me and said, "So that when I grow up, I can show this to my kids?"
And I thought, "Wow, this is powerful stuff."
So I want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family.
This is the first time our son took more than two steps at once -- captured on film.
It's a cluttered environment; it's natural life.
And so you hear me encouraging him, realizing what's happening, and then the magic happens.
Listen very carefully.
(Video) DR: Hey.
Come here.
Can you do it?
Oh, boy.
Can you do it?
Baby: Yeah.
(Laughter) (Applause) DR: Thank you.
(Applause)
This is a river.
This is a stream.
This is a river.
This is happening all over the country.
On this map, the colored areas represent water conflicts.
Similar problems are emerging in the East as well.
The reasons vary state to state, but mostly in the details.
They're the veins of the ecosystem, and they're often empty veins.
I want to tell you the story of just one of these streams, because it's an archetype for the larger story.
It runs through a populated area from East Helena to Lake Helena.
It supports wild fish including cutthroat, brown and rainbow trout.
Nearly every year for more than a hundred years ...
How did we get here?
Well, it started back in the late 1800s when people started settling in places like Montana.
In short, there was a lot of water and there weren't very many people.
But as more people showed up wanting water, the folks who were there first got a little concerned, and in 1865, Montana passed its first water law.
Oddly, a lot of people showed up wanting to share the stream, and the folks who were there first got concerned enough to bring out their lawyers.
There were precedent-setting suits in 1870 and 1872, both involving Prickly Pear Creek.
And in 1921, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Prickly Pear that the folks who were there first had the first, or "senior water rights."
Some of these creeks have claims for 50 to 100 times more water than is actually in the stream.
And the senior water rights holders, if they don't use their water right, they risk losing their water right -- along with the economic value that goes with it.
So after decades of lawsuits and 140 years, now, of experience, we still have this.
It's a broken system.
And I'm sure you all know, this has created significant conflicts between the agricultural and environmental communities.
OK, now I'm going to change gears here.
Most of you will be happy to know that the rest of the presentation's free ...
(Laughter) and some of you'll be happy to know that it involves beer.
(Laughter) There's another thing happening around the country, which is that companies are starting to get concerned about their water footprint.
They're concerned about securing an adequate supply of water, they're trying to be really efficient with their water use, and they're concerned about how their water use affects the image of their brand.
Well, it's a national problem, but I'm going to tell you another story from Montana ...
I bet you didn't know, it takes about 5 pints of water to make a pint of beer.
Now the brewers in Montana have already done a lot to reduce their water consumption, but they still use millions of gallons of water.
I mean, there's water in beer.
These ecosystems are really important to the Montana brewers and their customers.
After all, there's a strong correlation between water and fishing, and for some, there's a strong correlation between fishing and beer.
(Laughter) So the Montana brewers and their customers are concerned and they're looking for some way to address the problem.
So how can they address this remaining water footprint?
Up until now, business water stewardship has been limited to measuring and reducing, and we're suggesting that the next step is to restore.
It's a broken system.
Well, we decided to connect these two worlds -- the world of the companies with their water footprints and the world of the farmers with their senior water rights on these creeks.
In some states, senior water rights holders can leave their water in the stream while legally protecting it from others, and maintaining their water right.
After all, it is their water right, and if they want to use that water right to help the fish grow in the stream, it's their right to do so.
But they have no incentive to do so.
So, working with local water trusts, we created an incentive to do so.
That's what's happening here.
This individual has made the choice and is closing this water diversion, leaving the water in the stream.
He doesn't lose the water right, he just chooses to apply that right, or some portion of it, to the stream, instead of to the land.
Because he's the senior water-rights holder, he can protect the water from other users in the stream.
He gets paid to leave the water in the stream.
Each increment gets a serial number and a certificate, and then the brewers and others buy those certificates as a way to return water to these degraded ecosystems.
The brewers pay to restore water to the stream.
It's about giving folks concerned about their water footprints a real opportunity to put water where it's critically needed, into these degraded ecosystems, while at the same time providing farmers a meaningful economic choice about how their water is used.
These transactions create allies, not enemies.
And they provide needed economic support for rural communities.
And most importantly, it's working.
We've returned more than four billion gallons of water to degraded ecosystems.
We've connected senior water-rights holders with brewers in Montana, with hotels and tea companies in Oregon, and with high-tech companies that use a lot of water in the Southwest.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause)
When I got my current job, I was given a good piece of advice, which was to interview three politicians every day.
(Laughter) But what they do have is incredible social skills.
When you meet them, they lock into you, they look you in the eye, they invade your personal space, they massage the back of your head.
I had dinner with a Republican senator several months ago who kept his hand on my inner thigh throughout the whole meal -- squeezing it.
I once -- this was years ago -- I saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate.
And they were friends, and they hugged each other and they were laughing, and their faces were like this far apart.
And I was like, "Get a room. I don't want to see this."
But they have those social skills.
Another case: Last election cycle, I was following Mitt Romney around New Hampshire, and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons: Bip, Chip, Rip, Zip, Lip and Dip.
(Laughter) And he's going into a diner.
And he goes into the diner, introduces himself to a family and says, "What village are you from in New Hampshire?"
And then he describes the home he owned in their village.
And so he goes around the room, and then as he's leaving the diner, he first-names almost everybody he's just met.
I was like, "Okay, that's social skill."
But the paradox is, when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode, that social awareness vanishes and they start talking like accountants.
So in the course of my career, I have covered a series of failures.
We sent economists in the Soviet Union with privatization plans when it broke up, and what they really lacked was social trust.
We invaded Iraq with a military oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities.
We had a financial regulatory regime based on the assumptions that traders were rational creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid.
For 30 years, I've been covering school reform and we've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes -- charters, private schools, vouchers -- but we've had disappointing results year after year.
And if you're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and a student, you're not talking about that reality.
But that reality is expunged from our policy-making process.
And so that's led to a question for me: Why are the most socially-attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy?
And I came to the conclusion, this is a symptom of a larger problem.
And it's led to a view of human nature that we're rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives, and it's led to ways of seeing the world where people try to use the assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is.
We're really good at talking about material things, but we're really bad at talking about emotions.
We're really good at talking about skills and safety and health; we're really bad at talking about character.
Alasdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher, said that, "We have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue, honor, goodness, but we no longer have a system by which to connect them."
And so this has led to a shallow path in politics, but also in a whole range of human endeavors.
You can see it in the way we raise our young kids.
You go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon and you watch the kids come out, and they're wearing these 80-pound backpacks.
You see these cars that drive up -- usually it's Saabs and Audis and Volvos, because in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy -- that's fine.
They get picked up by these creatures I've called uber-moms, who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard.
Driving them home, and they want them to be enlightened, so they take them to Ben & Jerry's ice cream company with its own foreign policy.
(Laughter) And they go to Whole Foods to get their baby formula, and Whole Foods is one of those progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International.
(Laughter) They buy these seaweed-based snacks there called Veggie Booty with Kale, which is for kids who come home and say, "Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer."
(Laughter) And so the kids are raised in a certain way, jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure -- SAT prep, oboe, soccer practice.
They get into competitive colleges, they get good jobs, and sometimes they make a success of themselves in a superficial manner, and they make a ton of money.
(Laughter) They have kids of their own, and they've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people, so their grandmoms look like Gertrude Stein, their daughters looks like Halle Berry -- I don't know how they've done that.
They get there and they realize it's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights.
So they've got these furry 160-pound dogs -- all look like velociraptors, all named after Jane Austen characters.
And then when they get old, they haven't really developed a philosophy of life, but they've decided, "I've been successful at everything; I'm just not going to die."
And so they hire personal trainers; they're popping Cialis like breath mints.
They're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis.
(Laughter) And so this is part of what life is, but it's not all of what life is.
And over the past few years, I think we've been given a deeper view of human nature and a deeper view of who we are.
And it's not based on theology or philosophy, it's in the study of the mind, across all these spheres of research, from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, psychologists, sociology, we're developing a revolution in consciousness.
And far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it's a new humanism, it's a new enchantment.
And I think when you synthesize this research, you start with three key insights.
The first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work.
And so one way to formulate that is the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40.
And this leads to oddities.
One of my favorite is that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, people named Lawrence become lawyers, because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar, which is why I named my daughter President of the United States Brooks.
(Laughter) Another finding is that the unconscious, far from being dumb and sexualized, is actually quite smart.
It's really hard to imagine a sofa, how it's going to look in your house.
The second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking.
People with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brain are not super smart, they're actually sometimes quite helpless.
And the "giant" in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning -- Antonio Damasio.
And one of the things he's really shown us is that emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value.
And so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom.
Now I'm a middle-aged guy.
They put them into a brain scan machine -- this is apocryphal by the way, but I don't care -- and they had them watch a horror movie, and then they had them describe their feelings toward their wives.
And the brain scans were identical in both activities.
It was just sheer terror.
So me talking about emotion is like Gandhi talking about gluttony, but it is the central organizing process of the way we think.
The brain is the record of the feelings of a life.
And the third insight is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals.
We're social animals, not rational animals.
And so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds.
When we watch a car chase in a movie, it's almost as if we are subtly having a car chase.
When we watch pornography, it's a little like having sex, though probably not as good.
And we see this when lovers walk down the street, when a crowd in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an emotional contagion, the deep interpenetration.
And this revolution in who we are gives us a different way of seeing, I think, politics, a different way, most importantly, of seeing human capital.
We are now children of the French Enlightenment.
We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties.
But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume, Adam Smith, actually had a better handle on who we are -- that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong, and our sentiments are often trustworthy.
It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life.
When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily -- things like grades, SAT's, degrees, the number of years in schooling.
The first gift, or talent, is mindsight -- the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer.
Babies come with this ability.
Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom's mind and to download what they find -- their models of how to understand reality.
In the United States, 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with Mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people.
Scientists at the University of Minnesota did a study in which they could predict with 77 percent accuracy, at age 18 months, who was going to graduate from high school, based on who had good attachment with mom.
Twenty percent of kids do not have those relationships.
They have trouble relating to other people.
So for example, we are overconfidence machines.
Ninety-five percent of our professors report that they are above-average teachers.
Ninety-six percent of college students say they have above-average social skills.
Time magazine asked Americans, "Are you in the top one percent of earners?"
Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top one percent of earners.
(Laughter) This is a gender-linked trait, by the way.
Men drown at twice the rate of women, because men think they can swim across that lake.
But some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence.
They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity.
They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence.
They are curious.
And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ.
The third trait is metis, what we might call street smarts -- it's a Greek word.
One of my colleagues at the Times did a great story about soldiers in Iraq who could look down a street and detect somehow whether there was an IED, a landmine, in the street.
They couldn't tell you how they did it, but they could feel cold, they felt a coldness, and they were more often right than wrong.
And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals.
And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal.
And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation.
Any child can say, "I'm a tiger," pretend to be a tiger.
But in fact, it's phenomenally complicated to take a concept "I" and a concept "tiger" and blend them together.
But this is the source of innovation.
What Picasso did, for example, was take the concept "Western art" and the concept "African masks" and blend them together -- not only the geometry, but the moral systems entailed in them.
And these are skills, again, we can't count and measure.
And then the final thing I'll mention is something you might call limerence.
And this is not an ability; it's a drive and a motivation.
The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige.
The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence, when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task -- when a craftsman feels lost in his craft, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels at one with God's love.
That is what the unconscious mind hungers for.
And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused.
And one of the most beautiful descriptions I've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter at the University of Indiana.
He was married to a woman named Carol, and they had a wonderful relationship.
When their kids were five and two, Carol had a stroke and a brain tumor and died suddenly.
And Hofstadter wrote a book called "I Am a Strange Loop."
In the course of that book, he describes a moment -- just months after Carol has died -- he comes across her picture on the mantel, or on a bureau in his bedroom.
And here's what he wrote: "I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes.
And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me.' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit -- the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children.
I realized that, though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but had lived on very determinedly in my brain."
The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom.
Through his suffering, Hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are.
Through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, I think, how shallow our view of human nature has been.
And now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are, comes this revolution in consciousness -- these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted, this new humanism.
Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious, of who we are deep inside, and it's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light.
We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes.
We see light reflected off the Moon.
And in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies, the known universe has come to us through light, across vast eras in cosmic history.
And with all of our modern telescopes, we've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe -- these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang.
And yet, the universe is not a silent movie because the universe isn't silent.
It can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold.
Now we'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe -- a sonic composition.
And while we've never heard the sounds from space, we really should, in the next few years, start to turn up the volume on what's going on out there.
So in this ambition to capture songs from the universe, we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have, because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song, which I'd like to play for you -- some of our predictions for what that song will be like.
Now black holes are dark against a dark sky.
We can't see them directly.
They're not brought to us with light, at least not directly.
We can see them indirectly, because black holes wreak havoc on their environment.
They destroy stars around them.
But they won't come to us directly through light.
We might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background, but we haven't yet.
And yet black holes may be heard even if they're not seen, and that's because they bang on space-time like a drum.
Einstein realized that if space were empty, if the universe were empty, it would be like this picture, except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it.
It was Einstein's great general theory of relativity.
Now even light will be bent by those paths.
And you can be bent so much that you're caught in orbit around the Sun, as the Earth is, or the Moon around the Earth.
These are the natural curves in space.
It wasn't Einstein who realized this, it was Karl Schwarzschild who was a German Jew in World War I -- joined the German army already an accomplished scientist, working on the Russian front.
I like to imagine Schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire, and then, in between, calculating Einstein's equations -- as you do in the trenches.
And he was reading Einstein's recently published general theory of relativity, and he was thrilled by this theory.
Now he wrote to Einstein, and he said, "As you will see, the war has been kind to me enough.
Despite the heavy gunfire, I've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas."
And Einstein was very impressed with his exact solution, and I should hope also the dedication of the scientist.
This is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions.
And he took Schwarzschild's idea to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the next week.
But Einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity.
He did not believe they existed in nature.
He thought nature would protect us from their formation.
It was decades before the term "black hole" was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects -- in fact they're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime.
But if we did a little thought experiment -- as Einstein was very fond of doing -- we could imagine putting the Sun crushed down to six kilometers, and putting a tiny little Earth around it in orbit, maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun.
This crushed black hole actually would fit inside Manhattan, more or less.
It might spill off into the Hudson a little bit before it destroyed the Earth.
But basically that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of Manhattan.
There's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe, but you actually have to get very close to fall in.
But what's very impressive is that, from our vantage point, we can always see the Earth.
The light from the Earth, some of it falls in, but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us.
If this were Battlestar Galactica and you're fighting the Cylons, don't hide behind the black hole.
They can see you.
Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole -- it's not massive enough -- but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy.
We would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and its luminous dust lanes.
And if we were to fall towards this black hole, we would see all of that light lensed around it, and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened.
But even though the black hole is dark from the outside, it's not dark on the inside, because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us.
And even though, due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation, our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time, it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us, right before we were crushed to death by the black hole.
It would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a total death experience.
(Laughter) And there's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel.
Now we've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole, but black holes can be heard, even if they're not seen.
Imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation -- imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together.
Maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes -- each one 10 times the mass of the Sun.
At the end of their lives, they're going around each other very near the speed of light.
Space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe.
And they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light.
This computer simulation is due to a relativity group at NASA Goddard.
It took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem.
It shows two black holes in orbit around each other, again, with these helpfully painted curves.
And if you can see -- it's kind of faint -- but if you can see the red waves emanating out, those are the gravitational waves.
You would literally hear the sound.
But I'd like to play for you the sound that we predict.
Imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole.
The sound you're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close.
But it comes in like a mallet, and it literally cracks space, wobbling it like a drum.
Now I've never heard it that loud -- it's actually more dramatic.
At home it sounds kind of anticlimactic.
It's sort of like ding, ding, ding.
This is another sound from my group.
Both black holes are moving.
Both black holes are getting closer together.
And then they're going to merge.
(Thumping) Now it's gone.
Now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging -- that it chirps up at the end.
Now that's our prediction for what we'll see.
Luckily we're at this safe distance in Long Beach, California.
And surely, somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged.
And surely, the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years, or a million years, at the speed of light to get to us.
But the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear.
It's a remarkably ambitious experiment, and it's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years -- to pick this up.
There's also a mission proposed for space, which hopefully will launch in the next ten years, called LISA.
And LISA will be able to see super-massive black holes -- black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun.
In this Hubble image, we see two galaxies.
They look like they're frozen in some embrace.
But they're not frozen; they're actually merging.
These two black holes are colliding, and they will merge over a billion-year time scale.
But LISA could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe's history, the last 15 minutes before they fall together.
And it's not just black holes, but it's also any big disturbance in the universe -- and the biggest of them all is the Big Bang.
When that expression was coined, it was derisive -- like, "Oh, who would believe in a Big Bang?"
This animation from my friends at Proton Studios shows looking at the Big Bang from the outside.
So imagine you're inside the Big Bang.
It's everywhere, it's all around you, and the space is wobbling chaotically.
Fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us.
Galaxies form, and generations of stars form in those galaxies, and around one star, at least one star, is a habitable planet.
And here we are frantically building these experiments, doing these calculations, writing these computer codes.
Imagine a billion years ago, two black holes collided.
That song has been ringing through space for all that time.
We weren't even here.
It gets closer and closer -- 40,000 years ago, we're still doing cave paintings.
It's getting closer and closer, and in 20 ...
If it was the Big Bang we were going to pick up, it would sound like this.
It's literally the definition of noise.
It's white noise; it's such a chaotic ringing.
But it's around us everywhere, presumably, if it hasn't been wiped out by some other process in the universe.
And if we pick it up, it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation, of our observable universe.
So within the next few years, we'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit, render the universe in audio.
But if we detect those earliest moments, it'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the Big Bang, which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest, most elusive, questions.
If we run the movie of our universe backwards, we know that there was a Big Bang in our past, and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it, but was our Big Bang the only Big Bang?
Will it happen again?
I mean, in the spirit of rising to TED's challenge to reignite wonder, we can ask questions, at least for this last minute, that honestly might evade us forever.
But we have to ask: Is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history?
Or, is it possible that we're just a branch off of a multiverse -- each branch with its own Big Bang in its past -- maybe some of them with black holes playing drums, maybe some without -- maybe some with sentient life, and maybe some without -- not in our past, not in our future, but somehow fundamentally connected to us?
So we have to wonder, if there is a multiverse, in some other patch of that multiverse, are there creatures?
Are there other creatures in the multiverse, wondering about us and wondering about their own origins?
And if they are, I can imagine them as we are, calculating, writing computer code, building instruments, trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there.
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
Back in New York, I am the head of development for a non-profit called Robin Hood.
Now in our town, where the volunteers supplement a highly skilled career staff, you have to get to the fire scene pretty early to get in on any action.
I remember my first fire.
When I found the captain, he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner, who was surely having one of the worst days of her life.
Here it was, the middle of the night, she was standing outside in the pouring rain, under an umbrella, in her pajamas, barefoot, while her house was in flames.
The other volunteer who had arrived just before me -- let's call him Lex Luther -- (Laughter) got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog.
The dog! I was stunned with jealousy.
Here was some lawyer or money manager who, for the rest of his life, gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature, just because he beat me by five seconds.
Well, I was next.
The captain waved me over.
I need you to go upstairs, past the fire, and I need you to get this woman a pair of shoes."
(Laughter) I swear.
So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went -- up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes.
Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm no hero.
(Laughter) I carried my payload back downstairs where I met my nemesis and the precious dog by the front door.
We took our treasures outside to the homeowner, where, not surprisingly, his received much more attention than did mine.
The act of kindness she noted above all others: someone had even gotten her a pair of shoes.
(Laughter) In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis.
And you know what I've learned?
So as I look around this room at people who either have achieved, or are on their way to achieving, remarkable levels of success, I would offer this reminder: don't wait.
Don't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody's life.
If you have something to give, give it now.
Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one.
So get in the game. Save the shoes.
Thank you.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Mark, Mark, come back.
(Applause) Mark Bezos: Thank you.
One winter morning, a couple of years ago, I was driving to work in Johannesburg, South Africa, and noticed a haze hanging over the city.
Johannesburg is known for its distinctive skyline, which I could barely see that morning.
It didn't take long for me to realize that I was looking at an enormous cloud of air pollution.
The contrast between the scenic environment I knew and this smog-covered skyline stirred up something within me.
I was appalled by the possibility of this city of bright and vivid sunsets being overrun by a dull haze.
At that moment, I felt an urge to do something about it, but I didn't know what.
The main challenge was, I didn't know much about environmental science air-quality management or atmospheric chemistry.
I am a computer engineer, and I was pretty sure I couldn't code my way out of this air pollution problem.
In the following years, I learned a very important lesson, a lesson we all need to take to heart if we are to work towards a better future.
Even if you're not an expert in a particular domain, your outside expertise may hold the key to solving big problems within that domain.
Sometimes the unique perspective you have can result in unconventional thinking that can move the needle, but you need to be bold enough to try.
That's the only way you'll ever know.
What I knew back then was that if I was even going to try to make a difference, I had to get smart about air pollution first, and so I became a student again.
I did a bit of basic research and soon learned that air pollution is the world's biggest environmental health risk.
Data from the World Health Organization shows that almost 14 percent of all deaths worldwide in 2012 were attributable to household and ambient air pollution, with most occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
Ambient air pollution alone causes more deaths each year than malaria and HIV/AIDS.
In Africa, premature deaths from unsafe sanitation or childhood malnutrition pale in comparison to deaths due to air pollution, and it comes at a huge economic cost: over 400 billion US dollars as of 2013, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As I thought about the air pollution problem, it became clear that we needed to find a way to make better decisions about how we manage air pollution, and given the scale of the problem, it was necessary to do it in a collaborative way.
I started to speak to officials from the City of Johannesburg and other surrounding cities, and I engaged the local scientific community, and I also made a few cold calls.
I began to develop an idea about what I could do to improve the situation.
I started by simply asking myself how I could bring together in some meaningful way my skills in software engineering and artificial intelligence and the expertise of the people I'd reached out to.
I wanted to create an online air-quality management platform that would uncover trends in pollution and project into the future to determine what outcomes can be expected.
I was determined to see my idea translate into a practical solution, but I faced uncertainty and had no guarantee of success.
What I had was a very particular set of engineering skills, skills I'd acquired over my career (Laughter) that were new to people who had been working on the air pollution problem for so many years.
What I have come to realize is that sometimes just one fresh perspective, one new skill set, can make the conditions right for something remarkable to happen.
Our willpower and imagination are a guiding light, enabling us to chart new paths and navigate through obstacles.
Armed with a firmer understanding of the air pollution problem, and having managed to source over a decade's worth of data on air pollutant levels and the meteorological conditions for in and around Johannesburg, my colleagues from South Africa and China and myself created an air-quality decision support system that lives in the cloud.
We then used new machine learning technology to predict future levels of pollution for several different pollutants days in advance.
This means that citizens can make better decisions about their daily movements and about where to settle their families.
We can predict adverse pollution events ahead of time, identify heavy polluters, and they can be ordered by the relevant authorities to scale back their operations.
Through assisted scenario planning, city planners can also make better decisions about how to extend infrastructure, such as human settlements or industrial zones.
We completed a pilot of our technology that was run over a period of 120 days, covering all of South Africa.
Through our leadership, we have brought cutting-edge, world-leading assets that can perform air-quality forecasting at an unprecedented resolution and accuracy, benefiting the city that I drove into one winter morning not very long ago, and thought to myself, "Something is wrong here. I wonder what can be done?"
So here is the point: What if I'd not investigated the problem of air pollution further?
What I have learned is that, when embarking on a challenging endeavor that advances a cause that we firmly believe in, it is important to focus on the possibility of success and consider the consequence of not acting.
We should not get distracted by resistance and opposition, but this should motivate us further.
You may be pleasantly surprised.
Thank you.
(Applause)
That was, of course, by Le Corbusier, the famous architect.
And I think that is the quintessence of this 18-minute talk -- that there is no good lighting that is healthy and for our well-being without proper darkness.
So this is how we normally would light our offices.
This is how we create uniform lighting from one wall to the other in a regular grid of lamps.
If we would apply these codes and standards to the Pantheon in Rome, it would never have looked like this, because this beautiful light feature that goes around there all by itself can only appear because there is also darkness in that same building.
And the same is more or less what Santiago Calatrava said when he said, "Light: I make it in my buildings for comfort."
And he didn't mean the comfort of a five-course dinner as opposed to a one-course meal, but he really meant the comfort of the quality of the building for the people.
He meant that you can see the sky and that you can experience the sun.
And he created these gorgeous buildings where you can see the sky, and where you can experience the sun, that give us a better life in the built environment, just because of the relevance of light in its brightness and also in its shadows.
And this image of the Sun may suggest that the Sun is something evil and aggressive, but we should not forget that all energy on this planet actually comes from the Sun, and light is only a manifestation of that energy.
The sun is for dynamics, for color changes.
The sun is for beauty in our environment, like in this building -- the High Museum in Atlanta, which has been created by Renzo Piano from Italy, together with Arup Lighting, a brilliant team of lighting designers, who created a very subtle modulation of light across the space, responding to what the sun does outside, just because of all these beautiful openings in the roof.
So in an indirect way, you can see the sun.
They created this shade that you can see here, which actually covers the sun, but opens up to the good light from the sky.
And here you can see how they really crafted a beautiful design process with physical models, with quantitative as well as qualitative methods, to come to a final solution that is truly integrated and completely holistic with the architecture.
They allowed themselves a few mistakes along the way.
And they allow people in that building to really enjoy the sun, the good part of the sun.
And it's just a bit bright up there, so these people have found a very intriguing solution.
This is, I think, a very illustrative image of what I try to say -- that the beautiful dynamics of sun, bringing these into the building, creates a quality of our built environment that truly enhances our lives.
As opposed to the first office that I showed you in the beginning of the talk, this is a well-known office, which is the Weidt Group.
They are in green energy consulting, or something like that.
And they really practice what they preach because this office doesn't have any electric lighting at all.
It has only, on one side, this big, big glass window that helps to let the sunlight enter deep into the space and create a beautiful quality there and a great dynamic range.
So it can be very dim over there, and you do your work, and it can be very bright over there, and you do your work.
But actually, the human eye turns out to be remarkably adaptable to all these different light conditions that together create an environment that is never boring and that is never dull, and therefore helps us to enhance our lives.
This is Richard Kelly who was born 100 years ago, which is the reason I bring him up now, because it's kind of an anniversary year.
In the 1930s, Richard Kelly was the first person to really describe a methodology of modern lighting design.
And he coined three terms, which are "focal glow," "ambient luminescence" and "play of the brilliants" -- three very distinctly different ideas about light in architecture that all together make up this beautiful experience.
Or something like this, which is the lighting design he did for General Motors, for the car showroom.
And you enter that space, and you feel like, "Wow! This is so impressive," just because of this focal point, this huge light source in the middle.
It could also be the sunlight that breaks through the clouds and lights up a patch of the land, highlighting it compared to the dim environment.
Richard Kelly saw it as something infinite, something without any focus, something where all details actually dissolve in infinity.
And I see it as a very comfortable kind of light that really helps us to relax and to contemplate.
It could also be something like this: the National Museum of Science in London, where this blue is embracing all the exhibitions and galleries in one large gesture.
These three distinct elements, together, make a lighting environment that helps us to feel better.
And we can only create these out of darkness.
And I guess that is something that Richard Kelly, here on the left, was explaining to Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe.
And behind them, you see that Seagram Building that later turned into an icon of modern lighting design.
Those times, there were some early attempts also for light therapy already.
You can see here a photo from the United States Library of Medicine, where people are put in the sun to get better.
It's a little bit of a different story, this health aspect of light, than what I'm telling you today.
In today's modern medicine, there is a real understanding of light in an almost biochemical way.
And there is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for.
But our circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on, they are much more triggered by blue light.
And by modulating the amount of blue in our environment, we can help people to relax, or to be alert, to fall asleep, or to stay awake.
And that is how, maybe in the near future, light can help hospitals to make people better sooner, recover them quicker.
Maybe in the airplane, we can overcome jet lag like that.
And you can imagine a lot more applications.
So light is, of course, for social interaction also -- to create relationships with all the features around us.
It is the place where we gather around when we have to say something to each other.
And it is all about this planet.
But when you look at this planet at night, it looks like this.
And I think this is the most shocking image in my talk today.
Because all this light here goes up to the sky.
It never reaches the ground where it was meant for.
So at a global scale, it looks like this.
And, I mean, that is quite amazing, what you see here -- how much light goes up into the sky and never reaches the ground.
Because if we look at the Earth the way it should be, it would be something like this very inspiring image where darkness is for our imagination and for contemplation and to help us to relate to everything.
The world is changing though, and urbanization is a big driver of everything.
I took this photo two weeks ago in Guangzhou, and I realized that 10 years ago, there was nothing like this, of these buildings.
It was just a much smaller city, and the pace of urbanization is incredible and enormous.
And we have to understand these main questions: How do people move through these new urban spaces?
How do they share their culture?
And how can light help there?
Because the new technologies, they seem to be in a really interesting position to contribute to the solutions of urbanization and to provide us with better environments.
It's not that long ago that our lighting was just done with these kinds of lamps.
And of course, we had the metal-halide lamps and fluorescent lamps and things like that.
And this is exactly what offers us a unique opportunity, because this tiny, tiny size allows us to put the light wherever we really need it.
The problem is, though, that I wanted to explain to you how this really works -- but I can have four of these on my finger, so you would not be able to really see them.
So I asked our laboratory to do something about it, and they said, "Well, we can do something."
They created for me the biggest LED in the world especially for TEDx in Amsterdam.
So here it is.
It's the same thing as you can see over there -- just 200 times bigger.
Now, this is not very pleasant and comfortable.
And for that reason, we cover the LED with a phosphor cap.
And the phosphor is excited by the blue and makes the light white and warm and pleasant.
And then when you add the lens to that, you can bundle the light and send it wherever you need it without any need to spill any light to the sky or anywhere else.
I just wanted to show that to you so you understand how this works.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) We can go further.
So we have to rethink the way we light our cities.
We have to think again about light as a default solution.
Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness?
And can we preserve the darkness?
Because to find a place like this today on Earth is really very, very challenging.
And to find a starry sky like this is even more difficult.
And it's known that migrating birds, for example, get very disoriented because of these offshore platforms.
And we discovered that when we make those lights green, the birds, they actually go the right way.
And it turns out once again that spectral sensitivity is very important here.
In all of these examples, I think, we should start making the light out of darkness, and use the darkness as a canvas -- like the visual artists do, like Edward Hopper in this painting.
Where have they come from? Where are they going?
What will be happening in the next five minutes?
And it only embodies all these stories and all this suspense because of the darkness and the light.
Edward Hopper was a real master in creating the narration by working with light and dark.
We can do that in commercial spaces like this.
And you can still also go outside and enjoy the greatest show in the universe, which is, of course, the universe itself.
So I give you this wonderful, informative image of the sky, ranging from the inner city, where you may see one or two stars and nothing else, all the way to the rural environments, where you can enjoy this great and gorgeous and beautiful performance of the constellations and the stars.
By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives.
This is the most well-known example, Tadao Ando's Church of the Light.
But I also think of Peter Zumthor's spa in Vals, where light and dark, in very gentle combinations, alter each other to define the space.
Or Richard MacCormac's Southwark tube station in London, where you can really see the sky, even though you are under the ground.
And finally, I want to point out that a lot of this inspiration comes from theater.
And I think it's fantastic that we are today experiencing TEDx in a theater for the first time because I think we really owe to the theater a big thanks.
And I think the theater is a place where we truly enhance life with light.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Good morning everyone. First of all, it's been fantastic being here over these past few days.
And what was so amazing to me, and what fits right in with what we're all talking about here at TED, is that there, right in the middle of this rainforest, was some solar panels -- the first in that part of Ecuador -- and that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women wouldn't have to go down.
The water was cleaned, but because they got a lot of batteries, they were able to store a lot of electricity.
So every house -- and there were, I think, eight houses in this little community -- could have light for, I think it was about half an hour each evening.
And there is the Chief, in all his regal finery, with a laptop computer.
(Laughter) And this man, he has been outside, but he's gone back, and he was saying, "You know, we have suddenly jumped into a whole new era, and we didn't even know about the white man 50 years ago, and now here we are with laptop computers, and there are some things we want to learn from the modern world.
We want to know about what other people do -- we're interested in it.
And we want to learn other languages.
We want to know English and French and perhaps Chinese, and we're good at languages."
So there he is with his little laptop computer, but fighting against the might of the pressures -- because of the debt, the foreign debt of Ecuador -- fighting the pressure of World Bank, IMF, and of course the people who want to exploit the forests and take out the oil.
But, of course, my real field of expertise lies in an even different kind of civilization -- I can't really call it a civilization.
A different way of life, a different being.
We've talked earlier -- this wonderful talk by Wade Davis about the different cultures of the humans around the world -- but the world is not composed only of human beings; there are also other animal beings.
And I propose to bring into this TED conference, as I always do around the world, the voice of the animal kingdom.
Too often we just see a few slides, or a bit of film, but these beings have voices that mean something.
(Applause) I've been studying chimpanzees in Tanzania since 1960.
During that time, there have been modern technologies that have really transformed the way that field biologists do their work.
For example, for the first time, a few years ago, by simply collecting little fecal samples we were able to have them analyzed -- to have DNA profiling done -- so for the first time, we actually know which male chimps are the fathers of each individual infant.
Because the chimps have a very promiscuous mating society.
So this opens up a whole new avenue of research.
And we're using -- you can see that I'm not really into this kind of stuff -- but we're using satellite imagery to look at the deforestation in the area.
And of course, there's developments in infrared, so you can watch animals at night, and equipment for recording by video, and tape recording is getting lighter and better.
So in many, many ways, we can do things today that we couldn't do when I began in 1960.
Especially when chimpanzees, and other animals with large brains, are studied in captivity, modern technology is helping us to search for the upper levels of cognition in some of these non-human animals.
I think the chimpanzee in captivity who is the most skilled in intellectual performance is one called Ai in Japan -- her name means love -- and she has a wonderfully sensitive partner working with her.
And she'll come in to sit at this computer -- it's like a video game for a kid; she's hooked.
She's 28, by the way, and she does things with her computer screen and a touch pad that she can do faster than most humans.
She does very complex tasks, and I haven't got time to go into them, but the amazing thing about this female is she doesn't like making mistakes.
And her concentration -- she's already concentrated hard for 20 minutes or so, and now she wants to do it all over again, just for the satisfaction of having done it better.
And the food is not important -- she does get a tiny reward, like one raisin for a correct response -- but she will do it for nothing, if you tell her beforehand.
So here we are, a chimpanzee using a computer.
Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans also learn human sign language.
But the point is that when I was first in Gombe in 1960 -- I remember so well, so vividly, as though it was yesterday -- the first time, when I was going through the vegetation, the chimpanzees were still running away from me, for the most part, although some were a little bit acclimatized -- and I saw this dark shape, hunched over a termite mound, and I peered with my binoculars.
Anyway, David Greybeard -- and I saw that he was picking little pieces of grass and using them to fish termites from their underground nest.
The reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time, it was thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools.
So that when Louis Leakey, my mentor, heard this news, he said, "Ah, we must now redefine 'man,' redefine 'tool,' or accept chimpanzees as humans."
(Laughter) We now know that at Gombe alone, there are nine different ways in which chimpanzees use different objects for different purposes.
Moreover, we know that in different parts of Africa, wherever chimps have been studied, there are completely different tool-using behaviors.
And because it seems that these patterns are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice -- that is a definition of human culture.
What we find is that over these 40-odd years that I and others have been studying chimpanzees and the other great apes, and, as I say, other mammals with complex brains and social systems, we have found that after all, there isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The chimps -- there's no time to discuss their fascinating lives -- but they have this long childhood, five years of suckling and sleeping with the mother, and then another three, four or five years of emotional dependence on her, even when the next child is born.
The importance of learning in that time, when behavior is flexible -- and there's an awful lot to learn in chimpanzee society.
The long-term affectionate supportive bonds that develop throughout this long childhood with the mother, with the brothers and sisters, and which can last through a lifetime, which may be up to 60 years.
And we find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism.
We find in their non-verbal communication -- this is very rich -- they have a lot of sounds, which they use in different circumstances, but they also use touch, posture, gesture, and what do they do?
They kiss; they embrace; they hold hands.
They pat one another on the back; they swagger; they shake their fist -- the kind of things that we do, and they do them in the same kind of context.
Sometimes they hunt -- not that often, but when they hunt, they show sophisticated cooperation, and they share the prey.
We find that they show emotions, similar to -- maybe sometimes the same -- as those that we describe in ourselves as happiness, sadness, fear, despair.
And I don't have time to go into the information that will prove some of these things to you, save to say that there are very bright students, in the best universities, studying emotions in animals, studying personalities in animals.
We know that chimpanzees and some other creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors -- "self" as opposed to "other."
They have a sense of humor, and these are the kind of things which traditionally have been thought of as human prerogatives.
But this teaches us a new respect -- and it's a new respect not only for the chimpanzees, I suggest, but some of the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet.
So, the sad thing is that these chimpanzees -- who've perhaps taught us, more than any other creature, a little humility -- are in the wild, disappearing very fast.
They're disappearing in the heart of their range in Africa because the big multinational logging companies have come in and made roads -- as they want to do in Ecuador and other parts where the forests remain untouched -- to take out oil or timber.
They shoot everything, every single thing that moves that's bigger than a small rat; they sun-dry it or smoke it.
And now they've got transport; they take it on the logging trucks or the mining trucks into the towns where they sell it.
And it's not sustainable, and the huge logging camps in the forest are now demanding meat, so the Pygmy hunters in the Congo basin who've lived there with their wonderful way of living for so many hundreds of years are now corrupted.
They're given weapons; they shoot for the logging camps; they get money.
Their culture is being destroyed, along with the animals upon whom they depend.
We talked already about the loss of human cultural diversity, and I've seen it happening with my own eyes.
And the grim picture in Africa -- I love Africa, and what do we see in Africa?
Were the people that we heard about yesterday, on the Easter Island, who cut down their last tree -- were they stupid?
Didn't they know what was happening?
Of course, but if you've seen the crippling poverty in some of these parts of the world it isn't a question of "Let's leave the tree for tomorrow."
"How am I going to feed my family today?
Maybe I can get just a few dollars from this last tree which will keep us going a little bit longer, and then we'll pray that something will happen to save us from the inevitable end."
The one thing we have, which makes us so different from chimpanzees or other living creatures, is this sophisticated spoken language -- a language with which we can tell children about things that aren't here.
We can talk about the distant past, plan for the distant future, discuss ideas with each other, so that the ideas can grow from the accumulated wisdom of a group.
We can do it by talking to each other; we can do it through video; we can do it through the written word.
And we are abusing this great power we have to be wise stewards, and we're destroying the world.
In the developed world, in a way, it's worse, because we have so much access to knowledge of the stupidity of what we're doing.
Do you know, we're bringing little babies into a world where, in many places, the water is poisoning them?
And the air is harming them, and the food that's grown from the contaminated land is poisoning them.
And that's not just in the far-away developing world; that's everywhere.
Do you know we all have about 50 chemicals in our bodies we didn't have about 50 years ago?
And so many of these diseases, like asthma and certain kinds of cancers, are on the increase around places where our filthy toxic waste is dumped.
We're harming ourselves around the world, as well as harming the animals, as well as harming nature herself -- Mother Nature, that brought us into being; Mother Nature, where I believe we need to spend time, where there's trees and flowers and birds for our good psychological development.
And yet, there are hundreds and hundreds of children in the developed world who never see nature, because they're growing up in concrete and all they know is virtual reality, with no opportunity to go and lie in the sun, or in the forest, with the dappled sun-specks coming down from the canopy above.
As I was traveling around the world, you know, I had to leave the forest -- that's where I love to be.
I had to leave these fascinating chimpanzees for my students and field staff to continue studying because, finding they dwindled from about two million 100 years ago to about 150,000 now, I knew I had to leave the forest to do what I could to raise awareness around the world.
And the more I talked about the chimpanzees' plight, the more I realized the fact that everything's interconnected, and the problems of the developing world so often stem from the greed of the developed world, and everything was joining together, and making -- not sense, hope lies in sense, you said -- it's making a nonsense.
Somebody said that yesterday.
And as I was traveling around, I kept meeting young people who'd lost hope.
They were feeling despair, they were feeling, "Well, it doesn't matter what we do; eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Everything is hopeless -- we're always being told so by the media."
And then I met some who were angry, and anger that can turn to violence, and we're all familiar with that.
And I looked in the eyes of my little grandchildren, and think how much we've harmed this planet since I was their age.
I feel this deep shame, and that's why in 1991 in Tanzania, I started a program that's called Roots and Shoots.
And Roots and Shoots is a program for hope.
Roots make a firm foundation.
Then, you see, it is a message of hope.
Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through, and can make this a better world.
And the most important message of Roots and Shoots is that every single individual makes a difference.
Every individual has a role to play.
Every one of us impacts the world around us everyday, and you scientists know that you can't actually -- even if you stay in bed all day, you're breathing oxygen and giving out CO2, and probably going to the loo, and things like that -- you're making a difference in the world.
So, the Roots and Shoots program involves youth in three kinds of projects.
And these are projects to make the world around them a better place.
One project to show care and concern for your own human community.
And the third kind of project: something for the local environment.
It's going to depend which part, say, of America they're in.
We're in every state now, and the problems in Florida are different from the problems in New York.
It's going to depend on which country they're in -- and we're already in 60-plus countries, with about 5,000 active groups -- and there are groups all over the place that I keep hearing about that I've never even heard of, because the kids are taking the program and spreading it themselves.
Why?
That's effective, but if they decide themselves, "We want to clean this river and put the fish back that used to be there.
We want to clear away the toxic soil from this area and have an organic garden.
We want to go and work in a dog shelter.
We want to learn about animals. We want ... " You know, it goes on and on, and this is very hopeful for me.
Everywhere there are children with shining eyes saying, "Look at the difference we've made."
And now comes the technology into it, because with this new way of communicating electronically these kids can communicate with each other around the world.
And if anyone is interested to help us, we've got so many ideas but we need help -- we need help to create the right kind of system that will help these young people to communicate their excitement.
But also -- and this is so important -- to communicate their despair, to say, "We've tried this and it doesn't work, and what shall we do?"
The philosophy is very simple.
We do not believe in violence.
No violence, no bombs, no guns.
That's not the way to solve problems.
Violence leads to violence, at least in my view.
The tools for solving the problems are knowledge and understanding.
Know the facts, but see how they fit in the big picture.
Hard work and persistence --don't give up -- and love and compassion leading to respect for all life.
How many more minutes? Two, one?
Chris Anderson: One -- one to two.
Jane Goodall: Two, two, I'm going to take two.
(Laughter) Are you going to come and drag me off?
(Laughter) Anyway -- so basically, Roots and Shoots is beginning to change young people's lives.
It's what I'm devoting most of my energy to.
And I believe that a group like this can have a very major impact, not just because you can share technology with us, but because so many of you have children.
And if you take this program out, and give it to your children, they have such a good opportunity to go out and do good, because they've got parents like you.
And it's been so clear how much you all care about trying to make this world a better place.
It's very encouraging.
Secondly, the resilience of nature.
And thirdly, the last speaker talked about -- or the speaker before last, talked about the indomitable human spirit.
We are surrounded by the most amazing people who do things that seem to be absolutely impossible.
Nelson Mandela -- I take a little piece of limestone from Robben Island Prison, where he labored for 27 years, and came out with so little bitterness, he could lead his people from the horror of apartheid without a bloodbath.
Even after the 11th of September -- and I was in New York and I felt the fear -- nevertheless, there was so much human courage, so much love and so much compassion.
And just after that a woman brought me this little bell, and I want to end on this note.
She said, "If you're talking about hope and peace, ring this.
So, yes, there is hope, and where is the hope?
It's in our hands.
It's in your hands and my hands and those of our children.
We're the ones who can make a difference.
If we lead lives where we consciously leave the lightest possible ecological footprints, if we buy the things that are ethical for us to buy and don't buy the things that are not, we can change the world overnight.
Thank you.
This is about a place in London called Kiteflyer's Hill where I used to go and spend hours going "When is he coming back? When is he coming back?"
But this is "Kiteflyer's Hill."
It's a beautiful song written by a guy called Martin Evan, actually, for me.
Boo Hewerdine, Thomas Dolby, thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a blessing singing for you.
Thank you very much.
♫ Do you remember when we used to go ♫ ♫ up to Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Those summer nights, so still ♫ ♫ with all of the city beneath us ♫ ♫ and all of our lives ahead ♫ ♫ before cruel and foolish words ♫ ♫ were cruelly and foolishly said ♫ ♫ Some nights I think of you ♫ ♫ and then I go up ♫ ♫ on Kiteflyer's Hill ♫ ♫ wrapped up against the winter chill ♫ ♫ And somewhere in the city beneath me ♫ ♫ you lie asleep in your bed ♫ ♫ and I wonder if ever just briefly ♫ ♫ do I creep in your dreams now and then ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you think of me sometimes ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Oh, I pray you one day will ♫ ♫ We won't say a word ♫ ♫ We won't need them ♫ ♫ Sometimes silence is best ♫ ♫ We'll just stand in the still of the evening ♫ ♫ and whisper farewell to loneliness ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Do you think of me sometimes? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? Kiteflyer's ... ♫ ♫ [French] ♫ ♫ Where are you? Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Kiteflyer's ... ♫ (Applause) Gracias. Thank you very much.
If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom," she's going to call me "Point B," because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.
And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand."
And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach.
So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal.
Believe me, I've tried.
"And, baby," I'll tell her, don't keep your nose up in the air like that.
I know that trick; I've done it a million times.
You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him.
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him.
But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix.
But that's what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me.
(Singing) There'll be days like this, my momma said.
And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you.
Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away.
And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.
And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive.
But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar.
It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing.
And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thanks.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true.
The only rule is don't think too hard.
So here are three things I know to be true.
I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order."
(Laughter) And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke.
(Laughter) Why was the scarecrow invited to TED?
(Laughter) I'm sorry.
Okay, so these are three things I know to be true.
Sometimes I get to the end of the poem, look back and go, "Oh, that's what this is all about," and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
Spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry.
And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable.
And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry.
I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theater, had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know.
My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine.
The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me.
The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking.
I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd.
She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, "Hey, I really felt that. Thanks."
I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could.
I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about.
In fact, they welcomed me.
The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well.
Never mind the fact that I was 14.
They told me, "Write about being 14."
Now I can divide my spoken-word journey into three steps.
Step one was the moment I said, "I can. I can do this."
And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie.
Step two was the moment I said, "I will. I will continue.
There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine.
It's not just the adage "Write what you know."
I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been.
When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E.
But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E., this time changing the mission to using spoken-word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire.
We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus.
But it turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary.
Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry.
And the first list that I assign is "10 Things I Know to be True."
And here's what happens, you would discover it too if we all started sharing our lists out loud.
At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list.
Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before.
Fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they're introducing a new angle of looking at it.
But one of my students, a freshman named Charlotte, was not convinced.
Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems.
So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list "10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now."
Number three on Charlotte's list was, "I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age."
I asked her what that meant, and she said, "Miss, it's kind of a long story."
And I said, "Charlotte, it sounds pretty interesting to me."
And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before.
(Laughter) "Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool -- nothing but swim trunks on -- diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion?
After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god."
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you.
Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this.
You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up.
I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.
I'm always trying to find the best way to tell each story.
I write musicals; I make short films alongside my poems.
But I teach spoken-word poetry because it's accessible.
Not everyone can read music or owns a camera, but everyone can communicate in some way, and everyone has stories that the rest of us can learn from.
And maybe even a giant girl in a hoodie who will connect with what you've shared.
And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14.
Plus, now with YouTube, that connection's not even limited to the room we're in.
I'm so lucky that there's this archive of performances that I can share with my students.
You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself.
And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing.
Because step three never ends.
But you don't get to start on step three, until you take step one first: "I can."
I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did.
And I'm trying to tell stories only I can tell -- like this story.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film -- And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end?
And I always thought that my beginning was at the Bowery Poetry Club, but it's possible that it was much earlier.
In preparing for TED, I discovered this diary page in an old journal.
I think December 54th was probably supposed to be 24th.
I think that we all did.
I would like to help others rediscover that wonder -- to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out.
So I'd like to close with this poem.
And what was left of the city soon followed.
When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before."
When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby."
My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth.
But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page.
So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.
My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name.
In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible, and -- she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible.
Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day.
Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk -- they hear you.
It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth -- that impossible connection.
There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation.
But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone.
The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light.
After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again.
I start quickly becoming part of your past.
So if you tell me I can do the impossible -- I'll probably laugh at you.
This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
You may know this feeling: you wake up to multiple unread notifications on your mobile phone.
Your calendar is already packed with meetings, sometimes double- or triple-booked.
You feel engaged, you feel busy.
You try to figure out what it is.
But before you do, the next day starts all over again.
I felt stressed; I felt anxious.
I felt a bit trapped.
The world around me was moving very quickly.
And I didn't know what to do.
I started wondering to myself: How do I keep up with all this?
How do we find fulfillment in a world that's literally changing as fast as we can think, or maybe even faster?
I started looking for answers.
I even read many self-help books.
In fact, the more self-help books I read, the more stressed and anxious I became.
(Laughter) It was like I was feeding my mind with junk food, and I was becoming mentally obese.
(Laughter) I was about to give up, until one day, I found this.
This is an ancient Chinese philosophy classic that was written more than 2,600 years ago.
And it was by far the thinnest and the smallest book on the bookshelf.
It only had 81 pages.
And each page had a short poem.
I remember I flipped to one particular poem.
Here it is.
(Laughter) Let me read it out to you.
In being, it flows to depths.
It is content with its nature and therefore cannot be faulted."
I felt the biggest chills down my spine.
My anxiety and stress just suddenly disappeared.
Ever since that day, I've been trying to apply the concepts in this passage to my day-to-day life.
And today, I'd like to share with you three lessons I learned so far from this philosophy of water -- three lessons that I believe have helped me find greater fulfillment in almost everything that I do.
The first lesson is about humility.
If we think about water flowing in a river, it is always staying low.
It helps all the plants grow and keeps all the animals alive.
It doesn't actually draw any attention to itself, nor does it need any reward or recognition.
But without water's humble contribution, life as we know it may not exist.
Water's humility taught me a few important things.
It taught me that instead of acting like I know what I'm doing or I have all the answers, it's perfectly OK to say, "I don't know.
I want to learn more, and I need your help."
It also taught me that, instead of promoting my glory and success, it is so much more satisfying to promote the success and glory of others.
It taught me that, instead of doing things where I can get ahead, it so much more fulfilling and meaningful to help other people overcome their challenges so they can succeed.
With a humble mindset, I was able to form a lot richer connections with the people around me.
I became genuinely interested in the stories and experiences that make them unique and magical.
Life became a lot more fun, because every day I'd discover new quirks, new ideas and new solutions to problems I didn't know before, all thanks to the ideas and help from others.
All streams eventually flow to the ocean because it is lower than them.
Humility gives water its power.
But I think it gives us the capacity to remain grounded, to be present, to learn from and be transformed by the stories of the people around us.
The second lesson I learned is about harmony.
When faced with an obstacle, somehow water finds a solution, without force, without conflict.
When I was thinking through this, I began to understand why I was feeling stressed out in the first place.
Instead of working in harmony with my environment, I was working against it.
I was forcing things to change because I was consumed by the need to succeed or to prove myself.
In the end, nothing did.
By simply shifting my focus from trying to achieve more success to trying to achieve more harmony, I was immediately able to feel calm and focused again.
I started asking questions like: Will this action bring me greater harmony and bring more harmony to my environment?
Does this align with my nature?
I became more comfortable simply being who I am, rather than who I'm supposed to be or expected to be.
I stopped fighting with myself, and I learned to work with my environment to solve its problems.
Yet, everything is accomplished.
That's Tao Te Ching's way of describing the power of harmony.
Just as water is able to find a solution without force or conflict, I believe we can find a greater sense of fulfillment in our endeavors by shifting focus from achieving more success to achieving more harmony.
The third lesson I learned from the philosophy of water is about openness.
Depending on the temperature, it can be a liquid, solid or gas.
Depending on the medium it's in, it can be a teapot, a cup or a flower vase.
In fact, it's water's ability to adapt and change and remain flexible that made it so enduring through the ages, despite all the changes in the environment.
We also live in a world today of constant change.
We can no longer expect to work to a static job description or follow a single career path.
We, too, are expected to constantly reinvent and refresh our skills to stay relevant.
In our organization, we host a lot of hackathons, where small groups or individuals come together to solve a business problem in a compressed time frame.
And what's interesting to me is that the teams that usually win are not the ones with the most experienced team members, but the ones with members who are open to learn, who are open to unlearn and who are open to helping each other navigate through the changing circumstances.
Life is like a hackathon in some way.
Now, we can stay behind closed doors and continue to be paralyzed by our self-limiting beliefs, such as: "I will never be able to talk about Chinese philosophy in front of a huge audience."
Those are the three lessons I learned from the philosophy of water so far.
They nicely abbreviate to H-H-O, or H2O.
(Laughter) This simple and powerful question inspired by a book written long before the days of bitcoin, fintech and digital technology has changed my life for the better.
Try it, and let me know how it works for you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life.
That was a great day for my mother.
My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine.
(Laughter) And Grandma was even more excited.
Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand-washed laundry for seven children.
And now, she was going to watch electricity do that work.
My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this.
And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, "No, no, no, no!
Let me! Let me push the button!"
(Laughter) And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, "Oh, fantastic!
I want to see this! Give me a chair! Give me a chair! I want to see it," and she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program.
(Laughter) She was mesmerized.
To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.
Today, in Sweden and other rich countries, people are using so many different machines.
I can't even name them all.
And yet, in the world, there are so many people who still heat the water on fire, and they cook their food on fire.
Sometimes they don't even have enough food.
And they live below the poverty line.
There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day.
And the richest people over there -- there's one billion people, and they live above what I call the "air line" -- (Laughter) because they spend more than 80 dollars a day on their consumption.
They have electricity, but the question is: How many have washing machines?
I've done the scrutiny of market data, and I've found that, indeed, the washing machine has penetrated below the air line, and today, there's an additional one billion people out there who live above the "wash line."
(Laughter) And they consume for more than 40 dollars per day.
So two billion have access to washing machines.
Or, to be more precise, how do most of the women in the world wash?
Because it remains the hard work for women to wash.
They wash like this: by hand.
It's hard, time-consuming labor, which they have to do for hours every week.
And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home, or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off.
And they want the washing machine.
And there's nothing different in their wish than it was for my grandma.
They want the washing machine in exactly the same way.
And then I ask my students -- over the last two years, I've asked -- "How many of you don't use a car?"
And some of them proudly raise their hand and say, "I don't use a car."
And then I put the really tough question: "How many of you hand-wash your jeans and your bedsheets?"
And no one raised their hand.
Even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines.
(Laughter) So how come [this is] something that everyone uses and they think others will not stop it?
Look here. You see the seven billion people up there?
One unit like this is an energy unit of fossil fuel -- oil, coal or gas.
That's what most of the electricity and the energy in the world is.
Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world population.
This group uses three, one each.
And they also have electricity.
That makes 12 of them.
But the main concern for the environmentally interested students -- and they are right -- is about the future.
What are the trends?
If we just prolong the trends, without any real advanced analysis, to 2050, there are two things that can increase the energy use: first, population growth; second, economic growth.
Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here, because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman.
And that will get you two extra, but that won't change the energy use very much.
And they will start to use as much as the Old West are doing already.
(Laughter) And these people, they want the washing machine.
But the total energy consumption will increase to 22 units.
And these 22 units -- still, the richest people use most of them.
Because the risk, the high probability of climate change is real.
It's real.
Of course, they must be more energy efficient.
They must change their behavior in some way.
They must also start to produce green energy, much more green energy.
(Laughter) (Applause) Here, we can get more green energy all over.
But I can assure you that this woman in the favela in Rio, she wants a washing machine.
She's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone -- so happy that she even voted for her.
And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world, moving from minister of energy to president.
If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines.
They love them!
(Laughter) And what's the magic with them?
My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day.
She said, "Now, Hans.
And now we can go to the library."
Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine?
And mother got time to read for me.
She loved this.
And she also got books for herself.
She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language.
And she read so many novels, so many different novels here.
And we really, we really loved this machine.
(Laughter) And what we said, my mother and me, "Thank you, industrialization.
And thank you, chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books."
Thank you very much.
(Laughter) (Applause)
I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival.
It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day -- where fun is serious business.
(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, meet your cousins.
This is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of Congo.
Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your living closest relative.
That means we all share a common ancestor, an evolutionary grandmother, who lived around six million years ago.
Now, chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression.
But bonobos show us the other side of the coin.
While chimpanzees are dominated by big, scary guys, bonobo society is run by empowered females.
These guys have really worked something out, since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet.
But unfortunately, bonobos are the least understood of the great apes.
They live in the depths of the Congolese jungle, and it has been very difficult to study them.
The Congo is a paradox -- a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself -- the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the First World War.
Not surprisingly, this destruction also endangers bonobo survival.
Bushmeat trades and forest loss means we couldn't fill a small stadium with all the bonobos that are left in the world -- and we're not even sure of that to be honest.
Yet, in this land of violence and chaos, you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees.
Who are these cousins?
We know them as the "make love, not war" apes since they have frequent, promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues.
Now, I'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems -- since there's more to bonobo life than the Kama Sutra.
Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives.
Play is not just child's games.
For us and them, play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance.
It's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game.
Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the generation of diversity -- diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections.
And when you watch bonobo play, you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual.
Play is the glue that binds us together.
Now, I don't know how you play, but I want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild.
Yeah.
(Laughter) So sex play is common in both bonobos and humans.
And this video is really interesting because it shows -- this video's really interesting because it shows the inventiveness of bringing unusual elements into play -- such as testicles -- and also how play both requires trust and fosters trust -- while at the same time being tremendous fun.
And I want you to see, this is Fuku, a young female, and she is quietly playing with water.
I think, like her, we sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds.
And it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore, drives us to interact, and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity.
So these are just small tasters into the insights that bonobo give us to our past and present.
But they also hold a secret for our future, a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation.
The secret is that play is the key to these capacities.
In other words, play is our adaptive wildcard.
In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play.
But will we make the most of our playfulness?
Play is not frivolous.
Play's essential.
For bonobos and humans alike, life is not just red in tooth and claw.
In times when it seems least appropriate to play, it might be the times when it is most urgent.
And so, my fellow primates, let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together, as we rediscover creativity, fellowship and wonder.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Today I want to talk about design, but not design as we usually think about it.
I want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific, biotechnological culture, where, for really the first time in history, we have the power to design bodies, to design animal bodies, to design human bodies.
In the history of our planet, there have been three great waves of evolution.
The first wave of evolution is what we think of as Darwinian evolution.
Then human beings stepped out of the Darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution, which was we changed the environment in which we evolved.
We altered our ecological niche by creating civilization.
And that has been the second great -- couple 100,000 years, 150,000 years -- flow of our evolution.
By changing our environment, we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve.
Whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities, all the way through modern medicine, we have changed our own evolution.
Now we're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history, which has been called many things: "intentional evolution," "evolution by design" -- very different than intelligent design -- whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet.
So I want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species, as well as our cultures, because of this change.
Now we actually have been doing it for a long time.
We started selectively breeding animals many, many thousands of years ago.
And if you think of dogs for example, dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures.
There isn't a dog on this earth that's a natural creature.
Dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like.
But we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them.
This is a beefalo.
A beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid.
And they are now making them, and someday, perhaps pretty soon, you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket.
This is a geep, a goat-sheep hybrid.
The scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards.
I think they said it tasted like chicken.
And they are now using these in certain cultures.
This is the largest cat in the world -- the lion-tiger hybrid.
It's bigger than a tiger.
And in the case of the liger, there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild.
But these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology.
None of this is Photoshopped. These are real creatures.
And so one of the things we've been doing is using genetic enhancement, or genetic manipulation, of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics.
But something much, much more powerful is happening now.
These are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish.
We all know that some deep-sea creatures glow.
Well, they've now taken that gene, that bioluminescent gene, and put it into mammal cells.
These are normal cells.
And what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light.
And by the way, the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that's a bioluminescent gene from coral, while this is from jellyfish.
They did it with pigs.
They did it with puppies.
And, in fact, they did it with monkeys.
In other words, it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark.
And in fact, right now in many states, you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets.
These are zebra fish. They're normally black and silver.
These are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow, green, red, and they are actually available now in certain states.
Other states have banned them.
There is no area of the government -- not the EPA or the FDA -- that controls genetically-engineered pets.
And so some states have decided to allow them, some states have decided to ban them.
Some of you may have read about the FDA's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon.
The salmon on top is a genetically engineered Chinook salmon, using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat, to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed.
And right now the FDA is trying to make a final decision on whether, pretty soon, you could be eating this fish -- it'll be sold in the stores.
And before you get too worried about it, here in the United States, the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it.
These are all the first cloned animals of their type.
He actually was the first person to clone a dog, which is a very difficult thing to do, because dog genomes are very plastic.
It's a Haflinger horse cloned in Italy, a real "gold ring" of cloning, because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings.
In other words, the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed.
But if you can clone that horse, you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud.
These were the first cloned calves, the first cloned grey wolves, and then, finally, the first cloned piglets: Alexis, Chista, Carrel, Janie and Dotcom.
(Laughter) In addition, we've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species.
So with antithrombin in that goat -- that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that GTC Genetics wants to create.
And then in addition, transgenic pigs, knockout pigs, from the National Institute of Animal Science in South Korea, are pigs that they are going to use, in fact, to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them, instead of producing them in an industrial way.
These are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species.
The guar is an endangered Southeast Asian ungulate.
A somatic cell, a body cell, was taken from its body, gestated in the ovum of a cow, and then that cow gave birth to a guar.
Same thing happened with the mouflon, where it's an endangered species of sheep.
We have two kinds of DNA in our bodies.
We have our nucleic DNA that everybody thinks of as our DNA, but we also have DNA in our mitochondria, which are the energy packets of the cell.
So really, what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon, but a guar with cow mitochondria, and therefore cow mitochondrial DNA, and a mouflon with another species of sheep's mitochondrial DNA.
These are really hybrids, not pure animals.
And it raises the question of how we're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology -- a question that we're not really sure yet how to solve.
This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach.
And what they've done here is they've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top, and it's on a big computer tracking ball.
And now, using a joystick, they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right, forwards or backwards.
They've created a kind of insect bot, or bugbot.
This actually is one of DARPA's very important -- DARPA is the Defense Research Agency -- one of their projects.
These goliath beetles are wired in their wings.
They have a computer chip strapped to their backs, and they can fly these creatures around the lab.
And in fact, this technology has gotten so developed that this creature -- this is a moth -- this is the moth in its pupa stage, and that's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology, so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth, it is already prewired.
Again, it's got technology -- it's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres; it's got a camera on top of its head.
The scientists can make this creature go left, right.
They have it running through mazes, controlling where it's going.
They've now created an organic robot.
The graduate students in Sanjiv Talwar's lab said, "Is this ethical?
He took owl monkeys, wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved, especially looking at the movement of their right arm.
The computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways.
They then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm, which you see here in the picture, put the arm in another room.
Pretty soon, the computer learned, by reading the monkey's brainwaves, to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey's arm did.
Then he put a video monitor in the monkey's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm, and the monkey got fascinated.
The monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm, this prosthetic arm would do.
And eventually she was moving it and moving it, and eventually stopped moving her right arm and, staring at the screen, could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves -- which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms.
And it's not just technology that we're putting into animals.
He took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons -- so these are just individual neurons from rats -- put them on a chip.
They self-aggregated into a network, became an integrated chip.
And he used that as the IT piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator.
So now we have organic computer chips made out of living, self-aggregating neurons.
It is living -- fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides, attached photosensitive sensors to the brain, put it into a cart -- here's the cart, the brain is sitting there in the middle -- and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart, when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart, the cart moves toward the light; when you turn it off, it moves away.
It's photophilic.
I don't know, but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding.
So, we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes.
This is a mouse created by Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts.
He altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin, put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being.
This is where we are in this process.
Finally, not that long ago, Craig Venter created the first artificial cell, where he took a cell, took a DNA synthesizer, which is a machine, created an artificial genome, put it in a different cell -- the genome was not of the cell he put it in -- and that cell then reproduced as the other cell.
In other words, that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent -- it did not have an organic parent.
This is what Frankenstein's lab looks like.
This is a DNA synthesizer, and here at the bottom are just bottles of A, T, C and G -- the four chemicals that make up our DNA chain.
And so, we need to ask ourselves some questions.
We can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power, and it confers on us a responsibility.
Do we have free reign to design animals?
Do we get to create organic robots, where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings?
And then the final step of this, once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings, what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then?
It's already happening. It's not science fiction.
We are not only already using these things in animals, some of them we're already beginning to use on our own bodies.
We are now taking control of our own evolution.
We are directly designing the future of the species of this planet.
It confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now.
It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future.
(Applause)
I want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities, or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again.
We at Berkeley Bionics call these robots exoskeletons.
It is actually the true integration of the man and the machine.
To show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the American soldier, that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs, and they are being asked to carry more equipment.
Obviously, this is resulting in some major complications -- back injuries, 30 percent of them -- chronic back injuries.
So we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue.
So let me now introduce to you HULC -- or the Human Universal Load Carrier.
Soldier: With the HULC exoskeleton, I can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours.
Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and high-agility movements.
It senses what I want to do, where I want to go, and then augments my strength and endurance.
Now let's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users, something that I'm particularly passionate about.
There are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide.
This is about one percent of the total population.
And that's actually a conservative estimate.
We are talking here about, oftentimes, very young individuals with spinal cord injuries, that in the prime of their life -- 20s, 30s, 40s -- hit a wall and the wheelchair's the only option.
And the only option, pretty much -- when it's stroke or other complications -- is the wheelchair.
And that is actually for the last 500 years, since its very successful introduction, I must say.
So we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility.
(Applause) EB: Amanda is wearing our eLEGS set.
It has sensors.
It's completely non-invasive, sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back.
There are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips, as well as her knee joints, that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait.
AB: I was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me.
In a split second, I lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis.
Not long afterwards, a doctor strode into my hospital room, and he said, "Amanda, you'll never walk again."
And that was 19 yeas ago.
Adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again, to rock climb and even handcycle.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) EB: As you can see, we have the technology, we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you.
It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations -- not only for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone.
AB: Thanks.
(Applause)
(Singing) (Singing ends) (Applause) Pep Rosenfeld: Folks, you've just met Claron McFadden.
She is a world-class soprano singer who studied in Rochester, New York.
Her celebrated operatic roles are numerous and varied.
In August 2007, Claron was awarded the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts, winning praise for her brilliance, her amazing and extensively wide repertoire and her vivid stage personality.
Please welcome Claron McFadden.
(Applause) Claron McFadden: The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal.
For me, the human voice is the vessel on which all emotions travel -- except, perhaps, jealousy.
And the breath, the breath is the captain of that vessel.
A child is born, takes its first breath -- (Inhales) Whah!
And we behold the wondrous beauty of vocal expression -- mysterious, spontaneous and primal.
A few years ago, I did a meditation retreat in Thailand.
I wanted a place where I would have total silence and total solitude.
I spent two weeks at this retreat in my own little hut -- no music, no nothing -- sounds of nature, trying to find the essence of concentration, being in the moment.
On my last day, the woman who looked after the place, she came and we spoke for a minute, and then she said to me, "Would you sing something for me?"
And I thought, but this is a place of total quiet and silence.
She said, "Please, sing for me."
Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high.
So hush little baby, don't you cry.
And I opened my eyes, and I saw that she had her eyes closed.
And after a moment, she opened her eyes and she looked at me and she said, "It's like meditation."
The emotions can flow from me to you and back.
There's a piece by a composer, an American composer called John Cage.
It's called "Aria."
No notes, no flats, no sharps.
But it's a kind of structure.
And the singer, within this structure, has total freedom to be creative, spontaneous.
For example, there are different colors and each color gets a different type of singing -- pop, country and western, opera, jazz -- and you just have to be consistent with that color.
You choose in your own tempo in your own way to follow the line, but you must respect it, more or less.
And these little dots, these represent a sort of sound that's not a vocal, not a lyrical way of expressing the voice.
So within this structure, one is free.
It's quite spontaneous.
And it's primal.
(Singing) Vidiel’a facilmente E io sono per te (Robotic voice) No other way Dans l'espace, so help (Singing) Si juste Dvidzénya bistri (Claps) (Singing) On pekrásen idyot a k u O a k ho a Sivayoot eternal loosin (Sneezes) (Laughs) Shh!
I know what you're thinking.
(Laughter) "Come to visit the children?
How long are you staying?"
I have been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years.
(Applause) And in that time, I have seen a lot of changes.
Now that statistic is quite shocking.
And I want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of English.
I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi.
And one fine day, she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary.
But it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses -- medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal.
How did those students get all that knowledge?
Of course, from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents.
But sadly, today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate.
Now, at the same time, English is the undisputed global language.
Well I don't know.
But I do know that I've seen a lot of changes.
Actually, not that long ago.
That is a little bit too early.
But nevertheless, I was recruited by the British Council, along with about 25 other teachers.
And we were the first non-Muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait.
We were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education.
And of course, the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth.
Now this is the major change that I've seen -- how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today.
No longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum, and no longer the sole domain of mother England, it has become a bandwagon for every English-speaking nation on earth.
And why not?
After all, the best education -- according to the latest World University Rankings -- is to be found in the universities of the U.K. and the U.S.
So everybody wants to have an English education, naturally.
But if you're not a native speaker, you have to pass a test.
Now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone?
Well, I don't think so.
We English teachers reject them all the time.
We put a stop sign, and we stop them in their tracks.
Now let me put it this way: if I met a monolingual Dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer, would I stop him from entering my British University?
I don't think so.
But indeed, that is exactly what we do.
We English teachers are the gatekeepers.
And you have to satisfy us first that your English is good enough.
Now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society.
"But," I hear you say, "what about the research?
It's all in English."
And so it goes on.
I ask you, what happened to translation?
If you think about the Islamic Golden Age, there was lots of translation then.
They translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic, into Persian, and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe and the Romance languages.
And so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe.
Now don't get me wrong; I am not against teaching English, all you English teachers out there.
But I am against using it as a barrier.
Do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being English, or Chinese?
This system equates intelligence with a knowledge of English, which is quite arbitrary.
(Applause) And I want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today's intelligentsia stand did not have to have English, they didn't have to pass an English test.
Case in point, Einstein.
He, by the way, was considered remedial at school because he was, in fact, dyslexic.
But fortunately for the world, he did not have to pass an English test.
Now it's exploded.
And millions and millions of students take these tests every year.
Now you might think, you and me, "Those fees aren't bad, they're okay," but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people.
(Applause) It brings to mind a headline I saw recently: "Education: The Great Divide."
Now I get it, I understand why people would want to focus on English.
They want to give their children the best chance in life.
And to do that, they need a Western education.
Because, of course, the best jobs go to people out of the Western Universities, that I put on earlier.
But they couldn't get the results they wanted.
They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German.
So bingo, problem solved.
But if another language can think that thought, then, by cooperating, we can achieve and learn so much more.
My daughter came to England from Kuwait.
She had studied science and mathematics in Arabic.
She had to translate it into English at her grammar school.
And she was the best in the class at those subjects.
Which tells us that when students come to us from abroad, we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know, and they know it in their own language.
So he invented a cost-free solar lamp.
(Applause) When he received his award, he said these lovely words: "The children can lead Africa from what it is today, a dark continent, to a light continent."
A simple idea, but it could have such far-reaching consequences.
People who have no light, whether it's physical or metaphorical, cannot pass our exams, and we can never know what they know.
Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark.
Let us celebrate diversity.
Use it to spread great ideas.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause)
The idea behind the Stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple.
We don't want Iran to get the bomb.
Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
The gray boxes that you see, these are real-time control systems.
Now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge.
The gray boxes don't run Windows software; they are a completely different technology.
But if we manage to place a good Windows virus on a notebook that is used by a maintenance engineer to configure this gray box, then we are in business.
So we start with a Windows dropper.
The payload goes onto the gray box, damages the centrifuge, and the Iranian nuclear program is delayed -- mission accomplished.
When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was.
The only thing that was known is it's very, very complex on the Windows part, the dropper part, used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities.
And it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems.
So that got our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet and checked this thing out.
Stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that didn't like our cheese -- sniffed, but didn't want to eat.
The dropper is prowling actively on the gray box if a specific configuration is found, and even if the actual program code that it's trying to infect is actually running on that target.
And if not, Stuxnet does nothing.
It could be, let's say for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany.
So we extracted and decompiled the attack code, and we discovered that it's structured in two digital bombs -- a smaller one and a bigger one.
So they know everything.
And if you have heard that the dropper of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you this: the payload is rocket science.
Here you see a sample of this actual attack code.
We are talking about -- around about 15,000 lines of code.
Looks pretty much like old-style assembly language.
So what we were looking for is, first of all, system function calls, because we know what they do.
And then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world -- to potential real world targets.
Now you don't find several thousand targets in that area.
It basically boils down to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and to the Natanz fuel enrichment plant.
So I told my assistant, "Get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base."
And I phoned them up and picked their brain in an effort to match their expertise with what we found in code and data.
And that worked pretty well.
So we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control.
The rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge, that black object that you see.
And if you manipulate the speed of this rotor, you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode.
So for example, the number 164 really stands out in that code; you can't overlook it.
I started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in Natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade, and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges.
And it even got better.
These centrifuges in Iran are subdivided into 15, what is called, stages.
So again, that was a real good match.
Now don't get me wrong here, it didn't go like this.
These results have been obtained over several weeks of really hard labor.
Anyway, so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target, but from different angles.
The small warhead is taking one cascade, and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down, and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves.
So in all, we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is.
It is Natanz, and it is only Natanz.
So we don't have to worry that other targets might be hit by Stuxnet.
Down there is the gray box, and on the top you see the centrifuges.
Now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors -- so for example, from pressure sensors and vibration sensors -- and it provides legitimate program code, which is still running during the attack, with fake input data.
And as a matter of fact, this fake input data is actually prerecorded by Stuxnet.
The idea here is obviously not only to fool the operators in the control room.
It actually is much more dangerous and aggressive.
The idea is to circumvent a digital safety system.
We need digital safety systems where a human operator could not act quick enough.
Obviously, this cannot be done by a human operator.
So this is where we need digital safety systems.
And when they are compromised, then real bad things can happen.
That's scary.
But it gets worse.
So it would work as well, for example, in a power plant or in an automobile factory.
It is generic.
And you don't have -- as an attacker -- you don't have to deliver this payload by a USB stick, as we saw it in the case of Stuxnet.
You could also use conventional worm technology for spreading.
Just spread it as wide as possible.
And if you do that, what you end up with is a cyber weapon of mass destruction.
That's the consequence that we have to face.
They're in the United States and Europe and in Japan.
So all of the green areas, these are your target-rich environments.
We have to face the consequences, and we better start to prepare right now.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: I've got a question.
Ralph, it's been quite widely reported that people assume that Mossad is the main entity behind this.
Is that your opinion?
Ralph Langner: Okay, you really want to hear that?
My opinion is that the Mossad is involved, but that the leading force is not Israel.
So the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower.
There is only one, and that's the United States -- fortunately, fortunately.
Because otherwise, our problems would even be bigger.
(Applause)
Adrian Kohler: Well, we're here today to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse.
Basil Jones: But actually we're going to start this evolution with a hyena.
(Laughter) Hahahaha.
The hyena is the ancestor of the horse because it was part of a production called "Faustus in Africa," a Handspring Production from 1995, where it had to play draughts with Helen of Troy.
This production was directed by South African artist and theater director, William Kentridge.
BJ: From an actor.
It's their kind of ur-story onstage, that desperation to live.
AK: Yeah, it's basically a dead object, as you can see, and it only lives because you make it.
And in a way that's a metaphor for life.
So we call this a piece of emotional engineering that uses up-to-the-minute 17th century technology -- (Laughter) to turn nouns into verbs.
AK: Well actually I prefer to say that it's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life.
BJ: Okay so.
AK: It has ears that move passively when the head goes.
BJ: And it has these bulkheads made out of plywood, covered with fabric -- curiously similar, in fact, to the plywood canoes that Adrian's father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop.
AK: In Port Elizabeth, the village outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa.
BJ: His mother was a puppeteer.
I really thought they were so beneath me.
I wanted to become an avant-garde artist -- and Punch and Judy was certainly not where I wanted to go.
And, in fact, it took about 10 years to discover the Bambara Bamana puppets of Mali in West Africa, where there's a fabulous tradition of puppetry, to learn a renewed, or a new, respect for this art form.
AK: So in 1981, I persuaded Basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company.
And 20 years later, miraculously, we collaborated with a company from Mali, the Sogolon Marionette Troupe of Bamako, where we made a piece about a tall giraffe.
It was just called "Tall Horse," which was a life-sized giraffe.
BJ: And here again, you see the same structure.
It's got two people inside it on stilts, which give them the height, and somebody in the front who's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head.
And he's controlling the ear movement.
BJ: So this production was seen by Tom Morris of the National Theatre in London.
And just around that time, his mother had said, "Have you seen this book by Michael Morpurgo called 'War Horse'?"
AK: It's about a boy who falls in love with a horse.
BJ: So Tom gave us a call and said, "Do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the National Theatre?"
BJ: But it had to ride. It had to have a rider.
AK: It had to have a rider, and it had to participate in cavalry charges.
(Laughter) A play about early 20th century plowing technology and cavalry charges was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department at the National Theatre in London.
So we began with a test.
BJ: This is Adrian and Thys Stander, who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse, and our next-door neighbor Katherine, riding on a ladder.
This is a cardboard model, a little bit smaller than the hyena.
You'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there.
BJ: And the two manipulators are inside.
But we didn't realize at the time that we actually needed a third manipulator, because we couldn't manipulate the neck from inside and walk the horse at the same time.
AK: We started work on the prototype after the model was approved, and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated.
We had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones.
It had to be shipped to London.
We were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in Cape Town, and it got to midnight and we hadn't done that yet.
BJ: So we got a camera, and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances.
And we sent it off to the National Theatre, hoping that they believed that we created something that worked.
(Laughter) AK: A month later, we were there in London with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us.
BJ: About 40 people.
We opened the lid, we took the horse out, and it did work; it walked and it was able to be ridden.
Here I have an 18-second clip of the very first walk of the prototype.
The choreographer, Toby Sedgwick, invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse, which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs, grew up into the big horse.
And Nick Starr, the director of the National Theatre, saw that particular moment, he was standing next to me -- he nearly wet himself.
And we went back to Cape Town and redesigned the horse completely.
Here is the plan.
(Laughter) And here is our factory in Cape Town where we make horses.
You can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there.
The horses are completely handmade.
There is very little 20th century technology in them.
We used a bit of laser cutting on the plywood and some of the aluminum pieces.
But because they have to be light and flexible, and each one of them is different, they can't be mass-produced, unfortunately.
So here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in London.
And now we would like to introduce you to Joey.
Joey boy, you there?
Joey.
(Applause) (Applause) Joey.
Joey, come here.
He's got it; it's in his pocket.
BJ: Joey.
AK: Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey.
Come here. Stand here where people can see you.
Here, Craig is working the head.
He has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand.
But he also controls the head directly by using his hand.
The ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse.
When they point right back, the horse is fearful or angry, depending upon what's going on in front of him, around him.
Horses' hearing is very important.
It's almost more important than their eyesight.
Over here, Tommy's got what you call the heart position.
You see the string tendon from the hyena, the hyena's front leg, automatically pulls the hoop up.
(Laughter) Horses are so unpredictable.
BJ: And Mikey also has, in his fingers, the ability to move the tail from left to right, and up and down with the other hand.
AK: You want to say something about the breathing?
Adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that -- because that's how a horse would breathe, with an expanded chest.
And it's very, very simple because all that happens is that the puppeteer breathes with his knees.
AK: Other emotional stuff.
If I were to touch the horse here on his skin, the heart puppeteer can shake the body from inside and get the skin to quiver.
And I would like you to believe that it was an aesthetic choice, that I was making a three-dimensional drawing of a horse that somehow moves in space.
But of course, it was the cane is light, the cane is flexible, the cane is durable and the cane is moldable.
The skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh, which, if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear, she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike.
You see the skeletal structure of it.
Again, that was a practical consideration.
The guys inside the horse have to be able to see out.
They have to be able to act along with their fellow actors in the production.
It's three heads making one character.
And plant.
(Applause) (Applause) (Music) So we would like to stress that the performance you see in the horse is three guys who have studied horse behavior incredibly thoroughly.
AK: Mikey Brett from Leicestershire.
(Applause) Mikey Brett, Craig, Leo, Zem Joaquin and Basil and me.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
It was October 13, 2012, a day that I will never forget.
I was on my bike, pushing up what seemed like a never-ending barren hill.
And it wasn't just any hill: it was a 15-mile climb up to a town called Hawi on the Big Island of Hawaii.
I can still feel my muscles burning.
I was struggling, tired and dehydrated, as I could feel the heat emanating from the asphalt, measuring almost 98 degrees.
I was near the halfway point of the bike portion of one of the most prestigious, longest, single-day endurance race events in the world.
Every year, during my childhood, I watched this very race on TV in our family living room.
I sat next to my dad on our 1970s-style orange and brown sofa, and I remember being in utter awe at how these athletes pushed themselves to their limit in this grueling race.
They were incredibly athletic, and I always participated from the sidelines, cheering on my three siblings or handing out water at local races.
I remember wanting so badly to be able to compete, but I couldn't.
Even though I couldn't play sports, I decided to be active in my community.
I volunteered at the local hospital in high school.
In college, I interned at the White House, studied abroad in Spain and backpacked through Europe all by myself with my leg braces and crutches.
Upon graduating, I moved to New York City for a job in management consulting, earned an MBA, got married and now have a daughter.
(Applause) At age 28, I was introduced to the sport of hand-cycling, and then triathlon, and by luck, I met Jason Fowler, an Ironman World Champion, at a camp for athletes with disabilities.
And with his encouragement, at age 34, I decided to go after Kona.
The Kona, or Hawaii Ironman is the oldest Iron-distance race in the sport, and if you're not familiar, it's like the Super Bowl of triathlon.
And the Ironman, for a wheelchair athlete like me, consists of a 2.4-mile open-water swim in the Pacific Ocean, a 112-mile hand cycle ride in lava fields -- now, that sounds exotic, but it's not as scenic as it sounds, and it's pretty desolate -- and then you top it off with a marathon, or a 26.2-mile run in 90-degree heat using a racing wheelchair.
That's right, it's a total distance of 140.6 miles using just your arms in less than 17 hours.
No female wheelchair athlete had ever completed the race because of the strict, seemingly impossible cutoff times.
And when I finally reached the top of that 15-mile climb, I was discouraged.
I had to make the agonizing decision to quit.
I removed my timing chip, and I handed it over to a race official.
My day was done.
My best friend Shannon and my husband Shawn were waiting at the top of Hawi to drive me back to town.
And on my way back to town, I began to cry.
I had failed.
My dream of completing the Ironman World Championship was crushed.
I felt like I'd messed up.
I worried about what my friends, my family and people at work would think of me.
A few weeks later I was talking to Shannon about the Kona "disaster," and she said this to me: "Minda, big dreams and goals can only be realized when you're ready to fail."
I was born in Bombay, India, and just before my first birthday, I contracted polio, which left me paralyzed from the hips down.
Unable to care for me, my birth mother left me at an orphanage.
Fortunately, I was adopted by an American family, and I moved to Spokane, Washington just shortly after my third birthday.
Over the next few years, I underwent a series of surgeries on my hips, my legs and my back that allowed me to walk with leg braces and crutches.
As a child, I struggled with my disability.
People stared at me all the time, and I was embarrassed about wearing a back brace and leg braces, and I always hid my chicken legs under my pants.
As a young girl, I thought thick, heavy braces on my legs did not look pretty or feminine.
Among my generation, I am one of the very few individuals in the US who are living with paralysis by polio today.
Many people who contract polio in developing countries do not have access to the same medical care, education, or opportunities like I have had in America.
Many do not even live to reach adulthood.
I have the humbling knowledge that, had I not been adopted, I most certainly wouldn't be in front of you today.
I may not even be alive.
All of us, in our own lives, may face seemingly insurmountable goals.
I want to share with you what I learned when I tried again.
I focused on one stroke at a time, staying in between bodies, counting my strokes -- one, two, three, four -- and lifting my head to sight every so often just so I wouldn't get too off track.
On to the bike segment.
I had eight hours and 45 minutes to complete the 112-mile bike course.
I broke up the course in seven- to 10-mile segments in my mind just to reduce the enormity of the race.
And I told myself, "Minda, you better focus.
Focus on what you can control, and that is your attitude and your effort."
I resolved to be OK being uncomfortable, and I told myself, "Push harder, forget about the pain, and keep that laser focus."
For the next 90 minutes, I cranked as though my life depended on it.
And when I rolled into town, I heard on the loudspeaker, "Minda Dentler is one of the last competitors to make the bike cutoff."
I did it!
(Applause) By only three minutes.
(Laughter) It was 5:27pm, and I had been racing for 10-and-a-half hours.
The first 10 miles of the run went pretty quickly, as I was so excited to finally pass people with my three wheels to their two feet.
The sun quickly went down, and I found myself pulling up to the bottom of Palani hill, looking straight into a half-mile hill that looked like Mt. Everest at mile 124 of the race.
My friends and family were ready at their stations to talk me up that hill.
I was struggling, tired, desperately gripping those rims just so I wouldn't tip backwards.
When I finally reached the top of that hill, I turned left onto a very lonely 15-mile stretch onto the Queen K Highway, totally exhausted.
I pressed on, focusing on one push at a time.
By 9:30pm, I made that final right-hand turn onto Ali'i Drive.
I heard the crowd's roar, and I was overcome with emotion.
I crossed that finish line.
For the first time in the 35-year history, a female wheelchair athlete completed the Ironman World Championship.
(Applause) (Applause ends) And it wasn't just any female athlete.
(Laughter) A paralyzed orphan from India.
Against all odds, I achieved my dream, and through this very personal commitment to myself, I slowly realized that completing the Ironman was about more than conquering Kona.
Today, we are closer than ever to eliminating one of those diseases everywhere in the world.
In the mid-1980s, polio once paralyzed more than 350,000 children a year in more than 125 countries.
By contrast, so far this year, the last endemic countries have reported a total of only 12 cases.
Since 1988, more than 2.5 billion children have been immunized against polio, and an estimated 16 million children, who otherwise would have been paralyzed like me, are walking.
Despite this incredible progress, we know that until it's eradicated, polio remains a very real threat, especially to children in the poorest communities of the world.
And I am reminded every day, when I look at my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maya.
She is able to climb a ladder in the park, push her scooter or kick a ball across the grass.
Almost everything that I see her do at her age reminds me of what I could not do at that age.
And when she was two months old, I took her to get her first polio vaccine.
And when the doctor came in the room to prepare the shot, I asked him if I could take a picture to document the moment.
When we left the room, I could feel my eyes welling up with tears.
I cried the entire way home.
It was in that moment that I realized that my daughter's life would be very different from mine.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In 1996, I was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to execute a large body of work called "Uses of Evidence."
It was a cube -- a very well large cube, at that.
Each side had a window in order for the spectators to view the interior of the structure.
The exterior of the structure was a collage of Africa and Africans as portrayed in the Western media and literature.
A look through the windows revealed a sharp contrast: within the cubes are tranquil, civilized, domestic images of African family members, friends and Nigerian professionals, ranging from writers, poets, fashion designers, etc.
But the images captured by Western media overwhelmingly depict Africans as basically primitive at best, or barely distinguishable from the African animals.
Not much has changed, I'm afraid, since 1996, when I executed this work.
I began my professional photography practice in 1994, but my passion and enthusiasm for photography goes back to childhood, when my parents arranged for us to be photographed by a professional photographer on almost a monthly basis.
Later, when I was in boarding school, my friends and I bought Polaroid cameras, and then I began to experiment with self-portraiture, or what I would call "proto-selfie auto-portraits."
(Laughter) "Cover Girl 1994" was my first major work that was critically well received in the US and Europe and quite instantly became a part of the school anthologies at universities and colleges.
With the "Cover Girl" series, I wanted to reimagine the magazine cover with imagery totally unexpected, yet profoundly reasonable.
The "Cover Girl" series proposed a different way the African can be represented in a more complex manner.
Like "Cover Girl," the "Sartorial Anarchy" series is made up of self-portraits.
These differences became a source of inspired artistic celebration.
For example, in "Sartorial Anarchy #4," I mixed a boater hat, inspired by the traditional Eton-Oxford College Boat Race, with a green Afghan traditional coat and an American Boy Scout shirt -- a culture clash that works.
In "Sartorial Anarchy #5," I wore a macaroni wig, inspired by eighteenth-century macaroni headgear from England.
This was paired with a British Norfolk jacket, Yoruba Nigerian trousers, and, improbably, a South African Zulu fighting stick.
All harmoniously coexist on one body.
And with "Sartorial Anarchy," I began to invest more into the organization of my pictures.
I also began to investigate the vast possibilities of color: its emotional values, psychological impulse, poetic allure and a boundless capacity beyond the realm of meaning and logic.
Now, enter Nollywood.
In October of 2014, I returned to Lagos, Nigeria, after over three decades away and took photographs of 64 Nollywood personalities.
I captured a cross section of the industry, as well as the next generation of rising stars.
Nollywood is the first time that you have a school of African filmmakers truly, truly, profoundly in charge of telling African stories.
In their varied movies -- from romantic movies, horror films, gangster movies to action movies -- one sees Nigerians portrayed with many layers of complexities.
All the Nigerian, or "Naija," archetypes, if you allow, are there -- from the divvers, the "Shakara," the coquette, the gangsters, the rich, the corrupt politicians, the whore, the pimp -- all in their swagger.
Nollywood is Africa's mirror par excellence.
She is the reigning queen of Nollywood.
Every aspect of her being commands attention.
So I posed her with her back to the audience.
She doesn't need to seek our approval.
In this portrait, he simply sat and allowed his massive, massive Nigerian caftan to signal his status.
Quite an accomplishment.
Belinda Effah.
Belinda Effah's portrait allowed me to indulge my passion for color, dressed in a long, fitted blue dress that emphasizes her curves, seated on an upholstered green velvet bench.
Her picture, or portrait, pretty much speaks for itself.
Enyinna Nwigwe is a Nollywood matinee idol.
That's what I felt when I designed and organized the portrait.
Now, Nollywood is a new phase of Africa.
It is modern, post-modern, meta-modern, bold sexy, shrewd and with a contagious attitude worth catching.
As the finale of the project, I assembled the Nollywood stars into a group grand portrait of 64 subjects, called "The School of Nollywood," which was inspired by Rafael's "School of Athens," that was done circa 1509.
It is at the Vatican.
It measures roughly 27 feet in width by six and a half feet in height.
Nollywood also exemplifies a type of modernity never before seen in Africa.
Think of it: there has never been anything so ubiquitous with such iconic optics to come out of Africa since the Nile Valley civilizations of Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia.
Outside of Nollywood, the image of Africa remains frozen in the old "National Geographic" mode and safari perspective.
But as Africans continue to step and see themselves portrayed by Nollywood in their varied and fantastic complexities, they will, in turn, propagate and perpetuate the positive image of themselves.
This is what Hollywood did and continues to do for the West.
As shocking as this may be, it is almost a taboo in the art world to show Africans in a modern framework -- that is to say, as polished, dry-cleaned, manicured, pedicured and coiffed.
(Applause) Part of my job is to keep beautifying Africa for the world, one portrait at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As a boy, I loved cars.
When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident.
Like this.
And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year.
Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.
I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert.
And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars went nowhere.
We built the hardware and the software.
And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars.
Yet I still hadn't saved a single life.
We've driven 140,000 miles.
Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving.
We've driven in cities, like in San Francisco here.
We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.
In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people didn't even notice.
Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco.
(Laughter) Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even do little stunts.
(Video) Man: Oh, my God.
What?
Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I can do something for all the people who died.
Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people?
And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error, and can therefore be prevented by machines?
Do you realize that you, TED users, spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic, wasting your time on your daily commute?
This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone.
And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted.
Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I wanted to be a rock star.
I dreamed of it, and that's all I dreamed of.
To be more accurate, I wanted to be a pop star.
This was in the late '80s.
And mostly I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran.
I didn't read music, but I played synthesizers and drum machines.
And I grew up in this little farming town in northern Nevada.
And when I went to college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas when I was 18, I was stunned to find that there was not a Pop Star 101, or even a degree program for that interest.
And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir.
And I said, "Yes, I would love to do that. It sounds great."
And about a week later, a friend of mine came to me and said, "Listen, you've got to join choir.
And the soprano section is just full of hot girls."
And I went to my first day in choir, and I sat down with the basses and sort of looked over my shoulder to see what they were doing.
They opened their scores, the conductor gave the downbeat, and boom, they launched into the Kyrie from the "Requiem" by Mozart.
The most transformative experience I've ever had -- in that single moment, hearing dissonance and harmony and people singing, people together, the shared vision.
And I felt for the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than myself.
I decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life.
I had learned to read music by then, or slowly learning to read music.
And then I started conducting, and I ended up doing my master's degree at the Juilliard School.
And I find myself now in the unlikely position of standing in front of all of you as a professional classical composer and conductor.
Well a couple of years ago, a friend of mine emailed me a link, a YouTube link, and said, "You have got to see this."
And it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me, singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called "Sleep."
My name is Britlin Losee, and this is a video that I'd like to make for you.
Here's me singing "Sleep."
I'm a little nervous, just to let you know.
Britlin was so innocent and so sweet, and her voice was so pure.
And I even loved seeing behind her; I could see the little teddy bear sitting on the piano behind her in her room.
Such an intimate video.
And I had this idea: if I could get 50 people to all do this same thing, sing their parts -- soprano, alto, tenor and bass -- wherever they were in the world, post their videos to YouTube, we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir.
So I wrote on my blog, "OMG OMG."
(Laughter) And I sent out this call to singers.
And I made free the download of the music to a piece that I had written in the year 2000 called "Lux Aurumque," which means "light and gold."
Now I should say, before that, what I did is I posted a conductor track of myself conducting.
And then as the videos started to come in ...
(Singing) This is Evangelina Etienne (Singing) from Massachusetts.
(Singing) Stephen Hanson from Sweden.
(Singing) This is Jamal Walker from Dallas, Texas.
I was told later, and also by lots of singers who were involved in this, that they sometimes recorded 50 or 60 different takes until they got just the right take -- they uploaded it.
Here's our winner of the soprano solo.
(Singing) I love the little smile she does right over the top of the note -- like, "No problem, everything's fine."
And he said, "Listen, this is the project I've been looking for my whole life.
I said, "Thank you, Scott. I'm so glad that you found me."
He scrubbed the audio.
And then we posted this video to YouTube about a year and a half ago.
This is "Lux Aurumque" sung by the Virtual Choir.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you so much.
And I had the same reaction you did.
I actually was moved to tears when I first saw it.
And the video went viral.
We had a million hits in the first month and got a lot of attention for it.
And because of that, then a lot of singers started saying, "All right, what's Virtual Choir 2.0?"
And so I decided for Virtual Choir 2.0 that I would choose the same piece that Britlin was singing, "Sleep," which is another work that I wrote in the year 2000 -- poetry by my dear friend Charles Anthony Silvestri.
And again, I posted a conductor video, and we started accepting submissions.
(Singing) And some younger members.
(Video) Soprano: ♫ Upon my pillow ♫ ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: That's Georgie from England. She's only nine.
Someone did all eight videos -- a bass even singing the soprano parts.
(Video) Beau Awtin: ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: And our goal -- it was sort of an arbitrary goal -- there was an MTV video where they all sang "Lollipop" and they got people from all over the world to just sing that little melody.
And there were 900 people involved in that.
So I told the singers, "That's our goal.
And we just closed submissions January 10th, and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries.
Thank you.
(Applause) From Malta, Madagascar, Thailand, Vietnam, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, as far north as Alaska and as far south as New Zealand.
"My sister and I used to sing in choirs together constantly.
Now she's an airman in the air force constantly traveling.
It's so wonderful to sing together again!"
I love the idea that she's singing with her sister.
"Aside from the beautiful music, it's great just to know I'm part of a worldwide community of people I never met before, but who are connected anyway."
And my personal favorite, "When I told my husband that I was going to be a part of this, he told me that I did not have the voice for it."
Me too.
"It hurt so much, and I shed some tears, but something inside of me wanted to do this despite his words.
It is a dream come true to be part of this choir, as I've never been part of one.
When I placed a marker on the Google Earth Map, I had to go with the nearest city, which is about 400 miles away from where I live.
As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush, satellite is my connection to the world."
The first is that human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other.
And the second is that people seem to be experiencing an actual connection.
It wasn't a virtual choir.
There are people now online that are friends; they've never met.
I feel a closeness to this choir -- almost like a family.
What I'd like to close with then today is the first look at "Sleep" by Virtual Choir 2.0.
But we do have the first three minutes.
And it's a tremendous honor for me to be able to show it to you here first.
You're the very first people to see this.
This is "Sleep," the Virtual Choir.
(Video) Virtual Choir: ♫ The evening hangs ♫ ♫ beneath the moon ♫ ♫ A silver thread on darkened dune ♫ ♫ With closing eyes and resting head ♫ ♫ I know that sleep is coming soon ♫ ♫ Upon my pillow, ♫ ♫ safe in bed, ♫ ♫ a thousand pictures fill my head ♫ ♫ I cannot sleep ♫ ♫ my mind's aflight ♫ ♫ and yet my limbs seem made of lead ♫ ♫ If there are noises in the night ♫ Eric Whitacre: Thank you very, very much. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a huge believer in hands-on education.
But you have to have the right tools.
If I'm going to teach my daughter about electronics, I'm not going to give her a soldering iron.
And similarly, she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands.
So my wonderful student Sam and I decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of: Play-Doh.
And so we spent a summer looking at different Play-Doh recipes.
And these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough -- pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen.
We have two favorite recipes -- one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt.
And they're great. We can make great little sculptures with these.
You see that really salty Play-Doh?
Well, it conducts electricity.
And this is nothing new.
It turns out that regular Play-Doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity, and high school physics teachers have used that for years.
And that sugar dough?
Well it's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough.
So what does that mean?
Well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits -- circuits that the most creative, tiny, little hands can build on their own.
(Applause) And so I want to do a little demo for you.
So if I take this salt dough, again, it's like the play-dough you probably made as kids, and I plug it in -- it's a two-lead battery pack, simple battery pack, you can buy them at Radio Shack and pretty much anywhere else -- we can actually then light things up.
But if any of you have studied electrical engineering, we can also create a short circuit.
Well now if I take that sugar dough, the sugar dough doesn't want to conduct electricity.
It's like a wall to the electricity.
In fact, I could even add some movement to my sculptures.
(Applause) And once you have the basics, we can make a slightly more complicated circuit.
We call this our sushi circuit. It's very popular with kids.
I plug in again the power to it.
And now I can start talking about parallel and series circuits.
And we can start talking about things like electrical load.
What happens if I put in lots of lights and then add a motor?
We can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we've done.
You could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this.
So this is all in your home kitchen.
We've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab.
We have a website, it's all there. These are the home recipes.
And it's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone.
So I would encourage you all to grab some Play-Doh, grab some salt, grab some sugar and start playing.
We don't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers, but maybe we should.
(Applause)
Ten years ago, on a Tuesday morning, I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
It was a routine training jump, like many more I'd done since I became a paratrooper 27 years before.
We went down to the airfield early because this is the Army and you always go early.
And you put on the T-10 parachute.
And you're very careful how you put the straps, particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs.
And then a jumpmaster comes, and he's an experienced NCO in parachute operations.
He checks you out, he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed, your shoulders are crushed down, and, of course, he's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well.
Then you load the aircraft, and then you stand up and you get on, and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this, in a line of people, and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft.
And you wait a little bit longer, because this is the Air Force teaching the Army how to wait.
Then you take off.
They give 20 minutes -- that's a time warning.
You sit there, OK.
Then they give you 10 minutes.
And of course, you're responding with all of these.
And that's to boost everybody's confidence, to show that you're not scared.
Then they give you, "Get ready."
I'm probably going to jump.
There's no way to get out of this at this point."
You go through some additional checks, and then they open the door.
So nice air comes flowing in.
The jumpmasters start to check the door.
And then when it's time to go, a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes, "Go."
Jump is a misnomer; you fall.
You do that because, 27 years before, an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that.
I have no idea whether it makes any difference, but he seemed to make sense, and I wasn't going to test the hypothesis that he'd be wrong.
And of course, if your leg straps aren't set right, at that point you get another little thrill.
Boom.
So then you look around, you're under a canopy and you say, "This is good."
Now you prepare for the inevitable.
You can't delay that much.
And you really can't decide where you hit very much, because they pretend you can steer, but you're being delivered.
And then as you get close, you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line, so that it's not on you when you land, and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall.
Now the Army teaches you to do five points of performance -- the toes of your feet, your calves, your thighs, your buttocks and your push-up muscles.
(Laughter) I always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window.
(Laughter) And I'd look around, and then I'd see another paratrooper, a young guy or girl, and they'd have pulled out their M4 carbine and they'd be picking up their equipment.
They'd be doing everything that we had taught them.
And I realized that, if they had to go into combat, they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders.
So now I do that Tuesday morning jump, but it's not any jump -- that was September 11th, 2001.
And when we took off from the airfield, America was at peace.
When we landed on the drop-zone, everything had changed.
And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very, very real -- and leadership seemed important.
But things had changed; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general.
I'd been successful, but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes, and on that morning, I didn't know it.
I was raised with traditional stories of leadership: Robert E. Lee, John Buford at Gettysburg.
And I also was raised with personal examples of leadership.
This was my father in Vietnam.
And I was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful; they didn't lie, cheat, steal or abandon their comrades.
But in my first 25 years of career, I had a bunch of different experiences.
But then a couple of years later, when I was a company commander, I went out to the National Training Center.
And we did an operation, and my company did a dawn attack -- you know, the classic dawn attack: you prepare all night, move to the line of departure.
And after the battle, they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an "after action review" to teach you what you've done wrong.
Sort of leadership by humiliation.
They put a big screen up, and they take you through everything: "and then you didn't do this, and you didn't do this, etc."
I walked out feeling as low as a snake's belly in a wagon rut.
And I saw my battalion commander, because I had let him down.
And I went up to apologize to him, and he said, "Stanley, I thought you did great."
And in one sentence, he lifted me, put me back on my feet, and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.
When 9/11 came, 46-year-old Brig. Gen. McChrystal sees a whole new world.
First, the things that are obvious, that you're familiar with: the environment changed -- the speed, the scrutiny, the sensitivity of everything now is so fast, sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it.
But everything we do is in a different context.
More importantly, the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries.
And instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them, I'm now leading a force that's dispersed, and I've got to use other techniques.
I've got to use video teleconferences, I've got to use chat, I've got to use email, I've got to use phone calls -- I've got to use everything I can, not just for communication, but for leadership.
A 22-year-old individual operating alone, thousands of miles from me, has got to communicate to me with confidence.
I have to have trust in them and vice versa.
And I also have to build their faith.
And that's a new kind of leadership for me.
So we had to get complex intelligence together, we had to line up the ability to act.
It was sensitive, we had to go up the chain of command, convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium.
The mission didn't work.
And so now what we had to do is I had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force, rebuild their confidence -- me and them, and them and me, and our seniors and us as a force -- all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder.
Entirely new requirement.
It was men, women, young, old -- not just from military; from different organizations, many of them detailed to us just from a handshake.
And so instead of giving orders, you're now building consensus and you're building a sense of shared purpose.
Probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference, the ages, had changed so much.
I asked, "Where were you on 9/11?"
And one young Ranger in the back -- his hair's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold Afghan wind -- he said, "Sir, I was in the sixth grade."
And it reminded me that we're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness, and yet he has different experiences, in many cases a different vocabulary, a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than I do and many of the other senior leaders.
It also produced something which I call an inversion of expertise, because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot, that suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn't what the force was doing anymore.
So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven't done what the people you're leading are doing?
And it's a brand new leadership challenge.
And it forced me to become a lot more transparent, a lot more willing to listen, a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower.
Then another thing.
There's an effect on you and on your leaders.
There's an impact, it's cumulative.
I stood in front of a screen one night in Iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces.
And I remembered his son was in our force.
And I said, "John, where's your son? And how is he?"
I said, "Where is he now?"
And it's a new cumulative pressure on leaders.
I probably learned the most about relationships.
I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment.
And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed.
And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem.
It's a promise.
Every Ranger promises every other Ranger, "No matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming."
And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger.
And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.
And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever.
We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive."
And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.
And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough.
I hope it's not over.
I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust.
It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs.
(Laughter) And it isn't always fair.
But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So what does the happiest man in the world look like?
He certainly doesn't look like me.
His name is Matthieu Ricard.
Well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain.
And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex.
He's by far the happiest man ever measured by science.
Which leads us to a question: What was he thinking when he was being measured?
(Laughter) Actually, he was meditating on compassion.
My dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime -- and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale.
Compassion is something that creates happiness.
Compassion is fun.
And that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game.
Therefore, to create the conditions for global compassion, all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun.
But fun is not enough.
Then, every boss, every manager in the world, will want to have compassion -- like this.
That would create the conditions for world peace.
Because what I was looking for was right in front of my eyes -- in Google, my company.
Google is a company born of idealism.
In Google, expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern.
It starts with a small group of Googlers taking the initiative to do something.
And they don't usually ask for permission; they just go ahead and do it, and then other Googlers join in, and it just gets bigger and bigger.
And sometimes it gets big enough to become official.
So in other words, it almost always starts from the bottom up.
The first example is the largest annual community event -- where Googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities -- was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official, because it just became too big.
Another example, three Googlers -- a chef, an engineer and, most funny, a massage therapist -- three of them, they learned about a region in India where 200,000 people live without a single medical facility.
So what do they do?
And they raise enough money to build this hospital -- the first hospital of its kind for 200,000 people.
During the Haiti earthquake, a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones.
And expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices.
In China for example, one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in China, involving more than 1,000 schools in China, working on issues such as education, poverty, health care and the environment.
There is so much organic social action all around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts.
And this idea, again, came from the grassroots, from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job.
And I found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy.
It was two persons saying, "Let's do this," and the company said, "Yes."
But again, fun is not enough.
There are also real business benefits.
So what are they?
The first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders.
There are three components of compassion.
There is the cognitive component, which is, "I understand you."
So what has this got to do with business leadership?
According to a very comprehensive study led by Jim Collins, and documented in the book "Good to Great," it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness.
And he calls them "Level 5 leaders."
These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, possess two important qualities, and they are humility and ambition.
These are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good.
And because they're ambitious for a greater good, they feel no need to inflate their own egos.
And they, according to the research, make the best business leaders.
And if you look at these qualities in the context of compassion, we find that the cognitive and affective components of compassion -- understanding people and empathizing with people -- inhibits, tones down, what I call the excessive self-obsession that's in us, therefore creating the conditions for humility.
The motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good.
In other words, compassion is the way to grow Level 5 leaders.
And this is the first compelling business benefit.
The second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce.
Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good.
It creates a vibrant, energetic community where people admire and respect each other.
I mean, you come to work in the morning, and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in India.
So this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration, initiative and creativity.
The first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good.
This awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in.
The second ingredient is autonomy.
So in Google, there's a lot of autonomy.
And one of our most popular managers jokes that, this is what he says, "Google is a place where the inmates run the asylum."
And he considers himself one of the inmates.
If you already have a culture of compassion and idealism and you let your people roam free, they will do the right thing in the most compassionate way.
The third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth.
Leadership training in Google, for example, places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, empathy and compassion, because we believe that leadership begins with character.
We even created a seven-week curriculum on emotion intelligence, which we jokingly call "Searching Inside Yourself."
So I'm an engineer by training, but I'm one of the creators and instructors of this course, which I find kind of funny, because this is a company that trusts an engineer to teach emotion intelligence.
(Laughter) So "Search Inside Yourself" -- how does it work?
It works in three steps.
The first step is attention training.
Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities.
Therefore, any curriculum for training emotion intelligence has to begin with attention training.
The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time.
And this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence.
The second step follows the first step.
The second step is developing self-knowledge and self-mastery.
It means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, objectivity and from a third-person perspective.
And once you can do that, you create the kind of self-knowledge that enables self-mastery.
The third step, following the second step, is to create new mental habits.
Imagine whenever you meet any other person, any time you meet a person, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, "I want you to be happy.
I want you to be happy."
Imagine you can do that.
Having this habit, this mental habit, changes everything at work.
Because this good will is unconsciously picked up by other people, and it creates trust, and trust creates a lot of good working relationships.
And this also creates the conditions for compassion in the workplace.
Someday, we hope to open-source "Search Inside Yourself" so that everybody in the corporate world will at least be able to use it as a reference.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion."
I found this to be true, both on the individual level and at a corporate level.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous.
I went to prison -- difficult.
I worked in a coal mine -- dangerous.
And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this -- fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end.
So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different.
I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk.
(Laughter) That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again -- (Laughter) to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be.
So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it.
(Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks?
It's a lot.
(Laughter) So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights.
Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty.
But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising.
(Laughter) You see, I had this idea for a movie.
(Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising.
Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center ...
these people will be married to the film in perpetuity -- forever.
And so the film explores this whole idea -- (Michael Kassan: It's redundant.) It's what? (MK: It's redundant.) In perpetuity, forever?
But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film.
The goal of this whole film is transparency.
So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish.
And I would love for CEG to help make it happen.
Robert Friedman: You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience.
XK: Do you have a perspective -- I don't want to use "angle" because that has a negative connotation -- but do you know how this is going to play out? (MS: No idea.) David Cohn: How much money does it take to do this?
MS: 1.5 million. (DC: Okay.) John Kamen: I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands.
XK: Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots.
MS: What do you think the response is going to be?
Stuart Ruderfer: The responses mostly will be "no."
JK: Both.
MS: ... Meaning not so optimistic.
So, sir, can you help me? I need help.
MS: Okay. (MK: Good.) Awesome.
MS: Yeah. (MK: That's the challenge.) When you look at the people you deal with ..
MS: I thought "Turn the camera off" meant, "Let's have an off-the-record conversation."
MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared.
None of them wanted anything to do with this movie.
And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible.
But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this.
Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever.
This would have been fine.
But what this image represents was the problem.
See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is --- (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up.
So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin. No.
(Laughter) This is was the problem: transparency -- free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices -- that last line being probably the biggest problem.
You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days.
Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it.
But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes.
But why? Well, transparency is scary -- (Roar) like that odd, still-screaming bear.
(Laughter) It's unpredictable -- (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road.
Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, "No, we want you to tell a story.
We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story."
See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie -- and there he is giving me the look he often gave me -- he would say, "Son, there's three sides to every story.
There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story."
Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story.
But with only one company, one agency willing to help me -- and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years -- I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team.
So what you suddenly started to realize -- or what I started to realize -- is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem.
(Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make.
And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have.
And then my friends who make small independent films say, "Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?"
Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant.
While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, "Are you fresh enough for this interview?
Are you ready? You look a little nervous.
I want to help you calm down.
Whether it's a "Floral Fusion" or a "Paradise Winds," they'll have their chance.
That's the two-cent tour.
Karen Frank: We are a smaller brand.
So we don't have the budgets that other brands have.
Ban is blank.
KF: That's a great question.
Man: We talk about bold, fresh.
I think "fresh" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus "fights odor and wetness."
It keeps you fresh.
MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation.
They need to tell me about my brand.
(Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand?
I don't know.
I like really nice clothes.
Woman: 80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day.
MS: All right, what is brand Gerry?
I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that.
But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too.
Woman: If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz.
Man 2: The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly.
Woman 2: Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl -- I don't know.
So I guess that's my brand.
In my warped little industry, that's my brand.
Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods.
Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand.
Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand.
Tom: I'm Tom.
(Laughter) And what I realized is I needed an expert.
I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your "brand personality."
They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality.
(Video) Abigail: You brought your pictures, right?
MS: I did. The very first picture is a picture of my family.
A: So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are.
A: Tell me about this world.
MS: This world? I think your world is the world that you live in -- like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do.
MS: The next one: This was the best day ever.
A: How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are?
MS: It's like, who do I want to be?
A: Tell me about the "why" phase -- what does that do for us?
What is the machete? What pupa stage are you in now?
Why is it important to reboot? What does the red represent?
Tell me a little bit about that part.
A: Thanks for you patience. (MS: Great job.) A: Yeah. (MS: Thanks a lot.) All right.
MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this.
There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there.
Lindsay Zaltman: The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality -- the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful/play brand.
And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both.
Most companies tend to -- and it's human nature -- to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see.
What other brands are like that?
The first on here is the classic, Apple.
And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue.
Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing.
MS: A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand?
If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be?
Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing?
Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007?
Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah?
Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda?
They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing.
(Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America.
What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly.
And that's what these brands did.
They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, "Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind.
I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world."
Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look.
According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then -- and this isn't even the whole thing -- we've had 900 million media impressions for this film.
That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period.
So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum.
And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part.
What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity.
I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks.
We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them.
Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear.
We've got to put that bear in a cage.
One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk.
Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way.
And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "Embrace Transparency," has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay.
(Applause) EMC: Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world.
EMC presents: "Embrace Transparency."
(Applause) June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100?
I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation -- a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED.
(Laughter) (Applause)
I have had the distinct blessing in my life to have worked on a bunch of amazing projects.
But the coolest I ever worked on was around this guy.
This guy's name is TEMPT.
TEMPT was one of the foremost graffiti artists in the 80s.
And he came up home from a run one day and said, "Dad, my legs are tingling."
And that was the onset of ALS.
He only has use of his eyes.
I was exposed to him.
I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world.
And so we decided that we were going to sponsor Tony, TEMPT, and his cause.
So I went and met with his brother and father and said, "We're going to give you this money.
What are you going to do with it?"
And his brother said, "I just want to be able to talk to Tony again.
I just want to be able to communicate with him and him to be able to communicate with me."
And he said, "No, unless you're in the upper echelon and you've got really amazing insurance, you can't actually do that.
These devices aren't accessible to people."
And I said, "Well, how do you actually communicate?"
Has everyone seen the movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?"
That's how they communicate -- so run their finger along.
So I showed up with the desire to just write a check, and instead, I wrote a check that I had no freaking idea how I was going to cash.
I committed to his brother and his father right then and there -- I'm like, "All right, here's the deal: Tony's going to speak, we're going to get him a machine, and we're going to figure out a way for him to do his art again.
So I spoke at a conference a couple months after that.
I met these guys called GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then, with a laser pointer, draw on it, and it just registers the negative space.
So they go around and do art installations like this.
So that started the journey.
And about two years later, about a year later, after a bunch of organization and a bunch of moving things around, we'd accomplished a couple things.
(Applause) Which was awesome.
And he's seriously one of the funniest -- I call him Yoda, because you talk to the guy, you get an email from him, and you're like, "I'm not worthy. This guy's so amazing."
The other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world -- literally every corner of the world -- into our house.
My wife and kids and I moved to our back garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house.
A lot of our friends thought we were absolutely stupid to do that and that we were going to come back and all the pictures on the wall would be removed and graf on the walls.
This is called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description.
This is a cheap pair of sunglasses that we bought at the Venice Beach boardwalk, some copper wire and some stuff from Home Depot and Radio Shack.
We took a PS3 camera, hacked it open, mounted it to an LED light, and now there's a device that is free -- you build this yourself, we publish the code for free, you download the software for free.
And now we've created a device that has absolutely no limitations.
There's no insurance company that can say "No."
There's no hospital that can say "No."
(Applause) Thank you.
So at the end of the two weeks, we went back to TEMPT's room.
I love this picture, because this is someone else's room and that's his room.
And this is an amazing picture, because this is his life support system, and he's looking over his life support system.
We kicked his bed so that he could see out.
And we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital.
The funny thing was, we had to break into the parking lot too, so we totally felt like we were legit in the whole graf scene too.
(Laughter) So at the end of this, he sent us an email, and this is what the email said: "That was the first time I've drawn anything for seven years.
I feel like I had been held underwater, and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could breathe."
Isn't that awesome?
That's what keeps us going and keeps us developing.
And we've got such a long way to go with this.
And someone who has that kind of artistic potential deserves so much more.
So we're in the process of trying to figure out how to make it better, faster, stronger.
We've won a bunch of awards.
Remember, it's free; none of us are making any money on this thing.
It's all coming out of our own pockets.
So the awards were like, "Oh, this is fantastic."
Armstrong Twittered about us, and then in December, Time magazine honored us as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010, which was really cool.
TEMPT's going to be in the show, which is pretty awesome.
Everything in this room wasn't possible -- this stage, this computer, this mic, the EyeWriter -- wasn't possible at one point.
Make it possible, everyone in this room.
Thank you guys.
(Applause)
Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17?
Do you know what I wanted to be?
I wanted to be a biker chick.
(Laughter) I wanted to race cars, and I wanted to be a cowgirl, and I wanted to be Mowgli from "The Jungle Book."
Because they were all about being free, the wind in your hair -- just to be free.
And on my seventeenth birthday, my parents, knowing how much I loved speed, gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday.
Not that we could have afforded I drive, but to give me the dream of driving.
And on my seventeenth birthday, I accompanied my little sister in complete innocence, as I always had all my life -- my visually impaired sister -- to go to see an eye specialist.
And my little sister wanted to be a pilot -- God help her.
So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun.
And on my seventeenth birthday, after my fake eye exam, the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday.
And he said, "So what are you going to do to celebrate?"
And I took that driving lesson, and I said, "I'm going to learn how to drive."
And then there was a silence -- one of those awful silences when you know something's wrong.
And he turned to my mother, and he said, "You haven't told her yet?"
On my seventeenth birthday, as Janis Ian would best say, I learned the truth at 17.
I am, and have been since birth, legally blind.
Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, "A Boy Named Sue."
I'm the eldest of three. I was born in 1971.
And very shortly after my birth, my parents found out I had a condition called ocular albinism.
And what the hell does that mean to you?
I can't see this clock and I can't see the timing, so holy God, woohoo! (Laughter) I might buy some more time.
But more importantly, let me tell you -- I'm going to come up really close here. Don't freak out, Pat.
See this hand?
Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline.
Every man in this room, even you, Steve, is George Clooney.
(Laughter) And every woman, you are so beautiful.
The really strange part is that, at three and a half, just before I was going to school, my parents made a bizarre, unusual and incredibly brave decision.
No labels.
My ability and my potential.
And they decided to tell me that I could see.
And don't get me wrong, because when I first heard it -- aside from the fact that I thought he was insane -- I got that thump in my chest, just that "huh?"
The first thing I thought about was my mom, who was crying over beside me.
And I swear to God, I walked out of his office, "I will drive. I will drive.
You're mad. I'll drive. I know I can drive."
And with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since I was such a child -- he taught me how to sail, knowing I could never see where I was going, I could never see the shore, and I couldn't see the sails, and I couldn't see the destination.
But he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face.
And that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and I would drive.
And I believed I could do it.
And then I was a masseuse. And then I was a landscape gardener.
And then I went to business school.
And you know, disabled people are hugely educated.
And then I went in and I got a global consulting job with Accenture.
And it's extraordinary how far belief can take you.
In 1999, two and a half years into that job, something happened.
And I'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world, where you work hard, play hard, you gotta be the best, you gotta be the best.
And I found myself in front of an HR manager in 1999, saying something I never imagined that I would say.
I was 28 years old.
I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn't do.
And I simply said, "I'm sorry.
Asking for help can be incredibly difficult.
We all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure.
And can I tell you, operating in the sighted world when you can't see, it's kind of difficult -- it really is.
Can I tell you, airports are a disaster.
Oh, for the love of God.
And there's nothing wrong with my sense of smell.
It's such a small thing, right?
And you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you're not, or to be somebody that you aren't?
And I had no idea that this man was going to change my life.
But before I got to him, I was so lost.
I had no idea who I was anymore.
God no, it was therapy.
And he asked me several questions, of which many were, "Why?
Why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself?
And you know, when you go to a global consulting firm, they put a chip in your head, and you're like, "I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture.
I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture." (Laughter) To leave would be failure.
And then he said to me, "What did you want to be when you were little?"
Now listen, I wasn't going to say to him, "Well, I wanted to race cars and motorbikes."
He thought I was mad enough anyway.
I think it's time to stop fighting and do something different."
And that door closed.
And that silence just outside a doctor's office, that many of us know.
And my chest ached.
And I had no idea where I was going. I had no idea.
And I went on a run that I know so well.
And I didn't know what to do.
And I sat there for quite some time going, "How am I going to get off this rock and go home?
Because who am I going to be?
And I thought about my dad, and I thought, "Good God, I'm so not Sue now."
And I kept thinking over and over in my mind, what had happened? Where did it go wrong? Why didn't I understand?
I had lost my belief.
I was crumpled.
And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me, "What do you want to be? What do you want to be?
What did you want to be when you were little? Do you love what you do?
Do something different. What do you want to be?
Do something different. What do you want to be?"
And really slowly, slowly, slowly, it happened.
And then the minute it came, it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart -- something different.
"Well, how about Mowgli from 'The Jungle Book'?
And the moment, and I mean the moment, the moment that hit me, I swear to God, it was like woo hoo! You know -- something to believe in.
And it doesn't matter whether I'm a boy or a girl, I'm just going to scoot.
And so I got off that rock, and, oh my God, did I run home.
And I ran up the stairs, and there was one of my favorite books of all time, "Travels on My Elephant" by Mark Shand -- I don't know if any of you know it.
And I grabbed this book off, and I'm sitting on the couch going, "I know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to go across India on the back of an elephant.
I had no idea how. I had no idea how you hire an elephant, get an elephant.
I didn't speak Hindi. I'd never been to India. Hadn't a clue.
But I knew I would.
Because, when you make a decision at the right time and the right place, God, that universe makes it happen for you.
Nine months later, after that day on snot rock, I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi.
And together we would trek a thousand kilometers across India.
Because I wasn't believing in me, really me, all the bits of me -- all the bits of all of us.
Do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we're not?
And you know what, when you really believe in yourself and everything about you, it's extraordinary what happens.
And you know what, that trip, that thousand kilometers, it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations.
Six thousand people got to see because of that.
When I came home off that elephant, do you know what the most amazing part was?
I left, and I became a social entrepreneur, and I set up an organization with Mark Shand called Elephant Family, which deals with Asian elephant conservation.
And I set up Kanchi, because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant, because disability is like the elephant in the room.
And I wanted to make you see it in a positive way -- no charity, no pity.
But I wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible.
That's what I wanted to do.
It just seemed that it was possible.
And I speak, but this is an amazing audience, and what am I doing here?
He said, "Be you."
And so here I am.
I simply needed vision and belief.
And if you truly believe -- and I mean believe from the bottom of your heart -- you can make change happen.
And we need to make it happen, because every single one of us -- woman, man, gay, straight, disabled, perfect, normal, whatever -- everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves.
I no longer want anybody to be invisible.
We are extraordinary, different, wonderful people.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Applause) Thank you.
(Music) ♫ Slide into the shimmering surface ♫ ♫ between two worlds. ♫ ♫ Standing at the center of time ♫ ♫ as it uncurls. ♫ ♫ Cutting through the veil of illusion. ♫ ♫ Moving beyond past conclusions. ♫ ♫ Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere right now, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ Searching for the future ♫ ♫ among the things we're throwing away. ♫ ♫ Trying to see the world ♫ ♫ through the junk we produce everyday. ♫ ♫ They say nothing lasts forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in history, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ The Romans, the Spanish ♫ ♫ the British, the Dutch, ♫ ♫ American exceptionalism, so out of touch. ♫ ♫ The folly of empire repeating its course, ♫ ♫ imposing its will ♫ ♫ and ruling by force ♫ ♫ on and on through time. ♫ ♫ But the world can't take it very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world is going to shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change things, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ ♫ They say nothing last forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it ♫ ♫ very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it, that you can see. ♫ ♫ If the oceans don't make it, neither will we. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself all the way free ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change the outcome, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
First, a video.
Yes, it is a scrambled egg.
Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself.
And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated.
And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works.
A scrambled egg is mush -- tasty mush -- but it's mush.
In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy.
What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure -- in fact, to mush.
And that's why that video feels a bit strange.
And yet, look around us.
Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded.
That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth.
And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.
So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center?
Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty.
Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe.
We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments.
And at each threshold, the going gets tougher.
The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.
And that's the story that we tell in big history.
But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible.
So let's do it.
(Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time.
And then suddenly, bang!
And we've crossed our first threshold.
The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom.
It's incredibly hot.
And it's expanding at incredible speed.
And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur.
Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity.
And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons.
And all of that happens in the first second.
Now we move forward 380,000 years.
That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet.
And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium.
Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage.
They're really a sort of cosmic mush.
But that's not completely true.
Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background.
What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas.
These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.
And this is how it works.
So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms.
So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds.
And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and -- bam!
From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them.
And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds.
When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table.
If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.
So now the universe is chemically more complex.
And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things.
And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons.
And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago.
Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials.
So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.
Now, the going gets tougher.
The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity.
We are huge packages of chemicals.
So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force.
That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets.
Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry?
Well, first, you need energy, but not too much.
In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again.
But not too little.
Why?
In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move.
Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect.
It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of liquid water.
And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements.
So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.
But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry.
How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable?
Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick.
And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information.
You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA.
So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms.
And DNA also copies itself.
So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean.
So the information spreads.
The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections.
And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning.
So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity.
And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.
For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple -- single cells.
Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear.
And occasionally, there are disasters.
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out.
And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.
Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago.
Let me explain why.
We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information.
But it is so slow.
DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work.
But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time.
They accumulate information, they learn.
The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them.
Now what makes humans different is human language.
We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory.
And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation.
And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history.
I call this ability collective learning.
It's what makes us different.
We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history.
We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the Ice Age tundra of Siberia -- tough, tough environment -- into the Americas, into Australasia.
Each migration involved learning -- learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm.
And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied.
Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected.
And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals.
And in the last 200 years, something else has happened.
So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.
We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years.
I hope you agree this is a powerful story.
And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role.
But it also contains warnings.
Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it.
I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction.
And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed.
If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.
We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years.
So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.
And now, finally -- this is what I want.
I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us.
I thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
How often do we hear that people just don't care?
How many times have you been told that real, substantial change isn't possible because most people are too selfish, too stupid or too lazy to try to make a difference in their community?
Let's start with city hall.
It's a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so the neighborhood knows what's happening.
As you can see, it's impossible to read.
You need to get halfway down to even find out which address they're talking about, and then further down, in tiny 10-point font, to find out how to actually get involved.
Imagine if the private sector advertised in the same way -- if Nike wanted to sell a pair of shoes -- (Laughter) And put an ad in the paper like that.
(Applause) Now, that would never happen.
You'll never see an ad like that, because Nike actually wants you to buy their shoes, whereas the city of Toronto clearly doesn't want you involved with the planning process, otherwise their ads would look something like this, with all the information laid out clearly.
Public space.
(Applause) The manner in which we mistreat our public spaces is a huge obstacle towards any type of progressive political change, because we've essentially put a price tag on freedom of expression.
Whoever has the most money gets the loudest voice, dominating the visual and mental environment.
So you're never going to see them on a billboard.
The media plays an important role in developing our relationship with political change, mainly by ignoring politics and focusing on celebrities and scandals, but even when they do talk about important political issues, they do it in a way that I feel discourages engagement.
The "Now" magazine from last week: progressive, downtown weekly in Toronto.
This is the cover story.
It's an article about a theater performance, and it starts with basic information about where it is, in case you actually want to go and see it after you've read the article -- where, the time, the website.
An art review.
A restaurant -- you might not want to just read about it, maybe you want to go there.
So they tell you where it is, the prices, the address, the phone number, etc.
Then you get to their political articles.
Here's a great article about an important election race that's happening.
It talks about the candidates, written very well, but no information, no follow-up, no websites for the campaigns, no information about when the debates are, where the campaign offices are.
Here's another good article, about a new campaign opposing privatization of transit, without any contact information for the campaign.
The message seems to be that the readers are most likely to want to eat, maybe read a book, maybe see a movie, but not be engaged in their community.
You might think this is a small thing, but I think it's important, because it sets a tone and it reinforces the dangerous idea that politics is a spectator sport.
Heroes: How do we view leadership?
Look at these 10 movies. What do they have in common?
There's a prophecy. You have to save the world."
This helps me understand why a lot of people have trouble seeing themselves as leaders -- because it sends all the wrong messages about what leadership is about.
A heroic effort is a collective effort, number one.
But most importantly, it's voluntary.
Political parties could and should be one of the basic entry points for people to get engaged in politics.
Instead, they've become, sadly, uninspiring and uncreative organizations that rely so heavily on market research and polling and focus groups that they end up all saying the same thing, pretty much regurgitating back to us what we already want to hear at the expense of putting forward bold and creative ideas.
(Applause) Charitable status.
Groups who have charitable status in Canada aren't allowed to do advocacy.
This is a huge problem and a huge obstacle to change, because it means that some of the most passionate and informed voices are completely silenced, especially during election time.
As you may have noticed, our elections in Canada are a complete joke.
We use out-of-date systems that are unfair and create random results.
Canada's currently led by a party that most Canadians didn't actually want.
How can we honestly and genuinely encourage more people to vote when votes don't count in Canada?
It's like trying to run into a brick wall.
Quite the opposite -- I actually think people are amazing and smart and that they do care, but that, as I said, we live in this environment where all these obstacles are being put in our way.
As long as we believe that people, our own neighbors, are selfish, stupid or lazy, then there's no hope.
We can open up city hall.
We can democratize our public spaces.
My main message is: if we can redefine apathy, not as some kind of internal syndrome, but as a complex web of cultural barriers that reinforces disengagement, and if we can clearly define, clearly identify what those obstacles are, and then if we can work together collectively to dismantle those obstacles, then anything is possible.
(Applause)
I've been a priest in the Church for 20 years.
For most of that time, I've been struggling and grappling with questions about the nature of God. Who is God?
And most people, both within and outside the organized church, still have a picture of a celestial controller, a rule maker, a policeman in the sky who orders everything, and causes everything to happen.
And in the worship of my church, the most frequently used adjective about God is "almighty."
I have become more and more uncomfortable with this perception of God over the years.
Do we really believe that God is the kind of male boss that we've been presenting in our worship and in our liturgies over all these years?
Of course, there have been thinkers who have suggested different ways of looking at God.
Exploring the feminine, nurturing side of divinity.
Suggesting that God expresses Himself or Herself through powerlessness, rather than power.
Acknowledging that God is unknown and unknowable by definition.
Finding deep resonances with other religions and philosophies and ways of looking at life as part of what is a universal and global search for meaning.
These ideas are well known in liberal academic circles, but clergy like myself have been reluctant to air them, for fear of creating tension and division in our church communities, for fear of upsetting the simple faith of more traditional believers.
Then, on December 26th last year, just two months ago, that underwater earthquake triggered the tsunami.
And two weeks later, Sunday morning, 9th of January, I found myself standing in front of my congregation -- intelligent, well meaning, mostly thoughtful Christian people -- and I needed to express, on their behalf, our feelings and our questions.
I had my own personal responses, but I also have a public role, and something needed to be said.
And this is what I said.
Shortly after the tsunami I read a newspaper article written by the Archbishop of Canterbury -- fine title -- about the tragedy in Southern Asia.
The essence of what he said was this: the people most affected by the devastation and loss of life do not want intellectual theories about how God let this happen.
He wrote, "If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier, or safer, or more confident in God?"
A verbal response would not be appropriate.
The only appropriate response would be a compassionate silence and some kind of practical help.
It isn't a time for explanation, or preaching, or theology; it's a time for tears.
This is true. And yet here we are, my church in Oxford, semi-detached from events that happened a long way away, but with our faith bruised.
And we want an explanation from God.
We demand an explanation from God.
In some way, God must feel the anguish, and grief, and physical pain that we feel.
In some way the eternal God must be able to enter into the souls of human beings and experience the torment within.
And if this is true, it must also be that God knows the joy and exaltation of the human spirit, as well.
We want a God who can weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice.
This seems to me both a deeply moving and a convincing re-statement of Christian belief about God.
For hundreds of years, the prevailing orthodoxy, the accepted truth, was that God the Father, the Creator, is unchanging and therefore by definition cannot feel pain or sadness.
Now the unchanging God feels a bit cold and indifferent to me.
And the devastating events of the 20th century have forced people to question the cold, unfeeling God.
The slaughter of millions in the trenches and in the death camps have caused people to ask, "Where is God in all this?
Who is God in all this?"
And the answer was, "God is in this with us, or God doesn't deserve our allegiance anymore."
If God is a bystander, observing but not involved, then God may well exist, but we don't want to know about Him.
Many Jews and Christians now feel like this, I know.
So we have a suffering God -- a God who is intimately connected with this world and with every living soul.
But it isn't enough. I need to ask some more questions, and I hope they are questions that you will want to ask, as well, some of you.
And last week we sang with the children one of their favorite songs, "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock."
Perhaps some of you know it. Some of the words go like this: "The foolish man built his house upon the sand / And the floods came up / And the house on the sand went crash."
Then in the same week, at a funeral, we sang the familiar hymn "We Plow the Fields and Scatter," a very English hymn.
So the first big question is about control.
Does God have a plan for each of us? Is God in control?
But if God can or will do these things -- intervene to change the flow of events -- then surely he could have stopped the tsunami.
Do we have a local God who can do little things like parking spaces, but not big things like 500 mile-per-hour waves?
That's just not acceptable to intelligent Christians, and we must acknowledge it.
Either God is responsible for the tsunami, or God is not in control.
After the tragedy, survival stories began to emerge.
You probably heard some of them: the man who surfed the wave, the teenage girl who recognized the danger because she had just been learning about tsunamis at school.
Then there was the congregation who had left their usual church building on the shore to hold a service in the hills.
Afterwards someone said that God must have been looking after them.
Can we earn God's favor by worshipping Him or believing in Him?
Does God demand loyalty, like any medieval tyrant?
A cosmic us and them, and a God who is guilty of the worst kind of favoritism?
Such a God would be morally inferior to the highest ideals of humanity.
Perhaps God allows or permits terrible things to happen, so that heroism and compassion can be shown.
Perhaps God is testing us: testing our charity, or our faith.
Perhaps there is a great, cosmic plan that allows for horrible suffering so that everything will work out OK in the end.
Perhaps, but these ideas are all just variations on God controlling everything, the supreme commander toying with expendable units in a great campaign.
We cannot afford to pay so much for admission.
It is not God that I do not accept.
I merely, most respectfully, return Him the ticket."
Or perhaps God set the whole universe going at the beginning and then relinquished control forever, so that natural processes could occur, and evolution run its course.
This seems more acceptable, but it still leaves God with the ultimate moral responsibility.
Is God a cold, unfeeling spectator?
Is God intimately involved in our suffering, so that He feels it in His own being?
If we believe something like this, we must let go of the puppet-master completely, take our leave of the almighty controller, abandon traditional models.
We must think again about God.
Maybe God isn't an agent like all of us are agents.
Early religious thought conceived God as a sort of superhuman person, doing things all over the place.
What if God is in things?
The loving soul of the universe.
What if God is in things?
In the infinitely complex network of relationships and connections that make up life.
In the natural cycle of life and death, the creation and destruction that must happen continuously.
In the incredible intricacy and magnificence of the natural world.
In you, in me, mind and body and spirit.
In change and development and growth.
Is God just another name for the universe, with no independent existence at all?
I don't know.
To what extent can we ascribe personality to God?
I don't know.
In the end, we have to say, "I don't know."
If we knew, God would not be God.
Isn't it ironic that Christians who claim to believe in an infinite, unknowable being then tie God down in closed systems and rigid doctrines?
How could one practice such a faith?
By seeking the God within. By cultivating my own inwardness.
In silence, in meditation, in my inner space, in the me that remains when I gently put aside my passing emotions and ideas and preoccupations.
By seeking intimate connection with your inwardness.
If God is in all people, then there is a meeting place where my relationship with you becomes a three-way encounter.
There is an Indian greeting, which I'm sure some of you know: "Namaste," accompanied by a respectful bow, which, roughly translated means, "That which is of God in me greets that which of God is in you."
Namaste.
In music and poetry, in the natural world of beauty and in the small ordinary things of life, there is a deep, indwelling presence that makes them extraordinary.
It needs a profound attentiveness and a patient waiting, a contemplative attitude and a generosity and openness to those whose experience is different from my own.
When I stood up to speak to my people about God and the tsunami, I had no answers to offer them.
I had some suggestions to make -- possible new ways of thinking about God.
But in the end, the only thing I could say for sure was, "I don't know," and that just might be the most profoundly religious statement of all.
Thank you.
Let me introduce him.
It all began for him during World War II, when at age 17 he found himself thrust into a forged documents workshop.
When I was a child I knew nothing about this, of course.
I grew up in the Paris suburbs and I was the youngest of three children.
I had a "normal" dad like everybody else, apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ...
well, he was basically old enough to be my grandfather.
Anyway, he was a photographer and a street educator, and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly.
And, of course, he never talked about his past life when he was a forger.
I was in high school and got a bad grade, a rare event for me, so I decided to hide it from my parents.
In order to do that, I set out to forge their signature.
So, I got working. I took some sheets of paper and started practicing, practicing, practicing, until I reached what I thought was a steady hand, and went into action.
Later, while checking my school bag, my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged.
She yelled at me like she never had before.
I went to hide in my bedroom, under the blankets, and then I waited for my father to come back from work with, one could say, much apprehension.
I heard him come in.
I remained under the blankets. He entered my room, sat on the corner of the bed, and he was silent, so I pulled the blanket from my head, and when he saw me he started laughing.
He was laughing so hard, he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand.
Then he said, "But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder! Can't you see it's really too small?"
Indeed, it's rather small.
I was born in Algeria.
Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations, and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life, especially that he had "done" World War II, that he had "done" the Algerian war.
But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent, I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun.
One day, while my father was working on a file for us to obtain French nationality, I happened to see some documents that caught my attention.
These are real!
These are mine, I was born an Argentinean.
But the document I happened to see that would help us build a case for the authorities was a document from the army that thanked my father for his work on behalf of the secret services.
And then, suddenly, I went "wow!"
My father, a secret agent?
I wanted to ask him questions, which he didn't answer.
And later, I told myself that one day I would have to question him.
And then I became a mother and had a son, and finally decided it was time -- that he absolutely had to talk to us.
I had become a mother and he was celebrating his 77th birthday, and suddenly I was very, very afraid.
I managed to convince him that it was important for us, but possibly also for other people that he shared his story.
He decided to tell it to me and I made a book, from which I'm going to read you some excerpts later.
So, his story. My father was born in Argentina.
His parents were of Russian descent.
The whole family came to settle in France in the '30s.
His parents were Jewish, Russian and above all, very poor.
So at the age of 14 my father had to work.
That's where he discovered something totally magical, and when he talks about it, it's fascinating -- it's the magic of dyeing chemistry.
During that time the war was happening and his mother was killed when he was 15.
All day he would ask many questions to his boss to learn, to accumulate more and more knowledge, and at night, when no one was looking, he'd put his experience to practice.
He was mostly interested in ink bleaching.
All this to tell you that if my father became a forger, actually, it was almost by accident.
Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers.
Well, they were out, but they were always in danger. The big "Jew" stamp was still on their papers.
My father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted, he'd never thought of false papers.
But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance.
Suddenly the man looked very, very interested.
As a "dyer," do you know how to bleach ink marks?
Of course he knew.
And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly how to bleach it.
And actually, without knowing it, my father had invented something we can find in every schoolchild's pencil case: the so-called "correction pen."
(Applause) But it was only the beginning.
That's my father.
He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch.
He started a press. He started photoengraving.
He started making rubber stamps.
He started inventing all kind of things -- with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel.
Anyway, he had to do all this because he was completely obsessed with output.
If he slept one hour, 30 people would die.
This sense of responsibility for other people's lives when he was just 17 -- and also his guilt for being a survivor, since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not -- stayed with him all his life.
I'd like to talk about those sacrifices, because there were many.
To him, being paid would have meant being a mercenary.
So he was a photographer by day, and a forger by night for 30 years.
Then there were the emotional sacrifices: How can one live with a woman while having so many secrets?
How can one explain what one does at night in the lab, every single night?
Of course, there was another kind of sacrifice involving his family that I understood much later.
One day my father introduced me to my sister.
He also explained to me that I had a brother, too, and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four, and they were 30 years older than me.
They are both in their sixties now.
In order to write the book, I asked my sister questions. I wanted to know who my father was, who was the father she had known.
She explained that the father that she'd had would tell them he'd come and pick them up on Sunday to go for a walk.
They would get all dressed up and wait for him, but he would almost never come.
Then one day he totally disappeared.
Time passed, and they thought he had surely forgotten them, at first.
Then as time passed, at the end of almost two years, they thought, "Well, perhaps our father has died."
And then I understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably didn't feel like talking about because it was painful.
And while my half brother and sister thought they'd been abandoned, orphaned, my father was making false papers.
And if he did not tell them, it was of course to protect them.
After the liberation he made false papers to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to Palestine before the creation of Israel.
And then, as he was a staunch anti-colonialist, he made false papers for Algerians during the Algerian war.
After the Algerian war, at the heart of the international resistance movements, his name circulated and the whole world came knocking at his door.
In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola.
And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid party.
He made false papers for persecuted black South Africans.
There was also Latin America.
My father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and then it was the turn of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico.
Then there was the Vietnam War.
My father made false papers for the American deserters who did not wish to take up arms against the Vietnamese.
My father made false papers for the dissidents against Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, against the colonels' dictatorship in Greece, and even in France.
There, just once, it happened in May of 1968.
My father watched, benevolently, of course, the demonstrations of the month of May, but his heart was elsewhere, and so was his time because he had over 15 countries to serve.
Once, though, he agreed to make false papers for someone you might recognize.
(Laughter) He was much younger in those days, and my father agreed to make false papers to enable him to come back and speak at a meeting.
And those heroes did not need an army behind them.
Anyhow, nobody would have followed them, except for a handful [of] men and women of conviction and courage.
I asked him whether, considering the sacrifices he had to make, he ever had any regrets.
He said no.
He told me that he would have been unable to witness or submit to injustice without doing anything.
He was persuaded, and he's still convinced that another world is possible -- a world where no one would ever need a forger.
He's still dreaming about it.
My father is here in the room today.
His name is Adolfo Kaminsky and I'm going to ask him to stand up.
(Applause) Thank you.
Roger Ebert: These are my words, but this is not my voice.
This is Alex, the best computer voice I've been able to find, which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh.
It was like breathing.
In those days, I was living in a fool's paradise.
After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, eat or drink, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me.
Maybe I wasn't as smart, but I was at least as talkative.
However, I've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous.
So I've decided to recruit some of my TED friends to read my words aloud for me.
I will start with my wife, Chaz.
Chaz Ebert: It was Chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak.
The doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw.
My tongue, larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected.
(Laughter) (Laughter) CE: I was optimistic, and all was right with the world.
The first surgery was a great success.
I saw myself in the mirror and I looked pretty good.
Two weeks later, I was ready to return home.
I was using my iPod to play the Leonard Cohen song 'I'm Your Man' for my doctors and nurses.
My carotid artery had ruptured.
Thank God I was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there.
So thank you, Leonard Cohen, for saving my life.
A doctor from Brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture.
Human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system.
Therefore, the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air.
Because I had lost my jaw, I could no longer form a seal, and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless.
Dean Ornish: At first for a long time, I wrote messages in notebooks.
Then I tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice.
This was faster, and nobody had to try to read my handwriting.
I tried out various computer voices that were available online, and for several months I had a British accent, which Chaz called Sir Lawrence."
(Laughter) "It was the clearest I could find.
Then Apple released the Alex voice, which was the best I'd heard.
It knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark.
There are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices, and I've experimented with them.
When I find myself in a conversational situation, I need to type fast and to jump right in.
People don't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase.
But what value do we place on the sound of our own voice?
When people hear Alex speaking my words, do they experience a disconnect?
How did I feel not being able to speak?
Even then, I'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties.
So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years.
At first I was against it.
I thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer.
There was something comforting about a voice that was not my own.
But I decided then to just give it a try.
So we contacted a company in Scotland that created personalized computer voices.
All of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth.
So I sent them many hours of recordings of my voice, including several audio commentary tracks that I'd made for movies on DVDs.
And it sounded like me, it really did.
But it wasn't that simple.
The tapes from my TV show weren't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved -- movie soundtracks, for example, or Gene Siskel arguing with me -- (Laughter) and my words often had a particular emphasis that didn't fit into a sentence well enough.
I'll let you hear a sample of that voice.
These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program.
And here's the voice we call Roger Jr.
or Roger 2.0.
Roger 2.0: Oprah, I can't tell you how great it is to be back on your show.
We have been talking for a long time, and now here we are again.
This is the first version of my computer voice.
When I heard it the first time, it sent chills down my spine.
The voice was created by a company in Scotland named CereProc.
It makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while I was commenting on "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane."
There are several very good voices available for computers, but they all sound like somebody else, while this voice sounds like me.
People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems.
Many blind people use them to read pages on the Web to themselves.
But I've got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can.
(Laughter) Roger Ebert: As you can hear, it sounds like me, but the words jump up and down.
The good people in Scotland are still improving my voice, and I'm optimistic about it.
But so far, the Apple Alex voice is the best one I've heard.
I wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played Alex.
He said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice.
A very large sample is needed.
John Hunter: All my life I was a motormouth.
Now I have spoken my last words, and I don't even remember for sure what they were.
On Wednesday, David Christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe.
For almost all of its millions and billions of years, there was no life on Earth at all.
For almost all the years of life on Earth, there was no intelligent life.
Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, did civilization become possible.
In cosmological terms, that was about 10 minutes ago.
Finally came mankind's most advanced and mysterious tool, the computer.
Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana, the birthplace of HAL 9000.
When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback.
It was about 1960.
As a local newspaper reporter still in high school, I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO.
The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations.
This was a computer-assisted instruction system, which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC.
The programmers said it could assist students in their learning.
The point is PLATO was only 50 years ago, an instant in time.
I have learned from Wikipedia that, starting with that humble beginning, PLATO established forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and multiple-player games.
Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana, it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual, online universe we occupy today.
But I'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce.
(Laughter) I'm here as a man who wants to communicate.
I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times.
I was in line at Radio Shack to buy one of the first Model 100's.
And when I told the people in the press room at the Academy Awards that they'd better install some phone lines for Internet connections, they didn't know what I was talking about.
When I bought my first desktop, it was a DEC Rainbow.
Does anybody remember that?"
(Applause) "The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble.
I joined CompuServe when it had fewer numbers than I currently have followers on Twitter.
(Laughter) CE: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye.
It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history.
Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history.
For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice.
Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness.
We are born into a box of time and space.
Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widely than ever before.
They aren't an improvement, but they're the best I can do.
They give me a way to speak.
But online, everybody speaks at the same speed.
This whole adventure has been a learning experience.
While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders, the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily.
Ironic that my legs are fine, and it's my shoulders that slow up my walk.
When you see me today, I look like the Phantom of the Opera.
(Laughter) (Applause) It is human nature to look at someone like me and assume I have lost some of my marbles.
People -- (Applause) People talk loudly -- I'm so sorry.
Excuse me.
(Applause) People talk loudly and slowly to me.
Sometimes they assume I am deaf.
There are people who don't want to make eye contact.
Believe me, he didn't mean this as -- anyway, let me just read it.
(Laughter) It is human nature to look away from illness.
We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality.
That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me.
And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way.
One of the funniest blogs on the Web is written by a friend of mine named Smartass Cripple.
(Laughter) Google him and he will make you laugh.
I am writing as well as ever.
I am productive.
If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago, I would be as isolated as a hermit.
Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.
RE: Wait. I have one more thing to add.
A guy goes into a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist says, "You're crazy."
The guy says, "I want a second opinion."
The psychiatrist says, "All right, you're ugly."
(Laughter) You all know the test for artificial intelligence -- the Turing test.
If the judge can't tell the machine apart from the human, the machine has passed the test.
I now propose a test for computer voices -- the Ebert test.
If a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want.
(Applause)
Hi, my name is Marcin -- farmer, technologist.
I was born in Poland, now in the U.S.
I started a group called Open Source Ecology.
We've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist -- things from tractors, bread ovens, circuit makers.
Then we set out to create an open source, DIY, do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost.
We call this the Global Village Construction Set.
So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy, and I discovered I was useless.
I guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle.
So I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming.
I bought a tractor -- then it broke.
I paid to get it repaired -- then it broke again.
I realized that the truly appropriate, low-cost tools that I needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just didn't exist yet.
I needed tools that were robust, modular, highly efficient and optimized, low-cost, made from local and recycled materials that would last a lifetime, not designed for obsolescence.
So I did just that.
And I tested them.
And I found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale.
So then I published the 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos and budgets on a wiki.
Then contributors from all over the world began showing up, prototyping new machines during dedicated project visits.
So far, we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines.
And now the project is beginning to grow on its own.
We know that open source has succeeded with tools for managing knowledge and creativity.
And the same is starting to happen with hardware too.
We're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people's lives in such tangible material ways.
If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing, then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential.
That's not only in the developing world.
Our tools are being made for the American farmer, builder, entrepreneur, maker.
We've seen lots of excitement from these people, who can now start a construction business, parts manufacturing, organic CSA or just selling power back to the grid.
Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit.
From what I've seen, this is only the beginning.
If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant.
We're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology.
Thank you.
(Applause)
in the following year.
I returned to Singapore and, in 1990, performed Asia's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure, but against all odds.
But perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators -- a matter which was debated in the parliament -- that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country.
(Applause) And perhaps more important, I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son.
(Applause) But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate.
The truth is, there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around.
As the demand for donor organs continues to rise, in large part due to the aging population, the supply has remained relatively constant.
In the United States alone, 100,000 men, women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs, and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs.
The transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation.
And the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living, related donors -- relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ, like a split liver graft, to a relative or loved one.
But as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs, the gift of life was then extended from living, related donors to now living, unrelated donors.
And this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy.
How can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from, for example, a submissive spouse, an in-law, a servant, a slave, an employee?
Where and how can we draw the line?
In my part of the world, too many people live below the poverty line.
And in some areas, the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living, unrelated donors.
Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant, I received my next assignment, and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners.
I was also pregnant at the time.
Pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman's life.
But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts -- thoughts of walking through the prison's high-security death row, as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room.
And at each time, I would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners' eyes follow me.
And for two years, I struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4:30 am on a Friday morning, driving to the prison, getting down, gloved and scrubbed, ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner, remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon.
But, in my life, the one fulfilling skill that I had was now invoking feelings of conflict -- conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of life at dusk.
I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos.
And in my mind, I realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence.
It made me wonder if there could be a better way -- a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide.
Now just about that time, the practice of surgery evolved from big to small, from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures, tiny incisions.
And in transplantation, concepts shifted from whole organs to cells.
In 1988, at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants.
And this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells.
I thought to myself, why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas -- the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes -- and transplant these cells? -- technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ.
And at that time, stem cell research had gained momentum, following the isolation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s.
The observation that stem cells, as master cells, could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types -- heart cells, liver cells, pancreatic islet cells -- captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public.
I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology, and this inspired a shift in my mindset, from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells.
And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants.
Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage, chiefly because of their pluripotency -- that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types.
But the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells -- the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos -- has encouraged research into other types of stem cells.
And adult stem cells are found in you and me -- in our blood, in our bone marrow, in our fat, our skin and other organs.
And as it turns out, fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells.
But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells.
And here is the limitation: adult stem cells are mature cells, and, like mature human beings, these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types, as embryonic stem cells [can].
But in 2007, two remarkable individuals, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States, made an astounding discovery.
They discovered that adult cells, taken from you and me, could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells, which they termed IPS cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells.
And in our lab, we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells -- cells that we may use to then form other, more specialized, cells, which one day may be used as cell transplants.
If this research is successful, it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos.
Indeed, there is a lot of hype, but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions.
Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases -- are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you?
In May 2006, something horrible happened to me.
I was about to start a robotic operation, but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room, I realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness.
Earlier that week, I had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing -- yes, I fell.
And I started to see floaters and stars, which I casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure.
This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases.
37 million people worldwide are blind, and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision.
Stem cell-derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide.
Indeed, we live in both challenging as well as exciting times.
As the world population ages, scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells.
It is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured, our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation.
And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue.
Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body, or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver.
As we speak, there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases.
What lies ahead?
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.
1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly.
4.8 million suffer cardiac failure.
There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease.
While still in a research phase, stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology.
Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings -- small, incremental steps, cells rather than organs, repair rather than replacement.
Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs.
Powerful new technologies always present enigmas.
As we speak, the world's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the USFDA approval.
And in the U.K., neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial.
The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers.
Each one has his story.
My story has been about my journey from organs to cells -- a journey through controversy, inspired by hope -- hope that, as we age, you and I may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life.
Thank you.
My students often ask me, "What is sociology?"
And they say, "So, how can I be a sociologist?
How can I understand those invisible forces?"
Start with empathy.
It all begins with empathy.
Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person."
So I imagine my life if, a hundred years ago, China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal.
And they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here.
And pretty soon, they began shipping that coal, ton by ton, railcar by railcar, boatload by boatload, back to China and elsewhere around the world.
And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so.
And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal.
And back here in the United States, we saw economic despair, deprivation.
This is what I saw.
And I asked myself the question: How is it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States, because coal is such a wealthy resource; it's so much money?
And the rest of us, the vast majority of us, struggle to get by.
And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship.
Does this sound familiar?
And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal.
And everywhere, there were symbols of the Chinese -- everywhere, a constant reminder.
And back in China, what do they say in China?
Nothing! They don't talk about us. They don't talk about the coal.
If you ask them, they'll say, "Well, you know, we need the coal.
You can't expect that."
And so, I get angry, and I get pissed, as do lots of average people.
And we fight back, and it gets really ugly.
And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way.
And before we know it, they send in the tanks and they send in the troops.
And lots of people are dying.
And it's a very, very difficult situation.
Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there, or a truck full of soldiers?
If you can, that's empathy. That's empathy.
And you've got to feel that.
OK, so that's the warm-up.
Now we're going to have the real radical experiment.
So, for the remainder of my talk, what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East -- in particular, in Iraq.
And so to help you, perhaps you're a member of this middle-class family in Baghdad.
What you want is the best for your kids.
You want your kids to have a better life.
And you watch the news, you pay attention.
Sometimes you even watch satellite, CNN, from the United States.
But really, you just want a better life for yourself.
That's what you want.
You're Arab Muslim living in Iraq.
You want a better life for yourself.
So here, let me help you.
Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking.
It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that.
People back in the United States know it's about oil.
It's because somebody else has a design for your resource.
It's your resource -- it's not somebody else's.
It's your land; it's your resource.
Because they have an entire economic system that's dependent on that oil -- foreign oil, oil from other parts of the world that they don't own.
And what else do you think about these people?
The Americans, they're rich.
Come on, they live in big houses, they have big cars.
They all have blond hair, blue eyes. They're happy.
You think that. It's not true, of course, but that's the media impression.
And they have big cities, and the cities are all dependent on oil.
Poverty, despair, struggle.
I mean -- this is Iraq.
This is what you see.
It's not easy; you see a lot of poverty.
These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see?
Something else you see that you talk about -- Americans don't talk about this, but you do -- there's this thing, this militarization of the world, and it's centered right in the United States.
And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending.
Four percent of the world's population!
It's part of your life.
And you talk about it with your friends.
And back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes.
When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it.
When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered.
And what you see, something else: the United States, the hub of democracy around the world -- they don't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world.
There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States.
All because of oil.
You talk about it.
It's in the forefront of your mind, always.
You say, "How is that possible?"
Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly, pain and sorrow.
But there's something else.
They're Christians.
They worship the Christian God, they have crosses, they carry Bibles.
Their Bibles have a little insignia that says "US Army" on them.
And their leaders, their leaders: before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country -- and you know the reason -- before they send them off, they go to a Christian church, and they pray to their Christian God, and they ask for protection and guidance from that god.
Why?
Well, obviously, when people die in the war, they are Muslims, they are Iraqis -- they're not Americans.
You don't want Americans to die -- "Protect Our Troops."
And you feel something about that -- of course you do.
And they do wonderful things.
You read about it, you hear about it.
They're there to build schools and help people.
That's what they want to do.
They do wonderful things, but they also do the bad things, and you can't tell the difference.
Here's a guy who says that your god is a false god.
Your god's an idol; his god is the true god.
The solution to the problem in the Middle East, according to him, is to convert you all to Christianity -- just get rid of your religion.
And you know that. Americans don't read about this guy.
You pass it around. You pass his words around.
He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq.
And you're thinking, "My God, if this guy is saying that, then all the soldiers must be saying that."
And this word here -- George Bush called this war a crusade.
You know what it means -- it's a holy war against Muslims.
If they won't submit, kill them.
This is frightening.
And this man, Terry Jones: I mean here's a guy who wants to burn Qurans, right?
He's a former hotel manager; he's got three dozen members of his church ..."
They laugh him off.
So people all over the Middle East, not just in your country, are protesting.
These Christians -- who are these Christians?
This is what you're thinking as an Arab Muslim, as an Iraqi.
And then your cousin says, "Hey coz, check out this website.
These Christians are nuts!
They're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus.
They take little kids and run them through these things till they teach them how to say, 'Sir! Yes, sir!' and things like 'grenade toss' and 'weapons care and maintenance.' And go to the website -- it says 'US Army' right on it.
I mean, these Christians, they're nuts.
And you're reading this website.
And of course, Christians in the United States, or anybody, says, "This is some little church in the middle of nowhere."
You don't know that.
And look at this.
They even teach their kids -- they train them in the same way the US Marines train.
And it scares you, and it frightens you.
You see, I, Sam Richards -- I know who these guys are.
They're my students, my friends; I know what they're thinking.
You don't know.
We don't see it that way in the United States, but you see it that way.
So here.
You're generalizing. It's wrong.
You don't understand the Americans.
It's not a Christian invasion.
We're not just there for oil; we're there for lots of reasons.
And of course, most of you don't support the insurgency; you don't support killing Americans; you don't support the terrorists.
OK. So now, here's what we're going to do.
Step outside of your shoes that you're in right now, and step back into your normal shoes.
Now here comes the radical experiment.
This photo: this woman -- man, I feel her.
I feel her.
She's my sister, my wife, my cousin, my neighbor.
She's anybody to me.
So here's what I want you to do.
Let's go back to my first example, of the Chinese.
I want you to go there.
It's all about coal, and the Chinese are here in the United States.
What I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising.
And the soldiers are Chinese, and everybody else is Chinese.
As an American, how do you feel about this picture?
What do you think about that scene?
This is the scene here.
What are you feeling and thinking about this photo, about this woman?
OK, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here.
They were caught by the American soldiers, trying to kill Americans.
And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them.
Can you go there?
It shouldn't be that difficult.
Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders?
Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country?
Can you imagine that maybe one of them, in the morning, bent down to their child and hugged their child and said, "Dear, I'll be back later.
I'm going out to defend your freedom, your lives.
Can you imagine saying that?
Can you go there?
What do you think they're feeling?
You see, that's empathy.
[understand] Now, you might ask, "OK, Sam, so why do you do this sort of thing?
You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being.
And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch -- one tiny inch -- then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life.
Whatever it is, you can go so far.
And this is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny, little world.
Step inside of the tiny, little world of somebody else.
And then do it again and do it again and do it again.
And suddenly, all these tiny, little worlds, they come together in this complex web.
And they build a big, complex world.
Everything has changed.
Everything in your life has changed.
And that's, of course, what this is about.
Attend to other lives, other visions.
Listen to other people, enlighten ourselves.
I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq.
But as a sociologist, what I am saying is: I understand.
And now perhaps -- perhaps -- you do, too.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm very fortunate to be here.
I feel so fortunate.
I've been so impressed by the kindness expressed to me.
I called my wife Leslie, and I said, "You know, there's so many good people trying to do so much good.
It's a true feeling.
Her name is Pam Moran in Albemarle County, Virginia, the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
She uses smart boards, she blogs, she Tweets, she does Facebook, she does all this sort of high-tech stuff.
She's a technology leader and instructional leader.
But in her office, there's this old wooden, weather-worn table, kitchen table -- peeling green paint, it's kind of rickety.
And I said, "Pam, you're such a modern, cutting-edge person.
Why is this old table in your office?"
And she told me, she said, "You know, I grew up in Southwestern Virginia, in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural Virginia, and this table was in my grandfather's kitchen.
And we'd come in from playing, he'd come in from plowing and working, and we'd sit around that table every night.
And as I grew up, I heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much wisdom come out around this table, I began to call it the wisdom table.
And when he passed on, I took this table with me and brought it to my office, and it reminds me of him.
It reminds me of what goes on around an empty space sometimes."
The project I'm going to tell you about is called the World Peace Game, and essentially it is also an empty space.
And I'd like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table, really.
It all started back in 1977.
And my parents were very patient, but I had been doing intermittent sojourns to India on a mystical quest.
And I remember the last time I came back from India -- in my long white flowing robes and my big beard and my John Lennon glasses -- and I said to my father, "Dad, I think I've just about found spiritual enlightenment."
He said, "Well there's one more thing you need to find."
I said, "What is that, dad?" "A job."
(Laughter) And so they pleaded with me to get a degree in something.
It was an experimental education program.
And I went in for a job interview in the Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, the capital city, bought a three-piece suit -- my concession to convention -- kept my long beard and my afro and my platform shoes -- at the time it was the '70s -- and I walked in, and I sat down and had an interview.
And I was so shocked, so stunned, I got up and said, "Well, thank you, but what do I do?"
There weren't really many materials or things to use.
And I said, "What do I do?"
And her answer shocked me. It stunned me.
Her answer set the template for the entire career I was to have after that.
So this happened in 1978, and I was teaching many years later, and a friend of mine introduced me to a young filmmaker.
His name is Chris Farina.
Chris Farina is here today at his own cost.
Chris, could you stand up and let them see you -- a young, visionary filmmaker who's made a film.
(Applause) This film is called "World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements."
He proposed the film to me, and I said, "Yeah, maybe it'll be on local TV, and we can say hi to our friends."
So we made a film and it turns out to be more than a story about me, more than a story about one teacher.
It's a story that's a testament to teaching and teachers.
And it's a beautiful thing.
And the strange thing is, when I watch the film -- I have the eerie sensation of seeing it -- I saw myself literally disappear.
What I saw was my teachers coming through me.
That's the smile I use -- that's his smile.
And they weren't flashing in anger, they were flashing in love, intense love for her students.
And I have that kind of flash sometimes.
And I saw Miss Ethel J. Banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school every day.
And you know, she had that old-school teacher stare.
(Laughter) "And I'm not even talking about you behind me, because I've got eyes in the back of my head."
(Laughter) You know that teacher?
And Miss Banks was there as a great mentor for me.
And then I saw my own parents, my first teachers.
My father, very inventive, spatial thinker.
That's my brother Malcolm there on the right.
And my mother, who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in Virginia, who was my inspiration.
And really, I feel as though, when I see the film -- I have a gesture she does, like this -- I feel like I am a continuation of her gesture.
And so that gesture of my mother's continues through many generations.
And so I'm here standing on the shoulders of many people.
I'm not here alone.
There are many people on this stage right now.
It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978.
I was creating a lesson for students on Africa.
I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies.
So I thought, well they like to play games.
And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure.
And it has four Plexiglass layers.
There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining.
There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining.
There are four countries around the board.
The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich; some are poor.
They have different assets, commercial and military.
And each country has a cabinet.
There's a Prime Minister, Secretary of State, Minister of Defense and a CFO, or Comptroller.
I choose the Prime Minister based on my relationship with them.
I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet.
There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations.
There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.
(Laughter) That's not all.
And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems.
So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes.
I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together.
And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation.
There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming.
If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable schools to you because they solved global warming in a week.
(Laughter) (Applause) And they've done it several times too.
And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply.
The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War."
They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.
Stewart Brand is here, and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a CoEvolution Quarterly article on a peace force.
The students run the game.
I have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing.
(Video) Boy: The World Peace Game is serious.
You're actually getting taught something like how to take care of the world.
John Hunter: I offered them a -- (Applause) Actually, I can't tell them anything because I don't know the answer.
And I admit the truth to them right up front: I don't know.
And because I don't know, they've got to dig up the answer.
And so I apologize to them as well.
I say, "I'm so sorry, boys and girls, but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible shape, and we hope you can fix it for us, and maybe this game will help you learn how to do it."
It's a sincere apology, and they take it very seriously.
Now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like.
(Video) JH: All right, we're going into negotiations as of now. Go.
(Chatter) JH: My question to you is, who's in charge of that classroom?
It's impossible. Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine, and I admit it to them openly.
In this game we had a little girl, and she was the Defense Minister of the poorest nation.
And she was next door to a very wealthy, oil-rich neighbor.
Without provocation, suddenly she attacked, against her Prime Minister's orders, the next-door neighbor's oil fields.
She marched into the oil field reserves, surrounded it, without firing a shot, and secured it and held it.
We were all upset with her, "Why are you doing this?
(Laughter) This was a little girl and, at nine years old, she held her pieces and said, "I know what I'm doing."
To her girlfriends she said that.
(Laughter) They are the toughest opponents.
And we were very upset.
But come to find out, a few game days later -- and there are turns where we take negotiation from a team -- actually there's a negotiation period with all teams, and each team takes a turn, then we go back in negotiation, around and around, so each turn around is one game day.
Had they had their fuel supplies, they would have done it.
She was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack in a peace game.
Now she used a small war to avert a larger war, so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right, conditional good, or not right.
That's the kind of thinking that we put them in, the situations.
It came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom.
(Applause) Another example, a beautiful thing happened.
We have a letter in the game.
You have to write a letter to their parents -- the fictional parents of your fictional troops -- explaining what happened and offering your condolences.
So you have a little bit more thought before you commit to combat.
And so we had this situation come up -- last summer actually, at Agnor-Hurt School in Albemarle County -- and one of our military commanders got up to read that letter and one of the other kids said, "Mr. Hunter, let's ask -- there's a parent over there."
There was a parent visiting that day, just sitting in the back of the room.
"Let's ask that mom to read the letter.
It'll be more realer if she reads it."
She read two sentences.
By the third sentence, she was in tears.
I was in tears.
We all lose.
And it was an amazing occurrence and an amazing understanding.
He's been in many battles.
I mean, we've been lucky [most of] the time.
But now I'm feeling really weird because I'm living what Sun Tzu said one week.
One week he said, "Those who go into battle and win will want to go back, and those who lose in battle will want to go back and win."
And I think it's sort of weird to be living what Sun Tzu said.
JH: I get chills every time I see that.
That's the kind of engagement you want to have happen.
And I can't design that, I can't plan that, and I can't even test that.
We know that's an authentic assessment of learning.
We have a lot of data, but I think sometimes we go beyond data with the real truth of what's going on.
This is about my friend Brennan.
We had played the game one session after school for many weeks, about seven weeks, and we had essentially solved all 50 of the interlocking crises.
Some are poor, some are wealthy. There are billions.
The World Bank president was a third-grader one time.
But he was setting fiscal policy in that game for high school players who were playing with him.
So the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer.
There was no way they could win.
I thought, I'm failing as a teacher.
I should have gotten it so they could have won.
I've failed them.
And I was just feeling so sad and dejected.
And suddenly, Brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell, the bell I ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets, and he ran back to his seat, rang the bell.
They were gesticulating; they were running around.
I didn't know what they were doing. I'd lost control of my classroom.
The parents were looking in the window.
And Brennan runs back to his seat. Everybody runs back to their seat.
And we've got 600 billion dollars.
We're going to offer it as a donation to this poor country.
And there are three seconds left on the clock.
Everybody looks at this prime minister of that country, and he says, "Yes."
Some games are more about social issues, some are more about economic issues.
But I don't try to deny them that reality of being human.
I allow them to go there and, through their own experience, learn, in a bloodless way, how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing.
And they find out what is right their own way, their own selves.
And on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders I'm standing, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
I would like to talk today about what I think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon, which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it.
My own interest in this subject, and my passion for it, began rather accidentally.
I had bought a copy of this book, "The Universe and Dr. Einstein" -- a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in Seattle.
A few years after that, in Bangalore, I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night, and I picked up this book, thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes.
And I was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do.
And that feeling hasn't left me yet.
That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career -- from being a software engineer to become a science writer -- so that I could partake in the joy of science, and also the joy of communicating it to others.
And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail.
So it took me from places like Chile -- the Atacama Desert in Chile -- to Siberia, to underground mines in the Japanese Alps, in Northern America, all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole.
And today I would like to share with you some images, some stories of these trips.
And I first begin with a pie chart -- and I promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation -- but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos.
All the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter -- the stuff that we're all made of -- and that's four percent of the universe.
Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, and something called dark energy, which permeates the fabric of space-time, that makes up another 73 percent.
So if you look at this pie chart, 96 percent of the universe, at this point in our exploration of it, is unknown or not well understood.
And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter.
And the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors.
And the reason why they have to go underground is that, if you did this experiment on the surface of the Earth, the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays, ambient radio activity, even our own bodies. You might not believe it, but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment.
So they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector.
And I went to see one of these experiments, and this is actually -- you can barely see it, and the reason for that is it's entirely dark in there -- this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960.
And physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s.
And the miners in the early part of the last century worked, literally, in candlelight.
This is one of the largest underground labs in the world.
And, among other things, they're looking for dark matter.
There is another way to search for dark matter, which is indirectly.
If dark matter exists in our universe, in our galaxy, then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about -- one of them being neutrinos.
And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules.
When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light, a flash of blue light, and by looking for this blue light, you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then, indirectly, something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino.
But you need very, very large volumes of water in order to do this.
You need something like tens of megatons of water -- almost a gigaton of water -- in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino.
This is Lake Baikal.
It is the largest lake in the world. It's 800 km long.
It's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places, and one to two kilometers deep.
And what the Russians are doing is they're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light.
This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter.
The lake is entirely frozen.
And the line of black dots that you see in the background, that's the ice camp where the physicists are working.
The reason why they have to work in winter is because they don't have the money to work in summer and spring, which, if they did that, they would need ships and submersibles to do their work.
So they wait until winter -- the lake is completely frozen over -- and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work.
Because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it's full of cracks.
And you have to imagine, there's an entire sea-like lake underneath, moving.
I still don't understand this one Russian man working in his bare chest, but that tells you how hard he was working.
And these people, a handful of people, have been working for 20 years, looking for particles that may or may not exist.
And they have dedicated their lives to it.
And just to give you an idea, they have spent 20 million over 20 years.
The toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack.
And it's that basic, but they do this every year.
From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to see something called The Very Large Telescope.
The Very Large Telescope is one of these things that astronomers do -- they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively.
But nonetheless, it's an extraordinary piece of engineering.
These are four 8.2 meter telescopes.
And these telescopes, among other things, they're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time.
And the more you understand that, the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about.
And one piece of engineering that I want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror.
Each mirror, there are four of them, is made of a single piece of glass, a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic, that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is [to] imagine a city like Paris, with all its buildings and the Eiffel Tower, if you grind down Paris to that kind of accuracy, you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high.
And that's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured.
An extraordinary set of telescopes.
The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert.
The dry air is really good for telescopes, and also, the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies.
Finally, I want to take you to Antarctica.
This is cosmology's final frontier.
Some of the most amazing experiments, some of the most extreme experiments, are being done in Antarctica.
I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up.
And that's where they do their experiments, and then the balloon, the payload, is brought down.
So this is us landing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
That's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica.
And I don't know if you can read the lettering, but it says, "Ivan the Terribus."
And that's taking us to McMurdo.
And this is the scene that greets you in McMurdo.
This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole.
Because it's so cold, the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it, with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there.
This is McMurdo itself. About a thousand people work here in summer, and about 200 in winter when it's completely dark for six months.
This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km.
What I want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight.
So you're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km.
And the engineers, the technicians, the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf, because Antarctica -- I won't go into the reasons why -- but it's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches, except for the weather.
The weather, as you can imagine, this is summer, and you're standing on 200 ft of ice.
And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top.
And that process takes about two hours.
For instance, here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind, which is eventually going to be filled up with helium.
Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium.
Now, in case the weather changes before the launch, they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station.
And this particular balloon, because it has to launch two tons of weight, is an extremely huge balloon.
The fabric alone weighs two tons.
Here, they can't do it with the kind shoes they're wearing, so they have to take their shoes off, get barefoot into the boxes, in this cold, and do that kind of work.
That's the kind of dedication these people have.
Here's the balloon being filled up with helium, and you can see it's a gorgeous sight.
Here's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end.
So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side, and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute, and then the parachute is then connected to the payload.
And remember, all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold, in sub-zero temperatures.
They're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff, but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that.
And I would like to share with you a launch.
(Video) Radio: Okay, release the balloon, release the balloon, release the balloon.
Anil Ananthaswamy: And I'll finally like to leave you with two images.
This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India.
And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side.
And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery.
And both require silence of some sort.
And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever.
And it was very obvious that, if we destroy these silent places on Earth, we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards, because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space.
Thank you.
(Applause)
That splendid music, the coming-in music, "The Elephant March" from "Aida," is the music I've chosen for my funeral.
Can you understand my quaint English accent?
(Laughter) Like everybody else, I was entranced yesterday by the animal session.
The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, "the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth."
Now of course, we know that he didn't really mean that, but in this country at the moment, you can't be too careful.
(Laughter) I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
In professional circles everywhere, it's of course universally accepted.
In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored.
But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility -- (Laughter) it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war.
The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it.
If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside.
(Laughter) Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called "Intelligent Design," or ID.
Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID.
It's just creationism under another name, rechristened -- I choose the word advisedly -- (Laughter) for tactical, political reasons.
The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day.
There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists.
They see us as rocking the boat, and you can understand why.
Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism: Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual "pre-version."
This book, "Finding Darwin's God," by Kenneth Miller, is one of the most effective attacks on Intelligent Design that I know and it's all the more effective because it's written by a devout Christian.
People like Kenneth Miller could be called a "godsend" to the evolution lobby, (Laughter) because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism.
But here, I want to say something nice about creationists.
It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully.
(Laughter) I think they're right about one thing.
I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.
I've already said that many individual evolutionists, like the Pope, are also religious, but I think they're deluding themselves.
Now, it may sound as though I'm about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that's not what I'm going to do.
In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir.
(Laughter) (Applause) But that's putting it too negatively.
If I was a person who were interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of evolutionary science, and indeed science generally, but evolution in particular, to inspire and enthrall, precisely because it is atheistic.
Now, the difficult problem for any theory of biological design is to explain the massive statistical improbability of living things.
Statistical improbability in the direction of good design -- "complexity" is another word for this.
Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers -- favor our side in a war -- (Laughter) disapprove of our sex lives, and so on.
(Laughter) Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem.
Darwinian natural selection is so stunningly elegant because it solves the problem of explaining complexity in terms of nothing but simplicity.
Essentially, it does it by providing a smooth ramp of gradual, step-by-step increment.
But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion, precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful.
So, returning to tactics and the evolution lobby, I want to argue that rocking the boat may be just the right thing to do.
My approach to attacking creationism is -- unlike the evolution lobby -- my approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole.
And at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against speaking ill of religion, and I'm going to do so in the words of the late Douglas Adams, a dear friend who, if he never came to TED, certainly should have been invited.
(Richard Saul Wurman: He was.) Richard Dawkins: He was. Good. I thought he must have been.
He begins this speech, which was tape recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died -- he begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on.
I quote, "Religion doesn't seem to work like that.
It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about.
You're just not. Why not? Because you're not."
So, we're used to not challenging religious ideas, and it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it." -- He meant me, not that one.
It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations, and blinds them to the wonderful, real explanations that we have within our grasp.
It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith, instead of always insisting on evidence.
There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, "Last Chance to See."
Now, there's a typical scientific journal, The Quarterly Review of Biology.
And I'm going to put together, as guest editor, a special issue on the question, "Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?"
And the first paper is a standard scientific paper, presenting evidence, "Iridium layer at the K-T boundary, and potassium argon dated crater in Yucatan, indicate that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."
"The President of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."
(Laughter) "It has been privately revealed to Professor Huxtane that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."
"Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma binding on all loyal Hawkinsians that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."
But suppose -- [Supporters of the Asteroid Theory cannot be patriotic citizens] (Laughter) (Applause) In 1987, a reporter asked George Bush, Sr.
Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous.
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.
This is one nation under God."
Democrats as well as Republicans parade their religiousness if they want to get elected.
What would Thomas Jefferson have said?
[In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty] Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison.
(Applause) In practice, what is an atheist?
An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf.
As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in.
(Laughter) (Applause) And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen.
Nevertheless, it's an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub.
And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority.
But actually, how do American atheists stack up numerically?
Christianity, of course, takes a massive lion's share of the population, with nearly 160 million.
But what would you think was the second largest group, convincingly outnumbering Jews with 2.8 million, Muslims at 1.1 million, Hindus, Buddhists and all other religions put together?
The second largest group, with nearly 30 million, is the one described as non-religious or secular.
You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby -- the state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote -- while at the same time, consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.
This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote.
Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle?
Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between intelligence and tendency to be religious?
Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ.
And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote -- "Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief, and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection.
That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious."
Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies, and I can't comment on that meta-analysis, but I would like to see more studies done along those lines.
But let me know show you some data that have been properly published and analyzed, on one special group -- namely, top scientists.
In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent.
About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists.
Similar figures obtained for belief in personal immortality.
Among biological scientists, the figure is even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God.
I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such as history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different.
A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public.
If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it -- the intelligentsia -- unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs.
To put it bluntly: American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
(Laughter) (Applause) I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done.
(Laughter) And I've already hinted what that something is.
From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it.
We need a consciousness-raising, coming-out campaign for American atheists.
In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists.
On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people who could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room.
When a critical mass has been obtained, there's an abrupt acceleration in recruitment.
So, what other words might be used to smooth the path, oil the wheels, sugar the pill?
Darwin himself preferred "agnostic" -- and not only out of loyalty to his friend Huxley, who coined the term.
Darwin said, "I have never been an atheist in the same sense of denying the existence of a God.
I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind."
Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism -- incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate "Das Kapital" to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling.
What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers, and a letter from Darwin saying, "My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me," was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard.
Anyway, it was Aveling, and when they met, Darwin challenged Aveling.
"Why do you call yourselves atheists?"
"'Agnostic, '" retorted Aveling, "was simply 'atheist' writ respectable, and 'atheist' was simply 'agnostic' writ aggressive."
Darwin complained, "But why should you be so aggressive?"
Darwin thought that atheism might be well and good for the intelligentsia, but that ordinary people were not, quote, "ripe for it."
Which is, of course, our old friend, the "don't rock the boat" argument.
It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse.
(Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago.
You'd think we might have grown up since then.
Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who, incidentally, observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "tooth-fairy agnostic."
He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but "agnostic" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence.
So, my friend is strictly agnostic about the tooth fairy, but it isn't very likely, is it?
Like God.
Hence the phrase, "tooth-fairy agnostic."
Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars.
You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence.
The list of things which we strictly have to be agnostic about doesn't stop at tooth fairies and teapots; it's infinite.
If you want to believe one particular one of them -- unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why.
We, who are atheists, are also a-fairyists and a-teapotists.
And this is why my friend uses "tooth-fairy agnostic" as a label for what most people would call atheist.
Nonetheless, if we want to attract deep-down atheists to come out publicly, we're going to have find something better to stick on our banner than "tooth-fairy" or "teapot agnostic."
This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place.
My problem with it is only its apparent anthropocentrism.
One of the things we've learned from Darwin is that the human species is only one among millions of cousins, some close, some distant.
And there are other possibilities, like "naturalist," but that also has problems of confusion, because Darwin would have thought naturalist -- "Naturalist" means, of course, as opposed to "supernaturalist" -- and it is used sometimes -- Darwin would have been confused by the other sense of "naturalist," which he was, of course, and I suppose there might be others who would confuse it with "nudism".
(Laughter) Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob, which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile.
(Laughter) I think the best of the available alternatives for "atheist" is simply "non-theist."
It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth-fairy agnostics.
When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "God," they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand.
But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "atheism" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia.
Critical mass may be harder to achieve with the word "atheist" than with the word "non-theist," or some other non-confrontational word.
But if we did achieve it with that dread word "atheist" itself, the political impact would be even greater.
Now, I said that if I were religious, I'd be very afraid of evolution -- I'd go further: I would fear science in general, if properly understood.
And this is because the scientific worldview is so much more exciting, more poetic, more filled with sheer wonder than anything in the poverty-stricken arsenals of the religious imagination.
As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought!
The universe is much bigger than our prophet said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'?
Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious.
Many of you probably subscribe to our polite cultural belief that we should respect religion.
But I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do.
(Laughter) If you're one of them, and of course many of you may not be, but if you are one of them, I'm asking you to stop being polite, come out, and say so.
The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations -- to say nothing of all the tax benefits -- by foundations, such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute.
If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself.
Well, here's how it changed me.
Let's all stop being so damned respectful.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft.
Imagine a plane full of smoke.
I was sitting in 1D.
So I looked at them right away, and they said, "No problem. We probably hit some birds."
The pilot had already turned the plane around, and we weren't that far.
You could see Manhattan.
Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time.
The pilot lines up the plane with the Hudson River.
That's usually not the route.
(Laughter) He turns off the engines.
And then he says three words.
I didn't have to talk to the flight attendant anymore.
Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day.
I learned that it all changes in an instant.
We have this bucket list, we have these things we want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I wanted to reach out to that I didn't, all the fences I wanted to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never did.
As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "I collect bad wines."
Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it.
And that urgency, that purpose, has really changed my life.
The second thing I learned that day -- and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot -- (Laughter) I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret.
I've lived a good life.
In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried.
But in my humanity, I also allow my ego to get in.
And I thought about my relationship with my wife, with my friends, with people.
And after, as I reflected on that, I decided to eliminate negative energy from my life.
I've not had a fight with my wife in two years.
It feels great.
I no longer try to be right; I choose to be happy.
The third thing I learned -- and this is as your mental clock starts going, "15, 14, 13."
You can see the water coming.
It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives.
But it was very sad.
I only wish I could see my kids grow up.
About a month later, I was at a performance by my daughter -- first-grader, not much artistic talent -- (Laughter) Yet!
(Laughter) And I'm bawling, I'm crying, like a little kid.
I realized at that point, by connecting those two dots, that the only thing that matters in my life is being a great dad.
Above all, above all, the only goal I have in life is to be a good dad.
I was given the gift of a miracle, of not dying that day.
I was given another gift, which was to be able to see into the future and come back and live differently.
I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane -- and please don't -- but imagine, and how would you change?
How would you change your relationships and the negative energy in them?
And more than anything, are you being the best parent you can?
Thank you.
(Applause)
How would you like to be better than you are?
Suppose I said that, with just a few changes in your genes, you could get a better memory -- more precise, more accurate and quicker.
Or maybe you'd like to be more fit, stronger, with more stamina.
Which would you like, if you could have just one?
(Audience Member: Creativity.) Creativity.
Raise your hands. Let me see.
(Laughter) That's very good.
Quite a few more.
A few less.
What about longevity?
Is it just imaginary?
Or, is it, perhaps, possible?
Evolution has been a perennial topic here at the TED Conference, but I want to give you today one doctor's take on the subject.
(Laughter) But if you do accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future?
Does it apply to others, or does it apply to us?
This is another look at the tree of life.
In this picture, I've put a bush with a center branching out in all directions, because if you look at the edges of the tree of life, every existing species at the tips of those branches has succeeded in evolutionary terms: it has survived; it has demonstrated a fitness to its environment.
The human part of this branch, way out on one end, is, of course, the one that we are most interested in.
We branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago.
Some have come and gone.
We have been here for about 130,000 years.
It may seem like we're quite remote from other parts of this tree of life, but actually, for the most part, the basic machinery of our cells is pretty much the same.
This is not like human insulin; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas.
And speaking of bacteria, do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body?
Maybe 10 times more.
Our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria.
It's warm, it's dark, it's moist, it's very cozy.
It's really like an Easy Street for bacteria, with the occasional interruption of the unintended forced rush to the exit.
But what will come in the future?
Or, are we destined to become something different -- something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment?
Now let's take a step back in time to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago -- the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years -- the first signs of proto-life, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth -- the first multi-celled organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago -- and then the human species, finally emerging in the last 130,000 years.
In this vast unfinished symphony of the universe, life on Earth is like a brief measure; the animal kingdom, like a single measure; and human life, a small grace note.
That was us.
That also constitutes the entertainment portion of this talk, so I hope you enjoyed it.
(Laughter) Now when I was a freshman in college, I took my first biology class.
I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology.
I became enamored of the power of evolution, and I realized something very fundamental: in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms, each cell simply divides, and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells.
But at the time multi-celled organisms come online, things start to change.
And very importantly, with the introduction of sexual reproduction that passes on the genome, the rest of the body becomes expendable.
In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction.
I've come to understand the sentiments of George Burns, who was performing still in Las Vegas well into his 90s.
He answers the door.
Standing before him is a gorgeous, scantily clad showgirl.
She looks at him and says, "I'm here for super sex."
"That's fine," says George, "I'll take the soup."
(Laughter) I came to realize, as a physician, that I was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution -- not necessarily contradictory, just different.
I wanted to keep us healthy.
Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation.
From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.
I want to achieve it through not dying."
(Laughter) Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived.
Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment.
That is the sole test of survival and success.
At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them.
So what does this mean, as we look back at what has happened in evolution, and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution, and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities.
And the reasoning behind that would be, first, we have, through medicine, managed to preserve a lot of genes that would otherwise be selected out and be removed from the population.
And secondly, we as a species have so configured our environment that we have managed to make it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it.
A second possibility is that there will be evolution of the traditional kind, natural, imposed by the forces of nature.
And the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution grind slowly, but they are inexorable.
And as far as isolation goes, when we as a species do colonize distant planets, there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way.
But there's a third possibility, an enticing, intriguing and frightening possibility.
They're, in some cultures, choosing to have more males than females.
It's not necessarily good for the society, but it's what the individual and the family are choosing.
Think also, if it were possible ever for you to choose, not simply to choose the sex of your child, but for you in your body to make the genetic adjustments that would cure or prevent diseases.
What if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or Alzheimer's or reduce the risk of cancer or eliminate stroke?
Wouldn't you want to make those changes in your genes?
If we look ahead, these kind of changes are going to be increasingly possible.
The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years.
It cost 2.7 billion dollars.
The year after it was finished in 2004, you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months.
Today, you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week.
It won't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome, and it will be increasingly available for everyone.
Just a week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Draper Prize to Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way -- what Frances Arnold calls "directed evolution."
These changes are coming.
The same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves, but induce immunity against other viruses.
These are all reality today, and [in] the future, will be evermore possible.
Imagine then just two other little changes.
You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells in your offspring?
Who doesn't want healthier children?
Why not live longer?
These will be irresistible.
And when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes we want, we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution.
We'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to a thousand years -- and maybe even in the next 100 years.
These are choices that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have before them.
Will we use these choices to make a society that is better, that is more successful, that is kinder?
Will we make a society that is more boring and more uniform, or more robust and more versatile?
These are the kinds of questions that we will have to face.
And most profoundly of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom, and to inherit the wisdom, that we'll need to make these choices wisely?
For better or worse, and sooner than you may think, these choices will be up to us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, security is two different things: it's a feeling, and it's a reality.
And they're different.
And what I want to do in this talk is to split them apart -- figuring out when they diverge and how they converge.
There aren't a lot of good words for the concepts we're going to talk about.
So if you look at security from economic terms, it's a trade-off.
Whether this is a personal decision -- whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home -- or a national decision, where you're going to invade a foreign country -- you're going to trade off something: money or time, convenience, capabilities, maybe fundamental liberties.
And the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off.
You've heard in the past several years, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is not in power.
The question is: Was it worth it?
And you can make your own decision, and then you'll decide whether the invasion was worth it.
That's how you think about security: in terms of the trade-off.
Now, there's often no right or wrong here.
And it'll depend on where we live, whether we live alone or have a family, how much cool stuff we have, how much we're willing to accept the risk of theft.
In politics also, there are different opinions.
A lot of times, these trade-offs are about more than just security, and I think that's really important.
Now, people have a natural intuition about these trade-offs.
Last night in my hotel room, when I decided to double-lock the door, or you in your car when you drove here; when we go eat lunch and decide the food's not poison and we'll eat it.
We make these trade-offs again and again, multiple times a day.
They're just part of being alive; we all do it.
Imagine a rabbit in a field, eating grass.
That rabbit will make a security trade-off: "Should I stay, or should I flee?"
And if you think about it, the rabbits that are good at making that trade-off will tend to live and reproduce, and the rabbits that are bad at it will get eaten or starve.
Yet it seems, again and again, that we're hopelessly bad at it.
And I think that's a fundamentally interesting question.
The answer is, we respond to the feeling of security and not the reality.
Certainly that's true for most of human prehistory.
We've developed this ability because it makes evolutionary sense.
One way to think of it is that we're highly optimized for risk decisions that are endemic to living in small family groups in the East African Highlands in 100,000 BC.
2010 New York, not so much.
Now, there are several biases in risk perception.
A lot of good experiments in this.
I'll give you four.
We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks -- so, flying versus driving.
The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar.
One example would be: people fear kidnapping by strangers, when the data supports that kidnapping by relatives is much more common.
This is for children.
And the fourth is: people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they don't control.
There are a bunch of other of these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions.
There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind.
So you can imagine how that works.
If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must be a lot of tigers around.
You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around.
This works, until you invent newspapers, because what newspapers do is repeat again and again rare risks.
I tell people: if it's in the news, don't worry about it, because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.
(Laughter) When something is so common, it's no longer news.
Car crashes, domestic violence -- those are the risks you worry about.
We're also a species of storytellers.
We respond to stories more than data.
I mean, the joke "One, two, three, many" is kind of right.
One mango, two mangoes, three mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes -- it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot.
And what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality.
Now, you either have a feeling -- you feel more secure than you are, there's a false sense of security.
Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity.
I write a lot about "security theater," which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything.
So back to economics.
And there are two ways to do this.
Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't notice.
Well, a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work.
But if you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality.
Enough real-world examples helps.
Security theater is exposed when it's obvious that it's not working properly.
If you don't understand the risks, you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't match reality.
Not enough examples.
If, for example, terrorism almost never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures.
This is why you keep sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great.
So let me complicate things.
I want to add a third element. I want to add "model."
Feeling and model are in our head, reality is the outside world; it doesn't change, it's real.
Feeling is based on our intuition, model is based on reason.
But in a modern and complex world, you need models to understand a lot of the risks we face.
You need a model to understand them.
This model is an intelligent representation of reality.
It's, of course, limited by science, by technology.
It's limited by our cognitive biases.
But it has the ability to override our feelings.
We get them from religion, from culture, teachers, elders.
A couple years ago, I was in South Africa on safari.
The tracker I was with grew up in Kruger National Park.
He had some very complex models of how to survive.
But he was born there, and he understood how to survive.
I was born in New York City.
(Laughter) Because we had different models based on our different experiences.
Think of models of terrorism, child kidnapping, airline safety, car safety.
Models can come from industry.
The two I'm following are surveillance cameras, ID cards, quite a lot of our computer security models come from there.
A lot of models come from science.
Health models are a great example.
Think of cancer, bird flu, swine flu, SARS.
All of our feelings of security about those diseases come from models given to us, really, by science filtered through the media.
So models can change.
Models are not static.
As we become more comfortable in our environments, our model can move closer to our feelings.
So an example might be, if you go back 100 years ago, when electricity was first becoming common, there were a lot of fears about it.
There were people who were afraid to push doorbells, because there was electricity in there, and that was dangerous.
We change light bulbs without even thinking about it.
It hasn't changed as we were growing up.
And we're good at it.
Or think of the risks on the Internet across generations -- how your parents approach Internet security, versus how you do, versus how our kids will.
Models eventually fade into the background.
A nice example of this came from last year and swine flu.
When swine flu first appeared, the initial news caused a lot of overreaction.
Now, it had a name, which made it scarier than the regular flu, even though it was more deadly.
And people thought doctors should be able to deal with it.
And those two things made the risk more than it was.
As the novelty wore off and the months went by, there was some amount of tolerance; people got used to it.
There was no new data, but there was less fear.
And there's kind of a bifurcation: people had to choose between fear and acceptance -- actually, fear and indifference -- and they kind of chose suspicion.
And when the vaccine appeared last winter, there were a lot of people -- a surprising number -- who refused to get it.
And it's a nice example of how people's feelings of security change, how their model changes, sort of wildly, with no new information, with no new input.
This kind of thing happens a lot.
I think it depends on the observer.
And most security decisions have a variety of people involved.
And stakeholders with specific trade-offs will try to influence the decision.
And I call that their agenda.
And you see agenda -- this is marketing, this is politics -- trying to convince you to have one model versus another, trying to convince you to ignore a model and trust your feelings, marginalizing people with models you don't like.
This is not uncommon.
An example, a great example, is the risk of smoking.
In the history of the past 50 years, the smoking risk shows how a model changes, and it also shows how an industry fights against a model it doesn't like.
Think about seat belts.
When I was a kid, no one wore a seat belt.
Compare that to the airbag debate, probably about 30 years behind.
And there's another cognitive bias I'll call confirmation bias, where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs.
It has to get very compelling before we'll pay attention.
New models that extend long periods of time are hard.
Global warming is a great example.
We can do "to the next harvest."
We can have both models in our head simultaneously -- that kind of problem where we're holding both beliefs together, the cognitive dissonance.
Eventually, the new model will replace the old model.
Strong feelings can create a model.
September 11 created a security model in a lot of people's heads.
You'll see these called "flashbulb events" by psychiatrists.
And we rely on others. We rely on proxies.
We rely on government agencies to tell us what pharmaceuticals are safe.
I flew here yesterday.
I didn't check the airplane.
I relied on some other group to determine whether my plane was safe to fly.
It's a model we just accept pretty much by faith.
Now, what we want is people to get familiar enough with better models, have it reflected in their feelings, to allow them to make security trade-offs.
The second, more honest way is to actually fix the model.
Change happens slowly.
The smoking debate took 40 years -- and that was an easy one.
Really, though, information seems like our best hope.
And I lied.
It actually does.
We live in a technological world; reality changes all the time.
1982 -- I don't know if people will remember this -- there was a short epidemic of Tylenol poisonings in the United States.
Someone took a bottle of Tylenol, put poison in it, closed it up, put it back on the shelf, someone else bought it and died.
There were a couple of copycat attacks.
There wasn't any real risk, but people were scared.
And this is how the tamper-proof drug industry was invented.
It's complete security theater.
As a homework assignment, think of 10 ways to get around it.
I'll give you one: a syringe.
But it made people feel better.
It made their feeling of security more match the reality.
Last story: a few years ago, a friend of mine gave birth.
I visit her in the hospital.
It turns out, when a baby's born now, they put an RFID bracelet on the baby, a corresponding one on the mother, so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward, an alarm goes off.
I wonder how rampant baby snatching is out of hospitals."
(Laughter) But if you think about it, if you are a hospital, and you need to take a baby away from its mother, out of the room to run some tests, you better have some good security theater, or she's going to rip your arm off.
(Laughter) So it's important for us, those of us who design security, who look at security policy -- or even look at public policy in ways that affect security.
It's not just reality; it's feeling and reality.
It's important that, if our feelings match reality, we make better security trade-offs.
Thank you.
We have all probably wondered how great minds achieved what they achieved, right?
And the more astonishing their achievements are, the more we call them geniuses, perhaps aliens coming from a different planet, definitely not someone like us.
But is that true?
So let me start with an example.
You all know the story of Newton's apple, right? OK.
Is that true? Probably not.
I mean some stepping stone, some specific conditions that made universal gravitation not impossible to conceive.
And definitely this was not impossible, at least for Newton.
It was possible, and for some reason, it was also there, available at some point, easy to pick as an apple.
Here is the apple.
And what about Einstein?
Was relativity theory another big leap in the history of ideas no one else could even conceive?
As a physicist, as a scientist, I have learned that posing the right questions is half of the solution.
But I think now we start having a great conceptual framework to conceive and address the right questions.
So we are discussing the "new," and of course, the science behind it.
The new can enter our lives in many different ways, can be very personal, like I meet a new person, I read a new book, or I listen to a new song.
Or it could be global, I mean, something we call innovation.
It could be a new theory, a new technology, but it could also be a new book if you're the writer, or it could be a new song if you're the composer.
In all of these global cases, the new is for everyone, but experiencing the new can be also frightening, so the new can also frighten us.
But still, experiencing the new means exploring a very peculiar space, the space of what could be, the space of the possible, the space of possibilities.
So it could be a physical space.
So in this case, for instance, novelty could be climbing Machu Picchu for the first time, as I did in 2016.
It could be a conceptual space, so acquiring new information, making sense of it, in a word, learning.
It could be a biological space.
I mean, think about the never-ending fight of viruses and bacteria with our immune system.
And now comes the bad news.
We are very, very bad at grasping this space.
Think of it. Let's make an experiment.
Try to think about all the possible things you could do in the next, say, 24 hours.
Here the key word is "all."
Of course you can conceive a few options, like having a drink, writing a letter, also sleeping during this boring talk, if you can.
But not all of them.
So think about an alien invasion, now, here, in Milan, or me -- I stopped thinking for 15 minutes.
A typical solution could be looking at the future with the eyes of the past, so relying on all the time series of past events and hoping that this is enough to predict the future.
And it failed because of the great complexity of the underlying phenomenon.
And now we can do this in a lot of cases with the help of a lot of data.
Looking at the future with the eye of the past could be misleading also for machines.
Now picture yourself for a second in the middle of the Australian Outback.
You look closer and you realize that the car has no driver.
So for some reasons, the algorithms driving the car cannot make sense of this strange beast jumping here and there on the street.
Now, I should tell you, this is a true story.
It happened a few months ago to Volvo's self-driving cars in the middle of the Australian Outback.
(Laughter) It is a general problem, and I guess this will affect more and more in the near future artificial intelligence and machine learning.
It's also a very old problem, I would say 17th century, but I guess now we have new tools and new clues to start solving it.
Italy. Rome. Winter.
So the winter of 2012 was very special in Rome.
Rome witnessed one of the greatest snowfalls of its history.
That winter was special also for me and my colleagues, because we had an insight about the possible mathematical scheme -- again, possible, possible mathematical scheme, to conceive the occurrence of the new.
I remember that day because it was snowing, so due to the snowfall, we were blocked, stuck in my department, and we couldn't go home, so we got another coffee, we relaxed and we kept discussing.
It could be ideas, it could be molecules, it could be technological products that are one step away from what actually exists, and you can achieve them through incremental modifications and recombinations of the existing material.
So for instance, if I speak about the space of my friends, my adjacent possible would be the set of all friends of my friends not already my friends.
I hope that's clear.
But now if I meet a new person, say Briar, all her friends would immediately enter my adjacent possible, pushing its boundaries further.
So if you really want to look from the mathematical point of view -- I'm sure you want -- you can actually look at this picture.
I know I'm asking a lot.
And the green spot is the adjacent possible for you, so something you've never touched before.
You move. You move in the space.
You have a drink. You meet friends. You read a book.
At some point, you end up on the green spot, so you meet Briar for the first time.
So what happens is there is a new part, a brand new part of the space, becoming possible for you in this very moment, even without any possibility for you to foresee this before touching that point.
And behind this there will be a huge set of points that could become possible at some later stages.
So you see the space of the possible is very peculiar, because it's not predefined.
It's not something we can predefine.
It's something that gets continuously shaped and reshaped by our actions and our choices.
So we were so fascinated by these connections we made -- scientists are like this.
In our theory -- this is a key point -- I mean, it's crucially based on a complex interplay between the way in which this space of possibilities expands and gets restructured, and the way in which we explore it.
Of course, we need a testable framework to study innovation.
The first one concerns the pace of innovation, so the rate at which you observe novelties in very different systems.
So our theory predicts that the rate of innovation should follow a universal curve, like this one.
This is the rate of innovation versus time in very different conditions.
And somehow, we predict that the rate of innovation should decrease steadily over time.
So somehow, innovation is predicted to become more difficult as your progress over time.
It's neat. It's interesting. It's beautiful. We were happy.
But the question is, is that true?
Of course we should check with reality.
So we went back to reality and we collected a lot of data, terabytes of data, tracking innovation in Wikipedia, Twitter, the way in which we write free software, even the way we listen to music.
I cannot tell you, we were so amazed and pleased and thrilled to discover that the same predictions we made in the theory were actually satisfied in real systems, many different real systems.
We were so excited.
Of course, apparently, we were on the right track, but of course, we couldn't stop, so we didn't stop.
It's very simple.
So you listen to "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen, and this experience triggers your passion for Cohen so that you start frantically listening to his whole production.
And then you realize that Fabrizio De André here recorded an Italian version of "Suzanne," and so on and so forth.
But the reason why we were thrilled is because actually we could give, for the first time, a scientific substance to this intuition and start making predictions about the way in which we experience the new.
They are not occurring randomly.
And this is good news, because it implies that impossible missions might not be so impossible after all, if we are guided by our intuition, somehow leading us to trigger a positive chain reaction.
(Laughter) So we could see very clearly all of these patterns in the huge amounts of data we collected and analyzed.
For instance, we discovered that popular hits in music are continuously born, you know that, and then they disappear, still leaving room for evergreens.
There is this coexistence between evergreens and new hits.
But it also explains why they are there, and they are there for a specific reason, because we as humans display different strategies in the space of the possible.
So we say they exploit.
Some of us always launch into new adventures.
So it seems that the wise balance, you could also say a conservative balance, between past and future, between exploitation and exploration, is already in place and perhaps needed in our system.
But again the good news is now we have scientific tools to investigate this equilibrium, perhaps pushing it further in the near future.
So as you can imagine, I was really fascinated by all this.
Our mathematical scheme is already providing cues and hints to investigate the space of possibilities and the way in which all of us create it and explore it.
This, I guess, is a starting point of something that has the potential to become a wonderful journey for a scientific investigation of the new, but also I would say a personal investigation of the new.
And I guess this can have a lot of consequences and a huge impact in key activities like learning, education, research, business.
So for instance, if you think about artificial intelligence, I am sure -- I mean, artificial intelligence, we need to rely in the near future more and more on the structure of the adjacent possible, to restructure it, to change it, but also to cope with the unknowns of the future.
In parallel, we have a lot of tools, new tools now, to investigate how creativity works and what triggers innovation.
And the aim of all this is to raise a generation of people able to come up with new ideas to face the challenges in front of us.
We all know.
I think it's a long way to go, but the questions, and the tools, are now there, adjacent and possible.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I brought along with me an abalone shell.
This abalone shell is a biocomposite material that's 98 percent by mass calcium carbonate and two percent by mass protein.
I've been fascinated by how nature makes materials, and there's a lot of secrets to how they do such an exquisite job.
Part of it is that these materials are macroscopic in structure, but they're formed at the nano scale.
They're formed at the nano scale, and they use proteins that are coded by the genetic level that allow them to build these really exquisite structures.
So something I think is very fascinating is: What if you could give life to non-living structures, like batteries and like solar cells?
What if they had some of the same capabilities that an abalone shell did, in terms of being able to build really exquisite structures at room temperature and room pressure, using nontoxic chemicals and adding no toxic materials back into the environment?
So that's kind of the vision that I've been thinking about.
And so what if you could grow a battery in a Petri dish?
Or what if you could give genetic information to a battery so that it could actually become better as a function of time, and do so in an environmentally friendly way?
And so, going back to this abalone shell, besides being nanostructured, one thing that's fascinating is, when a male and female abalone get together, they pass on the genetic information that says, "This is how to build an exquisite material.
Every time the diatoms replicate, they give the genetic information that says, "Here's how to build glass in the ocean that's perfectly nanostructured."
And you can do it the same, over and over again."
So what if you could do the same thing with a solar cell or a battery?
I like to say my favorite biomaterial is my four year old.
But anyone who's ever had or knows small children knows, they're incredibly complex organisms.
If you wanted to convince them to do something they don't want to do, it's very difficult.
So when we think about future technologies, we actually think of using bacteria and viruses -- simple organisms.
Also, when we think about future technologies, we start with the beginning of Earth.
Basically, it took a billion years to have life on Earth.
And very rapidly, they became multi-cellular, they could replicate, they could use photosynthesis as a way of getting their energy source.
But it wasn't until about 500 million years ago -- during the Cambrian geologic time period -- that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials.
Before that, they were all soft, fluffy structures.
It was during this time that there was increased calcium, iron and silicon in the environment, and organisms learned how to make hard materials.
So that's what I would like to be able to do, convince biology to work with the rest of the periodic table.
Now, if you look at biology, there's many structures like DNA, antibodies, proteins and ribosomes you've heard about, that are nanostructured -- nature already gives us really exquisite structures on the nano scale.
Here are some examples.
Natural shells, natural biological materials.
The abalone shell here.
There's diatoms made out of SiO2, and there are magnetotactic bacteria that make small, single-domain magnets used for navigation.
What all these have in common is these materials are structured at the nano scale, and they have a DNA sequence that codes for a protein sequence that gives them the blueprint to be able to build these really wonderful structures.
Now, going back to the abalone shell, the abalone makes this shell by having these proteins.
These proteins are very negatively charged.
They can pull calcium out of the environment, and put down a layer of calcium and then carbonate, calcium and carbonate.
It has the chemical sequences of amino acids which says, "This is how to build the structure.
Here's the DNA sequence, here's the protein sequence in order to do it."
So an interesting idea is, what if you could take any material you wanted, or any element on the periodic table, and find its corresponding DNA sequence, then code it for a corresponding protein sequence to build a structure, but not build an abalone shell -- build something that nature has never had the opportunity to work with yet.
And so here's the periodic table.
I absolutely love the periodic table.
And so I give this out to thousands of people.
And I know it says MIT and this is Caltech, but I have a couple extra if people want it.
I was really fortunate to have President Obama visit my lab this year on his visit to MIT, and I really wanted to give him a periodic table.
So I stayed up at night and talked to my husband, "How do I give President Obama a periodic table?
What if he says, 'Oh, I already have one,' or, 'I've already memorized it?'" (Laughter) So he came to visit my lab and looked around -- it was a great visit.
And then afterward, I said, "Sir, I want to give you the periodic table, in case you're ever in a bind and need to calculate molecular weight."
(Laughter) I thought "molecular weight" sounded much less nerdy than "molar mass."
(Laughter) (Applause) Later in a lecture that he gave on clean energy, he pulled it out and said, "And people at MIT, they give out periodic tables." So ...
And that's a hard sell to a graduate student: "I have this great project ... 50 million years ..."
And so we use a nontoxic virus called M13 bacteriophage, whose job is to infect bacteria.
Well, it has a simple DNA structure that you can go in and cut and paste additional DNA sequences into it, and by doing that, it allows the virus to express random protein sequences.
This is pretty easy biotechnology, and you could basically do this a billion times.
So you can have a billion different viruses that are all genetically identical, but they differ from each other based on their tips, on one sequence, that codes for one protein.
Now if you take all billion viruses, and put them in one drop of liquid, you can force them to interact with anything you want on the periodic table.
And through a process of selection evolution, you can pull one of a billion that does something you'd like it to do, like grow a battery or a solar cell.
Once you find that one out of a billion, you infect it into a bacteria, and make millions and billions of copies of that particular sequence.
The other thing that's beautiful about biology is that biology gives you really exquisite structures with nice link scales.
These viruses are long and skinny, and we can get them to express the ability to grow something like semiconductors or materials for batteries.
Now, this is a high-powered battery that we grew in my lab.
We engineered a virus to pick up carbon nanotubes.
One part of the virus grabs a carbon nanotube, the other part of the virus has a sequence that can grow an electrode material for a battery, and then it wires itself to the current collector.
That battery went to the White House for a press conference, and I brought it here.
(Laughter) But basically you can pull one out of a billion, and make lots of amplifications to it.
Basically, you make an amplification in the lab, and then you get it to self-assemble into a structure like a battery.
We're able to do this also with catalysis.
This is the example of a photocatalytic splitting of water.
And what we've been able to do is engineer a virus to basically take dye-absorbing molecules and line them up on the surface of the virus so it acts as an antenna, and you get an energy transfer across the virus.
And then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, that can be used for clean fuels.
My students promised me it would work.
These are virus-assembled nanowires.
In this case, you're seeing oxygen bubbles come out.
(Applause) Basically, by controlling the genes, you can control multiple materials to improve your device performance.
The last example are solar cells.
We've been able to engineer viruses to pick up carbon nanotubes and then grow titanium dioxide around them, and use it as a way of getting electrons through the device.
And what we've found is through genetic engineering, we can actually increase the efficiencies of these solar cells to record numbers for these types of dye-sensitized systems.
And I brought one of those as well, that you can play around with outside afterward.
So this is a virus-based solar cell.
Through evolution and selection, we took it from an eight percent efficiency solar cell to an 11 percent efficiency solar cell.
So I hope that I've convinced you that there's a lot of great, interesting things to be learned about how nature makes materials, and about taking it the next step, to see if you can force or take advantage of how nature makes materials, to make things that nature hasn't yet dreamed of making.
Thank you.
(Laughter) From making sketches of the models in my mom's Sears catalog ...
to a bedroom so full of my craft projects that it was like my own personal art gallery, I lived to make.
I don't think anyone in my family was surprised when I became an architect.
But to be honest with you, the real foundation of the architect I became was not laid in that bedroom art gallery but by the conversations around my family's dinner table.
There were stories of how people lived and connected to one another, from the impact of urban migration on a village in Zambia to the complex health care needs of the homeless in the streets of San Francisco.
The fact is, we share some of our deepest connections in physical space.
And our stories play out, even in this crazy age of texting and tweeting, in physical space.
Unfortunately, architecture hasn't done a great job of telling all of our stories equally.
Too often, we see the building of monuments like the Gherkin or even Trump Tower ...
(Laughter) that tell the story of the haves rather than the have-nots.
I've tried to create a practice that is rooted in elevating the stories of those who have most often been silenced.
That work -- it's been a mission in spatial justice.
(Applause) Now, spatial justice means that we understand that justice has a geography, and that the equitable distribution of resources, services and access is a basic human right.
So what does spatial justice look like?
For years, I've been working in the historically African-American neighborhood of Bayview Hunters Point in San Francisco, on a plot of land that once held a power plant.
Back in the '90s, a community group led by mothers who lived in the public housing on the hill above the plant fought for its closure.
They won.
The utility company finally tore it down, cleaned the soil and capped most of the site with asphalt so that the clean soil wouldn't blow away.
Sounds like a success story, right?
Well, not so fast.
What that meant is that this community that had been living near a power plant for decades, now had 30 acres of asphalt in their backyard.
Now, the utility company didn't want to be the bad guy here.
Recognizing that they owed the community, they actually put out a call for designers to propose temporary uses for this site, hoping to turn it into a community benefit rather than blight.
I'm part of the diverse team of designers that responded to that call, and for the last four years, we've been collaborating with those mothers and other residents, as well as local organizations and the utility company.
We've been experimenting with all types of events to try and address issues of spatial justice.
Everything from job training workshops to an annual circus to even a beautiful, new shoreline trail.
In the four years that we've been operational, over 12,000 people have come and done something on this site that we hope has transformed their relationship to it.
But lately, I'm starting to realize that events are not enough.
The utility company was finally ready to talk concretely about long-term redevelopment.
That meeting was kind of a disaster.
There was a lot of yelling and anger.
People asked things like, "If you're going to sell it to a developer, wouldn't they just build luxury condos like everyone else?"
But in spite of that, there was still pain here.
Pain from a history of environmental injustice that left many industrial uses in this neighborhood, leaving residents living near toxic waste and, literally, shit.
There's pain from the fact that this zip code still has one of the lowest per capita income, highest unemployment and highest incarceration rates in a city which tech giants like Twitter, Airbnb and Uber call home.
And those tech companies -- hm -- they've actually helped to trigger a gentrification push that is rapidly redefining this neighborhood, both in terms of identity and population.
Now let me pause for a moment to talk about gentrification.
I suspect for a lot of us, it's kind of like a dirty word.
It's become synonymous with the displacement of poor residents from their neighborhood by wealthier newcomers.
If you've ever been displaced, then you know the agony of losing a place that held your story.
Think about what it would be like to find your favorite local spot, a place where you often went and hung out with the old-timers or your friends, had vanished.
The choice to stay -- it's not yours to make.
You no longer belong in your home.
And know that this feeling you're feeling right now, it would be the same regardless of whether or not the person who harmed you meant to do so.
Developer Majora Carter once said to me, "Poor people don't hate gentrification.
They just hate that they rarely get to hang around long enough to enjoy its benefits."
Why is it that we treat culture erasure and economic displacement as inevitable?
And make a commitment to build people's capacity to stay -- to stay in their homes, to stay in their communities, to stay where they feel whole.
But to do this rethink, it requires looking at those past injustices and the pain and grief that is interwoven into them.
And as I started to reflect on my own work, I realized that pain and grief have been recurring themes.
I heard it early on in the Bayview Hunters Point project when a man named Daryl said, "We've always been set aside like an island -- a no-man's-land."
You know, you've seen the pain, too.
From campaigns around statue removals in Charlottesville and New Orleans ...
to towns that have lost their industrial lifeblood and are now dying, like Lorain, Ohio and Bolton, England.
We often rush to remake these places, thinking that we can ease their pain.
But in our boundless desire to do good, to get past all of our mistakes, to build places that hold possibility, we often maintain a blissful ignorance of a landscape filled with a very long trail of broken promises and squelched dreams.
We are building on top of brokenness.
Holding space for pain and grief was never part of my job description as an architect -- after all, it's not expedient, focused on beauty, and hell, even requested by my clients.
But I've seen what happens when there's space for pain.
It can be transformational.
Returning to our story, when we first started working in the neighborhood, one of the first things we did was go out and interview the activists who had led the fight to close the plant.
We consistently heard and felt from them a sense of impending loss.
People were leaving or dying of old age, and with those departures, stories were being lost.
At worst, a place of violence; at best, a blank slate.
Neither was true, of course.
So my colleagues and I, we reached out to StoryCorps.
And we invited the residents to come and have their stories recorded for posterity.
After a few days of recording, we held a listening party where we played clips, much like what you hear on NPR every Friday morning.
That party -- it was one of the most amazing community meetings I've ever been a part of.
Two stories that I remember well -- AJ talked about what it was like to grow up in the neighborhood.
But he also spoke with sadness of what it was like to first be stopped and questioned by a police officer when he was 11.
He wanted to see more of that.
By holding space to first express pain and grief, we were then able to brainstorm ideas for a site -- amazing ideas that then became the seeds of what we did over the next four years.
So why the radically different meeting now?
Healing also takes time.
After all, who here thinks you can go to therapy just once and be cured?
I didn't think so.
My work's taken me all over the world, and I have yet to set foot in a place where pain didn't exist and the potential for healing was absent.
So while I've spent my career honing my skills as an architect, I realize that I'm now also a healer.
I suppose this is the point in the talk where I should be telling you those five steps to healing, but I don't have the solution -- yet.
That being said, there are a few things I have learned along the way.
First -- we cannot create cities for everyone unless we're first willing to listen to everyone.
For those of us with privilege, we have to have a reckoning with our own guilt, discomfort and complicity.
As non-profit leader Anne Marks once observed, "Hurt people hurt people; healed people heal people."
Healing is about acknowledging pain and making peace with it.
One of my favorite quotes says that healing renews our faith in the process of becoming.
I stand here before you as an architect-healer because I'm ready to see what I can become, what my community and those that I work with can become, and what this country, and frankly, this world can become.
I believe that you all are far more resilient than you think.
But the first step requires courage.
The courage to see each other's pain, and to be willing to stay in the presence of it, even when it gets uncomfortable.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So for the past year and a half, my team at Push Pop Press and Charlie Melcher and Melcher Media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book.
It's called "Our Choice" and the author is Al Gore.
It's the sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth," and it explores all the solutions that will solve the climate crisis.
The book starts like this. This is the cover.
Or, we can scroll through the pages at the bottom.
And anything you see in the book, you can pick up with two fingers and lift off the page and open up.
And if you want to go back and read the book again, you just fold it back up and put it back on the page.
(Audio) Al Gore: I consider myself among the majority who look at windmills and feel they're a beautiful addition to the landscape.
This photo, you can you can even see on an interactive map.
And throughout the book, there's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations.
So you can open this one.
(Audio) AG: Most modern wind turbines consist of a large ...
Or we can zoom out to the table of contents, and the video keeps playing.
But one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics.
But instead of just showing us the information, we can take our finger and explore, and see, state by state, exactly how much wind potential there is.
We can do the same for geothermal energy and solar power.
This is one of my favorites.
(Laughter) (Applause) When the wind is blowing, any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery.
And as the wind starts dying down, any excess energy will be diverted back into the house -- the lights never go out.
And so you can start reading on your iPad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iPhone.
And it works the exact same way.
You can pinch into any page.
So that's Push Pop Press' first title, Al Gore's "Our Choice."
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That's spectacular.
Do you want to be a publisher, a technology licenser?
MM: Yeah, we're building a tool that makes it really easy for publishers right now to build this content.
So Melcher Media's team, who's on the East coast -- and we're on the West coast, building the software -- takes our tool and, every day, drags in images and text.
CA: So you want to license this software to publishers to make books as beautiful as that? (MM: Yes.) All right. Mike, thanks so much.
MM: Thank you. (CA: Good luck.) (Applause)
My name is Arvind Gupta, and I'm a toymaker.
I've been making toys for the last 30 years.
The early '70s, I was in college.
It was a very revolutionary time.
It was a political ferment, so to say -- students out in the streets of Paris, revolting against authority.
America was jolted by the anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement.
In India, we had the Naxalite movement, the [unclear] movement.
Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the National Movement.
Now in the early '70s, one of the great programs in India was to revitalize primary science in village schools.
There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR.
So he designed and went and started a village science program.
Many people were inspired by this.
The slogan of the early '70s was "Go to the people.
Live with them; love them.
Start from what they know. Build on what they have."
So I took one year off, and I went to this village science program.
It was a very small village -- a weekly bazaar where people, just once in a week, they put in all the vats.
So I said, "I'm going to spend a year over here."
So I just bought one specimen of everything which was sold on the roadside.
And one thing which I found was this black rubber.
This is called a cycle valve tube.
And some of these models -- so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube, you can put two matchsticks inside this, and you make a flexible joint.
It's like its own little coupling.
If you have three of them, and you loop them together, well you make a triangle.
With four, you make a square, you make a pentagon, you make a hexagon, you make all these kind of polygons.
If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile.
You can just pull this out, this becomes a rectangle.
Look at the pentagon, for instance, pull this out -- it becomes a boat shape trapezium.
Why use triangles?
Because triangles are the only rigid structures.
We can't make a bridge with squares because the train would come, it would start doing a jig.
Ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in India, they might not have gone to engineering college, but no one makes a roof placed like this.
Because if they put tiles on top, it's just going to crash.
They always make a triangular roof.
And if I were to poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle, I would make a tetrahedron.
So you make all these 3D shapes.
You make a tetrahedron like this.
Put this on top.
You can play around with it.
This makes an igloo.
Now this is in 1978.
I was a 24-year-old young engineer.
(Applause) If you, as a matter of fact, put four marbles inside, you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4.
Four atoms of hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron, which means the little carbon atom.
I see hope. I see happiness in their faces.
Children want to make things. Children want to do things.
Now this, we make lots and lots of pumps.
Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon.
It's a real pump. You could actually pop the balloon.
And we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it.
So all you do is -- it's a very kind of provocative statement -- this old bicycle tube and this old plastic [unclear] This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube.
And this is how you make a valve.
You put a little sticky tape.
Well we make lots and lots of pumps.
And this is the other one -- that you just take a straw, and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts.
Now this is what you do, is you bend both these legs into a triangle, and you just wrap some tape around.
And this is the pump.
And now, if you have this pump, it's like a great, great sprinkler.
It's like a centrifuge.
(Applause) Well in terms of -- if you were in Andhra Pradesh, you would make this with the palmyra leaf.
Many of our folk toys have great science principles.
If I do it with both hands, you can see this fun Mr. Flying Man.
Right.
This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing.
You see insects, you see frogs, snakes, eagles, butterflies, frogs, snakes, eagles.
Here's a paper which you could [unclear] -- designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928, Arthur Stone, documented by Martin Gardner in many of his many books.
But this is great fun for children.
The insects are eaten by the frogs; the frogs are eaten by the snakes; the snakes are eaten by the eagles.
And what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination.
If you take a smaller paper, you make a smaller flexagon.
Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here.
And this is a hundred-year-old toy.
There have been six major research papers on this.
There's some grooves over here, you can see.
Six major research papers on this.
As a matter of fact, Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this.
He wrote a paper on this.
And you don't need the three billion-dollar Hadron Collider for doing this. (Laughter) (Applause) This is there for every child, and every child can enjoy this.
And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back, that white light's made of seven colors, just by spinning this around.
This is a straw.
This is a kind of a blowing straw.
I just put this inside this.
There's a hole here, and I shut this.
What we do is make a very simple electric motor.
Now this is the simplest motor on Earth.
The most expensive thing is the battery inside this.
If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it.
This is an old bicycle tube, which gives you a broad rubber band, two safety pins.
This is a permanent magnet.
Whenever current flows through the coil, this becomes an electromagnet.
It's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin.
We made 30,000.
Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years, they just muck up the definition and they spit it out.
When teachers make it, children make it.
They get a thrill of what science is all about.
And this science is not a rich man's game.
In a democratic country, science must reach to our most oppressed, to the most marginalized children.
This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools.
Over 100,000 children learn science this way.
And we're just trying to see possibilities.
There are six layers -- three layers of plastic, aluminum -- which are are sealed together.
They are fused together, so you can't separate them.
Now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an icosahedron.
So something which is trash, which is choking all the seabirds, you could just recycle this into a very, very joyous -- all the platonic solids can be made with things like this.
You put this in your mouth, and you blow.
(Honk) It's children's delight, a teacher's envy, as they say.
You're not able to see how the sound is produced, because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth.
(Honk) So no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations.
And something very, very nice happens.
(Honk) (Applause) And when you get a very small one -- (Honk) This is what the kids teach you. You can also do this.
Well before I go any further, this is something worth sharing.
This is strips of Velcro, this is my drawing slate, and this is my drawing pen, which is basically a film box.
It's basically like a fisherman's line, a fishing line.
And this is wool over here.
And what a blind child can do is to just draw this.
Wool sticks on Velcro.
There are 12 million blind children in our country -- (Applause) who live in a world of darkness.
There's a factory out there making our children blind, not able to provide them with food, not able to provide them with vitamin A.
There are no patents. Anyone can make it.
You can see, this is the generator. It's a crank generator.
These are two magnets.
This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs.
Small pulley and two strong magnets.
And this fiber turns a wire attached to an LED.
There will be a spinning magnetic field.
And you can see, this LED is going to glow.
So this is a small crank generator.
Well, this is, again, it's just a ring, a steel ring with steel nuts.
And imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on.
Well in the end, what we can also do: we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps.
This is worthy of Sachin Tendulkar.
It's a great cricket cap. (Laughter) (Applause) When first you see Nehru and Gandhi, this is the Nehru cap -- just half a newspaper.
We make lots of toys with newspapers, and this is one of them.
And this is -- you can see -- this is a flapping bird.
All of our old newspapers, we cut them into little squares.
And if you have one of these birds -- children in Japan have been making this bird for many, many years.
And you can see, this is a little fantail bird.
This is called "The Captain's Hat Story."
The captain was a captain of a sea-going ship.
And there were lots of passengers on the ship, and they were getting bored, so the captain invited them on the deck.
"Wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance, and I'll provide you with good food and drinks."
And the captain would wear a cap everyday and join in the regalia.
The first day, it was a huge umbrella cap, like a captain's cap.
And the third day, it would be a Shikari cap -- just like an adventurer's cap.
If you've seen any of our Bollywood films, this is what the policeman wears, it's called a zapalu cap.
And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship.
So that's a ship.
They were singing and dancing.
Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves.
And all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves.
A huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks it down.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
Phyllis Rodriguez: We are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship.
And yet, it feels natural to us now.
I first learned that my son had been in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001.
We didn't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later.
At the time, we knew that it was political.
We were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son -- my husband, Orlando, and I and our family.
And a couple of weeks later when Zacarias Moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism, and the U.S. government called for a death penalty for him, if convicted, my husband and I spoke out in opposition to that, publicly.
Through that and through human rights groups, we were brought together with several other victims' families.
When I saw Aicha in the media, coming over when her son was indicted, and I thought, "What a brave woman.
Someday I want to meet that woman when I'm stronger."
I knew I would find her someday, or we would find each other.
Because, when people heard that my son was a victim, I got immediate sympathy.
But when people learned what her son was accused of, she didn't get that sympathy.
But her suffering is equal to mine.
So we met in November 2002, and Aicha will now tell you how that came about.
I am the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui.
And I asked the Organization of Human Rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims.
So they introduced me to five families.
And I saw Phyllis, and I watched her.
She was the only mother in the group.
The others were brothers, sisters.
And I saw in her eyes that she was a mother, just like me.
I suffered a lot as a mother.
I was married when I was 14.
I lost a child when I was 15, a second child when I was 16.
I know she really cried for her son.
But she knows where he is.
I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if he's tortured.
I don't know what happened to him.
So that's why I decided to tell my story, so that my suffering is something positive for other women.
For all the women, all the mothers that give life, you can give back, you can change.
It's up to us women, because we are women, because we love our children.
We must be hand-in-hand and do something together.
I go to schools to talk to young, Muslim girls so they don't accept to be married against their will very young.
So if I can save one of the young girls, and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as I did, well this is something good.
This is why I'm here in front of you.
PR: I would like to say that I have learned so much from Aicha, starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members -- which was a very private meeting with security, because it was November 2002, and, frankly, we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country -- those of us family members.
But we were all so nervous.
"Why does she want to meet us?"
And then she was nervous.
"Why did we want to meet her?"
What did we want from each other?
Before we knew each others' names, or anything, we had embraced and wept.
Then we sat in a circle with support, with help, from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation.
And Aicha started, and she said, "I don't know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I want to tell you how sorry I am for what happened to your families.
I know what it is to suffer, and I feel that if there is a crime, a person should be tried fairly and punished."
But she reached out to us in that way, and it was, I'd like to say, it was an ice-breaker.
And what happened then is we all told our stories, and we all connected as human beings.
By the end of the afternoon -- it was about three hours after lunch -- we'd felt as if we'd known each other forever.
Now what I learned from her, is a woman, not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then, and what was being done to her son, but the life she's had.
I never had met someone with such a hard life, from such a totally different culture and environment from my own.
And I feel that we have a special connection, which I value very much.
And I think it's all about being afraid of the other, but making that step and then realizing, "Hey, this wasn't so hard.
Who else can I meet that I don't know, or that I'm so different from?"
(Laughter) (Translator) AW: I wanted to say that we have to try to know other people, the other.
You have to be generous, and your hearts must be generous, your mind must be generous.
You must be tolerant.
And I hope that someday we'll all live together in peace and respecting each other.
(Applause)
I've got something to show you.
(Laughter) Think about this as a pixel, a flying pixel.
Now if you take this picture -- I'm Italian originally, and every boy in Italy grows up with this picture on the wall of his bedroom -- but the reason I'm showing you this is that something very interesting happened in Formula 1 racing over the past couple of decades.
Now some time ago, if you wanted to win a Formula 1 race, you take a budget, and you bet your budget on a good driver and a good car.
And if the car and the driver were good enough, then you'd win the race.
Now today, if you want to win the race, actually you need also something like this -- something that monitors the car in real time, has a few thousand sensors collecting information from the car, transmitting this information into the system, and then processing it and using it in order to go back to the car with decisions and changing things in real time as information is collected.
This is what, in engineering terms, you would call a real time control system.
And basically, it's a system made of two components -- a sensing and an actuating component.
What is interesting today is that real time control systems are starting to enter into our lives.
Our cities, over the past few years, just have been blanketed with networks, electronics.
They're becoming like computers in open air.
And, as computers in open air, they're starting to respond in a different way to be able to be sensed and to be actuated.
Just as an aside, I wanted to mention, cities are only two percent of the Earth's crust, but they are 50 percent of the world's population.
They are 75 percent of the energy consumption -- up to 80 percent of CO2 emissions.
Beyond cities, all of this sensing and actuating is entering our everyday objects.
That's from an exhibition that Paola Antonelli is organizing at MoMA later this year, during the summer.
It's called "Talk to Me."
Well our objects, our environment is starting to talk back to us.
In a certain sense, it's almost as if every atom out there were becoming both a sensor and an actuator.
And that is radically changing the interaction we have as humans with the environment out there.
In a certain sense, it's almost as if the old dream of Michelangelo ...
Well today, for the first time, our environment is starting to talk back to us.
Let's starting with sensing.
Well, the first project I wanted to share with you is actually one of the first projects by our lab.
It was four and a half years ago in Italy.
And what we did there was actually use a new type of network at the time that had been deployed all across the world -- that's a cellphone network -- and use anonymous and aggregated information from that network, that's collected anyway by the operator, in order to understand how the city works.
The summer was a lucky summer -- 2006.
It's when Italy won the soccer World Cup.
Some of you might remember, it was Italy and France playing, and then Zidane at the end, the headbutt.
And anyway, Italy won at the end.
(Laughter) Now look at what happened that day just by monitoring activity happening on the network.
Here you see the city.
You see the Colosseum in the middle, the river Tiber.
It's morning, before the match.
You see the timeline on the top.
Early afternoon, people here and there, making calls and moving.
The match begins -- silence.
France scores. Italy scores.
First overtime, second.
Zidane, the headbutt in a moment.
Italy wins. Yeah.
(Laughter) (Applause) Well, that night, everybody went to celebrate in the center.
The following day, again everybody went to the center to meet the winning team and the prime minister at the time.
And then everybody moved down.
Well, that's just one example of how we can sense the city today in a way that we couldn't have done just a few years ago.
This is a map that shows you all the chips that form a Mac computer, how they came together.
But we know very little about where things go.
So in this project, we actually developed some small tags to track trash as it moves through the system.
So we actually started with a number of volunteers who helped us in Seattle, just over a year ago, to tag what they were throwing away -- different types of things, as you can see here -- things they would throw away anyway.
(Music) From Seattle ...
With this information we realized there's a lot of inefficiencies in the system.
We can actually do the same thing with much less energy.
But the other thing is that we believe that if we see every day that the cup we're throwing away, it doesn't disappear, it's still somewhere on the planet.
And the plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there.
And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change.
So that was the reason for the project.
My colleague at MIT, Assaf Biderman, he could tell you much more about sensing and many other wonderful things we can do with sensing, but I wanted to go to the second part we discussed at the beginning, and that's actuating our environment.
And the first project is something we did a couple of years ago in Zaragoza, Spain.
It started with a question by the mayor of the city, who came to us saying that Spain and Southern Europe have a beautiful tradition of using water in public space, in architecture.
And the question was: How could technology, new technology, be added to that?
And one of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing.
You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water.
If those pixels fall, you can write on it, you can show patterns, images, text.
And we got a commission to design a building at the entrance of the expo.
We called it Digital Water Pavilion.
The whole building is made of water.
(Music) The roof also is covered with water.
And if there's a bit of wind, if you want to minimize splashing, you can actually lower the roof.
Or you could close the building, and the whole architecture will disappear, like in this case.
You know, these days, you always get images during the winter, when they take the roof down, of people who have been there and said, "They demolished the building."
Well, I should tell you now what happened one night when all of the sensors stopped working.
But actually that night, it was even more fun.
(Video) (Crowd Noise) And that was, for us, was very interesting, because, as architects, as engineers, as designers, we always think about how people will use the things we design.
But then reality's always unpredictable.
Here is an image then of the building with the physical pixels, the pixels made of water, and then projections on them.
That's, imagine those pixels could actually start flying.
Imagine you could have small helicopters that move in the air, and then each of them with a small pixel in changing lights -- almost as a cloud that can move in space.
Here is the video.
(Music) So imagine one helicopter, like the one we saw before, moving with others, in synchrony.
So you can have this cloud.
You can have a kind of flexible screen or display, like this -- a regular configuration in two dimensions.
You can play with a different type.
Imagine your screen could just appear in different scales or sizes, different types of resolution.
But then the whole thing can be just a 3D cloud of pixels that you can approach and move through it and see from many, many directions.
Here is the real Flyfire control and going down to form the regular grid as before.
When you turn on the light, actually you see this. So the same as we saw before.
And imagine each of them then controlled by people.
You can have each pixel having an input that comes from people, from people's movement, or so and so.
I want to show you something here for the first time.
We've been working with Roberto Bolle, one of today's top ballet dancers -- the étoile at Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan -- and actually captured his movement in 3D in order to use it as an input for Flyfire.
And here you can see Roberto dancing.
You see on the left the pixels, the different resolutions being captured.
It's both 3D scanning in real time and motion capture.
You can go all the way through.
But then, once we have the pixels, then you can play with them and play with color and movement and gravity and rotation.
So we want to use this as one of the possible inputs for Flyfire.
I wanted to show you the last project we are working on.
It's called The Cloud.
Imagine you can have everybody make a small donation for one pixel.
And I think what is remarkable that has happened over the past couple of years is that, over the past couple of decades, we went from the physical world to the digital one.
This has been digitizing everything, knowledge, and making that accessible through the Internet.
Now today, for the first time -- and the Obama campaign showed us this -- we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one.
That means something built in a city.
So the idea that we can actually involve people in doing this thing together, collectively.
The cloud is a cloud, again, made of pixels, in the same way as the real cloud is a cloud made of particles.
And those particles are water, where our cloud is a cloud of pixels.
It's a physical structure in London, but covered with pixels.
You can enter inside it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So as a fashion designer, I've always tended to think of materials something like this, or this, or maybe this.
But then I met a biologist, and now I think of materials like this -- green tea, sugar, a few microbes and a little time.
Over time, these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface.
So we start by brewing the tea.
I brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time, and then while it's still hot, add a couple of kilos of sugar.
And along with that, some acetic acid.
And once you get this process going, you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid.
We need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth.
And I use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it.
So this is my mini fabric farm.
After about three days, the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid.
So this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing.
And the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid.
So they're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose.
And they're sticking together, forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface.
So the bath on the left is after five days, and on the right, after 10.
And this is a static culture.
You don't have to do anything to it; you just literally watch it grow.
And when it's ready to harvest, you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold, soapy water.
At this point, it's really heavy.
It's over 90 percent water, so we need to let that evaporate.
So I spread it out onto a wooden sheet.
Again, you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air.
And as it's drying, it's compressing, so what you're left with, depending on the recipe, is something that's either like a really light-weight, transparent paper, or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather.
And then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally, or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape.
And as it evaporates, it will knit itself together, forming seams.
So the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea.
I guess it also looks a little bit like human skin, which intrigues me.
And in fact, cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark.
And because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose, it just takes one, and a really short one at that.
So if I was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today, I would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water.
Possibly a good performance piece, but definitely not ideal for everyday wear.
So what I want to do is say to a future bug, "Spin me a thread.
Make it hydrophobic.
And while you're at it, just form it around this 3D shape."
Bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing, and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels, possibly even replacement bone tissue.
But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire.
Obviously, as a designer, that's really exciting because then I start to think, wow, we could actually imagine growing consumable products.
What excites me about using microbes is their efficiency.
And in fact, we could make it from a waste stream -- so for example, a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant.
Finally, at the end of use, we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings.
But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources.
So I guess what my question to you is: in the future, what would you choose to grow?
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Suzanne, just a curiosity, what you're wearing is not random. (Suzanne Lee: No.) This is one of the jackets you grew?
It's probably -- part of the project's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes.
Suzanne Lee. (SL: Thank you.) (Applause)
The universe is really big.
We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy.
There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this.
Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way -- a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs.
There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.
100 billion is the only number you need to know.
The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years.
(Laughter) Which tells you something about our place in the universe.
One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it.
It's extremely beautiful.
But we would also like to understand it.
As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this?
One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time.
If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you.
And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster.
So we say the universe is expanding.
What that means, of course, is that, in the past, things were closer together.
In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter.
The thing that doesn't make sense to us as much is that the universe, at early times, near the Big Bang, was also very, very smooth.
You might think that that's not a surprise.
The air in this room is very smooth.
You might say, "Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out."
But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room.
The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang.
What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars each.
At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big -- literally -- at early times.
Keeping the universe very, very smooth at early times is not easy; it's a delicate arrangement.
It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly.
There is something that made it that way.
So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century.
And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy.
You've heard of entropy.
It's the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems.
Boltzmann gave us a formula -- engraved on his tombstone now -- that really quantifies what entropy is.
And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same.
If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom.
A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few arrangements that look that way.
A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way.
This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics -- the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe.
The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy.
This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what's behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future.
Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing -- the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future.
The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that's because entropy is increasing.
Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it's very natural for it to increase because there's more ways to be high entropy.
What he didn't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place.
The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very, very smooth.
We'd like to understand that.
That's our job as cosmologists.
Unfortunately, it's actually not a problem that we've been giving enough attention to.
One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman.
50 years ago, he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures.
He gave the popular lectures that became "The Character of Physical Law."
He gave lectures to Caltech undergrads that became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics."
He gave lectures to Caltech graduate students that became "The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation."
In every one of these books, every one of these sets of lectures, he emphasized this puzzle: Why did the early universe have such a small entropy?
So he says -- I'm not going to do the accent -- he says, "For some reason, the universe, at one time, had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased.
The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding."
So that's our job.
It's not true that we've figured it out by now.
The reason the problem has gotten worse, rather than better, is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn't know before.
The universe is not only expanding.
If you look at the galaxy, it's moving away.
Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating.
Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don't know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that's the theory of dark energy.
It's just the idea that empty space itself has energy.
In every little cubic centimeter of space, whether or not there's stuff, whether or not there's particles, matter, radiation or whatever, there's still energy, even in the space itself.
It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other.
Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands.
The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger.
This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future.
Back when I was your age, we didn't know what the universe was going to do.
Einstein was fond of this idea.
But if there's dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever.
14 billion years in the past, 100 billion dog years, but an infinite number of years into the future.
Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see.
There's a finite region of space that we have access to, surrounded by a horizon.
So even though time goes on forever, space is limited to us.
Finally, empty space has a temperature.
In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it's black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics.
The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation, and the black hole radiates.
A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates.
The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations.
And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space.
So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever.
That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century.
He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy.
But that's a probabilistic statement.
It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge.
It's not something you have to worry about -- the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us.
It's very, very unlikely.
Everything that is allowed, every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room, would eventually be obtained.
So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium.
He didn't know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about the expansion of the universe.
He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton -- they were absolute; they just stuck there forever.
So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere -- the everything molecules.
But if you're Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations.
So it's not that entropy must always increase -- you can get fluctuations into lower entropy, more organized situations.
Well if that's true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas -- the multiverse and the anthropic principle.
He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can't live there.
Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time.
We would not be able to process information, metabolize, walk and talk, if we lived in thermal equilibrium.
So if you imagine a very, very big universe, an infinitely big universe, with randomly bumping into each other particles, there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states, and then they relax back.
So Boltzmann says, we will only live in the part of the multiverse, in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles, where life is possible.
That's the region where entropy is low.
Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time.
Carl Sagan once famously said that "in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe."
In Boltzmann's scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie.
That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie.
So this scenario makes predictions.
Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are, and we have, not only our memories, but our impression that outside there's something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy, it's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech, the United States and the galaxy.
The good news is that, therefore, this scenario does not work; it is not right.
And Feynman also understood this.
Feynman says, "From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we've never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we've just looked at -- high entropy.
If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy?
(Laughter) Here is the universe that we tell you about, versus the universe that really exists.
I just showed you this picture.
The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so.
But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more.
If the dark energy remains around, the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel, they will stop burning.
They will fall into black holes.
We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes.
That universe will last 10 to the 100 years -- a lot longer than our little universe has lived.
The future is much longer than the past.
But even black holes don't last forever.
They will evaporate, and we will be left with nothing but empty space.
That empty space lasts essentially forever.
However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there's actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space.
So even though the universe lasts forever, there's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe.
Number one: If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years, why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it, in the warm, comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang?
Why aren't we in empty space?
You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness.
So like I said, I don't actually know the answer.
I'm going to give you my favorite scenario.
Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe.
An egg, an unbroken egg, is a low entropy configuration, and yet, when we open our refrigerator, we do not go, "Hah, how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator."
That's because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken.
Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations.
If that's true, it would happen more than once; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse.
That's my favorite scenario.
And 50 years from now, all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities.
We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse.
And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations.
This is a prediction. I might be wrong.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's great being here at TED.
You know, I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head, but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet.
The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted.
And you can't tell the story about pollinators -- bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies -- without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years.
Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with.
Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth.
It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it.
When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action.
We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat.
And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind.
It's like the canary in the coalmine.
What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers: "What motivates the pollinators?"
Well, their answer was, "It's all about risk and reward."
And they'd say, "Well, because they want to survive."
"Well, why?"
And I thought that they'd probably say, "Well, it's all about sex."
And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, "Nothing lasts forever.
Everything in the universe wears out."
And that blew my mind.
Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.
Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment.
It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again.
I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden.
And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder.
Here are some images from the film.
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland.
There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families.
All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing.
The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers.
And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it.
I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only, some images, a cross-section of my work, to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "Have You Ever."
I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before, but they're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet.
And what these images are -- you'll see them at the start of the slide show -- there's only about four images -- but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest.
It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear.
There are only 200 of these bears left.
I thought, my career's over.
I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic.
What in the heck was I thinking?
So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life, after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me.
Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time: they publish pictures, not excuses.
(Laughter) And after two months of sitting there -- one day, thinking that it was all over, this incredible big white male came down, right beside me, three feet away from me, and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it.
And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest.
He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep.
And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him, just in the forest, and photograph him.
So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions.
Please enjoy.
(Music) Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫ ♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ You're part of the life there ♫ ♫ You're part of something good ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫ ♫ What's the purpose? ♫ ♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫ ♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫ ♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ You always end up ♫ ♫ Not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫ ♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫ (Applause) Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over.
My clock is ticking. OK, let's stop.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level.
And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years.
And what does that mean?
After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news.
And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem.
Projections are that we could lose polar bears, they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years.
Polar bears are amazing hunters.
This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores.
There was no ice around.
And this bear swam out to that seal -- 800 lb. bearded seal -- grabbed it, swam back and ate it.
And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal, that, as I approached him -- about 20 feet away -- to get this picture, his only defense was to keep eating more seal.
So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive, but it's the ice that's disappearing.
When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago, we never found dead bears.
And in the last four or five years, we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place.
We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out.
I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice.
These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice.
They're not going to die of hypothermia.
They're going to get to land.
But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem.
These ringed seals, these are the "fatsicles" of the Arctic.
And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here.
These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice.
They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice.
And here's a picture of sick ice.
And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts, these big pockets of black water are forming and they're grabbing the sun's energy and accelerating the melting process.
And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea.
The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines; the ice is moving all over the place.
I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive.
But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice, that big chunk of ice up in the corner.
In that one single piece of ice, you have 300 species of microorganisms.
And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life.
So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden.
It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden.
Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden.
This is after an hour under the ice.
I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen; I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet.
And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water.
And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over.
And he thinks I'm saying, "Take my picture."
So we had this little communication breakdown.
(Laughter) But it's worth it.
I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made.
I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo.
I got very nervous -- no rope, no safety line, the whole world is moving around me -- and I thought, "I'm in trouble."
But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle.
And when you have low productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down.
This is a bowhead whale.
Supposedly, science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now.
This very whale right here could be over 250 years old.
This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution.
It could have survived 150 years of whaling.
And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South.
Narwhals, these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here; they could be out on the open water.
But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod.
And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods.
Alright, my favorite part.
When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to remember one story more than any other.
Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals.
Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation.
They've got that wryly smile on their mouth.
They've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body.
And tragically in [2003], a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal.
And people were like, "We knew they were vicious. We knew they were."
And so people love to form their opinions.
Oh, and they also happen to eat Happy Feet.
(Laughter) As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad.
This is just the food chain unfolding.
They're also big.
They're not these little harbor seals.
And they're also curiously aggressive.
You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon.
The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked.
(Laughter) So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage -- isn't that beautiful -- after five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica.
I'm with my Swedish assistant and guide.
And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one.
So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal.
(Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth.
And what it's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out, so it can eat the meat off the bones, and then it goes off and gets another one.
And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat.
And we're trying to not fall in the water.
And we sit down, and that's when Goran said to me, "This is a good seal, ya.
(Laughter) And I looked at Goran, and I said to him, "Forget that."
But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter "F."
But he was right.
He scolded me out, and said, "This is why we're here.
And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic.
And now you've got to deliver.
And my legs were just trembling. I couldn't feel my legs.
I put my flippers on. I could barely part my lips.
I put my snorkel in my mouth, and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water.
And this was the first thing she did.
She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera -- and her teeth are up here and down here -- but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice.
He said, "If you get scared, you close your eyes, ya, and she'll go away."
(Laughter) So that's all I had to work with at that point.
But I just started to shoot these pictures.
So she did this threat display for a few minutes, and then the most amazing thing happened -- she totally relaxed.
She went off, she got a penguin.
She stopped about 10 feet away from me, and she sat there with this penguin, the penguin's flapping, and she let's it go.
The penguin swims toward me, takes off.
She grabs another one. She does this over and over.
Why else would she release these penguins at me?
And after she did this four or five times, she swam by me with this dejected look on her face.
You don't want to be too anthropomorphic, but I swear that she looked at me like, "This useless predator's going to starve in my ocean."
This didn't work.
I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding, because I was crying underwater, just because it was so amazing.
And so that didn't work.
So then she'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this. (Laughter) And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me.
This went on for four days.
And then so she realized I couldn't catch live ones, so she brought me dead penguins.
(Laughter) Now I've got four or five penguins floating around my head, and I'm just sitting there shooting away.
Because she can't believe I can't eat this penguin.
Because in her world, you're either breeding or you're eating -- and I'm not breeding, so ...
(Laughter) And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head.
She was trying to force-feed me. She's pushing me around.
She's trying to force-feed my camera, which is every photographer's dream.
She would, I think, let me know that I was going to starve.
She would not stop trying to feed me penguins.
And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far, I got nervous because she came up to me, she rolled over on her back, and she did this deep, guttural jackhammer sound, this gok-gok-gok-gok.
She's about to let me know she's too frustrated with me.
She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me.
(Laughter) That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with.
I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter.
They are the most remarkable animals I've ever worked with, and the same with polar bears.
And just like the polar bears, these animals depend on an icy environment.
I get emotional. Sorry.
It's a story that lives deep in my heart, and I'm proud to share this with you.
And I'm so passionate about it.
Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic, I'll take you; let's go.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thanks very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
I'm thrilled to be here.
So that's kind of a bold statement.
It's edible; it's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response.
It actually gets reintegrated in the body.
And it's technological, so it can do things like microelectronics, and maybe photonics do.
And the material looks something like this.
In fact, this material you see is clear and transparent.
So this material is silk.
So it's kind of different from what we're used to thinking about silk.
The process of discovery, generally, is inspired by nature.
And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about, and that we're familiar with, for the textile industry, the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things.
We want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid Kevlar, to this natural Kevlar.
So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material.
And this is an insight that came, about two decades ago, from a person that I'm very fortunate to work with, David Kaplan.
And so this starting material is back to the basic building block.
So the recipe is simple: you take the silk solution, you pour it, and you wait for the protein to self-assemble.
And then you detach the protein and you get this film, as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates.
But I mentioned that the film is also technological.
And so what does that mean?
It means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology, like microelectronics and nanoscale technology.
And the image of the DVD here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface, which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale.
So we tried something out, and we wrote a message in a piece of silk, which is right here, and the message is over there.
And much like in the DVD, you can read it out optically.
And this requires a stable hand, so this is why I decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people.
(Applause) And the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that.
It's actually not limited to films.
And then you go a little crazy, and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays, like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes.
Or you can do beautiful things that, if the camera can capture, you can make.
You can add a third dimensionality to the film.
And if the angle is right, you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk.
But you can do other things.
You can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light, and so we've made optical fibers.
But silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics.
And you can think of different formats.
So for instance, if you're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle, we do microneedle arrays.
What you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that's made of silk -- just to give you a sense of size.
You can do bigger things.
You can do gears and nuts and bolts -- that you can buy at Whole Foods.
So you think of alternative mechanical parts.
And maybe you can use that liquid Kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins, for example, or maybe an entire bone.
And so you have here a little example of a small skull -- what we call mini Yorick.
(Laughter) But you can do things like cups, for example, and so, if you add a little bit of gold, if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods.
You can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap.
Or if you're fashion forward, some silk LED tattoos.
So there's versatility, as you see, in the material formats, that you can do with silk.
I mean, why would you want to do all these things for real?
I mentioned it briefly at the beginning; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible.
And you see here a picture of a tissue section.
And so what does that mean, that it's biodegradable and biocompatible?
You can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted.
So, much like you're seen at night by a car, then the idea is that you can see, if you illuminate tissue, you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk.
So you have a clock, you have protein, and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt -- (Applause) unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday.
It's edible, so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food.
Silk, during its self-assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter.
And so if you change the recipe, and you add things when you pour -- so you add things to your liquid silk solution -- where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines, the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants.
So that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together -- a fractured bone together -- and deliver drugs at the same, while your bone is healing, for example.
So we've made a silk card with penicillin in it.
And we stored penicillin at 60 degrees C, so 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin.
And so that could be --- (Applause) that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels. (Laughter) And of course, there's no use in storage if you can't use [it].
And so what you see there is the difference.
In the top, you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade, and in the bottom, a film that has been programmed to degrade in water.
And what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it.
So the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero.
I wanted to save the world and make everyone happy.
But I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true.
By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be, (Laughter) how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being, and how inspiring she would be to others.
In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture.
(Laughter) But now I know it was all in his smile.
Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players.
Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years.
(Laughter) The good news is that we're actually born smiling.
Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, even in the womb.
And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice.
Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans.
In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions, found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals, (Laughter) attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would.
So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction.
How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day?
Raise your hand if you do.
Oh, wow.
Outside of this room, more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five.
In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children, who smile as many as 400 times per day.
A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles.
You ask why?
Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles.
Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically helps us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler.
In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles.
Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth -- when they could not mimic the smile they saw -- their judgment was impaired.
(Laughter) In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory.
His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better, rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good.
In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who sent electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles.
Please, don't try this at home.
(Laughter) In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles.
The finding supported Darwin's theory, by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain, in a way that helps us feel better when we smile.
Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate -- a well-regarded pleasure inducer -- cannot match.
British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate.
And think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 -- quite a few kids out there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every day.
(Laughter) And unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier.
Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and reduce overall blood pressure.
And if that's not enough, smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others.
A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent.
My name is Amit.
And 18 months ago, I had another job at Google, and I pitched this idea of doing something with museums and art to my boss who's actually here, and she allowed me to do it.
And it took 18 months.
A lot of fun, negotiations and stories, I can tell you, with 17 very interesting museums from nine countries.
But I'm going to focus on the demo.
There are a lot of stories about why we did this.
And I grew up in India.
I had a great education -- I'm not complaining -- but I didn't have access to a lot of these museums and these artworks.
And so when I started traveling and going to these museums, I started learning a lot.
And while working at Google, I tried to put this desire to make it more accessible with technology together.
I'm going to probably get into the demo and then tell you a couple of the interesting things we've had since launch.
I'm going to actually get to one of my favorites, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It doesn't matter where you are -- Bombay, Mexico, it doesn't really matter.
You move around, you have fun.
Open the plan up, and, in one click, jump.
You're in there, you want to go to the end of the corridor.
(Laughter) So now I'm in front of one of my favorite paintings, "The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel at the Met.
I see this plus sign.
If the museum has given us the image, you click on it.
Now this is one of the images.
For those of you who are truly interested in art, you can click this -- but I'm going to click this off right now.
And this is one of these images that we captured in what we call gigapixel technology.
So this image, for example, has close to, I think, around 10 billion pixels.
And I get a lot of people asking me: "What do you get for 10 billion pixels?"
You can zoom around very simply.
I love this guy; his expression is priceless.
And I was like, "Hold on. That sounds interesting."
I did a little research, spoke to a couple of my contacts at the Met, and actually found out that this is a game called squall, which involves beating a goose with a stick on Shrove Tuesday.
And apparently it was quite popular.
I don't know why they did it, but I learned something about it.
Now just to give you some perspective, I'm going to zoom out so you really see what you get.
So another one of my favorites, "The Starry Night."
But what if you want to see brush strokes?
And what if you want to see how Van Gogh actually created this masterpiece?
You zoom in. You really go in.
This is "The Starry Night," I think, never seen like this before.
You can go and create your own museum online -- create your own collection across all these images.
This is "The Ambassadors," based in the National Gallery.
It really comes from these artists.
And the biggest question I get asked nowadays is, "Did you do this to replicate the experience of going to a museum?"
And the answer is no.
And that's it. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend, Richard Feynman.
I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence.
And I'm going to tell you about the Richard Feynman that I knew.
I'm sure there are people here who could tell you about the Richard Feynman they knew, and it would probably be a different Richard Feynman.
He was a man of many, many parts.
He was, of course, foremost, a very, very, very great scientist.
He was an actor. You saw him act.
They were fantastic.
He was a philosopher.
He was a drum player.
He was a teacher par excellence.
Richard Feynman was also a showman, an enormous showman.
He was full of macho, a kind of macho one-upmanship.
He loved intellectual battle.
He had a gargantuan ego.
But the man had, somehow, a lot of room at the bottom.
I always felt good with Dick Feynman.
It was always fun to be with him.
He always made me feel smart.
How can somebody like that make you feel smart?
He made me feel smart. He made me feel he was smart.
He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever.
And in fact, we did sometimes do physics together.
He loved to win, win these little macho games we would sometimes play.
And he didn't only play them with me, but with all sorts of people.
I remember once he told me a story about a joke the students played on him.
I think it was for his birthday -- they took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena.
It may still exist; I don't know.
You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich.
You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich.
The students went there in advance, and arranged that they'd all order Feynman sandwiches.
One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches.
Feynman loved this story.
He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing.
When he finished the story, I said to him, "Dick, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich."
The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham."
What Feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense -- phoniness, false sophistication, jargon.
I remember sometime during the mid-'80s, Dick and I and Sidney Coleman would meet a couple of times up in San Francisco -- at some very rich guy's house -- up in San Francisco for dinner.
And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers.
Their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness.
And they were full of all kinds of jargon.
I'm trying to remember the words -- "monism," "dualism," categories all over the place.
And what did we talk about?
Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds?
There's one obvious thing to talk about: Can a machine become a mind?
Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being that is conscious?
We sat around and talked about this -- we of course never resolved it.
But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-ophizing.
It's a scientific question, after all.
And this was a very, very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman.
(Laughter) Feynman let them have it -- both barrels, right between the eyes.
He really popped their balloon.
But the amazing thing was -- Feynman had to leave a little early; he wasn't feeling too well, so he left a little bit early.
And Sidney and I were left there with the two philosophers.
They were so happy.
They had met the great man; they had been instructed by the great man; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud ...
And it was something special.
I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did.
Dick -- he was my friend; I did call him Dick -- Dick and I had a little bit of a rapport.
We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things.
Sometimes I would win, mostly he would win, but we both enjoyed them.
And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality.
I don't think he was right.
I think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves.
And the man was incredibly curious.
And one day, we were walking.
We were in France, in Les Houches.
We were up in the mountains, 1976.
And Feynman said to me, "Leonardo ..."
The reason he called me "Leonardo" is because we were in Europe, and he was practicing his French.
(Laughter) And he said, "Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or your father when you were a kid?"
I said, "Well, my real hero was my father.
He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem.
He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the shortcut distance."
And Feynman's eyes just opened up.
And he said that he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father.
In fact, he had been convinced at one time that to be a good physicist, it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father.
I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened.
He said he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary, a necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist.
He wanted to go out and do an experiment.
(Laughter) Well, he did.
He went out and did an experiment.
He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists, "Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?"
They were all men, and to a man, every single one of them said, "My mother."
(Laughter) But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with his father as he had with his father.
And for some time, he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well.
I don't know. Maybe. Who knows?
But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist.
Feynman's style -- no, "style" is not the right word.
"Style" makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn, or the suit he was wearing.
It's something much deeper than that, but I can't think of another word for it.
Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible.
No doubt, part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could.
But he also deeply believed, he truly believed, that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.
In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked.
There was a theory.
It was a complicated theory; I'll tell you what it was soon enough.
It was a terribly complicated theory, full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth.
The only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very, very far apart.
And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other.
Feynman decided, as a sort of amateur helium physicist, that he would try to figure it out.
He had an idea, a very clear idea.
He would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like.
He would try to visualize it, guided by a small number of simple principles.
The small number of simple principles were very, very simple.
The first one was that when helium atoms touch each other, they repel.
The implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero, it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other.
The other fact is that in the ground state -- the lowest energy state of a quantum system -- the wave function is always very smooth; it has the minimum number of wiggles.
So he sat down -- and I imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil -- and he tried to write down, and did write down, the simplest function that he could think of, which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between.
He wrote down a simple thing -- so simple, in fact, that I suspect a really smart high-school student who didn't even have calculus could understand what he wrote down.
The thing was, that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium, and then some.
Incidentally, I'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was.
It was the technique of Feynman diagrams.
(Laughter) He did it again in 1968.
In 1968, in my own university -- I wasn't there at the time -- they were exploring the structure of the proton.
And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams.
That's what Feynman diagrams were constructed for -- to understand particles.
The experiments that were going on were very simple: you simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron.
This was the thing the Feynman diagrams were for.
The only problem was that Feynman diagrams are complicated.
Just think of the proton as an assemblage, a swarm, of little particles."
He called them "partons."
Because they're moving real fast, relativity says the internal motions go very slow.
What do you see?
You just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons."
This was the key to analyzing these experiments.
Extremely effective.
Somebody said the word "revolution" is a bad word.
I suppose it is, so I won't say "revolution," but it certainly evolved very, very deeply our understanding of the proton, and of particles beyond that.
So I think I'll just finish up by saying: I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event.
But ...
How should we really honor Feynman?
(Applause)
Think about your day for a second.
You woke up, felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door, encountered new colleagues and had great discussions and felt in awe when you found something new.
And that's that all those sensations, feelings, decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called your brain.
Now, the brain may not look like much from the outside -- a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh, amorphous.
But the last 100 years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain and to see the intricacy of what lies within.
And they've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons.
Now, unlike a human-designed computer, where there's a fairly small number of different parts, and we know how they work because we humans designed them, the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells, maybe tens of thousands.
They come in different shapes; they're made out of different molecules; they project and connect to different brain regions.
They also change in different ways in different disease states.
There's a class of cells, a fairly small cell, an inhibitory cell, that quiets its neighbors.
It's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia.
It's called the basket cell.
And this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we're learning about.
New ones are being discovered every day.
As just a second example: these pyramidal cells, large cells, can span a significant fraction of the brain.
And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy.
Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device.
They receive inputs from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs, which then, if they pass a certain threshold, will go to thousands of downstream partners.
And this process, which takes just a millisecond or so, happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells, as long as you live and think and feel.
So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does?
And that's the story I'm going to tell you about today.
Now, before I tell you about the technology, the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room, if we live long enough, will encounter, perhaps, a brain disorder.
These disorders -- schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction -- they not only steal away our time to live, they change who we are.
They take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people.
Now, in the 20th century, there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders.
That's also why most of the drugs, not all, on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too.
Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain, for Parkinson's disease or cochlear implants.
But electricity also will go in all directions -- the path of least resistance -- which is where that phrase, in part, comes from, and will also affect normal circuits, as well as the abnormal ones you want to fix.
So, when I started in neuroscience 11 years ago -- I had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist -- the first thing I thought about was, if these neurons are electrical devices, all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance.
If we could turn on the electricity in one cell but not its neighbors, that'd give us the tool to activate and shut down these different cells to figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they're embedded.
Well, there are many molecules that exist in nature which are able to convert light into electricity.
You can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells.
If we install these molecules in neurons somehow, then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light, and their neighbors, which don't have this molecule, would not.
There's one other magic trick you need to make this happen: the ability to get light into the brain.
The brain doesn't feel pain.
Taking advantage of all the effort that's gone into the internet, telecommunications, etc., you can put optical fibers connected to lasers to activate -- in animal models, for example, in preclinical studies -- these neurons and see what they do.
So how do we do this?
Around 2004, in collaboration with Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth, this vision came to fruition.
And it senses light with a little eyespot, which works not unlike how our eye works.
In its membrane, or its boundary, it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity.
These molecules are called channelrhodopsins.
When blue light hits it, it opens a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eyespot; that allows this eyespot to have an electrical signal, just like a solar cell charging a battery.
So what we need to do is take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons.
And because it's a protein, it's encoded for in the DNA of this organism.
So all we've got to do is take that DNA, put it into a gene therapy vector, like a virus, and put it into neurons.
And this was a very productive time in gene therapy, and lots of viruses were coming along, so this turned out to be fairly simple.
Early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004, we gave it a try, and it worked on the first try.
You take this DNA and put it into the neuron.
The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof.
And the next thing you know, you have a neuron which can be activated with light.
So this is very powerful.
One of the tricks you have to do is figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells you want and not all the other neighbors.
And you can do that; you can tweak the viruses so they hit some cells and not others.
And there's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells.
This field has now come to be known as "optogenetics."
And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do, you can take a complex network, use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network.
And then when you shine light on the entire network, just that cell type will be activated.
If we can deliver that gene to these cells -- they won't be altered by the expression of the gene, of course -- then flash blue light over the entire brain network, just these cells are going to be driven.
And when the light turns off, these cells go back to normal; there don't seem to be adverse events.
Not only can you study what these cells do, what their power is in computing in the brain, you can also use this to try to figure out if we could jazz up the activity of these cells if indeed, they're atrophied.
I want to tell you some short stories about how we're using this both at the scientific clinical and preclinical levels.
One of the questions that we've confronted is: What signals in the brain mediate the sensation of reward?
Because if you could find those, those would be some of the signals that could drive learning; the brain will do more of what got that reward.
These are also signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction.
So if we could figure out what cells they are, we could maybe find new targets for which drugs can be designed or screened against or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have severe disability.
To do that, we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorillo group, where, if the animal goes to one side of this little box, it gets a pulse of light.
And we'll make different cells in the brain sensitive to light.
If these cells can mediate reward, the animal should go there more and more.
The animal goes to the right-hand side and pokes his nose there and gets a flash of blue light every time he does it.
These are the dopamine neurons, in some of the pleasure centers in the brain.
Now we can generalize the idea.
Instead of one point in the brain, we can devise devices that span the brain, that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns -- arrays of optical fibers, each coupled to its own independent miniature light source.
Then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to date in a dish, like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders.
One story I want to tell you about is: How can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear?
This goes back to the Pavlovian days.
It's called Pavlovian fear conditioning, where a tone ends with a brief shock.
Now the question is: What targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear?
But we activate different targets in the brain, using that optical fiber array I showed on the previous slide, in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear.
There's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner.
This next clip is just eight minutes later.
And now you can see, just 10 minutes into the experiment, that we've equipped the brain, by photoactivating this area, to overcome the expression of this fear memory.
Over the last couple years, we've gone back to the tree of life, because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off.
If you can delete cells for a few milliseconds or seconds, you can figure out what role they play in the circuits in which they're embedded.
We found molecules called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins, that respond to green and yellow light.
And they do the opposite of the molecule I told you about before, with the blue light activator, channelrhodopsin.
Consider, for example, a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive.
Now, if drugs fail in epileptic treatment, one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain, but that's irreversible, and there could be side effects.
What if we could just turn off that brain for the brief amount of time until the seizure dies away, and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state, like a dynamical system that's being coaxed down into a stable state?
We don't have data to show you on this front, but we're very excited about this.
I want to close on one story, which we think is another possibility, which is that maybe these molecules, if you can do ultraprecise control, can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic, an optical prosthetic.
Seventy-five thousand people have Parkinson's deep-brain stimulators implanted, maybe 100,000 people have cochlear implants, which allow them to hear.
Another thing -- you've got to get these genes into cells.
And so far, there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus.
There's one last elephant in the room: the proteins themselves, which come from algae, bacteria and funguses and all over the tree of life.
Most of us don't have funguses or algae in our brains, so what will our brain do if we put that in?
Will the cells tolerate it? Will the immune system react?
It's early -- these haven't been done in humans yet -- but we're working on a variety of studies to examine this.
So it's early days, to be upfront, but we're excited about it.
Now, there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors -- light sensors in the back of our eye -- are gone.
And the retina is a complex structure.
Let's zoom in on it so we can see it in more detail.
The photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top.
The signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed via various computations until finally, the layer of cells at the bottom, the ganglion cells, relay the information to the brain, where we see that as perception.
In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed.
On the other hand, light can still get into the eye.
The eye is still transparent and you can get light in.
So what if we could take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spared cells and convert them into little cameras?
And because there are so many of these cells in the eye, potentially, they could be very high-resolution cameras.
This is some work that we're doing, led by one of our collaborators, Alan Horsager at USC, and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company, Eos Neuroscience, which is funded by the NIH.
What you see here is a mouse trying to solve a six-arm maze.
The goal of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that's under the lit top port.
He's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform.
He's not using vision to do it.
These different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans.
So we're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach.
Light is converted to electricity on them.
So this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule on a virus.
And to point out the power of this: these animals can get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives.
So this preclinical study, I think, bodes hope for the kinds of things we're hoping to do in the future.
We're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology.
We're developing tools and sharing them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world for them to study and try to treat different disorders.
Thank you.
(Applause) Juan Enriquez: So some of this stuff is a little dense.
(Laughter) But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs and being able to target those specifically is a first step.
The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors, like an on-off switch.
Ed Boyden: That's right.
JE: Which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code.
EB: Right.
With blue light, we can drive information, and it's in the form of a one.
And by turning things off, it's more or less a zero.
JE: And in theory, that means that, as a mouse feels, smells, hears, touches, you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros.
EB: Yeah. We're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings and use that to understand more about the brain.
JE: Does that mean that someday you could download memories and maybe upload them?
EB: That's something we're starting to work on very hard.
JE: Well, that might change a couple things. Thank you.
EB: Thank you.
(Applause)
Hello, my name is Thomas Heatherwick.
I have a studio in London that has a particular approach to designing buildings.
When I was growing up, I was exposed to making and crafts and materials and invention on a small scale.
And I was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications I was seeing felt soulless and cold.
And there on the smaller scale, the scale of an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical instrument, was a materiality and a soulfulness.
The first building I built was 20 years ago.
And since, in the last 20 years, I've developed a studio in London.
Sorry, this was my mother, by the way, in her bead shop in London.
I spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that.
This is a hospital building.
This is a shop for a bag company.
This is studios for artists.
This is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball.
And this is a window display.
And this is pair of cooling towers for an electricity substation next to St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
And this is a temple in Japan for a Buddhist monk.
And this is a cafe by the sea in Britain.
And just very quickly, something we've been working on very recently is we were commissioned by the mayor of London to design a new bus that gave the passenger their freedom again.
Because the original Routemaster bus that some of you may be familiar with, which had this open platform at the back -- in fact, I think all our Routemasters are here in California now actually.
But they aren't in London.
And so you're stuck on a bus.
And if the bus is going to stop and it's three yards away from the bus stop, you're just a prisoner.
But the mayor of London wanted to reintroduce buses with this open platform.
So we've been working with Transport for London, and that organization hasn't actually been responsible as a client for a new bus for 50 years.
And so we've been very lucky to have a chance to work.
So it's got hybrid drive.
And this is a project for a bridge.
And as he was diving, someone had stamped on his knee, and it had broken like this.
And then we looked at these kinds of bridges and just couldn't help feeling that it was a beautiful thing that had broken.
And so this is in Paddington in London.
And it's a very boring bridge, as you can see.
But instead of what it is, our focus was on the way it worked.
(Applause) So we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it would end up kissing each other.
A project that we've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station -- so a power station that uses organic waste material.
In the news, the subject of where our future water is going to come from and where our power is going to come from is in all the papers all the time.
And we used to be quite proud of the way we generated power.
(Laughter) And so when a consortium of engineers approached us and asked us to work with them on this power station, our condition was that we would work with them and that, whatever we did, we were not just going to decorate a normal power station.
And instead, we had to learn -- we kind of forced them to teach us.
And so we spent time traveling with them and learning about all the different elements, and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies that weren't being capitalized on.
And what we found -- this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain.
And there are 2,000 new homes being built next to this power station.
So it felt this has a social dimension.
It has a symbolic importance.
And we should be proud of where our power is coming from, rather than something we are necessarily ashamed of.
So it felt that what we could try to do is make a power park and actually bring the whole area in, and using the spare soil that's there on the site, we could make a power station that was silent as well.
And we also found that we could make a more efficient structure and have a cost-effective way of making a structure to do this.
The finished project is meant to be more than just a power station.
(Laughter) And it's a power park.
In Shanghai, we were invited to build -- well we weren't invited; what am I talking about.
We won the competition, and it was painful to get there.
(Laughter) So we won the competition to build the U.K. pavilion.
There's 250 pavilions.
It's the world's biggest ever expo that had ever happened.
(Laughter) But the thing that was true, the expo was about the future of cities, and particularly the Victorians pioneered integrating nature into the cities.
And the world's first public park of modern times was in Britain.
And the world's first major botanical institution is in London, and they have this extraordinary project where they've been collecting 25 percent of all the world's plant species.
So we suddenly realized that there was this thing.
And everyone agrees that trees are beautiful, and I've never met anyone who says, "I don't like trees."
I've never met anyone who says, "I don't like flowers."
But we realized that seeds -- there's been this very serious project happening -- but that seeds -- at these major botanical gardens, seeds aren't on show.
So we realized we had to make a project that would be seeds, some kind of seed cathedral.
And the film "Jurassic Park" actually really helped us.
So the challenge was, how are we going to bring light and expose these things?
We didn't want to make a separate building and have separate content.
By the way, we had half the budget of the other Western nations.
And so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue.
(Video) Voice Over: The new Play-Doh Mop Top Hair Shop.
Song: ♫ We've got the Mop Tops, the Play-Doh Mop Tops ♫ ♫ Just turn the chair and grow Play-Doh hair ♫ ♫ They're the Mop Tops ♫ Thomas Heatherwick: Okay, you get the idea.
So the idea was to take these 66,000 seeds that they agreed to give us, and to take each seed and trap it in this precious optical hair and grow that through this box, very simple box element, and make it a building that could move in the wind.
And by night, artificial light in each one emanates and comes out to the outside.
And to make the project affordable, we focused our energy.
Instead of building a building as big as the football pitch, we focused it on this one element.
And so the rest of the site was a public space.
And with a million people there a day, it just felt like offering some public space.
And then, you know when a pet has an operation and they shave a bit of the skin and get rid of the fur -- in order to get you to go into the seed cathedral, in effect, we've shaved it.
And inside there's nothing; there's no famous actor's voice; there's no projections; there's no televisions; there's no color changing.
There's just silence and a cool temperature.
And if a cloud goes past, you can see a cloud on the tips where it's letting the light through.
This is the only project that we've done where the finished thing looked more like a rendering than our renderings.
(Laughter) A key thing was how people would interact.
I mean, in a way it was the most serious thing you could possible do at the expo.
And I just wanted to show you.
The British government -- any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have.
And so there was a moment when suddenly -- actually, the next thing.
(Video) Children: One, two, three, go.
(Laughter) So finally, texture is something.
And the project that we're building in Malaysia is apartment buildings for a property developer.
And it's in a piece of land that's this site.
And the mayor of Kuala Lumpur said that, if this developer would give something that gave something back to the city, they would give them more gross floor area, buildable.
So there was an incentive for the developer to really try to think about what would be better for the city.
And the conventional thing with apartment buildings in this part of the world is you have your tower, and you squeeze a few trees around the edge, and you see cars parked.
It's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience, and the rest of it is just for postcards.
The lowest value is actually the bottom part of a tower like this.
So if we could chop that away and give the building a small bottom, we could take that bit and put it at the top where the greater commercial value is for a property developer.
(Applause) So we're building these buildings.
They're just chopped at different heights.
And that's my final slide.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) June Cohen: So thank you. Thank you, Thomas. You're a delight.
TH: These are a few of the tests we did when we were building the structure.
So there were 66,000 of these.
This optic was 22 feet long.
There was one person in the contractors who was the right size -- and it wasn't a child -- who could fit between them for the final waterproofing of the building.
JC: Thank you, Thomas.
(Applause)
I'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist, so I put children to sleep for a living.
(Laughter) And I'm an academic, so I put audiences to sleep for free.
(Laughter) But what I actually mostly do is I manage the pain management service at the Packard Children's Hospital up at Stanford in Palo Alto.
And it's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that I want to bring to you the message this morning, that pain is a disease.
Now most of the time, you think of pain as a symptom of a disease, and that's true most of the time.
It's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation.
But about 10 percent of the time, after the patient has recovered from one of those events, pain persists.
It persists for months and oftentimes for years, and when that happens, it is its own disease.
And before I tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it, I want to show you how it feels for my patients.
So imagine, if you will, that I'm stroking your arm with this feather, as I'm stroking my arm right now.
Please keep your seat.
(Laughter) A very different feeling.
Now what does it have to do with chronic pain?
Imagine, if you will, these two ideas together.
Imagine what your life would be like if I were to stroke it with this feather, but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling -- and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain.
In fact, imagine something even worse.
Imagine I were to stroke your child's arm with this feather, and their brain [was] telling them that they were feeling this hot torch.
That was the experience of my patient, Chandler, whom you see in the photograph.
As you can see, she's a beautiful, young woman.
She was 16 years old last year when I met her, and she aspired to be a professional dancer.
And during the course of one of her dance rehearsals, she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist.
Now you would probably imagine, as she did, that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person's life.
Wrap it in an ACE bandage, take some ibuprofen for a week or two, and that's the end of the story.
But in Chandler's case, that was the beginning of the story.
This is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain.
The muscles were frozen, paralyzed -- dystonic is how we refer to that.
The worst part was that she had allodynia, the medical term for the phenomenon that I just illustrated with the feather and with the torch.
The lightest touch of her arm -- the touch of a hand, the touch even of a sleeve, of a garment, as she put it on -- caused excruciating, burning pain.
How can the nervous system misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame?
In your house, wires run in the wall, from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb.
And when you turn the switch on, the light goes on.
And when you turn the switch off, the light goes off.
So people imagine the nervous system is just like that.
If you hit your thumb with a hammer, these wires in your arm -- that, of course, we call nerves -- transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires, new nerves, take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt.
But the situation, of course, in the human body is far more complicated than that.
Instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion, in fact, what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions -- laterally, vertically, up and down in the spinal cord -- and they start interacting with other adjacent cells.
These cells, called glial cells, were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together, like the nerves.
But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation, amplification and, in the case of pain, the distortion of sensory experiences.
These glial cells become activated.
Their DNA starts to synthesize new proteins, which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves, and they start releasing their neurotransmitters, and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells, and so on and so forth, until what we have is a positive feedback loop.
It's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch, the toilet flushed three doors down, or your dishwasher went on, or your computer monitor turned off.
That's crazy, but that's, in fact, what happens with chronic pain.
And that's why pain becomes its own disease.
The nervous system has plasticity.
Well, what do we do about that?
What can we do in a case like Chandler's?
We treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time.
We take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet, and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics.
And most importantly, what we do is we use a rigorous, and often uncomfortable, process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life.
And we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency, despair and depression that always accompanies severe, chronic pain.
But the future is actually even brighter.
The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem, as we have now, but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells, or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate, that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up, or plasticity, that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain.
So I have hope that in the future, the prophetic words of George Carlin will be realized, who said, "My philosophy: No pain, no pain."
(Applause)
And it's not a trip that requires light-years of travel, but it's to a place where it's defined by light.
So it's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light.
I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence.
I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs.
Since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky.
But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task.
And the first time I figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called Deep Rover.
This next video clip, you're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence.
And the first thing you're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across.
This is the first time it has ever been recorded.
Edith Widder: So I recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye.
Which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible.
(Laughter) So, if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible, I have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it.
And you'll note there's no light coming from them right now, either because they're dead -- (Laughter) or because I need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like.
(Gasps) Oops. Sorry.
(Laughter) I spend most of my time working in the dark; I'm used to that.
Well, it uses it to defend itself from its predators.
The flash is like a scream for help.
There's a lot of animals that use this trick, for example this black dragonfish.
The light organs under the eyes are flashing.
There's other ways you can defend yourself with light.
For example, this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud.
This blinds or distracts the predator.
This little squid is called the fire shooter because of its ability to do this.
Now it may look like a tasty morsel, or a pig's head with wings -- (Laughter) but if it's attacked, it puts out a barrage of light -- in fact, a barrage of photon torpedoes.
So there's a lot of animals in the open ocean -- most of them that make light.
They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators.
But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange.
And some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in "Avatar," but you don't have to travel to Pandora to see them.
This is a golden coral, a bush.
In fact, it's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old, which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed.
And you see things like this.
This looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book -- just all manner of creatures all over this thing.
But if you keep poking it, it starts to produce light.
And it actually ends up looking like a galaxy.
There are starfish that can make light.
And there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms.
So it can actually hold itself in very strong currents, as you see here.
Here's another one. This is also a sea pen.
It's a green saber of light.
(Laughter) So there's a language of light in the deep ocean, and we're just beginning to understand it, and one way we're going about that is we're imitating a lot of these displays.
This is an optical lure that I've used.
We call it the electronic jellyfish.
It's just 16 blue LEDs that we can program to do different types of displays.
And we view it with a camera system I developed called Eye-in-the-Sea that uses far red light that's invisible to most animals, so it's unobtrusive.
So I just want to show you some of the responses we've elicited from animals in the deep sea.
So the camera's black and white.
And right in the front is the electronic jellyfish.
But as soon as it starts to flash -- and it's going to look big, because it blooms on the camera -- I want you to look right here.
We're talking to something.
It looks like a little of string pearls basically -- in fact, three strings of pearls.
And this was very consistent.
This was in the Bahamas at about 2,000 feet.
We basically have a chat room going on here, because once it gets started, everybody's talking.
And I think this is actually a shrimp that's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water.
Personally, I think it's something sexy.
(Laughter) And then finally, I want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world's first deep-sea webcam, which we had installed in Monterey Canyon last year.
We've only just begun to analyze all of this data.
And it is an optical cue that there's carrion on the bottom of the ocean.
So this scavenger comes in, which is a giant sixgill shark.
And it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish.
That's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark.
Okay, so this next one is from the webcam, and it's going to be this pinwheel display.
And that was a Humboldt squid, a juvenile Humboldt squid, about three feet long.
This is at 3,000 feet in Monterey Canyon.
It's supposed to be attacking what's attacking the jellyfish.
"Hey, wait a minute.
He's thinking about it.
But he's persistent.
He keeps coming back.
(Laughter) Nope.
So if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible, by all means, climb in and take the plunge.
This is something that should be on everybody's bucket list, because we live on an ocean planet.
More than 90 percent, 99 percent, of the living space on our planet is ocean.
It's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures, alien life forms that you don't have to travel to another planet to see.
But if you do take the plunge, please remember to turn out the lights.
But I warn you, it's addictive.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective, intelligent, intellectual, savvy, worldly and innovative people in the world.
And I think that's true.
And believe me, I lived the same sad life until about three years ago.
And what happened to me was I bought, what was for me, a very expensive pair of shoes.
But those shoes came with round nylon laces, and I couldn't keep them tied.
So I went back to the store and said to the owner, "I love the shoes, but I hate the laces."
He took a look and said, "Oh, you're tying them wrong."
Now up until that moment, I would have thought that, by age 50, one of the life skills that I had really nailed was tying my shoes.
(Laughter) But not so -- let me demonstrate.
This is the way that most of us were taught to tie our shoes.
(Applause) Wait, there's more.
As it turns out -- (Laughter) there's a strong form and a weak form of this knot, and we were taught the weak form.
If you pull the strands at the base of the knot, you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe.
That's the weak form of the knot.
But not to worry.
And if you pull the cords under the knot, you will see that the bow orients itself along the transverse axis of the shoe.
This is a stronger knot.
Pull the knot.
Now, in keeping with today's theme, I'd like to point out -- something you already know -- that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else.
(Laughter) Live long and prosper.
(Applause)
So I think data can actually make us more human.
We're collecting and creating all kinds of data about how we're living our lives, and it's enabling us to tell some amazing stories.
Recently, a wise media theorist Tweeted, "The 19th century culture was defined by the novel, the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema, and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface."
And I believe this is going to prove true.
Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories.
So I'm going to show you a few of the projects that I've been working on over the last couple years that reflect on our lives and our systems.
This is a project called Flight Patterns.
What you're looking at is airplane traffic over North America for a 24-hour period.
As you see, everything starts to fade to black, and you see people going to sleep.
Everybody's moving from the East coast to the West coast.
You see San Francisco and Los Angeles start to make their journeys down to Hawaii in the lower left-hand corner.
I think it's one thing to say there's 140,000 planes being monitored by the federal government at any one time, and it's another thing to see that system as it ebbs and flows.
This is a time-lapse image of that exact same data, but I've color-coded it by type, so you can see the diversity of aircraft that are in the skies above us.
And I started making these, and I put them into Google Maps and allow you to zoom in and see individual airports and the patterns that are occurring there.
So here we can see the white represents low altitudes, and the blue are higher altitudes.
And you can zoom in. This is taking a look at Atlanta.
You can see this is a major shipping airport, and there's all kinds of activity there.
You can also toggle between altitude for model and manufacturer.
See again, the diversity.
And you can scroll around and see some of the different airports and the different patterns that they have.
This is scrolling up the East coast.
You can see some of the chaos that's happening in New York with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other.
Moving across to the West coast, you see San Francisco and Los Angeles -- big low-traffic zones across Nevada and Arizona.
This is looking at ascending versus descending flights.
And you can see, over time, the ways the airports change.
You see the holding patterns that start to develop in the bottom of the screen.
And you can see, eventually the airport actually flips directions.
So this is another project that I worked on with the Sensible Cities Lab at MIT.
This is visualizing international communications.
So it's how New York communicates with other international cities.
And we set this up as a live globe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Design the Elastic Mind exhibition.
And it had a live feed with a 24-hour offset, so you could see the changing relationship and some demographic info coming through AT&T's data and revealing itself.
This is another project I worked on with Sensible Cities Lab and CurrentCity.org.
And it's visualizing SMS messages being sent in the city of Amsterdam.
So you're seeing the daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city, until we approach New Year's Eve, where everybody says, "Happy New Year!"
(Laughter) So this is an interactive tool that you can move around and see different parts of the city.
This is looking at another event. This is called Queen's Day.
And then you can see people celebrating the next day.
And you can pause it and step back and forth and see different phases.
So now on to something completely different.
This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess playing machine.
And it's this amazing robot that plays chess extremely well, except for one thing: it's not a robot at all.
There's actually a legless man that sits in that box and controls this chess player.
This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk -- named after this guy.
And it's based on the premise that there are certain things that are easy for people, but really difficult for computers.
So they made this web service and said, "Any programmer can write a piece of software and tap into the minds of thousands of people."
The nerdy side of me thought, "Wow, this is amazing.
I can tap into thousands of people's minds."
And the other nerdy side of me thought, "This is horrible. This is completely bizarre.
What does this mean for the future of mankind, where we're all plugged into this borg?"
I was probably being a little extreme.
But what does this mean when we have no context for what it is that we're working on, and we're just doing these little labors?
So I created this drawing tool.
And I said, "I'll pay you two cents for your contribution."
And I collected a lot, a lot of different sheep.
Lots of sheep.
I took the first 10,000 sheep that I collected, and I put them on a website called TheSheepMarket.com where you can actually buy collections of 20 sheep.
I think there's something really interesting to watching people as they go through this creative toil -- something we can all relate to, this creative process of trying to come up with something from nothing.
I think it was really interesting to juxtapose this humanity versus this massive distributed grid.
Kind of amazing what some people did.
Approximate collection rate of 11 sheep per hour, which would make a working wage of 69 cents per hour.
There were 662 rejected sheep that didn't meet "sheep-like" criteria and were thrown out of the flock.
(Laughter) The amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes.
And there were 7,599 people that contributed to the project, or were unique IP addresses -- so about how many people contributed.
But only one of them out of the 7,599 said this.
(Laughter) Which I was pretty surprised by.
I expected people to be wondering, "Why did I draw a sheep?"
And I think it's a pretty valid question.
And there's a lot of reasons why I chose sheep.
Sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts, the first to be selectively bred for production traits, the first animal to be cloned.
And there's this reference to "Le Petit Prince" where the narrator asks the prince to draw a sheep.
He draws sheep after sheep.
And he says, "It's not about a scientific rendering of a sheep.
It's about your own interpretation and doing something different."
And I like that.
So this is a clip from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times."
It's showing Charlie Chaplin dealing with some of the major changes during the Industrial Revolution.
So I thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the Mechanical Turk with a drawing tool.
And this was the inspiration for a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kawashima.
We decided to use the Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for, which is making money.
So we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces, and we fed those into the Mechanical Turk.
We asked people to draw what it was that they saw.
People, if they drew a stick figure or a smiley face, it actually made it into the bill.
So what you see is actually a representation of how well people did what it was they were asked to do.
So we took these hundred dollar bills, and we put them on a website called TenThousandsCents.com, where you can browse through and see all the individual contributions.
And other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces.
Here on the right-hand side in the middle you see this one guy writing, "$0.01!!! Really?"
(Laughter) So the last Mechanical Turk project I'm going to talk to you about is called Bicycle Built for 2000.
This is a collaboration with my friend Daniel Massey.
This is Max Mathews and John Kelly from Bell Labs in the '60s, where they created the song "Daisy Bell," which was the world's first singing computer.
You may recognize it from "2001: A Space Odyssey."
When HAL's dying at the end of the film he starts singing this song, as a reference to when computers became human.
Daisy Bell: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ... ♫ Aaron Koblin: And we took all of those individual pieces, and we fed them into another Turk request.
We wanted to see how this applies to collaborative, distributed music making, where nobody has any idea what it is they're working on.
So if you go to the BicycleBuiltforTwoThousand.com you can actually hear what all this sounds like together.
(Noise) Chorus: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ Give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'd look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ AK: So stepping back for a quick second, when I was at UCLA going to grad school, I was also working at a place called the Center for Embedded Network Sensing.
And I was writing software to visualize laser scanners.
And this was seen by a director in L.A. named James Frost who said, "Wait a minute.
You mean we can shoot a music video without actually using any video?"
We made a music video for one of my favorite bands, Radiohead.
And I think one of my favorite parts of this project was not just shooting a video with lasers, but we also open sourced it, and we made it released as a Google Code project, where people could download a bunch of the data and some source code to build their own versions of it.
This is actually two of my favorites: the pin-board Thom Yorke and a LEGO Thom Yorke.
A whole YouTube channel of people submitting really interesting content.
More recently, somebody even 3D-printed Thom Yorke's head, which is a little creepy, but pretty cool.
And I met a music video director named Chris Milk.
And we started bouncing around ideas to make a collaborative music video project.
So we put the idea on the back burner for a few months.
And he ended up talking to Rick Rubin, who was finishing up Johnny Cash's final album called "Ain't No Grave."
The lyrics to the leading track are "Ain't no grave can hold my body down."
So we thought this was the perfect project to build a collaborative memorial and a virtual resurrection for Johnny Cash.
So I teamed up with my good friend Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr. doob, who's a much better programmer than I am, and he made this amazing Flash drawing tool.
As you know, an animation is a series of images.
So what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of Johnny Cash, and at eight frames a second, we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video.
So I don't have time to play the entire thing for you, but I want to show you two short clips.
One is the beginning of the music video.
And that's going to be followed by a short clip of people who have already contributed to the project talking about it briefly.
(Music) (Video) Johnny Cash: ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body down ♫ ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold body down ♫ ♫ When I hear the trumpet sound ♫ ♫ I'm going to ride right out of the ground ♫ ♫ Ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body ... ♫ (Applause) AK: What better way to pay tribute to the man than to make something for one of his songs.
Collaborator: I felt really sad when he died.
And I just thought it'd be wonderful, it'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory.
Collaborator Four: I've seen everybody from Japan, Venezuela, to the States, to Knoxville, Tennessee.
And in a weird way, that's what I actually like about Johnny Cash's music as well.
AK: So if you go to the website JohnnyCashProject.com, what you'll see is the video playing above.
And below it are all the individual frames that people have been submitting to the project.
So this isn't finished at all, but it's an ongoing project where people can continue to collaborate.
And you can also see the way that it was drawn.
And you can pick a style. So this one was tagged "Abstract."
But there's a bunch of different styles.
And you can sort the video a number of different ways.
You can say, "I want to see the pointillist version or the sketchy version or the realistic version.
And then this is, again, the abstract version, which ends up getting a little bit crazy.
So the last project I want to talk to you about is another collaboration with Chris Milk.
And this is called "The Wilderness Downtown."
It's an online music video for the Arcade Fire.
Chris and I were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers, where you have HTML5 audio and video and the power of JavaScript to render amazingly fast.
And we wanted to push the idea of the music video that was meant for the Web beyond the four-by-three or sixteen-by-nine window and try to make it play out and choreograph throughout the screen.
But most importantly, I think, we really wanted to make an experience that was unlike the Johnny Cash Project, where you had a small group of people spending a lot of time to contribute something for everyone.
So the project starts off by asking you to enter the address of the home where you grew up.
And you type in the address -- it actually creates a music video specifically for you, pulling in Google maps and Streetview images into the experience itself.
And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.
(Applause)
Now I bet, in this audience, you're thinking of some really incredible technology, some stuff that I haven't even heard of, I'm absolutely sure.
This is a polio vaccine.
And it's a great thing actually that nobody's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted.
This is a great technology.
We can take it completely for granted.
Even here in California, if we were to go back just a few years, it was a very different story.
They were terrified of polio, and it would cause public panic.
In this scene, people are living in an iron lung.
These are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before, and then two days later, they can no longer breathe, and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs, but also their breathing muscles.
And they were going to spend the rest of their lives, usually, in this iron lung to breathe for them.
This disease was terrifying.
There was no cure, and there was no vaccine.
The disease was so terrifying that the president of the United States launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it.
Twenty years later, they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine.
It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s.
Finally, a vaccine that could stop this awful disease, and here in the United States it had an incredible impact.
As you can see, the virus stopped, and it stopped very, very fast.
But this wasn't the case everywhere in the world.
And it happened so fast in the United States, however, that even just last month Jon Stewart said this: (Video) Jon Stewart: Where is polio still active?
Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated.
Bruce Aylward: Oops. Jon, polio's almost been eradicated.
But the reality is that polio still exists today.
We made this map for Jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists.
This is the picture.
But the reason there's not very much left is because there's been an extraordinary public/private partnership working behind the scenes, almost unknown, I'm sure to most of you here today.
But just last year, we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just isn't good enough with a virus like polio.
And this is the reason: in two countries that hadn't had this disease for more than probably a decade, on opposite sides of the globe, there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks.
Hundreds of people were paralyzed.
Hundreds of people died -- children as well as adults.
And in both cases, we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses, and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries.
They had come from thousands of miles away.
And not only that, but when they came into these countries, then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like Russia, where, for the first time in over a decade last year, children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years.
But the message was very clear.
Polio is still a devastating, explosive disease.
It's just happening in another part of the world.
So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership, the Polio Partnership, is trying to do.
We're not trying to get it down to just a few cases, because this disease is like a root fire; it can explode again if you don't snuff it out completely.
So what we're looking for is a permanent solution.
We want a world in which every child, just like you guys, can take for granted a polio-free world.
This is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary.
And we've got pretty good vaccines, as I've just showed you.
So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely.
What the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on Earth.
Now we don't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this, to eradicating diseases.
It's been tried six times in the last century, and it's been successful exactly once.
And this is because disease eradication, it's still the venture capital of public health.
The risks are massive, but the pay-off -- economic, humanitarian, motivational -- it's absolutely huge.
One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days -- in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs.
And if we can finish polio eradication, the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone.
But smallpox eradication was hard; it was very, very hard.
And polio eradication, in many ways, is even tougher, and there's a few reasons for that.
The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox.
And there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries.
So it was a massive effort.
The second challenge we had was -- in contrast to the smallpox vaccine, which was very stable, and a single dose protected you for life -- the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile.
But the third challenge we have -- and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge -- is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy -- every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash.
With polio it's almost completely different.
The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease.
So you can't see the enemy most of the time, and as a result, we've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox.
We've had to create one of the largest social movements in history.
There's over 10 million people, probably 20 million people, largely volunteers, who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime.
These people, these 20 million people, vaccinate over 500 million children every single year, multiple times at the peak of our operation.
Now giving the polio vaccine is simple.
But reaching 500 million people is much, much tougher.
And these vaccinators, these volunteers, they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest, densest urban slums in the world.
They've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world.
And they also have to dodge bullets, because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children, even in areas affected by conflict.
One reporter who was watching our program in Somalia about five years ago -- a place which has eradicated polio, not once, but twice, because they got reinfected.
He was sitting outside of the road, watching one of these polio campaigns unfold, and a few months later he wrote: "This is foreign aid at its most heroic."
And these heroes, they come from every walk of life, all sorts of backgrounds.
But one of the most extraordinary is Rotary International.
This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years.
Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication -- more than 15 years, much longer than it should have -- but once it was built, the results were striking.
Within a couple of years, every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses, with the exception of four countries that you see here.
And then, by 1999, one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide -- proof of concept.
And then today, there's been a 99 percent reduction -- greater than 99 percent reduction -- in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease.
When we started, over 20 years ago, 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus.
Last year, it was 1,000.
And at the same time, the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas.
It's been working to help control pandemic flu, SARS for example.
But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us, the international community, to reach every single child, every single community, the most vulnerable people in the world, with the most basic of health services, irrespective of geography, poverty, culture and even conflict.
So things were looking very exciting, and then about five years ago, this virus, this ancient virus, started to fight back.
The first problem we ran into was that, in these last four countries, the strongholds of this virus, we just couldn't seem to get the virus rooted out.
And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades.
And then, in one of the most important, tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world, we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have.
Now at that time, there was a great, as you can imagine, frustration -- let's call it frustration -- it started to grow very, very quickly.
We should abandon this idea of eradication.
Let's settle for control -- that's good enough."
Now as seductive as the idea of control sounds, it's a false premise.
The brutal truth is, if we don't have the will or the skill, or even the money that we need to reach children, the most vulnerable children in the world, with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine, then pretty soon, more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year.
There's absolutely no question.
These are children like Umar.
Umar is seven years old, and he's from northern Nigeria.
He lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters.
Umar also has polio.
His right leg was paralyzed in 2004.
This leg, his right leg, now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl, because it's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends, keep up with his brothers and sisters, than to get up on his crutches and walk.
But Umar is a fantastic student. He's an incredible kid.
As you probably can't see the detail here, but this is his report card, and you'll see, he's got perfect scores.
But you know I'd love to be able to tell you that Umar is a typical kid with polio these days, but it's not true.
Umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances.
The reality of polio today is something very different.
Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world.
In northern India, we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this, so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters, so we could get to the millions of children on the Koshi River basin where there are no other health services.
In northern Nigeria, the political leaders and the traditional Muslim leaders, they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence.
And now they've even started using these devices -- speaking of cool technology -- these little devices, little GIS trackers like this, which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators.
And in Afghanistan, we're trying new approaches -- access negotiators.
We're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child.
But as we tried these extraordinary things, as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics, we went back to the vaccine -- it's a 50-year-old vaccine -- and we thought, surely we can make a better vaccine, so that when they finally get to these kids, we can have a better bang for our buck.
And this started an incredible collaboration with industry, and within six months, we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted, just two years ago, the last two types of polio in the world.
Now June the ninth, 2009, we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine, and it turned out to be a game-changer.
The new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had, and we immediately started using this.
And it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world.
The first place this vaccine was used was in southern Afghanistan, because it's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this.
Now here at TED, over the last couple of days, I've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible.
So this morning at about seven o'clock, I decided that we'd try to drive Chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from India again, so that you could see something that's just unfolding today, which proves that the impossible is possible.
And only two years ago, people were saying that this is impossible.
Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio -- Uttar Pradesh and Bihar -- 500,000 children every single month.
And yet, the impossible is happening.
In Umar's home country of Nigeria, a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year.
And in the last six months, we've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history.
We have major challenges, you can imagine, to finish this job, but as you've also seen, it's doable, it has great secondary benefits, and polio eradication is a great buy.
And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus, it's a stark reminder that we are failing, as a society, to reach children with the most basic of services.
And for that reason, polio eradication: it's the ultimate in equity and it's the ultimate in social justice.
The huge social movement that's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children.
But capitalizing on their enthusiasm, capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago.
Now we're in tough times economically.
But as David Cameron of the United Kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio, "There's never a wrong time to do the right thing."
Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do.
And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years.
We have a new vaccine, we have new resolve, and we have new tactics.
We have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history.
But if we blink now, we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease.
Here's a great idea to spread: End polio now.
Help us tell the story.
Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child, every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever.
Thank you.
(Applause) Bill Gates: Well Bruce, where do you think the toughest places are going to be?
Where would you say we need to be the smartest?
And Afghanistan, Afghanistan, we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly.
They're going to be the tough ones.
BG: Now what about the money?
And is it easy to raise that money?
And what's it going to be like the next couple of years?
We spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year.
It sounds like a lot of money; it is a lot of money.
But when you're reaching 500 million children multiple times -- 20, 30 cents to reach a child -- that's not very much money.
But right now we don't have enough of that.
And that great buy costs us a little bit more.
Thank you. (BA: Thank you.) (Applause)
The story I wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an Iranian artist, as an Iranian woman artist, as an Iranian woman artist living in exile.
Well, it has its pluses and minuses.
Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political.
If you're living in Iran, you're facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture -- at times, execution.
If you're living outside like me, you're faced with life in exile -- the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family.
Therefore, we don't find the moral, emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility.
Also, people like myself, we're fighting two battles on different grounds.
And at the same time, we're fighting another battle.
That is our regime, our government -- our atrocious government, [that] has done every crime in order to stay in power.
Our artists are at risk.
We are in a position of danger.
We pose a threat to the order of the government.
But ironically, this situation has empowered all of us, because we are considered, as artists, central to the cultural, political, social discourse in Iran.
We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope to our people.
We are the reporters of our people, and are communicators to the outside world.
Art is our weapon.
Culture is a form of resistance.
I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression.
For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics.
From the fact that they are only serving one audience, mainly the Western culture.
But also, I worry about the West, because often in this country, in this Western world that we have, culture risks being a form of entertainment.
My journey as an artist started from a very, very personal place.
I did not start to make social commentary about my country.
It was after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
While I was absent from Iran, the Islamic Revolution had descended on Iran and had entirely transformed the country from Persian to the Islamic culture.
I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in the society.
More so, I became very interested, as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions, I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution -- how, indeed, it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women.
I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting, in the way the women of Iran, historically, seemed to embody the political transformation.
So in a way, by studying a woman, you can read the structure and the ideology of the country.
So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life, and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse -- the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of God, faith, but violence and crime and cruelty.
I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic Revolution.
This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn't know I would discover.
So my art became slightly more critical.
My knife became a little sharper.
And I fell into a life in exile.
I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico.
Last year, I finished a film called "Women Without Men."
"Women Without Men" returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history.
It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader, Dr. Mossadegh.
The book is written by an Iranian woman, Shahrnush Parsipur.
It's a magical realist novel.
This book is banned, and she spent five years in prison.
My obsession with this book, and the reason I made this into a film, is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female -- traditionally, historically in Iran -- and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change, freedom and democracy -- while the country of Iran, equally, as if another character, also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions.
I made this film because I felt it's important for it to speak to the Westerners about our history as a country.
That all of you seem to remember Iran after the Islamic Revolution.
That Iran was once a secular society, and we had democracy, and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government.
This film also speaks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamicized -- in the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way we had intellectual life.
And most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy.
These are some of the shots actually from my film.
These are some of the images of the coup.
And we made this film in Casablanca, recreating all the shots.
This film tried to find a balance between telling a political story, but also a feminine story.
Being a visual artist, indeed, I am foremost interested to make art -- to make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism, and become an important, timeless, universal work of art.
The challenge I have is how to do that.
How to tell a political story but an allegorical story.
How to move you with your emotions, but also make your mind work.
These are some of the images and the characters of the film.
Now comes the green movement -- the summer of 2009, as my film is released -- the uprising begins in the streets of Tehran.
What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice, repeats itself now again in Tehran.
It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy.
What was most significant for me was, once again, the presence of the women.
They're absolutely inspirational for me.
If in the Islamic Revolution, the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn't have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran -- women who were educated, forward thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist.
These women and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside.
I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women.
And once again, they proved themselves.
I stand here to say that Iranian women have found a new voice, and their voice is giving me my voice.
And it's a great honor to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the West only for now.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
A few weeks ago, I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia.
And the first thing I wanted to do as a Muslim was to go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of Islam.
And I did that; I put on my ritualistic dress, I went to the holy mosque, I did my prayers, I observed all the rituals.
And meanwhile, besides all the spirituality, there was one mundane detail in the Kaaba that was pretty interesting for me: there was no separation of sexes.
They were together while praying.
And if you wonder why this is interesting at all, you have to see the rest of Saudi Arabia, because this a country which is strictly divided between the sexes.
In other words: as men, you are simply not supposed to be in the same physical space with women.
I left the Kaaba to eat something in downtown Mecca.
I headed to the nearest Burger King restaurant.
And I went there -- I noticed that there was a male section, which is carefully separated from the female section.
I had to pay, order and eat in the male section.
"It's funny," I said to myself, "You can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger King?"
(Laughter) Quite, quite ironic.
Ironic, and it's also, I think, quite telling, because the Kaaba and the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of Islam, that of prophet Muhammad.
And if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men from women, the rituals around the Kaaba could have been designed accordingly.
This is also, I think, confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the Koran -- the very core of Islam, the divine core of Islam -- that all Muslims, equally myself, believe.
Actually, this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon.
What we call today Islamic law, and especially Islamic culture -- and there are many Islamic cultures, actually; the one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from in Istanbul or Turkey.
But still, if you're going to speak about a Muslim culture, this has a core: the divine message which began the religion.
But then many traditions, perceptions, practices were added on top of it.
And these were traditions of the Middle East medieval traditions.
There are two important messages, or two lessons, to take from that reality.
Maybe some things are bad traditions and they need to be changed.
On the other hand, the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains.
Maybe it's a Middle Eastern culture that became confused with Islam.
There is a practice called female circumcision.
It's something terrible, horrible.
It is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure.
And Westerners -- Europeans or Americans -- who didn't know about this before, [saw] this practice within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa.
But when you look at female circumcision, you see that it has nothing to do with Islam; it's just a North African practice which predates Islam.
It was there for thousands of years.
And, quite tellingly, some Muslims do practice it -- the Muslims in North Africa, not in other places.
But also the non-Muslim communities of North Africa -- the animists, some Christians and even a Jewish tribe in North Africa -- are known to practice female circumcision.
So what might look like a problem within Islamic faith might turn out to be a tradition that Muslims have subscribed to.
The same thing can be said for honor killings, which is a recurrent theme in the Western media -- and which is, of course, a horrible tradition.
And we see, truly, in some Muslim communities, that tradition.
But in the non-Muslim communities of the Middle East, such as some Christian communities, Eastern communities, you see the same practice.
We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey's Armenian community just a few months ago.
And it is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called "Islamic regimes," such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the worst case, the Taliban in Afghanistan, they are pretty authoritarian -- no doubt about that.
For example, in Saudi Arabia, there is a phenomenon called the religious police.
And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen, by force -- like, women are forced to cover their heads -- wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover.
Now that is pretty authoritarian, and that's something I'm very much critical of.
But when I realized that the non-Muslim, or the non-Islamic-minded actors in the same geography sometimes behaved similarly, I realized that the problem maybe lies in the political culture of the whole region, not just Islam.
Let me give you an example: in Turkey, where I come from, which is a very hyper-secular republic, until very recently, we used to have what I call "secularism police," which would guard the universities against veiled students.
But when I saw that, I said, "Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region, and some Muslims have been influenced by that.
Maybe it's a problem of the political culture, and we have to think about how to change that political culture."
Now, these are some of the questions I had in mind a few years ago when I sat down to write a book.
And as the subtitle suggests, I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty, and I tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty.
And there are strengths in Islamic tradition.
Islam, actually, as a monotheistic religion, which defined man as a responsible agent by itself, created the idea of the individual in the Middle East, and saved it from the communitarianism, the collectivism of the tribe.
But besides that, I also saw problems within Islamic tradition.
The Koran, for example, doesn't condone stoning.
There is no punishment for apostasy.
These things which make Islamic law, the troubling aspects of Islamic law, were developed into later interpretations of Islam.
Which means that Muslims can, today, look at those things and say, "Well, the core of our religion is here to stay with us.
But we can change how it was interpreted, because it was interpreted according to the time and milieu in the Middle Ages.
Now we're living in a different world, with different values and political systems."
But that's not the case at all.
Actually, from the 19th century on, there's a whole revisionist, reformist -- whatever you call it -- tradition, a trend in Islamic thinking.
These were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century, and later, 20th century, which looked at Europe, basically, and saw that Europe has many things to admire, like science and technology.
But not just that; also democracy, parliament, the idea of representation, the idea of equal citizenship.
These Muslim thinkers, intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th century, looked at Europe, saw these things, and said, "Why don't we have these things?"
And they looked back at Islamic tradition, and saw that there are problematic aspects, but they're not the core of the religion, so maybe they can be re-understood, and the Koran can be reread in the modern world.
That trend is generally called Islamic modernism, and it was advanced by intellectuals and statesmen, not just as an intellectual idea, though, but also as a political program.
And that's why, actually, in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms -- reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion.
That's why the Ottoman Empire, in its last decades, turned into a proto-democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time.
Similarly, in the Arab world, there was what the great Arab historian Albert Hourani defines as the Liberal Age.
He has a book, "Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age," and the Liberal Age, he defines as 19th century and early 20th century.
Quite notably, this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century among Islamic thinkers and statesmen and theologians.
But there is a very curious pattern in the rest of the 20th century, because we see a sharp decline in this Islamic modernist line.
And in place of that, what happens is that Islamism grows as an ideology which is authoritarian, which is quite strident, which is quite anti-Western, and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision.
So Islamism is the problematic idea that really created a lot of problems in the 20th-century Islamic world.
And even the very extreme forms of Islamism led to terrorism in the name of Islam -- which is actually a practice that I think is against Islam, but some, obviously, extremists, did not think that way.
But there is a curious question: If Islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, why did Islamism become so popular in the rest of the 20th century?
And this is a question, I think, which needs to be discussed carefully.
In my book, I went into that question as well.
And actually, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that.
Just look at the political history of the 20th century, and you see things have changed a lot.
In the 19th century, when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example, they were independent; they were more self-confident.
In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized.
So Europe is not just an example now to emulate; it's an enemy to fight and to resist.
So there's a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the Muslim world, and what you see is more of a defensive, rigid, reactionary strain, which led to Arab socialism, Arab nationalism and ultimately to the Islamist ideology.
And when the colonial period ended, what you had in place of that was generally secular dictators, which say they're a country, but did not bring democracy to the country, and established their own dictatorship.
And I think the West, at least some powers in the West, particularly the United States, made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators, thinking that they were more helpful for their interests.
But the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in their country and suppressed Islamic groups in their country actually made the Islamists much more strident.
So in the 20th century, you had this vicious cycle in the Arab world, where you have a dictatorship suppressing its own people, including the Islamic pious, and they're reacting in reactionary ways.
There was one country, though, which was able to escape or stay away from that vicious cycle.
And that's the country where I come from, Turkey.
Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections, which ended the more autocratic secular regime, which was in the beginning of Turkey.
And the pious Muslims in Turkey saw that they could change the political system by voting.
And they realized that democracy is something compatible with Islam, compatible with their values, and they've been supportive of democracy.
That's an experience that not every other Muslim nation in the Middle East had, until very recently.
Secondly, in the past two decades, thanks to globalization, thanks to the market economy, thanks to the rise of a middle class, we in Turkey see what I define as a rebirth of Islamic modernism.
Now, there's the more urban middle-class pious Muslims who, again, look at their tradition and see that there are some problems in the tradition, and understand that they need to be changed and questioned and reformed.
They see an example, at least, to take some inspiration from.
That's why the EU process, Turkey's effort to join the EU, has been supported inside Turkey by the Islamic pious, while some secular nationalists were against it.
Well, that process has been a little bit blurred by the fact that not all Europeans are that welcoming, but that's another discussion.
But the pro-EU sentiment in Turkey in the past decade has become almost an Islamic cause and supported by the Islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well, of course.
And thanks to that, Turkey has been able to reasonably create a success story in which Islam and the most pious understandings of Islam have become part of the democratic game, and even contributes to the democratic and economic advance of the country.
And this has been an inspiring example right now for some of the Islamic movements or some of the countries in the Arab world.
You must have all seen the Arab Spring, which began in Tunis and in Egypt.
Arab masses just revolted against their dictators.
They were asking for democracy; they were asking for freedom.
They said, "We want freedom; we want democracy.
We are Muslim believers, but we want to be living as free people in free societies."
Democracy is not an overnight achievement; it's a process.
But this is a promising era in the Muslim world.
And I believe that the Islamic modernism which began in the 19th century, but which had a setback in the 20th century because of the political troubles of the Muslim world, is having a rebirth.
And I think the takeaway message from that would be that Islam, despite some of the skeptics in the West, has the potential in itself to create its own way to democracy, create its own way to liberalism, create its own way to freedom.
They just should be allowed to work for that.
Thanks so much.
(Applause)
(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause)
So before I talk about this car for the blind, let me briefly tell you about another project that I worked on called the DARPA Urban Challenge.
Now this was about building a robotic car that can drive itself.
So about that time, the National Federation of the Blind, or NFB, challenged the research committee about who can develop a car that lets a blind person drive safely and independently.
(Laughter) We couldn't have been more wrong.
What NFB wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around, but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive.
So to test this crazy idea, we developed a small dune buggy prototype vehicle to test the feasibility.
But the problem with this car was it was designed to only be driven in a very controlled environment, in a flat, closed-off parking lot -- even the lanes defined by red traffic cones.
So with this success, we decided to take the next big step, to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads.
So how does it work?
So we have three steps.
So it measures acceleration, angular acceleration -- like a human ear, inner ear.
We fuse that information with a GPS unit to get an estimate of the location of the car.
We also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road.
The lasers scan the environment to detect obstacles -- a car approaching from the front, the back and also any obstacles that run into the roads, any obstacles around the vehicle.
So all this vast amount of information is then fed into the computer, and the computer can do two things.
One is, first of all, process this information to have an understanding of the environment -- these are the lanes of the road, there's the obstacles -- and convey this information to the driver.
The system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car.
So we can also generate instructions on how to operate the controls of the vehicle.
But the problem is this: How do we convey this information and instructions to a person who cannot see fast enough and accurate enough so he can drive?
So for this, we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology.
But today we're going to talk about three of these non-visual user interfaces.
Now the first interface is called a DriveGrip.
Another device is called SpeedStrip.
So this is a chair -- as a matter of fact, it's actually a massage chair.
We gut it out, and we rearrange the vibrating elements in different patterns, and we actuate them to convey information about the speed, and also instructions how to use the gas and the brake pedal.
So over here, you can see how the computer understands the environment, and because you cannot see the vibration, we actually put red LED's on the driver so that you can see what's happening.
This is the sensory data, and that data is transferred to the devices through the computer.
So these two devices, DriveGrip and SpeedStrip, are very effective.
But the problem is these are instructional cue devices.
So this is not really freedom, right?
The computer tells you how to drive -- turn left, turn right, speed up, stop.
We call this the "backseat-driver problem."
So we're moving away from the instructional cue devices, and we're now focusing more on the informational devices.
A good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called AirPix.
So think of it as a monitor for the blind.
So it's a small tablet, has many holes in it, and compressed air comes out, so it can actually draw images.
So even though you are blind, you can put your hand over it, you can see the lanes of the road and obstacles.
So it's actually a multi-dimensional user interface.
So here you can see the left camera, the right camera from the vehicle and how the computer interprets that and sends that information to the AirPix.
For this, we're showing a simulator, a blind person driving using the AirPix.
This simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces.
So just a month ago, on January 29th, we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous Daytona International Speedway during the Rolex 24 racing event.
(Music) (Video) Announcer: This is an historic day in January.
Well there comes the first box.
He does. He passes it on the right.
He's closing in on the van to make the moving pass.
He's approaching the end of the run, makes his way between the barrels that are set up there.
(Honking) (Applause) Dennis Hong: I'm so happy for you.
(Applause) DH: So since we started this project, we've been getting hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls from people from all around the world.
Letters thanking us, but sometimes you also get funny letters like this one: "Now I understand why there is Braille on a drive-up ATM machine."
You must be out of your mind."
But this vehicle is a prototype vehicle, and it's not going to be on the road until it's proven as safe as, or safer than, today's vehicle.
And I truly believe that this can happen.
But still, will the society, would they accept such a radical idea?
How are we going to handle insurance?
There's many of these different kinds of hurdles besides technology challenges that we need to address before this becomes a reality.
Of course, the main goal of this project is to develop a car for the blind.
But potentially more important than this is the tremendous value of the spin-off technology that can come from this project.
The sensors that are used can see through the dark, the fog and rain.
And together with this new type of interfaces, we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people.
Just imagine, in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what's written and read using these non-visual interfaces.
So today, the things I've showed you today, is just the beginning.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Then this January, my mother died, and pursuing a film like that just seemed the last thing that was interesting to me.
We can see the first part here was designed here by pigs.
It was a little bit too funky, and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way -- fashion.
My studio in Bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest, and monkeys, of course, are supposed to be the happiest of all animals.
So of course, what you don't do properly yourself is never deemed done really.
And it turns out that men and women report very, very similar levels of happiness.
That if you live in the best climate, in San Diego in the United States, or in the shittiest climate, in Buffalo, New York, you are going to be just as happy in either place.
If you make more than 50,000 bucks a year in the U.S., any salary increase you're going to experience will have only a tiny, tiny influence on your overall well-being.
Black people are just as happy as white people are.
You will adapt to it and get used to it.
If you have manageable health problems it doesn't really matter.
So now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left -- meaning that, if you have a lot of friends, and you have meaningful friendships, that does make a lot of difference.
As well as being married -- you are likely to be much happier than if you are single.
A fellow TED speaker, Jonathan Haidt, came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
He says that the conscious mind is this tiny rider on this giant elephant, the unconscious.
And the rider thinks that he can tell the elephant what to do, but the elephant really has his own ideas.
If I look at my own life, I'm born in 1962 in Austria.
If I would have been born a hundred years earlier, the big decisions in my life would have been made for me -- meaning I would have stayed in the town that I was born in; I would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did; and I would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected.
We live where we want to be -- at least in the West.
And so it's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of.
If you look at the statistics and you see that the guy called George, when he decides on where he wants to live -- is it Florida or North Dakota? -- he goes and lives in Georgia.
And if you look at a guy called Dennis, when he decides what to become -- is it a lawyer, or does he want to become a doctor or a teacher? -- best chance is that he wants to become a dentist.
And if Paula decides should she marry Joe or Jack, somehow Paul sounds the most interesting.
And so even if we make those very important decisions for very silly reasons, it remains statistically true that there are more Georges living in Georgia and there are more Dennises becoming dentists and there are more Paulas who are married to Paul than statistically viable.
(Laughter) Now I, of course, thought, "Well this is American data," and I thought, "Well, those silly Americans.
They get influenced by things that they're not aware of.
This is just completely ridiculous."
So I am looking still for a Stephanie.
If I make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer, the easiest answer, of course, is do more of the stuff that I like to do and much less of the stuff that I don't like to do -- for which it would be helpful to know what it is that I actually do like to do.
One of them is to think without pressure.
It's a book on culture, and, as you can see, culture is rapidly drifting around.
The example I have here is a chair that came out of the year in Bali -- clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture, not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there.
Quite consciously, design projects that need an incredible amount of various techniques, just basically to fight straightforward adaptation.
Being close to the content -- that's the content really is close to my heart.
This is a bus, or vehicle, for a charity, for an NGO that wants to double the education budget in the United States -- carefully designed, so, by two inches, it still clears highway overpasses.
Working on projects that actually have visible impacts, like a book for a deceased German artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous.
And I think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest.
So in this case, it's an outside projection for Singapore on these giant Times Square-like screens.
And I of course knew stuff, as a designer, about typography, even though we worked with those animals not so successfully.
And from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project.
In this case, "Keeping a Diary Supports Personal Development" -- I've been keeping a diary since I was 12.
And I've found that it influenced my life and work in a very intriguing way.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
How many Creationists do we have in the room?
And yet many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy -- would like to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes.
Beaver dams, yes. Hoover Dam, no.
What do they think it is that prevents the products of human ingenuity from being themselves, fruits of the tree of life, and hence, in some sense, obeying evolutionary rules?
And yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking -- to our thinking.
It climbs up to the top, and it falls, and it climbs, and it falls, and it climbs -- trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass.
What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of?
Is it just a fluke?
Yeah, it's just a fluke. It's a lancet fluke.
It's a little brain worm.
It's a parasitic brain worm that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle.
The ant's brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior.
Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means "surrender," or "submission of self-interest to the will of Allah."
Well, it's ideas -- not worms -- that hijack our brains.
Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas?
No, it's worse than that.
Most people have.
(Laughter) Justice. Truth. Communism.
Many people have laid down their lives for communism, and many have laid down their lives for capitalism.
And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam.
They're infectious.
Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking.
Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others.
I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is.
So, this is mine.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Now, this is a profound biological effect.
It's the subordination of genetic interest to other interests.
It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one.
Unmistakable.
Richard Dawkins, whom you'll be hearing later in the day, invented the term "memes," and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book "The Selfish Gene."
Now here am I talking about his idea.
Well, you see, it's not his. Yes -- he started it.
I'm responsible for what I say about memes.
Actually, I think we're all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses.
So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused.
They're very easy to misuse. That's why they're dangerous.
So let me just point out: memes are like viruses.
I mean, a virus is -- you know, it's stuff! What's a meme made of?"
Yesterday, Negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications but -- what's a virus?
A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude.
And that's what a meme is. It's an information packet with attitude.
What's a meme made of? What are bits made of, Mom?
They're made of information, and can be carried in any physical medium.
Sometimes when people say, "Do memes exist?"
Then there's all the other memes that can't be pronounced.
There are different species of memes.
Simple, beautiful furniture?
And, of course, they're basically extinct now.
Not just the priests. Everybody.
Well, it's not so surprising that they've gone extinct. (Laughter) But in fact that's not why they went extinct.
And there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home.
So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they're not being passed on genetically.
After all, the meme for Shaker-dom was essentially a sterilizing parasite.
There are other parasites that do this -- which render the host sterile.
It's part of their plan.
I'm just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective, which I recommend.
In Jared Diamond's wonderful book, "Guns, Germs and Steel," he talks about how it was germs, more than guns and steel, that conquered the new hemisphere -- the Western hemisphere -- that conquered the rest of the world.
And they just wiped out -- these pathogens just wiped out the native people, who had no immunity to them at all.
Yesterday, a number of people -- Nicholas Negroponte and others -- spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out, thanks to all the new technology all over the world.
But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas.
Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the ideologues that inspired Osama bin Laden.
These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures.
And it's not our fault, anymore than it's our fault when our germs lay waste to people that haven't developed the immunity.
They're like a mild cold.
They're not a big deal for us.
As we spread our education and our technology, one of the things that we are doing is we're the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes -- the memes that they are prepared to die for.
Well now, how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes?
If you've had a friend who's died of AIDS, then you hate HIV.
But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective.
Get the facts.
There's plenty of room for moral passion once we've got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do.
And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them.
This is a representation of your brain, and your brain can be broken into two parts.
There's the left half, which is the logical side, and then the right half, which is the intuitive.
You can be logical and intuitive.
And so I consider myself one of these people, along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists, who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas.
How do we develop this intuition? Well we like to play with stuff.
So some intuition that you may have developed over the years is that one thing is only in one place at a time.
I mean, it can sound weird to think about one thing being in two different places at the same time, but you weren't born with this notion, you developed it.
And I remember watching a kid playing on a car stop.
He was just a toddler and he wasn't very good at it, and he kept falling over.
And so this is a great conceptual model to have of the world, unless you're a particle physicist.
It'd be a terrible model for a particle physicist, because they don't play with car stops, they play with these little weird particles.
And when they play with their particles, they find they do all sorts of really weird things -- like they can fly right through walls, or they can be in two different places at the same time.
And so they wrote down all these observations, and they called it the theory of quantum mechanics.
And so that's where physics was at a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little, tiny particles.
This didn't really sit well with my intuition, and maybe it's just because I don't play with particles very often.
I mean, nobody's ever seen a particle.
Because if everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics?
And so I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that an everyday object also follows quantum mechanics.
So a few years ago, I set off to do just that.
This is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition.
And you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle.
And that's this piece of metal I'm going to be talking about in a minute.
This is a photograph of the object.
And then here's a really, really big close-up of the little piece of metal.
So what we're looking at is a little chunk of metal, and it's shaped like a diving board, and it's sticking out over a ledge.
And so I made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip.
For the last stuff, I had to build my own machine -- to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device.
This device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition, but it needs a little help to do it.
Here, let me give you an analogy.
You know how uncomfortable it is to be in a crowded elevator?
I mean, when I'm in an elevator all alone, I do all sorts of weird things, but then other people get on board and I stop doing those things because I don't want to bother them, or, frankly, scare them.
So quantum mechanics says that inanimate objects feel the same way.
And so that's what we did.
We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
Now, all alone in the elevator, the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted.
And so we measured its motion.
Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating, and the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this -- like expanding and contracting bellows.
What does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time?
So let's think about the atoms.
That means that every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places.
(Laughter) Really.
(Applause) It was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years because, check this out, the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you.
So imagine if you're in multiple places at the same time, what would that be like?
How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space?
There's one more part to the story.
It's when we warmed it up, and we turned on the lights and looked inside the box, we saw that the piece metal was still there in one piece.
And so I had to develop this new intuition, that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space.
You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected.
It's more than that; it's deeper.
It's that those connections, your connections to all the things around you, literally define who you are, and that's the profound weirdness of quantum mechanics.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion.
I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores.
Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet.
Is it going to be my size?
Will it be under $20?
I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED.
I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it.
I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs.
And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear -- (Laughter) that means I found a few things.
So let's start with Sunday.
I call this "Shiny Tiger."
You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great.
This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week.
Monday: Color is powerful.
It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants.
(Laughter) If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you.
I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in.
Wednesday: Embrace your inner child.
Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old.
I like to smile and say, "Thank you."
Thursday: Confidence is key.
I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out.
But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant.
If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off.
So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience.
Thank you.
(Applause) Friday: A universal truth -- five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything.
And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word.
It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations.
Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go.
I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
That is the word that comes to mind.
We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power.
How much power do we have?
Scene from a movie: "Apocalypse Now" -- great movie.
We've got to get our hero, Captain Willard, to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz.
So the scene: the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in.
And there's this loud, thrilling music in the background, this wild music.
♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Da ta da da ♫ That's a lot of power.
That's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have.
Let's take an example.
What can we do with just one person's data?
I can look at your financial records.
I can tell if you pay your bills on time.
When you come to my website, I actually know what you're going to do already because I've seen you visit millions of websites before.
And I'm sorry to tell you, you're like a poker player, you have a tell.
I know what you like. I know who you are, and that's even before I look at your mail or your phone.
Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have.
But I'm not actually here to talk about what we can do.
What's the right thing to do?
We're just building this stuff. Somebody else is using it."
Fair enough.
But it brings me back.
We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they'll build.
We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology.
Or should we respect his privacy, protect his dignity and leave him alone?
Which one is it?
I know: crowdsource. Let's crowdsource this.
Let's do a show of hands -- iPhone.
Android.
You'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn't be such suckers just for the pretty phones.
(Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder.
Should we be collecting all of that guy's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he's up to no good?
Or should we leave him alone?
Collect his data.
Leave him alone.
You're safe. It's fine.
(Laughter) Okay, last question -- harder question -- when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case, should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework, or should we use a Millian consequentialist one?
Kant.
How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don't have a moral framework?
We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system.
We all know right and wrong, right?
You feel good when you do something right, you feel bad when you do something wrong.
Our parents teach us that: praise with the good, scold with the bad.
But how do we figure out what's right and wrong?
In other words, it's kind of random, kind of ad hoc, how we figure out what we should do.
And maybe, if we want to be on surer footing, what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there, that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place, and how would we know in a given situation what to do.
So let's get a moral framework.
How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework?
I know a guy who did exactly that.
Remember him -- old philosopher?
You were sleeping during that class.
And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did.
He was worried about right and wrong.
I don't want opinions; I want knowledge.
I want to know the truth about justice -- like we have truths in math.
In math, we know the objective facts.
Favorite number. I love that number.
There are truths about two.
If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four.
That's true no matter what thing you're talking about.
It's an objective truth about the form of two, the abstract form.
When you have two of anything -- two eyes, two ears, two noses, just two protrusions -- those all partake of the form of two.
And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion.
What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math?
What if there were a pure form of justice?
What if there are truths about justice, and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated, partook of that form of justice?
I mean, think about that. How grand. How ambitious.
That's as ambitious as we are.
He wants objective truths.
Aristotle said, "We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows."
He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path.
But don't give up.
Maybe there's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework.
How about this: What if in any situation you could just calculate, look at the choices, measure out which one's better and know what to do?
That sound familiar?
That's a utilitarian moral framework.
So basis of utilitarianism -- I'm sure you're familiar at least.
But here's the way it works.
What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain?
Let's take an example.
Not just because it rang earlier, but I'm going to take it because I made a little calculation.
And what if he's been sending little messages to Bin Laden's hideout -- or whoever took over after Bin Laden -- and he's actually like a terrorist, a sleeper cell.
That has a very high utility to prevent that damage.
But maybe you don't feel that way either.
Maybe you think, it's his phone.
It's wrong to take his phone because he's a person and he has rights and he has dignity, and we can't just interfere with that.
He has autonomy.
It doesn't matter what the calculations are.
There are things that are intrinsically wrong -- like lying is wrong, like torturing innocent children is wrong.
Kant was very good on this point, and he said it a little better than I'll say it.
He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules.
It's not a matter of calculation.
We're right in the thick of it, this philosophical thicket.
And this goes on for thousands of years, because these are hard questions, and I've only got 15 minutes.
How should we be making our decisions?
What should we be doing? What's the answer?
What's the formula?
There's not a formula.
There's not a simple answer.
Ethics is hard.
Ethics requires thinking.
And that's uncomfortable.
I know; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence, trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us, that could give us answers.
We're the ones who have to do it.
Happily, we're not machines, and we can do it.
Not only can we think, we must.
Hannah Arendt said, "The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil.
It arises from not thinking."
That's what she called the "banality of evil."
So let's do that. Let's think.
Every person in this room do this: think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing, where you wondered, "What should I be doing?"
Or like Kant, did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right?"
Are you ready? Go.
Stop. Good work.
Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision.
Do it over lunch.
And don't just find another technologist friend; find somebody different than you.
In fact, find somebody from the humanities.
Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together.
You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature.
You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater -- how does that bear upon venture capital?
Well that's interesting. That's a different way of thinking.
And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions.
And you're telling him what we're talking about, about our whole data revolution and all this -- maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music.
♫ Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ Well, your musician friend will stop you and say, "You know, the theme music for your data revolution, that's an opera, that's Wagner.
It's based on Norse legend.
That's interesting.
Now it's also a beautiful opera, and we're moved by that opera.
We care what happens in that opera.
And we certainly care what happens with our technologies.
We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news.
This is our movie.
We figure out what will happen with this technology.
We determine how this will all end.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams.
I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist, and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur.
And so that's what I've been striving for all of my life.
I was very fortunate early in my career.
I wasn't very good at reading things.
In fact, I don't read much of anything.
I am extremely dyslexic, and so reading is the hardest thing I do.
I basically practice for finding money on the street.
And I have been fortunate enough to find things like the first eggs in the Western hemisphere and the first baby dinosaurs in nests, the first dinosaur embryos and massive accumulations of bones.
And it happened to be at a time when people were just starting to begin to realize that dinosaurs weren't the big, stupid, green reptiles that people had thought for so many years.
People were starting to get an idea that dinosaurs were special.
And so, at that time, I was able to make some interesting hypotheses along with my colleagues.
We were able to actually say that dinosaurs -- based on the evidence we had -- that dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies and cared for their young, brought food to their babies and traveled in gigantic herds.
So it was pretty interesting stuff.
I have gone on to find more things and discover that dinosaurs really were very social.
We have found a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed from when they were juveniles to when they were adults.
The appearance of them would have been different -- which it is in all social animals.
In social groups of animals, the juveniles always look different than the adults.
The adults can recognize the juveniles; the juveniles can recognize the adults.
And they didn't just all chase Jeeps around.
(Laughter) But it is that social thing that I guess attracted Michael Crichton.
And in his book, he talked about the social animals.
And then Steven Spielberg, of course, depicts these dinosaurs as being very social creatures.
The theme of this story is building a dinosaur, and so we come to that part of "Jurassic Park."
Michael Crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life.
You all know the story, right.
I mean, I assume everyone here has seen "Jurassic Park."
If you want to make a dinosaur, you go out, you find yourself a piece of petrified tree sap -- otherwise known as amber -- that has some blood-sucking insects in it, good ones, and you get your insect and you drill into it and you suck out some DNA, because obviously all insects that sucked blood in those days sucked dinosaur DNA out.
And you take your DNA back to the laboratory and you clone it.
And I guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg, or something like that, and then you wait, and, lo and behold, out pops a little baby dinosaur.
And everybody's happy about that.
They keep doing it; they just keep making these things.
And then, then, then, and then ...
And, of course, that's what makes Steven Spielberg's movie -- conspiring dinosaurs chasing people around.
So I assume everybody knows that if you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it, and you drilled into it, and you got something out of that insect, and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over again, you'd have a room full of mosquitos.
(Laughter) (Applause) And probably a whole bunch of trees as well.
Now if you want dinosaur DNA, I say go to the dinosaur.
Back in 1993 when the movie came out, we actually had a grant from the National Science Foundation to attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur, and we chose the dinosaur on the left, a Tyrannosaurus rex, which was a very nice specimen.
And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing.
And they're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone.
So she sampled some material out of it.
Now it wasn't DNA; she didn't find DNA.
But she did find heme, which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin.
That was interesting.
Well we tried and tried and we couldn't really get anything else out of it.
So a few years went by, and then we started the Hell Creek Project.
And the Hell Creek Project was this massive undertaking to get as many dinosaurs as we could possibly find, and hopefully find some dinosaurs that had more material in them.
And out in eastern Montana there's a lot of space, a lot of badlands, and not very many people, and so you can go out there and find a lot of stuff.
And we did find a lot of stuff.
We found a lot of Tyrannosaurs, but we found one special Tyrannosaur, and we called it B-rex.
And B-rex was found under a thousand cubic yards of rock.
And I and my colleagues cut into it, and we were able to determine, by looking at lines of arrested growth, some lines in it, that B-rex had died at the age of 16.
We don't really know how long dinosaurs lived, because we haven't found the oldest one yet.
Medullary tissue is the calcium build-up, the calcium storage basically, when an animal is pregnant, when a bird is pregnant.
So here was the character that linked birds and dinosaurs.
But Mary went further.
She took the bone, and she dumped it into acid.
Now we all know that bones are fossilized, and so if you dump it into acid, there shouldn't be anything left.
There were flexible, clear blood vessels.
And so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur.
But she also found osteocytes, which are the cells that laid down the bones.
And so we built a laboratory in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer, and actually took the laboratory to the field where we could get better samples.
And we did. We got better material.
The cells looked better.
Found the protein collagen.
I mean, it was wonderful stuff.
But it's not dinosaur DNA.
We're just not going to be able to do what they did in "Jurassic Park."
But birds are dinosaurs.
Birds are living dinosaurs.
We actually classify them as dinosaurs.
We now call them non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs.
Avian dinosaurs are our modern birds.
So we don't have to make a dinosaur because we already have them.
(Laughter) I know, you're as bad as the sixth-graders.
(Laughter) The sixth-graders look at it and they say, "No."
(Laughter) "You can call it a dinosaur, but look at the velociraptor: the velociraptor is cool."
(Laughter) So this is our problem, as you can imagine.
I mean it really is.
(Laughter) (Applause) But the sixth-graders demand it.
"Fix the chicken."
(Laughter) So that's what I'm here to tell you about: how we are going to fix a chicken.
So we have a number of ways that we actually can fix the chicken.
Because evolution works, we actually have some evolutionary tools.
We started out with a wolf-like creature and we ended up with a Maltese.
Or any of the other funny-looking little dogs.
We also have transgenesis.
Transgenesis is really cool too.
That's how people make GloFish.
You take a glow gene out of a coral or a jellyfish and you stick it in a zebrafish, and, puff, they glow.
And they obviously make a lot of money off of them.
And now they're making Glow-rabbits and Glow-all-sorts-of-things.
(Laughter) But I don't think that'll satisfy the sixth-graders either.
But there's another thing.
There's what we call atavism activation.
And atavism activation is basically -- an atavism is an ancestral characteristic.
You heard that occasionally children are born with tails, and it's because it's an ancestral characteristic.
Snakes are occasionally born with legs.
And here's an example.
This is a chicken with teeth.
A fellow by the name of Matthew Harris at the University of Wisconsin in Madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth, and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens.
We can make a chicken with teeth.
That's getting closer.
That's better than a glowing chicken.
(Laughter) A friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Dr. Hans Larsson at McGill University, is actually looking at atavisms.
And he's looking at them by looking at the embryo genesis of birds and actually looking at how they develop, and he's interested in how birds actually lost their tail.
He's looking for those genes as well.
And so he agreed.
If you look at dinosaur hands, a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it.
Archaeopteryx, which is a bird, a primitive bird, still has that very primitive hand.
But the cool thing is that, if you look in the embryo, as the embryo is developing the hand actually looks pretty much like the archaeopteryx hand.
But a gene turns on that actually fuses those together.
And so what we're looking for is that gene.
We want to stop that gene from turning on, fusing those hands together, so we can get a chicken that hatches out with a three-fingered hand, like the archaeopteryx.
Birds have basically rudimentary tails.
So that's the other gene we're looking for.
But it's just the very basics.
Well, that's a good question.
Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things.
(Laughter) Anyway -- When our dino-chicken hatches, it will be, obviously, the poster child, or what you might call a poster chick, for technology, entertainment and design.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This story is about taking imagination seriously.
Today, I'm using it to create permanent, billowing, voluptuous forms the scale of hard-edged buildings in cities around the world.
I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture.
In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.
I went off on my own to become an artist, and I painted for 10 years, when I was offered a Fulbright to India.
Promising to give exhibitions of paintings, I shipped my paints and arrived in Mahabalipuram.
This fishing village was famous for sculpture.
So I tried bronze casting.
I went for a walk on the beach, watching the fishermen bundle their nets into mounds on the sand.
My first satisfying sculpture was made in collaboration with these fishermen.
It's a self-portrait titled "Wide Hips."
I discovered their soft surfaces revealed every ripple of wind in constantly changing patterns.
I continued studying craft traditions and collaborating with artisans, next in Lithuania with lace makers.
Thousands of people saw it, and one of them was the urbanist Manual Sola-Morales who was redesigning the waterfront in Porto, Portugal.
I didn't know if I could do that and preserve my art.
For two years, I searched for a fiber that could survive ultraviolet rays, salt, air, pollution, and at the same time remain soft enough to move fluidly in the wind.
So we raised this 45,000-pound steel ring.
We had to engineer it to move gracefully in an average breeze and survive in hurricane winds.
But there was no engineering software to model something porous and moving.
I found a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designs sails for America's Cup racing yachts named Peter Heppel.
He helped me tackle the twin challenges of precise shape and gentle movement.
I couldn't build this the way I knew because hand-tied knots weren't going to withstand a hurricane.
So I developed a relationship with an industrial fishnet factory, learned the variables of their machines, and figured out a way to make lace with them.
It was hard to believe that what I had imagined was now built, permanent and had lost nothing in translation.
I walked underneath it for the first time.
As I watched the wind's choreography unfold, I felt sheltered and, at the same time, connected to limitless sky.
Historic Philadelphia City Hall: its plaza, I felt, needed a material for sculpture that was lighter than netting.
So we experimented with tiny atomized water particles to create a dry mist that is shaped by the wind and in testing, discovered that it can be shaped by people who can interact and move through it without getting wet.
I'm using this sculpture material to trace the paths of subway trains above ground in real time -- like an X-ray of the city's circulatory system unfolding.
(Laughter) I didn't know where to begin, but I said yes.
I read about the recent earthquake in Chile and the tsunami that rippled across the entire Pacific Ocean.
It shifted the Earth's tectonic plates, sped up the planet's rotation and literally shortened the length of the day.
So I contacted NOAA, and I asked if they'd share their data on the tsunami, and translated it into this.
Its title: "1.26" refers to the number of microseconds that the Earth's day was shortened.
Its shape was too complex now.
So I replaced the metal armature with a soft, fine mesh of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel.
Then I got a call from New York City asking if I could adapt these concepts to Times Square or the High Line.
This new soft structural method enables me to model these and build these sculptures at the scale of skyscrapers.
They don't have funding yet, but I dream now of bringing these to cities around the world where they're most needed.
Fourteen years ago, I searched for beauty in the traditional things, in craft forms.
My artistic horizons continue to grow.
I got a call from a friend in Phoenix.
There they were in their business suits, laying in the grass, noticing the changing patterns of wind beside people they didn't know, sharing the rediscovery of wonder.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
In 2007, I decided that we needed to reconceptualize how we thought about economic development.
Our new goal should be that when every family thinks about where they want to live and work, they should be able to choose between at least a handful of different cities that were all competing to attract new residents.
Now we're a long way away from that goal right now.
But the amazing thing about cities is they're worth so much more than it costs to build them.
So we could easily supply the world with dozens, maybe hundreds, of new cities.
Now this might sound preposterous to you if you've never thought about new cities.
Imagine half the people who wanted to be in apartments already had them; the other half aren't there yet.
You could try and expand the capacity by doing additions on all the existing apartments.
But you know what you'd run into is those apartments and the surrounding areas have rules to avoid discomfort and the distractions of construction.
So it's extremely hard to do all of those additions.
But you could go out someplace brand new, build a brand new apartment building, as long as the rules there were ones that facilitated construction rather than getting in the way.
So I proposed that governments create new reform zones big enough to hold cities and gave them a name: charter cities.
Later I learned that at about this same time, Javier and Octavio were thinking about the challenge of reform in Honduras.
They knew that about 75,000 Hondurans every year would leave to go to the United States, and they wanted to ask, what could they do to make sure that those people could stay and do the same things in Honduras.
At one point, Javier said to Octavio, "What if we took some of our empty land -- what if we just gave it to an embassy -- give some to the U.S. embassy; give some to the Canadian embassy -- and then if people want to go work under the rules of Canada or under the rules of the United States, they can go get jobs, do everything they do on those embassy grounds that they would otherwise have to go to Canada or the U.S. to do?"
In the summer of 2009, Honduras went through a wrenching constitutional crisis.
At the next regularly scheduled election, Pepe Lobo won in a landslide on a platform that promised reform, but reconciliation as well.
He asked Octavio to be his chief of staff.
Meanwhile, I was getting ready to give a talk at TEDGlobal.
Through a process of refinement, trial and error, a lot of user testing, I tried to boil this complicated concept of charter city down to the bare essentials.
The first point was the importance of rules, like those rules that say you can't come in and disturb all the existing apartment holders.
We pay a lot of attention to new technologies, but it takes technologies and rules to get progress, and it's usually the rules that hold us back.
In the fall of 2010, a friend from Guatemala sent Octavio a link to the TEDTalk.
He showed it to Javier.
They called me.
So in December we met in Miami, in a hotel conference room.
I tried to explain this point about how valuable cities are, how much more valuable they are than they cost.
And I used this slide showing how valuable the raw land is in a place like New York City: notice, land that's worth thousands of dollars, in some cases, per square meter.
But it was a fairly abstract discussion, and at some point when there was a pause, Octavio said, "Paul, maybe we could watch the TEDTalk."
(Laughing) So the TEDTalk laid out in very simple terms, a charter city is a place where you start with uninhabited land, a charter that specifies the rules that will apply there and then a chance for people to opt in, to go live under those rules or not.
So I was asked by the president of Honduras who said that we need to do this project, this is important, this could be the way forward for our country.
I was asked to come to Tegucigalpa and talk again on January fourth and fifth.
So I presented another fact-filled lecture that included a slide like this, which tried to make the point that, if you want to create a lot of value in a city, it has to be very big.
This is a picture of Denver, and the outline is the new airport that was built in Denver.
This airport alone covers more than 100 square kilometers.
So I was trying to persuade the Hondurans, if you build a new city, you've got to start with a site that's at least 1,000 square kilometers.
That's more than 250 hundred-thousand acres.
Everybody applauded politely.
The faces in the audience were very serious and attentive.
The leader of the congress came up on stage and said, "Professor Romer, thank you very much for your lecture, but maybe we could watch the TEDTalk.
I've got it here on my laptop."
So I sat down, and they played the TEDTalk.
There would be a choice of a city which you could go to which could be in Honduras, instead of hundreds of miles away in the North.
And it also involved new choices for leaders.
This picture's from there.
All parties, all factions in society, backed this.
To be part of the constitution, you actually have to pass it twice in the congress.
On February 17th they passed it again with another vote of 114 to one.
Immediately after that vote, on February 21st to the 24th, a delegation of about 30 Hondurans went to the two places in the world that are most interested in getting into the city building business.
One is South Korea.
This is a picture of a big, new city center that's being built in South Korea -- bigger than downtown Boston.
The other place that's very interested in city building is Singapore.
They've actually built two cities already in China and are preparing the third.
So if you think about this practically, here's where we are.
They've got a site; they're already thinking about this site for the second city.
One country has already volunteered to let its supreme court be the court of final appeal for the new judicial system there.
There's designers and builders of cities who are very interested.
There's lots of businesses that would like to locate in the Americas, especially in a place with a free trade zone, and there's lots of people who'd like to go there.
Around the world, there's 700 million people who say they'd like to move permanently someplace else right now.
There's a million a year who leave Latin America to go to the United States.
Many of these are a father who has to leave his family behind to go get a job -- sometimes a single mother who has to get enough money to even pay for food or clothing.
Sadly, sometimes there are even children who are trying to get reunited with their parents that they haven't seen, in some cases, for a decade.
So what kind of an idea is it to think about building a brand new city in Honduras?
What kind of an idea is it to think about insisting that every family have a choice of several cities that are competing to attract new residents?
This is an idea worth spreading.
And my friends from Honduras asked me to say thank you, TED.
(Applause)
I want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day, at the exact same moment, each conceiving a baby, OK?
So two couples each conceiving one baby.
And in this scenario, I want to imagine that, in one case, the sperm is carrying a Y chromosome, meeting that X chromosome of the egg.
And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, meeting the X chromosome of the egg.
Both are viable; both take off.
So I wear two hats in most of what I do.
In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms.
So some of what I've worked on, for example, is people who are conjoined twins -- two people within one body.
Some of what I've worked on is people who have dwarfism -- so people who are much shorter than typical.
And a lot of what I've worked on is people who have atypical sex -- so people who don't have the standard male or the standard female body types.
And as a general term, we can use the term "intersex" for this.
Intersex comes in a lot of different forms.
So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes.
But because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone, the body doesn't react to the testosterone.
And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome.
As a consequence, the body develops more along the female typical path.
When the child is born, she looks like a girl.
She is a girl, she is raised as a girl.
And it's often not until she hits puberty and she's growing and developing breasts, but she's not getting her period, that somebody figures out something's up here.
And they do some tests and figure out that, instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus, she has testes inside, and she has a Y chromosome.
Now what's important to understand is you may think of this person as really being male, but they're really not.
Females, like males, have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands.
And the adrenal glands make androgens, which are a masculinizing hormone.
Most females like me -- I believe myself to be a typical female -- I don't actually know my chromosomal make-up, but I think I'm probably typical -- most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive.
We're making androgen, and we're responding to androgens.
The consequence is that somebody like me has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome.
So sex is really complicated -- it's not just that intersex people are in the middle of all the sex spectrum -- in some ways, they can be all over the place.
Another example: a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, who was born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, had a life as a guy, and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside.
What he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia.
He had XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment.
And as a consequence, his genitals were masculinized, his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones.
And he was born looking like a boy -- nobody suspected anything.
OK, so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex.
The reason that children with these kinds of bodies -- whether it's dwarfism, or it's conjoined twinning, or it's an intersex type -- are often "normalized" by surgeons is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health.
In many cases, people are actually perfectly healthy.
The reason they're often subject to various kinds of surgeries is because they threaten our social categories.
Our system has been based typically on the idea that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity.
So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity; what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, to have an African anatomy in terms of your history.
So we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism.
And our nation's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism.
I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, "Which is the test they're going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?"
In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit: Nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature.
So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories, that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought.
And it's not just in terms of sex.
It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed.
We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees.
What are we to make of the fact that we differ from them only, really, by a few nucleotides?
And as we get farther and farther with our science, we get more and more into a discomforted zone, where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we've had are probably overly simplistic.
We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, such that it has a different right than a fetal life.
In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead.
And as a consequence, we have to struggle with this really difficult question about who's dead, and this leads us to a really difficult situation where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before.
I'm a political progressive, I defend people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous.
So in order to tell you about that tension, I have to first admit to you a huge fan of the Founding Fathers.
I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, but they were great.
I mean, they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did, that I find myself watching that cheesy musical "1776" every few years, and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable.
It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers.
The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, the original anatomical activists, and this is why.
What they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years.
So as you all recall, what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy, and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy.
The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, but they did have a concept of birthright.
They had a concept of blue blood.
They had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth.
The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept, and that concept was "all men are created equal."
They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was the commonality of anatomy, not the difference in anatomy, and that was a really radical thing to do.
Now they were doing it in part because they were part of an Enlightenment system where two things were growing up together.
And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, a lot of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in the concept of a naturalistic world.
They were moving towards a naturalistic concept.
And if you look, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, they talk about nature and nature's God.
They don't talk about God and God's nature.
They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are.
So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality.
And in doing so, they were really setting up in a beautiful way the Civil Rights Movement of the future.
They didn't think of it that way, but they did it for us, and it was great.
So what happened years afterwards?
What happened was women, for example, who wanted the right to vote, took the Founding Fathers' concept of anatomical commonality being more important than anatomical difference and said, "The fact that we have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough in terms of a difference to mean that we shouldn't have the right to vote, the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc."
Next came the successful Civil Rights Movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, "Ain't I a woman?"
We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights Movement saying, "I am a man."
We see the same thing with the disability rights movement.
The problem is, of course, that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions.
Mind you, I want to maintain some divisions, anatomically, in our culture.
For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human.
I don't want to say a five-year-old should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry.
So there are some anatomical divisions that make sense to me and that I think we should retain.
We have two beings, both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day.
Let's imagine one of them, Mary, is born three months prematurely, so she's born on June 1, 1980.
Henry, by contrast, is born at term, so he's born on March 1, 1980.
Simply by virtue of the fact that Mary was born prematurely three months, she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does -- the right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink.
We find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are.
Mary, meanwhile, cannot in all the states have the same right that Henry has in all the states, namely, the right to marry.
Henry can marry, in every state, a woman, but Mary can only marry today in a few states, a woman.
So we have these anatomical categories that persist, that are in many ways problematic and questionable.
And the question to me becomes: What do we do, as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy, that we reach the point where we have to admit that a democracy that's been based on anatomy might start falling apart?
I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time, it feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us.
It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: "We have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere."
But a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position.
So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you have a Y chromosome.
In practice they don't test people for their chromosomes.
But this is also very bizarre, because of the story I told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome.
If we look at one of the Founding Fathers of modern democracy, Dr. Martin Luther King, he offers us something of a solution in his "I have a dream" speech.
He says we should judge people "based not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character," moving beyond anatomy.
And I want to say, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea."
I also want to point out that I'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans, because, I have to admit, that there are some golden retrievers I know that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans I know.
We don't have a situation that Iran has, for example, where a man who's sexually attracted to other men is liable to be murdered, unless he's willing to submit to a sex change, in which case he's allowed to live.
We don't have that kind of situation.
I'm glad to say we don't have the kind of situation with -- a surgeon I talked to a few years ago who had brought over a set of conjoined twins in order to separate them, partly to make a name for himself.
But when I was on the phone with him, asking why he'll do this surgery -- this was a very high-risk surgery -- his answer was that, in this other nation, these children were going to be treated very badly, and so he had to do this.
My response to him was, "Well, have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery?"
So I think we have to be in the lead.
Well, just to close, I want to suggest to you that I've been talking a lot about the Fathers.
And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers.
For years, because I've been interested in intersex, I've also been interested in sex-difference research.
And one of the things that I've been interested in is looking at the differences between males and females in terms of the way they think and operate in the world.
And what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females, on average -- not everyone, but on average -- are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are, basically, vulnerable within the group.
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my graduate advisors who knew I was interested in feminism -- I considered myself a feminist, as I still do, asked a really strange question.
He said, "Tell me what's feminine about feminism."
Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, so there's nothing feminine about feminism."
But the more I thought about his question, the more I thought there might be something feminine about feminism.
That is to say, there might be something, on average, different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships, and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable.
So whereas the Fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, it's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, what we would have is more of a concept of not just how to protect, but how to care for each other.
And maybe that's where we need to go in the future, when we take democracy beyond anatomy, is to think less about the individual body in terms of the identity, and think more about those relationships.
So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, we're thinking about what we do for each other.
Thank you.
(Applause)
He had just signed the contract to sell his New York apartment at a six-figure profit, and he'd only owned it for five years.
And yet, despite everything going really well for John, he was struggling, fighting addiction and a gripping depression.
On the night of June 11th, 2003, he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below.
Remarkably -- no, miraculously -- he lived.
The fall shattered his right arm, broke every rib that he had, punctured his lung, and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and out into the pathway of the Staten Island Ferry, where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain, contacted the boat's captain who contacted the Coast Guard who fished him out of the East River and took him to Bellevue Hospital.
And that's actually where our story begins.
Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail.
But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time.
And what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life, because of our taboos around suicide, we're not sure what to say, and so quite often we say nothing.
And that furthers the isolation that people like John found themselves in.
I know John's story very well because I'm John.
And this is, today, the first time in any sort of public setting I've ever acknowledged the journey that I have been on.
But after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide, and sitting last year at TEDActive, I knew that I needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading -- and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help.
As the Trevor Project says, it gets better.
It gets way better.
And I'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you, to urge you, that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide, or you know somebody who has, talk about it; get help.
It's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading.
Thank you.
(Applause)
A couple of years ago, when I was attending the TED conference in Long Beach, I met Harriet.
We'd actually met online before -- not the way you're thinking.
We were introduced because we both knew Linda Avey, one of the founders of the first online personal genomic companies.
And because we shared our genetic information with Linda, she could see that Harriet and I shared a very rare type of mitochondrial DNA, haplotype K1a1b1a, which meant we were distantly related.
We actually share the same genealogy with Ötzi the Iceman.
And being the current day, of course, we started our own Facebook group.
When I met Harriet in person the next year at the TED conference, she'd gone online and ordered our own happy haplotype T-shirts.
(Laughter) Why am I telling you this story?
What does it have to do with the future of health?
Well, the way I met Harriet is an example of how leveraging cross-disciplinary, exponentially growing technologies is affecting our future of health and wellness -- from low-cost gene analysis to the ability to do powerful bioinformatics to the connection of the Internet and social networking.
What I'd like to talk about today is understanding these exponential technologies.
We often think linearly.
If we start to think exponentially, we can see how this is starting to affect all the technologies around us.
Many of these technologies, speaking as a physician and innovator, we can start to leverage, to impact the future of our own health and of health care, and to address many of the major challenges in health care today, ranging from the exponential costs to the aging population, the way we really don't use information very well today, the fragmentation of care and the often very difficult course of adoption of innovation.
And one of the major things we can do is move the curve to the left.
We spend most of our money on the last 20 percent of life.
What if we could incentivize physicians in the health care system and our own selves to move the curve to the left and improve our health, leveraging technology as well?
I mean, this is the iPhone 4.
Imagine what the iPhone 8 will be able to do.
We bring together each summer about 100 very talented students from around the world.
And we look at these exponential technologies from medicine, biotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, space, and address how we can cross-train and leverage these to impact major unmet goals.
We also have seven-day executive programs.
And coming up next month is FutureMed, a program to help cross-train and leverage technologies into medicine.
Now, I mentioned the phone.
These mobile phones have over 20,000 different mobile apps available.
There's one out of the UK where you can pee on a little chip, connect it to your iPhone, and check for an STD.
I don't know if I'd try that, but it's available.
There are other sorts of applications.
Merging your phone and diagnostics, for example, measuring your blood glucose on your iPhone and sending that to your physician, so they can better understand and you can better understand your blood sugars as a diabetic.
So let's see how exponential technologies are taking health care.
It's no secret that computers, through Moore's law, are speeding up faster and faster.
They're really approaching -- in many cases, surpassing -- the ability of the human mind.
But where I think computational speed is most applicable is in imaging.
The ability now to look inside the body in real time with very high resolution is really becoming incredible.
And we're layering multiple technologies -- PET scans, CT scans and molecular diagnostics -- to find and seek things at different levels.
Here you're going to see the very highest resolution MRI scan done today, of Marc Hodosh, the curator of TEDMED.
And now we can see inside of the brain at a resolution and ability never before available, and essentially learn how to reconstruct and maybe even reengineer or backwards engineer the brain, so we can better understand pathology, disease and therapy.
We can look inside with real-time fMRI in the brain at real time.
And by understanding these sorts of processes and these connections, we're going to understand the effects of medication or meditation and better personalize and make effective, for example, psychoactive drugs.
The scanners for these are getting smaller, less expensive and more portable.
And this sort of data explosion available from these is really almost becoming a challenge.
The scan of today takes up about 800 books, or 20 gigabytes.
The scan in a couple of years will be one terabyte, or 800,000 books.
I won't ask who here's had a colonoscopy, but if you're over age 50, it's time for your screening colonoscopy.
Now there's essentially virtual colonoscopy.
Compare those two pictures.
As a radiologist, you can basically fly through your patient's colon, and augmenting that with artificial intelligence, potentially identify a lesion that we might have missed, but using AI on top of radiology, we can find lesions that were missed before.
Maybe this will encourage people to get colonoscopies that wouldn't have otherwise.
This is an example of this paradigm shift.
We're moving to this integration of biomedicine, information technology, wireless and, I would say, mobile now -- this era of digital medicine.
Even my stethoscope is now digital, and of course, there's an app for that.
We're moving, obviously, to the era of the tricorder.
So the handheld ultrasound is basically surpassing and supplanting the stethoscope.
For about 5,000 dollars, I can have the power of a very powerful diagnostic device in my hand.
Now that we're switching to merging medical data, making it available electronically, we can crowd-source the information, and as a physician, I can access my patients' data from wherever I am, just through my mobile device.
And now, of course, we're in the era of the iPad, even the iPad 2.
Just last month, the first FDA-approved application was approved to allow radiologists to do actual reading on these sorts of devices.
So certainly, the physicians of today, including myself, are completely reliable on these devices.
And as you saw just about a month ago, Watson from IBM beat the two champions in "Jeopardy."
So I want you to imagine when, in a couple of years, we've started to apply this cloud-based information, when we really have the AI physician and leverage our brains to connectivity to make decisions and diagnostics at a level never done.
Only in about 20 percent of visits do you need to lay hands on the patient.
We're now in the era of virtual visits.
And these are being augmented even by our devices, again, today.
My friend Jessica sent me a picture of her head laceration, so I can save her a trip to the emergency room, and do diagnostics that way.
Or maybe we can leverage today's gaming technology, like the Microsoft Kinect, hack that to enable diagnostics, for example, in diagnosing stroke, using simple motion detection, using $100 devices.
This is the RP7; if I'm a hematologist, I can visit another clinic or hospital.
You step on the scale, tweet your weight to your friends, they can keep you in line.
We have wireless blood pressure cuffs.
This was developed at Stanford.
Consumers now can basically buy $100 devices, like this little Fitbit.
There's watches that measure your heart rate, Zeo sleep monitors, a suite of tools that enable you to leverage and have insight into your own health.
There's even mirrors that can pick up your pulse rate.
And I would argue, in the future, we'll have wearable devices in our clothes, monitoring us 24/7.
And just like the OnStar system in cars, your red light might go on.
Now, we've heard a lot today about technology and connection.
And I think some of these technologies will enable us to be more connected with our patients, to take more time and do the important human-touch elements of medicine, as augmented by these technologies.
And now this is being augmented with further layers of technology, like augmented reality.
So the surgeon can see inside the patient, through their lens, where the tumor is, where the blood vessels are.
This can be integrated with decision support.
A surgeon in New York can help a surgeon in Amsterdam, for example.
And we're entering an era of truly scarless surgery called NOTES, where the robotic endoscope can come out the stomach and pull out that gallbladder, all in a scarless way and robotically.
This is called NOTES, and it's coming -- basically scarless surgery, as mediated by robotic surgery.
Now, how about controlling other elements?
For those who have disabilities -- the paraplegic, there's the brain-computer interface, or BCI, where chips have been put on the motor cortex of completely quadriplegic patients, and they can control a cursor or a wheelchair or, potentially, a robotic arm.
These devices are getting smaller and going into more and more of these patients.
Still in clinical trials, but imagine when we can connect these, for example, to the amazing bionic limb, such as the DEKA Arm, built by Dean Kamen and colleagues, which has 17 degrees of motion and freedom, and can allow the person who's lost a limb to have much higher dexterity or control than they've had in the past.
So we're really entering the era of wearable robotics, actually.
If you haven't lost a limb but had a stroke, you can wear these augmented limbs.
I took this video last week.
Here's a paraplegic patient, walking by strapping on these exoskeletons.
This is the early era of wearable robotics.
This is Aimee Mullins, who lost her lower limbs as a young child, and Hugh Herr, who's a professor at MIT, who lost his limbs in a climbing accident.
And now both of them can climb better, move faster, swim differently with their prosthetics than us normal-abled persons.
How about other exponentials?
Clearly the obesity trend is exponentially going in the wrong direction, including with huge costs.
You can swallow this completely integrated device.
On the cardiac side, pacemakers are getting smaller and much easier to place, so no need to train an interventional cardiologist to place them.
Artificial retinas, the ability to put arrays on the back of the eyeball and allow the blind to see -- also in early trials, but moving into the future.
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi available -- beams back images to your eye.
(Laughter) Now, if you have trouble maintaining your diet, it might help to have some extra imagery to remind you how many calories are going to be coming at you.
How about enabling the pathologist to use their cell phone to see at a microscopic level and to lumber that data back to the cloud and make better diagnostics?
In fact, the whole era of laboratory medicine is completely changing.
We can now leverage microfluidics, like this chip made by Steve Quake at Stanford.
Microfluidics can replace an entire lab of technicians; put it on a chip, enable thousands of tests at the point of care, anywhere in the world.
This will really leverage technology to the rural and the underserved and enable what used to be thousand-dollar tests to be done for pennies, and at the point of care.
If we go down the small pathway a little bit further, we're entering the era of nanomedicine, the ability to make devices super-small, to the point where we can design red blood cells or microrobots that monitor our blood system or immune system, or even those that might clear out the clots from our arteries.
Now how about exponentially cheaper?
Not something we usually think about in the era of medicine, but hard disks used to be 3,400 dollars for 10 megabytes -- exponentially cheaper.
And in two years, a $100 genome.
Soon we'll have millions of these tests available.
Then it gets interesting, when we start to crowd-source that information, and enter the era of true personalized medicine: the right drug for the right person at the right time, instead of what we're doing now, which is the same drug for everybody, blockbuster drug medications, which don't work for the individual.
Many different companies are working on leveraging these approaches.
My data indicates I've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration, a kind of blindness.
But if I take that same data, upload it to deCODEme, I can look at my risk for type 2 diabetes; I'm at almost twice the risk.
It might change my behavior.
So again, it's not just genes, it's multiple details -- our habits, our environmental exposures.
When was the last time your doctor asked where you've lived?
Geomedicine: where you live, what you've been exposed to, can dramatically affect your health.
We can capture that information.
Genomics, proteomics, the environment -- all this data streaming at us individually and as physicians: How do we manage it?
We're now entering the era of systems medicine, systems biology, where we can start to integrate all this information.
And by looking at the patterns, for example, in our blood, of 10,000 biomarkers in a single test, we can look at patterns and detect disease at a much earlier stage.
This is called by Lee Hood, the father of the field, P4 Medicine.
More importantly, it'll be increasingly participatory.
Through websites like PatientsLikeMe or managing your data on Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health, leveraging this together in participatory ways will be increasingly important.
What if we take a new device, knock out the nerve vessels that help mediate blood pressure, and in a single therapy, basically cure hypertension?
This is a new device doing essentially that.
It should be on the market in a year or two.
How about more targeted therapies for cancer?
We learned at Stanford and other places that we can discover cancer stem cells, the ones that seem to be really responsible for disease relapse.
The cancer stem cells remain, and the tumor can return months or years later.
We're now learning to identify the cancer stem cells and identify those as targets and go for the long-term cure.
We're entering the era of personalized oncology, the ability to leverage all of this data together, analyze the tumor and come up with a real, specific cocktail for the individual patient.
I've studied a lot about stem cells.
We have adult stem cells throughout our body; we use those in bone marrow transplantation.
We've been using adult stem cells in clinical trials for about 15 years to approach a whole range of topics, particularly cardiovascular disease.
If we take our own bone marrow cells and treat a patient with a heart attack, we can see much improved heart function and better survival using our own bone marrow derived cells after a heart attack.
I invented a device called the MarrowMiner, a much less invasive way for harvesting bone marrow.
It's now been FDA approved; hopefully on the market in the next year.
Where is stem-cell therapy going?
If you think about it, every cell in your body has the same DNA you had when you were an embryo.
I think there'll be a new era of your own stem cell banking to have in the freezer your own cardiac cells, myocytes and neural cells to use them in the future, should you need them.
We're integrating this now with a whole era of cellular engineering, and integrating exponential technologies for essentially 3D organ printing, replacing the ink with cells, and essentially building and reconstructing a 3D organ.
That's where things are heading.
Still very early days, but I think, as integration of exponential technologies, this is the example.
So in closing, as you think about technology trends and how to impact health and medicine, we're entering an era of miniaturization, decentralization and personalization.
Because I know as a doctor, if someone comes to me with stage I disease, I'm thrilled; we can often cure them.
But often it's too late, and it's stage III or IV cancer, for example.
So by leveraging these technologies together, I think we'll enter a new era that I like to call stage 0 medicine.
Thanks very much.
(Applause) Take a bow, take a bow.
Tom Zimmerman: We'd like to take you on a fantastic journey to visit the creatures we call the Elders.
We call them the Elders because a half a billion years ago they tripled the amount of oxygen in the air, which led to an explosion of life, which led to all of us.
We call them the Elders, but you probably know them as plankton.
(Laughter) Now, Simone is a physicist, and I'm an inventor.
A couple of years ago, I was giving a talk about an invention I made -- it was a 3D microscope.
And Simone was in the audience.
He realized that my microscope could solve a big problem he was having.
(Laughter) It was like peanut butter meets chocolate.
(Laughter) So we started working together, studying these amazing creatures.
And that's why we're here today.
And I just want to do something with you.
Now, please, just hold your breath for a second.
Yes, literally hold your breath.
This is the world without plankton.
You see, plankton generate two-thirds of our oxygen using the sun.
OK, now you can breathe, because they're still here.
Simone Bianco: As many of you know, since 1950, the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by one degree Centigrade due to all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air.
Now, while this temperature increase may not seem like a big deal to us, it is to plankton.
Indirect measurements have shown that the global phytoplankton population may have decreased by as much as 40 percent between 1950 and 2010 because of climate change.
And about a billion people around the world depend on fish as their primary source of protein from animals.
So you see, this isn't just about breathing.
No plankton means no fish.
And that is a lot of food we will need to replace.
The bodies of plankton's ancestors actually make up a for lot of the carbon we burn today.
Which is kind of ironic, if you ask me.
Because the plankton that are here today clean that carbon out of the air.
But you see, they don't really hold a grudge.
(Laughter) The problem is they cannot keep up with the tremendous amount of carbon we are dumping into the air.
Well, it means that our big carbon footprint is crushing the very creatures that sustain us.
And yes, like Tom said, killing almost half of the creatures that allow us to breathe is a really big deal.
So you're probably asking yourself: Why aren't we doing something about it?
Our theory is that plankton are tiny, and it's really, really hard to care about something you cannot see.
You see, there's a quote I really like in "The Little Prince" that goes, "What is essential is invisible to the eye."
We really believe that if more people could come face to ... cilia with plankton, there is a greater chance we could all rally together and save these creatures that are so important to life on our planet.
TZ: Exactly, Simone.
So to do this, we're going to bring you scuba diving with plankton.
But I just need to shrink you by a factor of 1000, to a scale where the diameter of a human hair is as big as my hand.
And I happen to have invented a machine to do just that.
SB: Anyone here remember "Fantastic Voyage" or "Innerspace?"
Yeah, yeah.
Martin Short is one of my all-time favorite actors.
And now this -- this is just like that.
When I was a boy, I saw "Fantastic Voyage," and I really loved how I could travel through the bloodstream and see biology work on a cellular level.
I've always been inspired by science fiction.
As an inventor, I try and turn fantasy into reality.
And I once invented this glove which let me travel and help people like you explore the virtual world.
It's not virtual, it's real.
Just really, really tiny.
It's based on the microscope that got Simone's attention.
So, here's how it works.
I have an image sensor like the kind in your cell phone, behind the lens.
(Laughter) Because I love plankton.
(Laughter) And underneath I have a light, an LED, which is going to cast shadows of the plankton on the image sensor.
And now this silver thing is an XY plotter, so I can move the image sensor to follow the plankton as they swim.
Now comes the fantasy part.
(Laughter) I put a tilt sensor on this helmet so I can control the microscope with my head.
And now let's look at the video from this image sensor.
These are all plankton.
This is in that little tray, and with my head, I can move the microscope.
So now we're ready to go scuba diving with plankton.
SB: Yes.
(Laughter) So welcome all to the wonderful world of life in a drop of water.
Alright, let's find something.
They are the garbage collectors of our waters.
They break down organic matter and allow it to be reclaimed by the environment.
Now, you know, nature is an amazing recycler.
Structures are continuously built, they are decomposed and recycled, and all of that is powered by solar energy.
Think about what will happen if, you know, our garbage collectors didn't come anymore, if they disappeared.
Oh, look at that.
You know, they are big, but they are a single cell.
You remember the rotifer we just met?
That's about half a millimeter, it's about 1,000 cells -- it's typically 15 for the brain, 15 for the stomach and you know, about the same for reproduction, which is kind of the right mix, if you ask me.
(Laughter) But ... right?
SB: But a Stentor is only a single cell.
And it's able to sense and react to its environment.
With our friends in the Center for Cellular Construction and the help of the National Science Foundation, we are using Stentor to sense the presence of contamination in food and water, which I think is really cool.
So the dots that you see there that are, let's say, behind everything, they're algae.
They are the creatures that provide the majority of oxygen in the air.
They convert solar light and carbon dioxide into the oxygen that is filling your lungs right now.
So you see, we all got algae breath.
TZ: (Exhales) SB: Yay! (Laughter) You know, there's something interesting.
About a billion years ago, ancient plants got their photosynthesis capability by incorporating tiny, tiny plankton into their cells.
That's exactly like us putting solar panels on top of our roofs.
TZ: Oh, indeed.
So now you've seen how vital plankton are to our lives and how much we need them.
Oh, yes, I know it's sad, yes.
(Laughter) In the game of plankton, you win or you die.
(Laughter) Now, what amazes me is, we have known about global warming for over a century.
Ever since the Swedish scientist, Arrhenius, calculated the effect of burning fossil fuel on the earth's temperature.
We've known about this for a long time, but it's not too late if we act now.
Yes, yes, I know, I know, our world is based on fossil fuels, but we can adjust our society to run on renewable energy from the Sun to create a more sustainable and secure future.
That's good for the little creatures here, the plankton, and that good for us -- here's why.
The three greatest concerns of people all around the globe typically are jobs, violence and health.
Look at these creatures, they're swimming around, they're looking for a place to eat and reproduce.
If a single cell is programmed to do that, it's no surprise that 30 trillion cells have the same agenda.
Violence.
Dependence on fossil fuels makes a country vulnerable.
Solar energy, on the other hand, is distributed around the whole globe, and no one can blockade the sun.
(Laughter) And then, finally, health.
Fossil fuels are like a global cigarette.
And in my opinion, coal is like an unfiltered type.
Now, just like smoking, the best time to quit is when?
Now I know if you look around, some people may abandon facts and reason.
Only until suffering -- (Laughter) Yes, they will abandon facts and reason.
But suffering will eventually and inevitably force change.
But let's instead use our neocortex, our new brain, to save the Elders, some of the oldest creatures on the earth.
And let's apply science to harness the energy that has fueled the Elders for millions of years -- the sun.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My mother was a philanthropist.
And now I know you're asking -- let me give you the answer: yes, a little bit like Melinda Gates -- (Laughter) but with a lot less money.
She supported the education of scores of children and invited many to live with us in our home in order to access schools.
She mobilized resources for building the local health clinic and the maternity wing is named in memory of her.
But most important, she was endeared by the community for her organizing skills, because she organized the community, and specifically women, to find solutions to anything that was needed.
She did all of this through isirika.
Now it's your turn. Say it with me.
Musimbi Kanyoro: Thank you.
That word is in my language, Maragoli, spoken in western Kenya, and now you speak my language.
The essence of isirika is to make it clear to everybody that you're your sister's keeper -- and yes, you're your brother's keeper.
Mutual responsibility for caring for one another.
A literal, simple English translation would be equal generosity, but the deep philosophical meaning is caring, together, for one another.
I grew up in a farming community in western Kenya.
I remember vividly the many times that neighbors would go to a neighbor's home -- a sick neighbor's home -- and harvest their crop for them.
I tagged alongside with my mother to community events and to women's events, and had the conversation about vaccinations in school, building the health center and really big things -- renewing seeds for the next planting season.
And often, the community would come together to contribute money to send a neighbor's child to school -- not only in the country but to universities abroad as well.
And so we have a surgeon.
The first surgeon in my country came from that rural village.
(Applause) So ...
And then I grew up, went to universities back at home and abroad, obtained a few degrees here and there, became organized and took up international jobs, working in development, humanitarian work and philanthropy.
In each place, I gained a new vocabulary.
The vocabulary of donors and recipients.
projects and programs.
Communities such as my childhood community became referred to as "poor, vulnerable populations."
Those are the communities of which literature speaks about as living on less than a dollar a day, and they become the targets for poverty eradication programs.
And by the way, they are the targets of our first United Nations' sustainable development goal.
I however think that we could do a better job, and we could do a better job by embracing isirika.
You don't see a refugee first and you don't see a woman first and you don't see a person with disability first.
That is the essence of seeing a person first.
And when you do that, you value their ideas, you value their contribution -- small or big.
And you value what they bring to the table.
What could we achieve for each other?
What could we achieve for humanity?
What could we achieve for peace issues?
First, you have to have faith that we are one humanity, we have one planet and we don't have two choices about that.
So give up the walls.
Give them up.
(Applause) And we don't have a planet B to go to.
(Applause) And this is the time for women to give more for women.
It is the time to give more for women.
Our parents, when they brought in other children to live with us, they didn't ask our permission.
And they made it clear that we should understand that their prosperity was not our entitlement, and I think that's good wisdom from isirika.
We could use that wisdom today, I think, in every culture, in every place, passing to the next generation what we could do together.
In the work that I do, we trust women leaders and their ideas.
And we support them with funding so that they can expand, they can grow and they can thrive within their own communities.
A woman in 1990 came to the Global Fund with a big idea -- a woman from Mexico by the name of Lucero González.
And she received a grant of 7,500 US dollars.
Today, 25 years later, Semillas, the name of the fund, has raised and spent, within the community, 17.8 million dollars.
(Applause) They have impacted over two million people, and they work with a group of 600,000 women in Mexico.
And I tell you, long after the lights have gone off Mexico, Semillas will be there with the communities, with the women, for a very long time.
And that's what I'm talking about: when we are able to support the ideas of communities that are rooted within their own setting.
Thirty years ago, there was very little funding that went directly to women's hands in their communities.
Today we celebrate 168 women's funds all over the world, 100 of which are in this country.
And they support -- (Applause) they support grassroots women's organizations -- community organizations under the leadership of girls and women, and together we have been able, collectively, to give a billion dollars to women and girls-led organizations.
(Applause) But the challenge begins today.
And what it really ingrains in people is that ability to trust and to move the agenda ahead.
So, three things that I have learned that I want to share with you through my work.
One: if you want to solve the world's biggest problems, invest in women and girls.
(Applause) Not only do they expand the investment, but they care for everyone in the community.
Not only their needs but the needs of their children, the needs of the rest of the community, the needs of the elderly, and most important, they protect themselves -- which is really important -- and they protect their communities.
And the second reason that I'm asking you to invest in women and girls is because this is the smartest thing you could ever do at this particular time.
And if we are going to have over 350 trillion dollars by 2030, those dollars need to be in the hands of women.
She was not a project or a program.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.
And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because I grew up around quirky, colorful characters who were great at making with their hands.
For instance, me and my sister, when we were little, we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains.
And my dad is the most voracious reader I know.
He can read a novel or two a day.
But when I was little, I remember, he would kill flies in our house with my BB gun.
And he could shoot it from two rooms away and not damage what it was on because he knew how to pump it just enough to kill the fly and not damage what it landed on.
So I should talk about art.
(Laughter) Or we'll be here all day with my childhood stories.
I love contemporary art, but I'm often really frustrated with the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene.
A few years ago, I spent months in Europe to see the major international art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world.
So amongst all the criteria I have, there's two main things.
One of them, I call my Mimaw's Test.
And what that is is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been refined enough yet.
And then my other second set of rules -- I hate to say "rules" because it's art -- my criteria would be the three H's, which is head, heart and hands.
And great art would have "head": it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts.
It would have "heart" in that it would have passion and heart and soul.
And then I realized one day, there's an easier solution to this.
(Laughter) And so this is what I did.
I'm going to do an international biennial; I need artists from all around the world.
So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world.
I figured out their bios, their passions in life and their art styles, and I started making their work.
(Laughter) (Applause) I felt, oh this is the kind of project that I could spend my whole life doing.
So I should start to talk about these guys.
So for example, in realist paintings, it ranges from this, which is kind of old masters style, to really realistic still-life, to this type of painting where I'm painting with a single hair.
And then at the other end, there's performance and short films and indoor installations like this indoor installation and this one, and outdoor installations like this one and this one.
This isn't Photoshopped.
I'm under the river with those fish.
So now let me introduce some of my fictional artists to you.
Nell is interested in agricultural processes, and her work is based in these practices.
And by taking giant mirrors -- (Applause) and here she's taking giant mirrors and pulling them into the dirt.
And this is 22 feet long.
And probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground's dark, but there's still the light above, bright above.
And so you're standing there and everything else is dark, but there's this portal that you want to jump in.
This piece was great. This is in my parents' backyard in Arkansas.
And I love to dig a hole.
So this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt.
The next artist is Kay Overstry, and she's interested in ephemerality and transience.
And in her most recent project, it's called "Weather I Made."
(Applause) And so this is five-foot, five-inches of frost that she left behind.
The sun rises, and it melts away.
And that was played by my mom.
So the next artist, this is a group of Japanese artists, a collective of Japanese artists -- (Laughter) in Tokyo.
And they were interested in developing a new, alternative art space, and they needed funding for it, so they decided to come up with some interesting fundraising projects.
One of these is scratch-off masterpieces.
(Laughter) And so what they're doing -- each of these artists on a nine-by-seven-inch card, which they sell for 10 bucks, they drew original works of art.
And all these works, in some way, talk about luck or fate or chance.
Those first two are portraits of mega-jackpot winners years before and after their win.
And in this one it's called "Drawing the Short Stick."
He draws sticks real good."
(Laughter) Which is one of the best compliments ever.
This artist is Gus Weinmueller, and he's doing a project, a large project, called "Art for the Peoples."
And within this project, he's doing a smaller project called "Artists in Residence."
And what he does is -- (Laughter) he spends a week at a time with a family.
And he shows up on their porch, their doorstep, with a toothbrush and pajamas, and he's ready to spend the week with them.
And he spends that week talking to the family about what do they think great art is.
He has all these discussions with their family, and he digs through everything they have, and he finds materials to make work.
For this family, he made this still-life painting.
This next project, this is by Jaochim Parisvega, and he's interested in -- he believes art is everywhere waiting -- that it just needs a little bit of a push to happen.
This project is called "Love Nests."
So he put the material in places where the birds were going to collect them, and they crafted his nests for him.
And this one's called "Lovelock's Nest."
This one's called "Mixtape Love Song's Nest."
(Laughter) And this one's called "Lovemaking Nest."
(Laughted) Next is Sylvia Slater.
She's a very serious Swiss artist.
So this life price is for an irrigation non-profit director.
And she makes them so they could either be broken up into payments, or they could be like these, which are leaves that can be payments.
And so they're valuable. This is precious metals and gemstones.
And this one had to get broken up.
This is by a duo, Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland.
So what they do is they move into an area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area.
So this is in Eastern Tennessee, and what they decided was that we need a positive tradition that goes with death.
(Laughter) And we got a lot of attention when we did it.
I talked my family into doing this, and they didn't know what I was doing.
And I was like, "Get dressed for a funeral. We're going to go do some work."
So what happens is you dance on the grave, and after you've done your dance, everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are.
That's my mom and dad.
This is by Jason Birdsong.
He is interested in how we see as an animal, how we are interested in mimicry and camouflage.
You know, we look down a dark alley or a jungle path, trying to make out a face or a creature.
And he plays with this idea.
And this piece: those aren't actually leaves.
Those are actually all real butterfly specimens.
And he pairs these up with paintings.
So you open the box and you think, "Whoa, there's a snake in there."
But it's actually a painting.
So he makes these interesting conversations about realism and mimicry and our drive to be fooled by great camouflage.
(Laughter) The next artist is Hazel Clausen.
Hazel Clausen is an anthropologist who took a sabbatical and decided, "You know, I would learn a lot about culture if I created a culture that doesn't exist from scratch."
So that's what she did.
And also they reference how the uvula -- everything they say is fallen because of the forbidden fruit.
And that's the symbol of their culture.
And this is from a documentary called "Sexual Practices and Populations Control Among the Uvulites."
This is a typical angora embroidery for them.
This is one of their founders, Gert Schaeffer.
(Laughter) And actually this is my Aunt Irene.
It was so funny having a fake person who was making fake things.
The next is a collective of artists called the Silver Dobermans, and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time.
And what they've done is they put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence.
(Laughter) (Applause) And this is called "Horse Sense Fence."
The next artist is K. M. Yoon, a really interesting South Korean artist.
Next is Maynard Sipes.
And I love Maynard Sipes, but he's off in his own world, and, bless his heart, he's so paranoid.
Next is Roy Penig, a really interesting Kentucky artist, and he's the nicest guy.
Next is an Australian artist, Janeen Jackson, and this is from a project of hers called "What an Artwork Does When We're Not Watching."
(Laughter) Next is by a Lithuanian fortune teller, Jurgi Petrauskas.
Next is Ginger Cheshire.
And that's my cousin and my sister's dog, Gabby.
He's an Australian Aboriginal elder, and he's also an artist.
She heals with color.
And she's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists, even though she's going to be 90 next year.
(Laughter) This is by Z. Zhou, and he's interested in stasis.
Next is by Hilda Singh, and she's doing a whole project called "Social Outfits."
Next is by Vera Sokolova.
And I have to say, Vera kind of scares me.
And it's good that she's not real; she'd be mad that I said that.
(Laughter) And she's an optometrist in St. Petersburg, and she plays with optics.
This is from a short film, "Adventures with Skinny."
(Laughter) And this is by Cicily Bennett, and it's from a series of short films.
And after this one, there's 77 other artists.
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thanks.
(Applause)
♫ Like the heather ♫ ♫ on the hillside ♫ ♫ as they drove us ♫ ♫ from the Highlands ♫ ♫ Like the ice flow ♫ ♫ from the Arctic ♫ ♫ where we landed ♫ ♫ in Newfoundland ♫ ♫ There's a color ♫ ♫ to my sorrow ♫ ♫ There's a name for ♫ ♫ all this sadness ♫ ♫ Like the ocean ♫ ♫ in between us ♫ ♫ I am blue ♫ ♫ Blue is a river ♫ ♫ Blue remembered ♫ ♫ Blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ Blue like a planet ♫ ♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ (Fiddle and synthesizer) ♫ So I came here ♫ ♫ to the city ♫ ♫ where the dream burns ♫ ♫ like a furnace ♫ ♫ And I dazzled ♫ ♫ in these dark streets ♫ ♫ like a diamond ♫ ♫ in a coalface ♫ ♫ Then the cold wind ♫ ♫ from the islands ♫ ♫ blew a storm cloud ♫ ♫ across the new moon ♫ ♫ Like the gun smoke ♫ ♫ above the houses ♫ ♫ in my home ♫ ♫ Blue is a river ♫ ♫ Blue remembered ♫ ♫ Blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ Blue like a planet ♫ ♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ (Fiddle and synthesizer) (Applause)
I'm here today to start a revolution.
Now before you get up in arms, or you break into song, or you pick a favorite color, I want to define what I mean by revolution.
By revolution, I mean a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave -- the way we think and the way we behave.
Now why, Steve, why do we need a revolution?
We need a revolution because things aren't working; they're just not working.
You know, I'm sick and tired of us not living up to our potential.
I'm sick and tired of us being last.
We're last place in Europe in innovation.
There we are right at the end, right at the bottom, last place as a culture that doesn't value innovation.
We're last place in health care, and that's important for a sense of well-being.
We're the saddest place on Earth, relative to GDP per capita -- the saddest place on Earth.
That's social. Let's look at education.
Where do we rank three weeks ago in another report by the OECD?
that entrepreneurs provide benefits to society.
Why as a result, what happens?
The lowest percentage of entrepreneurs starting businesses.
And this is despite the fact that everybody knows that small business is the engine of economies.
We hire the most people; we create the most taxes.
So it's no surprise, guys, that 62 percent of Bulgarians are not optimistic about the future.
And these are facts, guys.
It's not.
It's not a conspiracy I have got against Bulgaria. These are facts.
So I think it should be really, really clear that our system is broken.
The way we think, the way we behave, our operating system of behaving is broken.
We need a drastic change in the way we think and behave to transform Bulgaria for the better, for ourselves, for our friends, for our family and for our future.
How did this happen?
We're holding ourselves back because we don't value play.
I said "play," all right.
In case some of you forgot what play is, this is what play looks like.
Babies play, kids play, adults play.
And we devalue it in three areas.
Let's go back to the same three areas.
Of communism -- of valuing the society and the state over the individual and squashing, inadvertently, creativity, individual self-expression and innovation.
And instead, what do we value?
Because it's shown the way we apply, generate and use knowledge is affected by our social and institutional context, which told us what in communism?
I can't tell you how many times I've been scolded in the park for letting my kids play on the ground.
Heaven forbid they play in the dirt, the kal, or even worse, lokvi, water -- that will kill them.
I have been told by babas and dyados that we shouldn't let our kids play so much because life is serious and we need to train them for the seriousness of life.
It's a social gene running through us.
It's a serious gene.
(Laughter) (Applause) And here's how it works.
Step one: woman says, "I want to have a baby. Iskam baby."
But then what happens in step three?
I'm going to give bebko to baba.
So what happens?
She passes that virus on to baby, and it takes a really, really, really long time -- as the redwood trees -- for that serious meme to get out of our operating system.
What happens then?
It goes into education where we have an antiquated education system that has little changed for 100 years, that values rote learning, memorization and standardization, and devalues self-expression, self-exploration, questioning, creativity and play.
True story: I went looking for a school for my kid.
(Laughter) And we said, "He's five."
What a crime. What a crime.
And it's a crime that our education system is so serious because education is serious that we're creating mindless, robotic workers to put bolts in pre-drilled holes.
But I'm sorry, the problems of today are not the problems of the Industrial Revolution.
We need adaptability, the ability to learn how to be creative and innovative.
What are qualities of a Bulgarian work?
I'm the boss and I know better than you.
Untrusting -- you're obviously a criminal, so I'm going to install cameras.
(Laughter) Controlling -- you're obviously an idiot, so I'm going to make a zillion little processes for you to follow so you don't step out of the box.
That's somehow unprofessional and bad.
And you can say, "That's ridiculous, Steve. What a dumb idea.
It can't be because of play.
Just play, that's a stupid thing."
Well I'm going to say no.
Play: our brains are hardwired for play.
Evolution has selected, over millions and billions of years, for play in animals and in humans.
Evolution does a really, really good job of deselecting traits that aren't advantageous to us and selecting traits for competitive advantage.
Throughout the animal kingdom, for example: ants. Ants play.
Maybe you didn't know that.
But when they're playing, they're learning the social order and dynamics of things.
Rats play, but what you might not have known is that rats that play more have bigger brains and they learn tasks better, skills.
Kittens play. We all know kittens play.
But what you may not know is that kittens deprived of play are unable to interact socially.
They can still hunt, but they can't be social.
Bears play.
But what you may not know is that bears that play more survive longer.
It's not the bears that learn how to fish better.
And a final really interesting study -- it's been shown, a correlation between play and brain size.
The more you play, the bigger the brains there are.
Dolphins, pretty big brains, play a lot.
But who do you think with the biggest brains are the biggest players?
Kids play, we play -- of every nationality, of every race, of every color, of every religion.
It's a universal thing -- we play.
And it's not just kids, it's adults too.
Really cool term: neoteny -- the retention of play and juvenile traits in adults.
And who are the biggest neotenists?
Humans. We play sports.
We do it for fun, or as Olympians, or as professionals.
We play musical instruments.
We dance, we kiss, we sing, we just goof around.
We're designed by nature to play from birth to old age.
Just like there's benefits to animals, there's benefits to humans.
For example, it's been shown to stimulate neural growth in the amygdala, in the area where it controls emotions.
It's been shown to promote pre-frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening.
We develop more emotional maturity if we play more.
We develop better decision-making ability if we play more.
These guys are facts.
It's not fiction, it's not story tales, it's not make-believe; it's cold, hard science.
These are the benefits to play.
It is a genetic birthright that we have, like walking or speaking or seeing.
Imagine a world without theater, without the arts, without song, without dancing, without soccer, without football, without laughter.
What does this world look like?
Now imagine your workplace.
We have this concept that the opposite of play is work.
"Oh, my colleagues see me laughing. I must not have enough work," or, "Oh, I've got to hide because my boss might see me.
The opposite of play is not work.
The opposite of play is depression. It's depression.
In fact, play improves our work.
Just like there's benefits for humans and animals, there's benefits for play at work.
For example, it stimulates creativity.
It improves our ability to learn.
It provides a sense of purpose and mastery -- two key motivational things that increase productivity, through play.
So before you start thinking of play as just not serious, play doesn't mean frivolous.
A doctor might be serious, but laughter's still a great medicine.
Our thinking is backwards.
We shouldn't be feeling guilty.
We should be celebrating play.
Quick example from the corporate world.
FedEx, easy motto: people, service, profit.
What happens? They give better service -- not worse, but better.
And when customers call for service and they're dealing with happy people that can make decisions and are fulfilled, how do the customers feel? They feel great.
And what do great customers do, great-feeling customers?
They buy more of your service and they tell more of their friends, which leads to more profit.
People, service, profit.
And you're going to say, "Gee, that can work for FedEx out there in the United States, but it can't work in Bulgaria.
It does work in Bulgaria, you guys. Two reasons.
There's nothing weird about Bulgarians that we can't play, besides the serious meme that we have to kick out.
We had marginal profit -- I did.
I don't care when you get in in the morning. I don't care when you leave.
Basically promoting fun.
And you can say, "Well how do you know they're happy?"
Well we did win, every year that we entered, one of the rankings for best employer for small business.
Independent analysis from anonymous employees on their surveys.
There's nothing holding us back, except our own mentality about play.
So some steps that we can take -- to finish up -- how to make this revolution through play.
First of all, you have to believe me.
If you don't believe me, well just go home and think about it some more or something.
Second of all, if you don't have the feeling of play in you, you need to rediscover play.
Whatever it was that as a kid you used to enjoy, that you enjoyed only six months ago, but now that you've got that promotion you can't enjoy, because you feel like you have to be serious, rediscover it.
I don't care if it's mountain biking or reading a book or playing a game.
Rediscover that because you're the leaders, the innovation leaders, the thought leaders.
You're the ones that have to go back to the office or talk to your friends and ignite the fire of change in the play revolution.
You guys have to, and if you're not feeling it, your colleagues, your employees, aren't going to feel it.
You've got to go back and say, "Hey, I'm going to trust you."
Weird concept: I hired you; I should trust you.
I'm going to let you make decisions. I'm going to empower you, and I'm going to delegate to the lowest level, rather than the top.
I'm going to encourage constructive criticism.
Because it's by challenging the way things are always done is that we are able to break out of the rut that we're in and create innovative solutions to problems of today.
We're not always right as leaders.
We're going to eradicate fear.
Fear is the enemy of play.
Let them be on instant messengers.
Let them take long lunches.
Let them do it. Give them some freedom, and in general, let them play. Let them have fun at the workplace.
(Laughter) So in summary, we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave, but we don't need a workers' revolution.
We don't need a workers' revolution.
What we need is a players' uprising.
What we need is a players' uprising.
What we need is a players' uprising.
But what you need to do is fan the flames of the revolution.
You need to go and share your ideas and your success stories of what worked about reinvigorating our lives, our schools, and our work with play; about how play promotes a sense of promise and self-fulfillment; of how play promotes innovation and productivity, and, ultimately, how play creates meaning.
Because we can't do it alone. We have to do it together, and together, if we do this and share these ideas on play, we can transform Bulgaria for the better.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As an artist, connection is very important to me.
Through my work I'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected.
I first went to Antarctica almost 10 years ago, where I saw my first icebergs.
I was in awe.
My heart beat fast, my head was dizzy, trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me.
The icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water, and I could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake, year after year.
Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves.
Each iceberg has its own individual personality.
They have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences.
Some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end, while others can't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion.
It's easy to think, when you look at an iceberg, that they're isolated, that they're separate and alone, much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves.
But the reality is far from it.
As an iceberg melts, I am breathing in its ancient atmosphere.
As the iceberg melts, it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life.
I approach photographing these icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors, knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again.
It is not a death when they melt; it is not an end, but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life.
Some of the ice in the icebergs that I photograph is very young -- a couple thousand years old.
And some of the ice is over 100,000 years old.
The last pictures I'd like to show you are of an iceberg that I photographed in Qeqetarsuaq, Greenland.
It's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling.
So here it is.
You can see on the left side a small boat.
That's about a 15-foot boat.
And I'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline.
This is an average-size Greenlandic iceberg.
It's about 120 feet above the water, or 40 meters.
And this video is real time.
(Music) And just like that, the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality.
Thank you.
(Applause)
BeatJazz is: 1. Live looping, 2. Jazz improvisation And 3. "Gestural" sound design.
Accelerometers on each hand read hand position.
The color of the lights indicates which sound I am playing.
Red = Drums, Blue = Bass, Green = Chords, Orange = Leads, Purple = Pads The mouthpiece consists of ...
a button, two guitar picks and lots of hot glue.
The heads-up display is a smartphone that displays system parameters.
Why?
But mostly ...
to MAKE the future rather than wait for it.
(Applause)
The two places where I feel most free aren't actually places.
The first is inside of dance.
The second place that I feel free is after scoring a goal on the soccer pitch.
My story is this: I'm a curator at a contemporary arts center, but I don't really believe in art that doesn't bleed or sweat or cry.
I imagine that my kids are going to live in a time when the most valuable commodities are fresh water and empathy.
I love pretty dances and majestic sculpture as much as the next guy, but give me something else to go with it.
For instance, I'm a theater maker who loves sports.
In this heightened moment of xenophobia and assault on immigrant identity, I wanted to think through how the game could serve as an affirmational tool for first-generation Americans and immigrant kids, to ask them to consider movement patterns on the field as kin to migratory patterns across social and political borders.
I wanted to help the kids understand that the same muscle that they use to plan the next goal can also be used to navigate the next block.
For me, freedom exists in the body.
We talk about it abstractly and even divisively, like "protect our freedom," "build this wall," "they hate us because of our freedom."
We have all these systems that are beautifully designed to incarcerate us or deport us, but how do we design freedom?
Imagine that you are a 15-year-old kid from Honduras now living in Harlem, or you're a 13-year-old girl born in DC to two Nigerian immigrants.
You love the game.
We spend a week looking at how the midfielder would explain Black Lives Matter, or how the goalkeeper would explain gun control, or how a defender's style is the perfect metaphor for the limits of American exceptionalism.
As we study positions on the field, we also name and imagine our own freedoms.
You know? It's like the official sport of this spinning ball.
Among these kids, I want to connect their families' histories to the bliss of a goal-scorer's run, family like that feeling after the ball beats the goalie, the closest thing going to freedom.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
Imagining a solo cello concert, one would most likely think of Johann Sebastian Bach unaccompanied cello suites.
As a child studying these eternal masterpieces, Bach's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up.
Late at night, after hours of practicing, I would listen to Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents' stereo.
It all became music to me.
I still start every day practicing playing Bach.
His music never ceases to sound fresh and surprising to me.
But as I was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression, I realized that with today's technological resources, there's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument.
The power and coherency that comes from one person hearing, perceiving and playing all the voices makes a very different experience.
The excitement of a great orchestra performance comes from the attempt to have a collective of musicians producing one unified whole concept.
My cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas.
When composers write music for me, I ask them to forget what they know about the cello.
I hope to arrive at new territories to discover sounds I have never heard before.
I want to create endless possibilities with this cello.
I become the medium through which the music is being channeled, and in the process, when all is right, the music is transformed and so am I.
(Music) (Applause)
By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life, and for the past 30 years, I've worked at Ford Motor Company.
And for most of those years, I worried about, how am I going to sell more cars and trucks?
My life is guided by two great passions, and the first is automobiles.
I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company.
I thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln and leave it in the driveway.
And I decided about that time, about age 10, that it would be really cool if I was a test driver.
So my parents would go to dinner.
And that went on for about two years, until -- I think I was about 12 -- my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III.
And it was snowing that day.
So he and mom went to dinner, and I snuck out and thought it'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow.
My dad finished dinner early that evening.
And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang.
And even though the color was pretty hideous, I did love the car, and it really cemented my love affair with cars that's continued on to this day.
But cars are really more than a passion of mine; they're quite literally in my blood.
My great grandfather was Henry Ford, and on my mother's side, my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone.
So when I was born, I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me.
But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them.
Because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress.
And that's a belief that I share.
My other great passion is the environment.
And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about.
And so even at a young age, that really resonated with me, and the whole notion of environmental preservation, at a very basic level, sunk in with me.
As a high-schooler, I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world.
And that was true until I got to college.
They thought that we were more interested, as an industry, in profits, rather than progress, and that we filled the skies with smog -- and frankly, we were the enemy.
I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do.
But I decided that I wanted to go and see if I could affect change there.
And as I look back over 30 years ago, it was a little naive to think at that age that I could. But I wanted to.
And I really discovered that my professors weren't completely wrong.
In fact, when I got back to Detroit, my environmental leanings weren't exactly embraced by those in my own company, and certainly by those in the industry.
I had some very interesting conversations, as you can imagine.
There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with "environmental wackos."
And I'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists.
And in time, my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today.
I mean, I think most people in the industry understand that we've got to get on with it.
And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues, of cars and the environment -- not only at Ford, but really as an industry.
We're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights.
And with new technology, we're reducing -- and I believe, someday we'll eliminate -- CO2 emissions.
We're starting to sell electric cars, which is great.
We're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word -- economically, socially and environmentally.
And actually, although we've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do, I can see the day where my two great passions -- cars and the environment -- actually come into harmony.
But unfortunately, as we're on our way to solving one monstrous problem -- and as I said, we're not there yet; we've got a lot of work to do, but I can see where we will -- but even as we're in the process of doing that, another huge problem is looming, and people aren't noticing.
And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened, just as the environment is.
The problem, put in its simplest terms, is one of mathematics.
Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world, and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow to about nine billion.
And at that population level, our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth.
And with that growth comes some severe practical problems, one of which is our transportation system simply won't be able to deal with it.
When we look at the population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer.
Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide.
Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams, and that's a huge waste of time and resources.
But that's nothing compared to what's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest.
Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute.
And last summer -- many of you probably saw this -- there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China.
In the decades to come, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more.
So you can see the size of the issue that we're facing.
When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow.
Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam.
So, if we make no changes today, what does tomorrow look like?
Well I think you probably already have the picture.
Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge, and they're really very, very inconvenient, but that's all they are.
And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised.
My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T, "If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses.'" So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads.
And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build more two-lane highways, we built the interstate highway system.
Today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future.
We are going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transportation systems and more.
We need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers.
And frankly, that's the kind of system that's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable.
Now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world.
And up above, you've got a series of pedestrian walkways.
On New York City's 34th Street, gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors.
Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created, and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes.
Now if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called Octopus there.
It's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system.
So parking garages, buses, trains, they all operate within the same system.
Now shared car services are also springing up around the world, and these efforts, I think, are great.
They're relieving congestion, and they're frankly starting to save some fuel.
But what really inspires me is what's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other.
Very soon, the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network.
Every morning I drive about 30 miles from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan.
And every night I go home, my commute is a total crapshoot.
But very soon we're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other.
So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic, it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way.
And these systems are being tested right now, and frankly they're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon.
But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless.
So just imagine: one day very soon, you're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system.
So you get in your car, and as you get in your car, your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive -- no more driving around looking for one, which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today's cars in urban areas -- is looking for parking spots.
Or think about being in New York City and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you don't have to wait in the cold to hail one.
This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system.
But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues, and also fossil fuels, there is no one silver bullet.
The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads or a new rail system; it can only be found, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions.
Now I know we can develop the technology that's going to make this work, but we've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions -- whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we haven't even thought of yet; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options.
Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity, as well as an enormous social problem.
And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge -- and it's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power, how much money and how much serious thought has, really over the last three years, just poured into the green energy field.
I mean, frankly, I need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue.
And we need people from all walks of life; not just inventors, we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they're going to respond to this challenge.
It's going to really require a national energy policy, frankly for each country, because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels, traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are.
And we must have an infrastructure that's designed to support this flexible future.
You know, we've come a long way.
And since then, the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live, where we work, where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around.
We don't want to regress and lose that freedom.
Because in doing so, we're going to preserve what we've really come to take for granted, which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world.
So let's get started now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant.
And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language.
I can see it in their eyes.
They want to ask me something.
I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots -- a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work.
I want to talk to you briefly about perception.
When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him -- little details that other people seem to miss.
Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer.
In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding.
Here are three questions drawn from my work.
I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge.
Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.
I'm an extreme example of this.
My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality.
One is a flash of white light.
Six is a tiny and very sad black hole.
Three is green.
Four is blue.
Five is yellow.
It's a multiplication of two prime numbers.
What about bigger numbers?
It's an infinite number -- literally goes on forever.
In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.
But it's not only numbers that I see in colors.
Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures.
And this is an opening phrase from the novel "Lolita."
And Nabokov was himself synesthetic.
And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out.
Another example: a little bit more mathematical.
64 multiplied by 75.
If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares.
What about 75?
Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this.
64 becomes 6,400.
And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything.
Four across, four up and down -- it's 16.
Easy when you know how.
(Laughter) The second question was an Icelandic word.
I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic.
So let me narrow the choices down to two.
What do you say?
Most people, a majority of people, say sad.
And it actually means sad.
(Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases?
In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with, the subjective, with the personal, intuitive experience of the listener.
Let's have a look at the third question.
It's a line from a poem by John Keats.
Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world.
It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships.
And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings.
In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English.
It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head.
They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion.
So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension.
So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities.
The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be.
I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You know, what I do is write for children, and I'm probably America's most widely read children's author, in fact.
And I always tell people that I don't want to show up looking like a scientist.
I'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies.
You've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany.
That's a painting of a circle.
A friend of mine did that -- Richard Bollingbroke.
It's the kind of complicated circle that I'm going to tell you about.
My circle began back in the '60s in high school in Stow, Ohio where I was the class queer.
She did it in secret.
She did it for three years.
I had a thumb, I had 85 dollars, and I ended up in San Francisco, California -- met a lover -- and back in the '80s, found it necessary to begin work on AIDS organizations.
Could you please come to Ohio, and please bring that man that I know you have found by now.
And I should mention that I have pancreatic cancer, and I'd like you to please be quick about this."
Well, the next day we were in Cleveland.
We took a look at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice.
We found her one, we got her there, and we took care of her and watched over her family, because it was necessary.
It's something we knew how to do.
And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands.
And what had happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle -- and that epiphany I talked about presented itself.
The epiphany is that death is a part of life.
She saved my life; I and my partner saved hers.
It needs truth and beauty, and I'm so happy it's been mentioned so much here today.
It also needs -- it needs dignity, love and pleasure, and it's our job to hand those things out.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.
And indeed, most people associate space with silence.
How many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star?
(Static) (Crackling) (Static) (Crackling) This is the planet Jupiter.
(Soft crackling) And this is the space probe Cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of Saturn.
(Crackling) This is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter, spinning in the distant universe.
(Tapping) So my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe.
And you may wonder, how do we know what these sounds are?
How can we tell the difference between the sound of the Sun and the sound of a pulsar?
Well the answer is the science of radio astronomy.
Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers, which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky.
And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth, we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques.
And therefore, it's through listening that we've come to uncover some of the universe's most important secrets -- its scale, what it's made of and even how old it is.
So today, I'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening.
Now this story doesn't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft, but a rather more humble technology -- and in fact, the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we're all part of today: the telephone.
It's 1876, it's in Boston, and this is Alexander Graham Bell who was working with Thomas Watson on the invention of the telephone.
A key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire, which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in Boston.
The line carried the telephone signals that would later make Bell a household name.
But like any long length of charged wire, it also inadvertently became an antenna.
Thomas Watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected.
Now you have to remember, this is 10 years before Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves -- 15 years before Nikola Tesla's four-tuned circuit -- nearly 20 years before Marconi's first broadcast.
So Thomas Watson wasn't listening to us.
So what were these strange noises?
Watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature.
Some of the crackles and pops were lightning, but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin.
Using the very first telephone, Watson was in fact dialed into the heavens.
As he correctly guessed, some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the Sun.
It was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to -- a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora.
So whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution, Watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves.
Fast-forward 50 years, and Bell and Watson's technology has completely transformed global communications.
And so before long, Bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution.
Radio could carry sound without wires.
But the medium is lossy -- it's subject to a lot of noise and interference.
So Bell employed an engineer to study those noises, to try and find out where they came from, with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec, which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony.
Most of the noises that the engineer, Karl Jansky, investigated were fairly prosaic in origin.
They turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power.
But there was one persistent noise that Jansky couldn't identify, and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day.
Now any astronomer will tell you, this is the telltale sign of something that doesn't originate from Earth.
Jansky had made a historic discovery, that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves.
Fifty years on from Watson's accidental encounter with the Sun, Jansky's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration: the radio astronomy age.
Over the next few years, astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky, about Jupiter and the Sun, by listening.
And once again, two scientists have got a problem with noise.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using the horn antenna at Bell's Holmdel laboratory to study the Milky Way with extraordinary precision.
A mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research.
It was in the microwave range, and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously.
Now this didn't make any sense, and like any reasonable engineer or scientist, they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself, it must be the dish.
But the noise didn't disappear.
It was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe.
This was the first experimental evidence that the Big Bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago.
So our story ends at the beginning -- the beginning of all things, the Big Bang.
This is the noise that Penzias and Wilson heard -- the oldest sound that you're ever going to hear, the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
(Fuzz) Thanks.
(Applause)
My name is Joshua Walters.
I'm a performer.
(Beatboxing) (Laughter) (Applause) But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar.
I reframe that as a positive because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become.
When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ.
(Laughter) I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show.
One day they'll get here.
At least that's what it says on my pen."
(Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see.
I can feel your noise.
When I got out I had a choice.
(Bugle sound) There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive -- at least the hypomanic edge part of it.
Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks.
You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible.
And there's a book -- John Gartner.
John Gartner wrote this book called "The Hypomanic Edge" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete.
Some of them committed suicide.
And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough."
So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy.
But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel.
Maybe no one's really crazy.
How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum.
How much depends on how lucky you are.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We spoke to you last several years ago.
And before I get started today, since many of you are wondering, I just wanted to get it out of the way.
The answer is boxers.
Now I hope all of you feel better.
Audience: Yes.
SB: What is it?
Audience: It's people logging on to Google around the world.
SB: Wow, OK. I didn't really realize what it was when I first saw it.
But this is what helped me see it.
This is what we run at the office, that actually runs real time.
But here you can see around the world how people are using Google.
And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20, 30 searches, or something like that.
And they're labeled by color right now, by language.
We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese.
There's a lot of activity in China.
There's a lot of activity in India.
Now you can also see, if I turn this around here -- hopefully I won't shake the world too much.
But you can also see, there are places where there's not so much.
And this is something that we should really work on, which is Africa, which is just a few trickles, basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities.
But basically, what we've noticed is these queries, which come in at thousands per second, are available everywhere there is power.
And pretty much everywhere there is power, there is the Internet.
And even in Antarctica -- well, at least this time of year -- we from time to time will see a query rising up.
But you can see also, once again -- so some places are much more wired than others, and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S., going up over to Asia, Europe in the other direction, and so forth.
Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like.
And if we can switch to slides -- all right, here we go.
And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing, is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load.
Now, each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own.
I mean, it could be somebody's health, it could be somebody's career, something important to them.
And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce, or in this case, ketchup.
In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time.
as it did in Spain.
And then from Spain, it went to Italy, and then Germany got excited, and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it.
And so I guess the U.S. finally, finally started to like it, too.
And I just wanted to play it for you.
Anyway, you can all enjoy it for yourselves -- hopefully that search will work.
As a part of -- you know, part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches.
And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated.
But partly, we want to make the world a better place, and so one thing that we're embarking upon is the Google Foundation, and we're in the process of setting that up.
We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world, and these are some of the charities that are on there.
And it's something I'm very excited to be a part of.
In fact, many of the organizations that are here -- the Acumen Fund, I think ApproTEC we have running, I'm not sure if that one's up yet -- and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants.
They run Google ads, and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know.
One of the earlier results that we got -- we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education, and that was one of the earliest results. And as I said, now there have been many, many stories that have come in, because we do have hundreds of charities in there, and the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor.
Now does anybody know who this is?
Audience: Orkut.
SB: Yes! Somebody got it.
Okay, not very many people know about it.
I'll explain it in a second.
This is one of our engineers.
Orkut had a vision to create a social network.
But it was a dream of his, and we, basically, when people really want to do something, well, we generally let them.
We just released it in a test phase last month, and it's been taking off.
This is our VP of Engineering.
You can see the red hair, and I don't know if you can see the nose ring there.
And these are all of his friends.
And now we've grown to over 100,000 members.
And they spread, actually, very quickly, even outside the U.S.
You can see, even though the U.S. is still the majority here -- though, by the way, search-wise, it's only about 30 percent of our traffic -- but it's already going to Japan, and the U.K., and Europe, and all the rest of the countries.
So it's a fun little project.
But it's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes.
Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey.
So one of the things -- both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school, and I think, for some reason, this has been incorporated in Google.
And Sergey mentioned Orkut, which is something that, you know, Orkut wanted to do in his time, and we call this -- at Google, we've embodied this as "the 20 percent time," and the idea is, for 20 percent of your time, if you're working at Google, you can do what you think is the best thing to do.
And many, many things at Google have come out of that, such as Orkut and also Google News.
Mendel, who was supposed to be teaching high-school students, actually, you know, discovered the laws of genetics -- as a hobby, basically.
So many, many useful things come out of this.
And News, which I just mentioned, was started by a researcher.
And he just -- he -- after 9/11, he got really interested in the news.
And so he started clustering it by category, and then he started using it, and then his friends started using it.
And in News' case, you know, they had a couple of people working on it for a while, and then more and more people started using it, and then we put it out on the Internet, and more and more people started using it.
And now it's a real, full-blown project with more people on it.
I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects.
And we had this problem, too, for a while, and we said, "Oh, we really need a new concept."
But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects.
And I don't know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once.
For example, the "Buy Iceland" was from a media article.
We would never do such a crazy thing, but -- in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be.
And so that's basically what we've done since we instituted that a few years ago, and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized.
The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important, and so naturally, people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities.
I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new, or you might not know about.
And the top thing, actually, is the Deskbar.
So this is a new -- how many of you use the Google Toolbar?
Raise your hands.
How many of you use the Deskbar?
But if you go to our site and search for "Deskbar," you'll get this.
And it's sort of like a better version of the toolbar.
This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about, and they just, they got going, and it's really, really a great product, and really taking off.
Froogle lets you search shopping information, and Blogger lets you publish things.
We also like to innovate in our physical space, and we noticed in meetings, you know, you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off, and they're noisy, so people shut them off.
And as a result, we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting, so when you walk into a meeting room now, it lists all the meetings that are happening, you can very easily take notes, and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting.
And things like that. And simple things like this can really make a big difference.
We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don't always do their laundry as much as they should.
we also allow dogs and things like that, and we've had, I think, a really fun culture at our company, which helps people work and enjoy what they're doing.
This is actually our "cult picture."
I just wanted to show quickly.
But anyway, every year we've taken the whole company on a ski trip.
A lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other, and informally.
And I think we've done a good job encouraging that.
In the early days, we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand, you know, because, you know, you'd never want to change your logo.
Why don't we try changing it every day?"
One of the things that really excites me about what we're doing now is we have this thing called AdSense, and this is a little bit foreshadowing -- this is from before Dean dropped out.
And these ads are generated automatically -- like in this case, on the Washington Post -- from the content on the site.
And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements, so we pick the one that's most relevant to what you're actually looking at, much as we do on search.
And the nice thing about this, we have a self-serve program, and many thousands of websites have signed up, and this let's them really make money. And I -- you know, there's a number of people I met -- I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party, and he said, "You know, I wasn't making any money.
I just put this thing on my site and I'm making 10,000 dollars a month.
And, you know, thank you.
And I think this is really important for us, because it makes the Internet work better.
It makes content get better, it makes searching work better, when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content.
So this session is supposed to be about the future, so I'd thought I'd talk at least briefly about it.
Because you can type, you know, any kind of thing into Google, and you expect an answer back, right?
But finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence.
It would be artificial intelligence.
And so that's something we work on, and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now, and that's really their goal.
This is a blog from Iraq, and it's not really what I'm going to talk about, but I just wanted to show you an example.
So, "related searches," right there. You can't see it that well, but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads, called "related searches."
He was just kind of writing about his life.
And he read this, and he thought a person had decided that he was boring, and it was very unfortunate, and he said, "You know, what are these, you know, bastards at Google doing?
Why don't they like my blog?"
And then, you know, he got even more mad, and he wrote -- like, started swearing and so on.
And so basically, he thought he was dealing with something smart, and of course, you know, we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out, and it didn't quite work, and we don't have this feature anymore.
So we don't have to worry about our products being sold, for example, for less money in places that are poor, and then they get re-imported into the U.S. -- for example, with the drug industry.
And I think we're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that's a tremendous, tremendous benefit.
The other thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information, and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine -- that we should provide very objective information.
We accept payment for advertising, and we mark it as such.
And I think decisions we're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world, and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google.
So thank you.
I'd like to begin with a thought experiment.
Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist -- no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter.
All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost.
Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities.
Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future?
This is no hypothetical question.
In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago.
The Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations.
It occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran.
Given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings.
They've found small objects such as these.
Here's an example of one of these objects.
Well obviously this is a replica.
But who is this person?
A king? A god?
A priest?
Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter.
In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say, and that's because the Indus script is undeciphered.
We don't know what any of these symbols mean.
The symbols are most commonly found on seals.
It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it.
So how big do you think that is?
Perhaps that big?
Or maybe that big?
Well let me show you.
It's only about one inch by one inch in size -- pretty tiny.
So what were these used for?
We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other.
You might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text.
Perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other -- we don't know.
We need to decipher the script to answer that question.
Deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia.
In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people.
First, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all.
These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields.
There's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language.
If you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family.
So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit.
There's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today.
These people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today.
And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian.
Which of these hypotheses can be true?
But deciphering the script is a very challenging task.
First, there's no Rosetta Stone.
I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text.
And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short.
So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny.
And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script.
In the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script.
I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook.
Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world.
But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script.
That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script.
And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity.
Are you ready?
Here are two texts that contain some symbols on them.
Can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right?
Oh, it's almost 50/50. Okay.
One of the signs is also below the text on the top.
This suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left, and so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts.
And the Indus script now has this particular property.
What other properties of language does the script show?
Languages contain patterns.
If I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be?
Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be?
The Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns.
There's a lot of text that start with this diamond-shaped symbol.
And this is very similar to a Q and U example.
The idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts.
And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other.
Given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it.
So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols.
Here are some examples.
You may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune.
What we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol.
In the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer.
There's also practical use for this particular procedure.
Here's an example of one such text.
And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction.
And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze.
Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model.
So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard.
Such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy.
This is a physics and information theory term.
How many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard?
You might have encountered the stuck-key problem -- so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again.
This kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all.
Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random.
What about the Indus script?
At the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters -- and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music.
And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them in the very high range.
At the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules.
Now what about the Indus script?
When this result was first published, it was highly controversial.
Who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession?
What does this result really show?
It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language.
So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands.
What other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language?
Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages.
So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet.
If you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns.
The same thing happens in the case of the Indus script.
The computer found several texts -- two of them are shown here -- that have very unusual patterns.
So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign.
This sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair.
We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley.
They were found in present day Iraq and Iran.
And why were they found there?
What I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising.
They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived, and so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq.
And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language.
And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley.
This suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages.
The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language.
If it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols?
That's our next big challenge.
So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds.
Most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words.
Here's my solution.
There could be other solutions.
So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles because the stakes are so high if you solve it.
My colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola, have been making some headway on this particular problem.
Here's a really short text.
It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign.
And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants.
And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth.
And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it.
So that was pretty exciting.
But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations?
Well not yet.
So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track.
Today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century.
The Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent.
The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us.
These are our ancestors -- yours and mine.
They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history.
If we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again.
I can't wait to find out.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to define what the terms of my success are."
I'm going to be sharing with you how, four years ago, I almost died -- found out I was, in fact, already almost dead -- and what I then found out about what's called the e-Patient movement.
I'll explain what that term means.
I had been blogging under the name "Patient Dave," and when I discovered this, I just renamed myself e-Patient Dave.
Regarding the word "patient": When I first started a few years ago getting involved in health care and attending meetings as just a casual observer, I noticed that people would talk about patients as if it was somebody who's not in the room here -- somebody out there.
Some of our talks today, we still act like that.
But I'm here to tell you: "patient" is not a third-person word.
You yourself will find yourself in a hospital bed -- or your mother, your child -- there are heads nodding, people who say, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean."
So when you hear what I'm going to talk about here today, first of all, I want to say that I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met.
One of the senior doctors at my hospital, Charlie Safran, and his colleague, Warner Slack, have been saying for decades that the most underutilized resource in all of health care is the patient.
They have been saying that since the 1970s.
This is from July, 1969.
I was a freshman in college, and this was when we first landed on the Moon.
And it was the first time we had ever seen from another surface -- that's the place where you and I are right now, where we live.
The world was changing.
It was about to change in ways that nobody could foresee.
A few weeks later, Woodstock happened.
Three days of fun and music.
Here, just for historical authenticity, is a picture of me in that year.
(Laughter) Yeah, the wavy hair, the blue eyes -- it was really something.
That fall of 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog came out.
We think of hippies of being just hedonists, but there's a very strong component -- I was in that movement -- a very strong component of being responsible for yourself.
This book's title's subtitle is "Access to Tools."
In the 1980s, this young doctor, Tom Ferguson, was the medical editor of the Whole Earth Catalog.
He saw that the great majority of what we do in medicine and health care is taking care of ourselves.
In fact, he said it was 70 to 80 percent of how we actually take care of our bodies.
Well, he also saw that when health care turns to medical care because of a more serious disease, the key thing that holds us back is access to information.
And when the Web came along, that changed everything, because not only could we find information, we could find other people like ourselves who could gather, who could bring us information.
And he coined this term "e-Patients" -- equipped, engaged, empowered, enabled.
Obviously, at this stage of life he was in a somewhat more dignified form than he was back then.
In 2006, I went to my doctor for a regular physical, and I had said, "I have a sore shoulder."
Well, I got an X-ray, and the next morning -- you may have noticed, those of you who have been through a medical crisis will understand this.
This morning, some of the speakers named the date when they found out about their condition.
For me, it was 9am on January 3, 2007.
I was at the office; my desk was clean.
I had the blue partition carpet on the walls.
The phone rang and it was my doctor.
He said, "Dave, I pulled up the X-ray image on the screen on the computer at home."
He said, "Your shoulder is going to be fine, but Dave, there's something in your lung."
And if you look in that red oval, that shadow was not supposed to be there.
He said, "Yeah, we're going to need to do a CT scan of your chest."
In parting, I said, "Is there anything I should do?"
He said -- think about this one, this is the advice your doctor gives you: "Just go home and have a glass of wine with your wife."
It turns out there were five of these things in both my lungs.
So at that point we knew that it was cancer.
We knew it wasn't lung cancer.
So I went in for an ultrasound.
My wife came with me.
She's a veterinarian, so she's seen lots of ultrasounds.
I mean, she knows I'm not a dog.
(Laughter) This is an MRI image.
There were actually two of these: one was growing out the front and had already erupted and latched onto the bowel.
(Laughter) I went home.
My point is, I went to a respected medical website, WebMD, because I know how to filter out junk.
I also found my wife online.
Before I met her, I went through some suboptimal search results.
(Laughter) So I looked for quality information.
A cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue.
How does that happen?
Well, so what I read on WebMD: "The prognosis is poor for progressing renal cell cancer.
Almost all patients are incurable."
"Prognosis is grim."
And I'm thinking, "What the heck?"
I didn't feel sick at all.
I mean, I'd been getting tired in the evening, but I was 56 years old, you know?
It was really something.
And this is the diagram of stage 4 kidney cancer from the drug I eventually got.
I fainted and landed on it, and it broke.
There's one in the skull, and then for good measure, I had these other tumors, including, by the time my treatment started, one was growing out of my tongue.
I had kidney cancer growing out of my tongue.
And what I read was that my median survival was 24 weeks.
I thought, "What's my mother's face going to look like on the day of my funeral?"
I had to sit down with my daughter and say, "Here's the situation."
I said, "I don't want you guys to get married prematurely, just so you can do it while Dad's still alive."
It's really serious.
If you wonder why patients are motivated and want to help, think about this.
Well, my doctor prescribed a patient community, ACOR.org, a network of cancer patients, of all amazing things.
Very quickly they told me, "Kidney cancer is an uncommon disease.
There is no cure, but there's something that sometimes works -- it usually doesn't -- called high-dosage interleukin.
Most hospitals don't offer it, so they won't even tell you it exists.
Don't let them give you anything else first.
And by the way, here are four doctors in your part of the United States who offer it, and their phone numbers."
(Applause) Here's the thing: Here we are, four years later -- you can't find a website that gives patients that information.
Government-approved, American Cancer Society, but patients know what patients want to know.
It's the power of patient networks.
My oncologist and I talk a lot these days because I try to keep my talks technically accurate.
And he said, "You know, the immune system is good at detecting invaders, bacteria coming from outside, but when it's your own tissue that you've grown, it's a whole different thing."
The story of how all that happened is in the book.
Anyway, this is the way the numbers unfolded.
Me being me, I put the numbers from my hospital's website, for my tumor sizes, into a spreadsheet.
You see, that's the immune system.
Amazing thing, those two yellow lines are where I got the two doses of interleukin two months apart.
And look at how the tumor sizes plummeted in between.
The punch line is that a year and a half later, I was there when this magnificent young woman, my daughter, got married.
And when she came down those steps, and it was just her and me for that moment, I was so glad that she didn't have to say to her mother, "I wish Dad could have been here."
Now, I want to talk briefly about a couple of other patients who are doing everything in their power to improve health care.
This is Regina Holliday, a painter in Washington DC, whose husband died of kidney cancer a year after my disease.
She's painting, here, a mural of his horrible final weeks in the hospital.
One of the things that she discovered was that her husband's medical record in this paper folder was just disorganized.
So she painted this medical facts mural with a nutrition label, something like that, in a diagram of him.
She came to realize there were a lot of people who'd written patient-advocate books that you just don't hear about at medical conferences.
Patients are such an underutilized resource.
Well, as it said in my introduction, I've gotten somewhat known for saying that patients should have access to their data.
I actually said at one conference a couple of years ago, "Give me my damn data, because you people can't be trusted to keep it clean."
And here, she has our "damned" data -- it's a pun -- which is starting to break out, starting to break through -- the water symbolizes our data.
And in fact, I want to do a little something improvisational for you.
There's a guy on Twitter that I know, a health IT guy outside Boston, and he wrote the e-Patient rap.
(Laughter) (Beatboxing) (Rapping) Gimme my damn data I wanna be an e-Patient just like Dave Gimme my damn data, 'cause it's my life to save (Normal voice) Now, I'm not going to go any further -- (Applause) (Cheering) Well, thank you. That shot the timing.
(Laughter) Think about the possibility.
Why is it that iPhones and iPads advance far faster than the health tools that are available to you to help take care of your family?
Here's a website, VisibleBody.com, that I stumbled across.
And then I realized it reminded me of Google Earth, where you can fly to any address.
And I thought, "Why not take this and connect it to my digital scan data and have Google Earth for my body?"
What did Google come out with this year?
Now there's Google Body browser.
It's not my data.
But if we can get that data out from behind the dam so software innovators can pounce on it the way software innovators like to do, who knows what we'll be able to come up with.
This is Kelly Young, a rheumatoid arthritis patient from Florida.
This is a live story, unfolding just in the last few weeks.
And that makes it really hard to tell how the disease is going, and some doctors think, "Yeah right, you're really in pain."
Well, she found, through her online research, a nuclear bone scan that's usually used for cancer, but it can also reveal inflammation.
So she took it.
And the radiologist's report said, "No cancer found."
Well, that's not what he was supposed to do with it.
She pulled up the CD.
He said, "If you don't want to follow my instructions, go away."
And she's now actively engaged on her blog in looking for assistance in getting better care.
See, that is an empowered patient -- no medical training.
We are, you are, the most underused resource in health care.
What she was able to do was because she had access to the raw data.
How big a deal was this?
Well at TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee himself, inventor of the Web, gave a talk where he said the next big thing is not to have your browser find other people's articles about the data, but the raw data.
And he got them chanting by the end of the talk, "Raw data now! Raw data now!"
Let patients help!
Let patients help!
Let patients help!
Thank you.
(Applause) For all the patients around the world watching this on the Webcast, God bless you, everyone. Let patients help.
The Highline is an old, elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through Manhattan.
And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave.
And it became known as "Death Avenue" because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front, and he became known as the "West Side Cowboy."
So they elevated it.
They built it 30 ft. in the air, right through the middle of the city.
But with the rise of interstate trucking, it was used less and less.
And by 1980, the last train rode.
It was a train loaded with frozen turkeys -- they say, at Thanksgiving -- from the meatpacking district.
And then it was abandoned.
And I live in the neighborhood, and I first read about it in the New York Times, in an article that said it was going to be demolished.
And I assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and I could volunteer, but I realized no one was doing anything.
I went to my first community board meeting -- which I'd never been to one before -- and sat next to another guy named Joshua David, who's a travel writer.
And at the end of the meeting, we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project; most people wanted to tear it down.
So we exchanged business cards, and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization, Friends of the High Line.
And what first attracted me, or interested me, was this view from the street -- which is this steel structure, sort of rusty, this industrial relic.
But when I went up on top, it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River.
And that's really where we started, the idea coalesced around, let's make this a park, and let's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape.
At the time, there was a lot of opposition.
Mayor Bloomberg came in office, he was very supportive, but we still had to make the economic case.
This was after 9/11; the city was in tough times.
So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case.
And it turns out, we got those numbers wrong.
We thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build.
So far it's cost about 150 million.
And the main case was, this is going to make good economic sense for the city.
So we said over a 20-year time period, the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million.
It turns out we were wrong on that.
We did a design competition, selected a design team.
We worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape.
There's three sections.
This is one of my favorite features in section one.
It's this amphitheater right over 10th Ave.
And the first section ends at 20th St. right now.
There's a point, you can stand here and see buildings by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Neil Denari.
And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line.
And this has been designed by Renzo Piano.
And we've already started construction on section two.
This is one of my favorite features, this flyover where you're eight feet off the surface of the High Line, running through a canopy of trees.
The High Line used to be covered in billboards, and so we've taken a playful take where, instead of framing advertisements, it's going to frame people in views of the city.
This was just installed last month.
And the city has planned -- for better or for worse -- 12 million square-feet of development that the High Line is going to ring around.
But what really, I think, makes the High Line special is the people.
But what I found is it's in the people and how they use it that, to me, makes it so special.
Just one quick example is I realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the High Line.
And I realized New Yorkers don't hold hands; we just don't do that outside.
But you see that happening on the High Line, and I think that's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other.
(Applause)
A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days.
The idea is actually pretty simple.
Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days.
It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from your life.
There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges.
The first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable.
And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day.
I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew.
I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work.
For fun!
(Laughter) Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.
I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges.
I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days.
Have you ever wanted to write a novel?
Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days.
It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month.
So I did.
Now is my book the next great American novel?
No. I wrote it in a month.
(Laughter) But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to say, "I'm a computer scientist."
No, no, if I want to, I can say, "I'm a novelist."
I learned that when I made small, sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick.
But they're less likely to stick.
When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this.
(Laughter) So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for?
I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot!
For the next 30 days.
(Applause)
I taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this.
I went to chef school in France.
And there is a way the world both envisions food, the way the world writes about food and learns about food.
And it's largely what you would find in these books.
In the last 20 years, people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food.
In fact, understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking -- some of the chemistry, some of the physics and so forth.
There's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed, some about new aesthetics, new approaches to food.
There's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria.
He's developed a very avant-garde cuisine.
A guy in England called Heston Blumenthal, he's developed his avant-garde cuisine.
None of them are taught in cooking schools.
In order to learn them, you have to go work in those restaurants.
Is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before?
This is a picture called a cutaway.
This is actually the first picture I took in the book.
The idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli.
Then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact.
But the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical, maybe a little bit more scientific, maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have.
Because with that beautiful photo, maybe I can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time.
Steaming ought to be faster.
It turns out it isn't because of something called film condensation, and this explains that.
This shaped wok doesn't work very well; this caught fire three times.
In this case, boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic.
You don't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can't grow in the acid.
One of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish.
The New York Times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called "The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger Just Got Longer."
Because our hamburger recipe, our ultimate hamburger recipe, if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff, it does take about 30 hours.
Buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference.
So it's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste.
Most people assume we use Photoshop.
And the answer is: no, not really; we use a machine shop.
And it turns out, the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half.
So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world.
(Laughter) We cut a $5,000 restaurant oven in half.
Now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots.
The great thing is, when you cut something in half, you have another half.
So you photograph that in exactly the same position, and then you can substitute in -- and that part does use Photoshop -- just the edges.
So it's very much like in a Hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air, supported by wires, and then they take the wires away digitally so you're flying through the air.
In most cases, though, there was no glass.
And so those coals that kept falling off the edge, we kept having to put them back up.
The wok shot caught fire three times.
What happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh!
One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way.
This is Fourier's law of heat conduction.
It's a partial differential equation.
We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it.
But you probably don't know that much about James Watt.
It's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt, and where he got his inspiration.
It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey.
We also did a lot of calculation.
I personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook.
Here's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue, or other radiant heat source, goes as you move away from it.
So that's the place where you really want to cook.
And it's got this funny horn-shaped thing, which as far as I know, again, the first cookbook to ever do this.
You know, there's two ways you can make a product.
You can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want, or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it.
And it's really simple, as you can see here.
As it comes out of the grinder, you just have a little tray, and you just take it off in little passes, build it up, slice it vertically.
Here's the final hamburger.
This is the 30-hour hamburger.
We make every aspect of this burger.
The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it.
Now watch closely. This is popcorn. I'll explain it here.
The popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics.
We have a very high-speed camera, which we had lots of fun with on the book.
The key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600.
That's what's happening to the water inside that popcorn.
Now I'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual.
We have a chapter on gels.
And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI, I thought, well, let's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin.
(Gasps) Now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot -- that's why you shouldn't get shot.
The other amazing thing is, when this ballistics gelatin comes down, it falls back down as a nice block.
Anyway, here's the book.
Here it is.
2,438 pages.
And they're nice big pages too.
(Applause) A friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen, so there's a sixth volume that has washable, waterproof paper.
(Applause)
Do you know how many species of flowering plants there are?
They're really difficult for plants to produce.
They take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources.
And the answer of course, like so many things in the world, is sex.
I know what's on your mind when you're looking at these pictures.
And the reason that sexual reproduction is so important -- there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce.
You can take cuttings; they can sort of have sex with themselves; they can pollinate themselves.
But they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches.
Evolution works that way.
Now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen.
Some of you may have seen some of these pictures before.
As I say, every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these.
And there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants.
And that's actually rather useful for forensics and so on.
Most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen, and that's a very inefficient process, which is why it gets up our noses so much.
So all the grasses, which means all of the cereal crops, and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen.
But most species actually use insects to do their bidding, and that's more intelligent in a way, because the pollen, they don't need so much of it.
The insects and other species can take the pollen, transfer it directly to where it's required.
So we're aware, obviously, of the relationship between insects and plants.
There's a symbiotic relationship there, whether it's flies or birds or bees, they're getting something in return, and that something in return is generally nectar.
Sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations -- the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation.
The plant gets something, and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else.
Plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way.
There are markings on many plants that look like other insects.
These are the anthers of a lily, cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it, the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with.
And there's an orchid that might look to you as if it's got jaws, and in a way, it has; it forces the insect to crawl out, getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else.
Orchids: there are 20,000, at least, species of orchids -- amazingly, amazingly diverse.
And they get up to all sorts of tricks.
They have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding.
This orchid, known as Darwin's orchid, because it's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it -- you can see that there's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid.
And sure enough, there's the insect.
Now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators, then, just as in human sex, people might start to deceive.
Now this is a plant.
This is a plant here that insects in South Africa just love, and they've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom.
And this is the mimic.
So this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant.
(Laughter) Now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom.
This flower with its black dots: they might look like black dots to us, but if I tell you, to a male insect of the right species, that looks like two females who are really, really hot to trot.
(Laughter) And when the insect gets there and lands on it, dousing itself in pollen, of course, that it's going to take to another plant, if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture, you can see that there are actually some patterning there, which is three-dimensional.
And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles.
Sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect, even to us.
I mean, I think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast.
It's a wonderful, amazing thing.
To the right species of bee, this looks like another very aggressive bee, and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away, and, of course, covers itself with pollen.
The other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects.
(Laughter) Here we see ylang ylang, the component of many perfumes.
And the flowers don't really have to be that gaudy.
This is a flower that really, really smells pretty nasty and is designed, again, evolved, to look like carrion.
So flies love this.
They fly in and they pollinate.
I don't know what a dead horse actually smells like, but this one probably smells pretty much like it.
I photographed this thing last week in Dorset.
They drink this fabulous nectar and then they're all a bit sticky.
For anyone here from Brazil, you'll know about this plant.
This is the most amazing thing.
And it does something that no other plant that I know of does, and that is that when it flowers -- that's the spadix in the middle there -- for a period of about two days, it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals.
And that's twice the energy output, weight for weight, than a hummingbird -- absolutely astonishing.
Not only will it raise itself to 115 Fahrenheit, 43 or 44 degrees Centigrade, for two days, but it keeps constant temperature.
And what a wonderful thing it is.
Now most pollinators that we think about are insects, but actually in the tropics, many birds and butterflies pollinate.
And many of the tropical flowers are red, and that's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us, we think, and can see the color red very well.
But if you look at the spectrum, birds and us, we see red, green and blue and see that spectrum.
Insects see green, blue and ultraviolet, and they see various shades of ultraviolet.
"And wouldn't it be great if we could somehow see what that is," I hear you ask.
So what is an insect seeing?
Last week I took these pictures of rock rose, helianthemum, in Dorset.
These are little yellow flowers like we all see, little yellow flowers all over the place.
And this is what it looks like with visible light.
This is what it looks like if you take out the red.
Most bees don't perceive red.
And that's a real fantastic bull's eye.
Now we don't know exactly what a bee sees, any more than you know what I'm seeing when I call this red.
Here's another little flower -- different range of ultraviolet frequencies, different filters to match the pollinators.
And that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light.
So maybe the chemical in that would be useful.
Finally, there's one of evening primrose that Bjorn Rorslett from Norway sent me -- fantastic hidden pattern.
And I love the idea of something hidden.
I think there's something poetic here, that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter, the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of Venus -- actually the clouds of Venus.
That's the main use of that filter.
Venus, of course, is the god of love and fertility, which is the flower story.
And just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding, they've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death, and particularly at marriage, which, when you think of it, is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
There was a time in my life when everything seemed perfect.
Everywhere I went, I felt at home.
And I want to share with you how I came to that place and what I've learned since I left it.
This is where it began.
And it raises an existential question, which is, if I'm having this experience of complete connection and full consciousness, why am I not visible in the photograph, and where is this time and place?
This is Los Angeles, California, where I live.
This is a police photo. That's actually my car.
We're less than a mile from one of the largest hospitals in Los Angeles, called Cedars-Sinai.
And the situation is that a car full of paramedics on their way home from the hospital after work have run across the wreckage, and they've advised the police that there were no survivors inside the car, that the driver's dead, that I'm dead.
And the police are waiting for the fire department to arrive to cut apart the vehicle to extract the body of the driver.
I'm put on full life support, and I have a massive stroke, and my brain drops into a coma.
It's essentially there's no sign of life from outside at all.
I spent more than a month in a Glasgow Coma Scale three, and it is inside that deepest level of coma, on the rim between my life and my death, that I'm experiencing the full connection and full consciousness of inner space.
Now to put this into a broader context, I want you to imagine that you are an eternal alien watching the Earth from outer space, and your favorite show on intergalactic satellite television is the Earth channel, and your favorite show is the Human Show.
And the reason I think it would be so interesting to you is because consciousness is so interesting.
It's so unpredictable and so fragile.
We all began in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia.
Because of the Earth tilting on its axis and those catastrophic climate shifts, we had to figure out how to find better food, and we had to learn -- there's Lucy; that's how we all began -- we had to learn how to crack open animal bones, use tools to do that, to feed on the marrow, to grow our brains more.
Now you also continue to watch as consciousness evolved to the point that here in India, in Madhya Pradesh, there's one of the two oldest known pieces of rock art found.
And the reason it connects us with consciousness today is that all of us still today, the very first shape we draw as a child is a circle.
There's the Egyptian god Horus, which symbolizes prosperity, wisdom and health.
And that comes down right way to the present with the dollar bill in the United States, which has on it an eye of providence.
So watching all of this show from outer space, you think we get it, we understand that the most precious resource on the blue planet is our consciousness.
Because it's the first thing we draw; we surround ourselves with images of it; it's probably the most common image on the planet.
But we don't. We take our consciousness for granted.
Until it was stripped from me, I never thought about it.
And what I've learned since that event and during my recovery is that consciousness is under threat on this planet in ways it's never been under threat before.
These are just some examples.
And the reason I'm so honored to be here to talk today in India is because India has the sad distinction of being the head injury capital of the world.
That statistic is so sad.
There is no more drastic and sudden gap created between potential and actual mind than a severe head injury.
What you find in the United States is an injury every 20 seconds -- that's one and a half million every year -- stroke every 40 seconds, Alzheimer's disease, every 70 seconds somebody succumbs to that.
All of these represent gaps between potential mind and actual mind.
And here are some of the other categories, if you look at the whole planet.
The World Health Organization tells us that depression is the number one disease on Earth in terms of years lived with disability.
We find that the number two source of disability is depression in the age group of 15 to 44.
Our children are becoming depressed at an alarming rate.
I discovered during my recovery the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers is suicide.
Half of E.R. admissions from adolescents are for concussions.
If I talk about migraine, 40 percent of the population suffer episodic headaches.
The average teenager sends 3,300 texts every [month].
We're talking about a society that is retreating into depression and disassociation when we are potentially confronting the next great catastrophic climate shift.
So what you'd be wondering, watching the Human Show, is are we going to confront and address the catastrophic climate shift that may be heading our way by growing our consciousness, or are we going to continue to retreat?
And that then might lead you to watch an episode one day of Cedars-Sinai medical center and a consideration of the difference between potential mind and actual mind.
This is a dense array EEG MRI tracking 156 channels of information.
It's the what our minds do every night to digest the day and to prepare to bridge from the potential mind when we're asleep to the actual mind when we awaken the following morning.
The horseshoe shape you can see on my skull is where they operated and went inside my brain to do the surgeries they needed to do to rescue my life.
But if you look into the eye of consciousness, that single eye you can see, I'm looking down, but let me tell you how I felt at that point.
I felt empty and full, hot and cold, euphoric and depressed because the brain is the world's first fully functional quantum computer; it can occupy multiple states at the same time.
And with all the internal regulators of my brain damaged, I felt everything simultaneously.
This is now flash-forward to the point in time where I've been discharged by the health system.
Look into those eyes. I'm not able to focus those eyes.
I'm not able to follow a line of text in a book.
But the system has moved me on because, as my family started to discover, there is no long-term concept in the health care system.
But let's take a look behind my eyes.
Here's my brain.
That is the consequence of more than a third of the right side of my brain being destroyed by the stroke.
And during that process -- it took many years -- one of the doctors said that my recovery, my degree of advance, since the amount of head injury I'd suffered, was miraculous.
And that was when I started to write a book, because I didn't think it was miraculous.
I thought there were miraculous elements, but I also didn't think it was right that one should have to struggle and search for answers when this is a pandemic within our society.
So from this experience of my recovery, I want to share four particular aspects -- I call them the four C's of consciousness -- that helped me grow my potential mind back towards the actual mind that I work with every day.
The first C is cognitive training.
Unlike the smashed glass of my car, plasticity of the brain means that there was always a possibility, with treatment, to train the brain so that you can regain and raise your level of awareness and consciousness.
Plasticity means that there was always hope for our reason -- hope for our ability to rebuild that function.
Indeed, the mind can redefine itself, and this is demonstrated by two specialists called Hagen and Silva back in the 1970's.
The global perspective is that up to 30 percent of children in school have learning weaknesses that are not self-correcting, but with appropriate treatment, they can be screened for and detected and corrected and avoid their academic failure.
But what I discovered is it's almost impossible to find anyone who provides that treatment or care.
Here's what my neuropsychologist provided for me when I actually found somebody who could apply it.
I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to talk about the various subtests.
And you can see here there are three columns.
Untestable -- that's when I'm in my coma.
In the health care system, if you touch average, you're done.
What does average I.Q. really mean?
Then I underwent cognitive training.
I.Q. is supposed to stabilize and solidify at the age of eight.
Now the Journal of the National Medical Association gave my memoir a full clinical review, which is very unusual.
I'm not a doctor. I have no medical background whatsoever.
But they felt the evidences that there was important, valuable information in the book, and they commented about it when they gave the full peer review to it.
The answer is yes, and for the first time, it's my pleasure to be able to share two examples.
Here's somebody, what they did as they went through cognitive training at ages seven and 11.
And here's another person in, call it, high school and college.
And this person is particularly interesting.
But that person could be identified as having a learning disability.
And with accommodation, they went on to college and had a full life in terms of their opportunities.
Second aspect: I still had crushing migraine headaches.
Two elements that worked for me here are -- the first is 90 percent, I learned, of head and neck pain is through muscular-skeletal imbalance.
Up to 30 percent of the population have a disorder, disease or dysfunction in the jaw that affects the entire body.
I was fortunate to find a dentist who applied this entire universe of technology you're about to see to establish that if he repositioned my jaw, the headaches pretty much resolved, but that then my teeth weren't in the right place.
So my teeth actually hold my jaw in the correct position.
This affected my entire body.
Now just trying putting a few grains of sand between your teeth and see the difference it makes.
I still had migraine headaches.
The next issue that resolved was that, if 90 percent of head and neck pain is caused by imbalance, the other 10 percent, largely -- if you set aside aneurysms, brain cancer and hormonal issues -- is the circulation.
There's a big pipe with the blood flowing through it, and around that pipe are the nerves drawing their nutrient supply from the blood.
That's basically it.
If you press on a hose pipe in a sealed system, it bulges someplace else.
If that some place else where it bulges is inside the biggest nerve in your body, your brain, you get a vascular migraine.
This is a level of pain that's only known to other people who suffer vascular migraines.
This is an MRI MRA MRV, a volumetric MRI.
Using this technology, the specialists at UCLA Medical Center were able to identify where that compression in the hose pipe was occurring.
A vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body.
And in the following months and years, I felt the neurological flow of life itself returning.
Communication, the next C. This is critical.
All consciousness is about communication.
And here, by great fortune, one of my father's clients had a husband who worked at the Alfred Mann Foundation for Scientific Research.
Alfred Mann is a brilliant physicist and innovator who's fascinated with bridging gaps in consciousness, whether to restore hearing to the deaf, vision to the blind or movement to the paralyzed.
It weighs less than a gram.
So two of them implanted in the body would weigh less than a dime.
Where does it go inside the body?
An FM device in the cortex of the brain, the motor cortex, will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm, let's say, in real time, if they've lost control of their arm.
And other FM devices implanted in fingertips, on contacting a surface, will send a message back to the sensory cortex of the brain, so that the person feels a sense of touch.
Is this science fiction? No, because I'm wearing the first application of this technology.
I don't have the ability to control my left foot.
A radio device is controlling every step I take, and a sensor picks up my foot for me every time I walk.
And in closing, I want to share the personal reason why this meant so much to me and changed the direction of my life.
And when I came out of my coma, I recognized my family, but I didn't remember my own past.
And I whispered the good news through my broken jaw, which was wired shut, to my night nurse.
And during my time in coma, she had been laid to rest in her hometown of Phoenix.
Now in the dark years that followed, I had to work out what remained for me if everything that made today special was gone.
And as I discovered these threats to consciousness and how they are surrounding the world and enveloping the lives of more and more people every day, I discovered what truly remained.
I believe that we can overcome the threats to our consciousness, that the Human Show can stay on the air for millennia to come.
I believe that we can all rise and shine.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Lakshmi Pratury: Just stay for a second. Just stay here for a second.
(Applause) You know, when I heard Simon's -- please sit down; I just want to talk to him for a second -- when I read his book, I went to LA to meet him.
And so I was sitting in this restaurant, waiting for a man to come by who obviously would have some difficulty ...
And he was walking around.
And then I was amazed at what role technology played in your recovery.
And we have his book outside in the bookshop.
The thing that amazed me is the painstaking detail with which he has written every hospital he has been to, every treatment he got, every near-miss he had, and how accidentally he stumbled upon innovations.
Simon Lewis: I knew when I was timing this that there wouldn't be time for me to do anything about -- Well this is it. This is the control unit.
And this records every single step I've taken for, ooh, five or six years now.
And that's my friend. I mean, I charge it every night.
This down here, if the camera can see that, that is a small antenna.
Underneath my heel, there is a sensor that detects when my foot leaves the ground -- what's called the heel lift.
But this is blinking all the time. It's sending signals in real time.
And if you walk faster, if I walk faster, it detects what's called the time interval, which is the interval between each heel lift.
And it accelerates the amount and level of the stimulation.
The other things they've worked on -- I didn't have time to say this in my talk -- is they've restored functional hearing to thousands of deaf people.
I could tell you the story: this was going to be an abandoned technology, but Alfred Mann met the doctor who was going to retire, [Dr. Schindler.] And he was going to retire -- all the technology was going to be lost, because not a single medical manufacturer would take it on because it was a small issue.
But there's millions of deaf people in the world, and the Cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now.
And the other thing is they're working on artificial retinas for the blind.
I should clarify that.
Because the first generation is exoskeletal, it's wrapped around the leg, around the affected limb.
I must tell you, they're an amazing -- there's a hundred people who work in that building -- engineers, scientists, and other team members -- all the time.
You'd think, there's plenty of paralyzed people in the world, but the audience is too small, and the amount of research, the time it takes, the FDA clearances, the payback time is too long for V.C. to be interested.
He's done a lot of very cutting-edge science.
LP: So when you get a chance, spend some time with Simon.
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
As an elementary school teacher, my mom did everything she could to ensure I had good reading skills.
This usually consisted of weekend reading lessons at our kitchen table while my friends played outside.
My reading ability improved, but these forced reading lessons didn't exactly inspire a love of reading.
High school changed everything.
In 10th grade, my regular English class read short stories and did spelling tests.
Out of sheer boredom, I asked to be switched into another class.
The next semester, I joined advanced English.
(Laughter) We read two novels and wrote two book reports that semester.
The drastic difference and rigor between these two English classes angered me and spurred questions like, "Where did all these white people come from?"
(Laughter) My high school was over 70 percent black and Latino, but this advanced English class had white students everywhere.
This personal encounter with institutionalized racism altered my relationship with reading forever.
And more out of like, rebellion, than being intellectual, I decided I would no longer allow other people to dictate when and what I read.
And without realizing it, I had stumbled upon a key to helping children read.
Identity.
Instead of fixating on skills and moving students from one reading level to another, or forcing struggling readers to memorize lists of unfamiliar words, we should be asking ourselves this question: How can we inspire children to identify as readers?
DeSean, a brilliant first-grader I taught in the Bronx, he helped me understand how identity shapes learning.
He looks at me and responds, "I'm not a mathematician, I'm a math genius!"
Completely different story.
I'm never going to learn to read," he would say.
I taught DeSean to read, but there are countless black boys who remain trapped in illiteracy.
According to the US Department of Education, more than 85 percent of black male fourth graders are not proficient in reading.
85 percent!
The more challenges to reading children face, the more culturally competent educators need to be.
Before going on stage, I assess an audience.
Are they white, are they Latino?
Are they old, young, professional, conservative?
While performing in a church, I could tell bar jokes.
(Laughter) As a society, we're creating reading experiences for children that are the equivalent of telling bar jokes in a church.
And then we wonder why so many children don't read.
Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire believed that teaching and learning should be two-way.
Students shouldn't be viewed as empty buckets to be filled with facts but as cocreators of knowledge.
Cookie-cutter curriculums and school policies that require students to sit statue-still or to work in complete silence -- these environments often exclude the individual learning needs, the interest and expertise of children.
Especially black boys.
Many of the children's books promoted to black boys focus on serious topics, like slavery, civil rights and biographies.
Less than two percent of teachers in the United States are black males.
And a majority of black boys are raised by single mothers.
There are literally young black boys who have never seen a black man reading.
What cultural factors, what social cues are present that would lead a young black boy to conclude that reading is even something he should do?
This is why I created Barbershop Books.
It's a literacy nonprofit that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barber shops.
The mission is simple: to help young black boys identify as readers.
Lots of black boys go to the barber shop once or twice a month.
Some see their barbers more than they see their fathers.
Barbershop Books connects reading to a male-centered space and involves black men and boys' early reading experiences.
This identity-based reading program uses a curated list of children's books recommended by black boys.
These are the books that they actually want to read.
Scholastic's 2016 Kids and Family Report found that the number one thing children look for when choosing a book is a book that will make them laugh.
So if we're serious about helping black boys and other children to read when it's not required, we need to incorporate relevant male reading models into early literacy and exchange some of the children's books that adults love so much for funny, silly or even gross books, like "Gross Greg".
(Laughter) "You call them boogers. Greg calls them delicious little sugars."
(Laughter) That laugh, that positive reaction or gross reaction some of you just had, (Laughter) black boys deserve and desperately need more of that.
Dismantling the savage inequalities that plague American education requires us to create reading experiences that inspire all children to say three words: I'm a reader.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning everybody.
And let me tell you what it's like to grow these cells in the lab.
I work in a lab where we take cells out of their native environment.
And we feed them -- sterilely of course -- with what we call cell culture media -- which is like their food -- and we grow them in incubators.
We observe the cells in a plate, and they're just on the surface.
But what we're really trying to do in my lab is to engineer tissues out of them.
What does that even mean?
Well it means growing an actual heart, let's say, or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body.
And so we need to do better at copying their natural environment to get them to thrive.
We call this the biomimetic paradigm -- copying nature in the lab.
Let's take the example of the heart, the topic of a lot of my research.
What makes the heart unique?
Well, the heart beats, rhythmically, tirelessly, faithfully.
We copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes.
These electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab.
What else do we know about the heart?
Well, heart cells are pretty greedy.
Nature feeds the heart cells in your body with a very, very dense blood supply.
Let's take the example of electrical stimulation.
On the left, we see a tiny piece of beating heart tissue that I engineered from rat cells in the lab.
It's about the size of a mini marshmallow.
It's amazing that these cells beat at all.
But what's really amazing is that the cells, when we electrically stimulate them, like with a pacemaker, that they beat so much more.
In a sense, tissue engineers have a bit of an identity crisis here, because structural engineers build bridges and big things, computer engineers, computers, but what we are doing is actually building enabling technologies for the cells themselves.
What does this mean for us?
Let's do something really simple.
Let's remind ourselves that cells are not an abstract concept.
Let's remember that our cells sustain our lives in a very real way.
"We are what we eat," could easily be described as, "We are what our cells eat."
And in the case of the flora in our gut, these cells may not even be human.
But it's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life.
Behind every sound, sight, touch, taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us.
It begs the question: shall we expand our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystem of our own bodies?
I invite you to talk about this with me further, and in the meantime, I wish you luck.
May none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species.
Thank you.
(Applause)
After cutting her arm with a broken glass, she fell into a fitful, exhausted sleep on the railway station platform.
When she saw her reflection in the mirror, she started to cry.
Her face was dirty and tearstained; her shirt was ripped and covered in blood.
She looked as if she'd been on the streets for three months, not three days.
She washed herself as best she could.
Her arms and stomach were hurting badly.
She tried to clean the wounds, but any pressure she applied just started the bleeding again.
They'd have sent her back home again.
She tightened her jacket -- well, fastened her jacket tightly to cover the blood.
She looked back at herself in the mirror.
There was only one thing she could think of doing.
(Telephone rings) (Telephone rings) Woman: Samaritans, can I help you?
Hello, Samaritans. Can I help you?
Girl: (Crying) I -- I don't know.
Woman: What's happened? You sound very upset.
(Girl cries) Woman: Why not start with your name?
I'm Pam. What can I call you?
Where are you speaking from?
Pam: You sound very young. How old are you?
Girl: Fourteen.
Pam: And what's happened to make you so upset?
Girl: I just want to die. Every day I wake up and wish I was dead.
If he doesn't kill me, then, I think, I want to do it myself.
Pam: I'm glad you called.
Sophie Andrews: Pam continued to gently ask the girl about herself.
She didn't say much; there were lots of silences.
But she knew she was there, and having Pam on the end of the phone felt so comforting.
I was running away from home, sleeping rough on the streets in London.
I was being sexually abused by my father and his friends.
I was self-harming every day. I was suicidal.
The first time I called Samaritans, I was 12 and absolutely desperate.
It was a few months after my mother had deserted me, walked out and left me in the family home.
And the abuse I was suffering at the hands of my father and his friends had left me a total wreck.
I was without hope and wanted to die.
Samaritans has been around since 1953.
It's a 24/7 confidential helpline in the UK for anyone who might be feeling desperate or suicidal.
During my teenage years, when I was most desperate, Samaritans became my lifeline.
They promised me total confidentiality.
And that allowed me to trust them.
They were always there for me and listened without judgment.
Mostly, they gently encouraged me to get help; I never felt out of control with them -- an interesting parallel, as I felt so out of control in every other aspect of my life.
It felt my self-harm was probably the only area where I felt I had any control.
And I had appropriate support around me to allow me to live with what had happened.
And at 21, I contacted Samaritans again.
Wanted to pay something back to the organization that had really saved my life.
I knew that the simple act of listening in an empathetic way could have a profound effect.
I knew that somebody listening to me without judgment would make the biggest difference.
So I caught up with my education, found someone I could persuade to give me a job, and I enjoyed my volunteering at Samaritans.
But I knew that that profound impact of that listening ear and someone being alongside me at that desperate time had the biggest impact, and I felt a great sense of fulfillment that I was able to help people as a Samaritan.
In my years volunteering at Samaritans, I was asked to perform many roles.
But I guess the peak came in 2008, when I was asked to chair the organization for three years.
So I had actually gone from that vulnerable caller in the phone box, desperate for help, to being the national lead for the organization and responsible for 22,000 volunteers.
(Laughter) Which I did.
But I guess in a world which is dominated by professionalizing everything we do, I really understood that that simple act of listening could have such a life-changing effect.
I guess it's a simple concept that can be applied across all areas of life.
So in the 1980s, when I called Samaritans, child abuse was a subject no one wanted to talk about.
And it was a topic of shame, and no one really wanted to talk about it.
Loneliness and isolation have profound health impacts.
Being lonely can have a significant impact on your own well-being.
Recent systematic review of research actually said that it increased the mortality rates, or premature death rates, by up to 30 percent.
It can lead to higher blood pressure, higher levels of depression, and actually aligned to mortality rates that might be more associated with alcohol abuse or smoking cigarettes.
Loneliness is actually more harmful that smoking 15 cigarettes.
Not in your life, in your day.
It's also associated with higher levels of dementia.
So a recent study also found that lonely people are twice at risk of Alzheimer's disease.
Of course, there's many people that live alone who are not lonely.
But being a caregiver for a partner that maybe has dementia can be a very lonely place.
And a recent landmark study gave us a very good, clear definition of what loneliness is.
And it said it's a subjective, unwelcome feeling of a lack or loss of companionship.
And it happens when there's a mismatch between the quality and the quantity of relationships that we have and those that we want.
And that was something that really stayed with me.
So as you will have gathered, in my teenage years, I was off the rails, I was going every day wondering if I'd even live the next day.
But that profound impact of the volunteer listening to me stayed with me.
When I finally got to a point in my life where I felt I could live with what had happened, I wanted to pay something back.
And in my experience, people who have been helped in a transforming way always want to pay something back.
So I started paying back by my 25 years volunteering with Samaritans.
And then, in 2013, picking up on that whole issue and the new stigma of loneliness, I launched a new national helpline in the UK for older people, called The Silver Line, which is there to support lonely and isolated older people.
In our short history, we've taken 1.5 million calls.
And I know we're having a big impact, based on the feedback we get every day.
Some people might be calling up for a friendly chat, maybe some information about local services.
Some might be calling because they're suicidal.
Some might be calling up because they're reporting abuse.
And some quite simply, as I was, may have simply just given up on life.
I guess it's a really simple idea, setting up a helpline.
But things have moved on, and now in 2017, we have over 200 staff listening to older people every day of the year, 24/7.
We also have over 3,000 volunteers making weekly friendship calls from their own home.
We also, for people that like the written word, offer Silver Letters, and we write pen-pal letters to older people who still enjoy receiving a letter.
And we also have introduced something called Silver Circles -- you notice I'm owning the word "silver" here -- put "silver" in front of it and it's ours.
Silver Circles are group conference calls where people actually talk about shared interests.
My favorite group is the music group, where people, every week, play musical instruments down the phone to each other.
But if you came to our helpline in the UK, you would also hear laughter.
Woman: Hello, Alan. Good morning.
Alan: Hello.
Woman: (Chipper) Hello!
Alan: Oh, how are you this morning?
Woman: I remember when I was a little girl, donkey's years ago, if you wanted to make a phone call to somebody, you had to go to a shop and use the telephone of the shop and pay the shop for using the telephone and have your phone call.
Alan: Oh, no.
Woman: (Coughs) Oh, sorry.
(Coughs) Excuse me about that.
Alan: It is. (Laughter) SA: And that's not untypical of a call we might receive at our helpline.
That's someone who really sees us as part of the family.
So Silver Line, I guess, are now helping older people in the same way that Samaritans has helped me.
How often do we really ever listen without giving advice?
It's actually quite hard.
We recently conducted a survey at The Silver Line to 3,000 older people, to ask them what they thought of the service.
And one person quite simply came back and said, for the first time in her life, she had what we would call in the sport cricket a wicketkeeper, and what you would call in baseball, a catcher.
I've been here 48 hours, and I'm talking American.
(Laughter) But for the first time in her life, she had that catcher, which is really, really important.
And now it's come full circle, because actually, people that are calling Silver Line and needing a catcher are now becoming catchers themselves by putting something back and becoming volunteers and becoming part of our family.
So I end my talk, really, where I started, talking about my own personal experience.
Because when I talk about my life, I often say that I've been lucky.
And people generally ask me why.
And it's because, at every stage of my life, I have been lucky enough to have someone alongside me at the right time who maybe has believed in me, which in turn has helped me just to believe a little bit more in myself, which has been so important.
And everyone needs a catcher at some point in their lives.
This is my catcher.
So that's Pam.
And she answered the call to me when I was that 14-year-old in the phone box, over 30 years ago.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984.
(Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause.
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight them with their own confusion.
Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."
Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free.
Fast-forward more than two decades: Apple launches the iPhone in China and censors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store.
The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups.
His app wasn't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize.
The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app censored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany.
And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks.
We have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies.
Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed.
Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question.
So here's the situation.
In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states.
But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace.
And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives.
And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond.
As Wael Ghonim, the Google-Egyptian-executive by day, secret-Facebook-activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet."
But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated.
On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March.
But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations.
And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces.
And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there.
And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May -- not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali.
But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence.
In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet.
But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem.
In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, "Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy.
But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power?
As Riadh Guerfali, the veteran digital activist from Tunisia, remarked over this incident, "Before, things were simple: you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other.
Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends.
The reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks.
In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.
This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world -- which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service.
But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace.
In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons.
But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling.
Now in China, you have the "great firewall," as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google+ and many of the other overseas websites.
And that's done in part with the help from Western technology.
But that's only half of the story.
The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet, known as a system of self-discipline.
In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users.
And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline -- i.e. policing their content.
And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients.
In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites.
But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site.
And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money.
This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable.
So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet, which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services.
So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys.
The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner.
Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us.
So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable.
We don't necessarily always do it very well, but we have a sense of what the models are, politically and institutionally, to do that.
How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit?
You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, "We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest."
But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous "three-strikes" law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens.
And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior.
So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement.
It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy.
Similarly, governments don't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day.
We also are going to need political innovation.
Eight hundred years ago, approximately, the barons of England decided that the Divine Right of Kings was no longer working for them so well, and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules.
This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation, which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed -- which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond.
So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked.
But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering.
Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade?
Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, "How could we have predicted that?"
Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least, and beyond.
I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies.
An identity was defined primarily by religion.
And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity.
So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation-state reflected that.
You could be American-Italian; you could be American-Irish; you could be British-Pakistani.
And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave.
And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on.
If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena.
I was, by the way -- I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K.
Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex.
But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization.
At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization.
At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this organization in the U.K.
At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan.
At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark.
By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.
Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world -- by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists.
I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used.
I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected.
But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state.
So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it.
And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this.
But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise.
A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational.
And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe.
Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world.
If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational.
In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned.
And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies.
And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream.
Now that never would have been possible before.
They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon.
And I'll give you an example here at this stage.
If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki.
As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank.
This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America.
In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears.
The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation-state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind.
And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America.
Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.
So why are they succeeding?
And why are democracy aspirants falling behind?
Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this.
And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics.
It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders.
I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda.
If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately.
If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately.
One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently.
So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately.
And that's the power of social movements.
However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists.
One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies.
There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies.
And I believe that's for four reasons.
Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries.
And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture.
The second, I believe, is political correctness.
That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that -- we associate believing in the universality of our values -- with extremists.
Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that human rights are universal.
But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism.
To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism.
And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party -- wanting to rule by military dictatorship.
And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us; we'll establish a theocracy."
So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies.
And then people say, "We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work.
And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance.
What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals.
So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice.
Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated.
Statistically, they are educated, on average, above the education levels of Western society.
Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia.
His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician -- not an ill-educated man.
International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise.
Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground.
And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down.
Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down.
Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots.
They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism.
Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising.
And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture -- which is necessarily more than just elections.
But without freedom of speech, you can't have free and fair elections.
Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations.
What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy.
Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics -- movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture.
But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship -- i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box.
To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground.
Now to conclude, how does that happen?
Well, Egypt is a good starting point.
The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning.
But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me.
What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader.
Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator.
That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values.
But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region.
So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region.
In the '80s and '90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole.
And the aspiration that we have at the moment -- as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism -- is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that.
But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture.
And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called Khudi, where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture.
And it's with that thought that I'll end.
(Applause)
Has anyone ever been to Aspen, Colorado?
I went to Aspen recently and stumbled into this song.
♫ Black men go to Aspen ♫ ♫ and rent colorful chalets. ♫ ♫ Giggle at the questions ♫ ♫ their mere presence seems to raise. ♫ ♫ Get taken for men ♫ ♫ we don't resemble in the least. ♫ "Are you ... ?"
"No."
♫ It's a winter wonderland ♫ ♫ in the belly of the beast. ♫ ♫ And black men ski. ♫ ♫ Black men ski. ♫ ♫ Black men send back sushi ♫ ♫ with a scorned Yakuza's flair. ♫ ♫ We make postmodern art ♫ ♫ with bacon grease ♫ ♫ and hot combed hair. ♫ ♫ We secretly play Beethoven ♫ ♫ inside our bassmobiles. ♫ ♫ We can tell you how cool looks ♫ ♫ but cannot show you how it feels ♫ ♫ when black men ski. ♫ ♫ When black men ski. ♫ ♫ Black men now are students ♫ ♫ of gay sensibility. ♫ ♫ We wear ironic T-shirts ♫ ♫ drenched in code unknown to thee. ♫ ♫ We get baptized in Walden Pond ♫ ♫ amongst a searing mob ♫ ♫ because the cleansing blood of Jesus ♫ ♫ could not do a thorough job. ♫ ♫ Black men ski. ♫ ♫ Black men ski. ♫ ♫ Chinese guys can jump real high ♫ ♫ and Germans cook soul food. ♫ ♫ White boys rap and hippies nap ♫ ♫ their dreads up to look rude. ♫ ♫ Jazz is now suburban ♫ ♫ it's Marsalisly clean. ♫ ♫ And now we've got Viagra ♫ ♫ everyone's a sex machine. ♫ ♫ So black men ski. ♫ What else can we do?
♫ Black men ski. ♫ ♫ Black men ski. ♫ ♫ Black men ski. ♫ ♫ Some kids I'll describe as friends ♫ ♫ say I am race-obsessed. ♫ ♫ The luxury of your opinion ♫ ♫ shows that you are blessed. ♫ ♫ See, I have poems about sunsets ♫ ♫ flowers and the rain. ♫ ♫ I've read them to policemen ♫ ♫ but it was all in vain. ♫ ♫ So black men ski. ♫ ♫ Black men ski ... ♫ elegantly.
It's the Second World War.
A German prison camp.
And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem.
The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn't really understand.
The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin.
And he's operating in a hostile environment.
And people do terrible things in wars.
On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners' lavatory while it was full of prisoners.
He said he heard suspicious laughter.
And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess.
And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself.
But Archie Cochrane was a resourceful person.
He'd already smuggled vitamin C into the camp, and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market.
Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is.
Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British.
It tastes ...
And importantly, it's a rich source of vitamin B12.
He gives half of them vitamin C.
He gives half of them vitamin B12.
He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book.
And after just a few days, it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness, marmite is the cure.
So Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp.
Now you've got to imagine at the moment -- forget this photo, imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair.
Cochrane, he starts ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent -- in fluent German, by the way, but in a Scottish accent -- and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave Schiller and Goethe to the world.
And he can't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated, and he vents his frustrations.
And then he goes back to his quarters, breaks down and weeps because he's convinced that the situation is hopeless.
If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners, it's a war crime."
And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover.
I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction, and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies.
And he had a name for it.
He called it the God complex.
Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily.
Now Archie was a doctor, so he hung around with doctors a lot.
And doctors suffer from the God complex a lot.
I see it in our business leaders.
And you know, with the future billions that we've been hearing about, the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way.
Imagine for a moment that, instead of Tim Harford in front of you, there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs.
You know Hans: the Mick Jagger of TED.
(Laughter) And he'd be showing you these amazing statistics, these amazing animations.
But a typical Hans Rosling graph: think for a moment, not what it shows, but think instead about what it leaves out.
So three pieces of data for each country -- three pieces of data.
I mean, have a look at this graph.
This is produced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo.
He's at MIT.
Cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products, and he's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products.
And I think it'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow.
Cesar and I tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works.
And what we learned is Cesar's work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine.
Five thousand products -- that's still nothing.
Five thousand products -- imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo's data.
Imagine you had one second per product category.
Now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart.
Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo, London or New York.
It's even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan.
If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York -- there are 10 billion of them -- it would take you 317 years.
This is how complex the economy we've created is.
And I'm just counting toasters here.
I'm not trying to solve the Middle East problem.
The complexity here is unbelievable.
And just a piece of context -- the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services.
So this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us.
We tend to retreat and say, "We can draw a picture, we can post some graphs, we get it, we understand how this works."
Now I'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here.
But the way we solve them is with humility -- to abandon the God complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works.
And we have a problem-solving technique that works.
Now you show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.
Here's an example.
I realize that's an ambiguous statement.
This baby is a human body: it evolved.
What is evolution?
And it's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error.
You could use it in an industrial context.
So let's say you wanted to make detergent.
Let's say you're Unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near Liverpool.
Well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent.
You pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle.
You create a spray of detergent.
Then the spray dries. It turns into powder.
It falls to the floor.
You scoop it up. You put it in cardboard boxes.
You make lots of money.
How do you design that nozzle?
It turns out to be very important.
You find yourself a mathematician; you find yourself a physicist -- somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid.
And he will, or she will, calculate the optimal design of the nozzle.
Now Unilever did this and it didn't work -- too complicated.
Even this problem, too complicated.
But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem -- trial and error, variation and selection.
You take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle.
You create 10 variations on that one.
You try out 10 variations on that one.
And after 45 generations, you have this incredible nozzle.
And we've heard a lot about how economies function.
How did it become the world's greatest economy?
I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy, but I think the most salient one is this: ten percent of American businesses disappear every year.
It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans.
Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans.
And eventually, they'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets -- (Laughter) if, of course, they haven't already done so.
I sometimes wonder.
But it's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence, this incredible performance of Western economies.
Now I've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months, and people sometimes say to me, "Well Tim, it's kind of obvious.
Obviously trial and error is very important.
Obviously experimentation is very important.
So I say, okay, fine.
You think it's obvious?
Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer.
And there's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher's desk who knows all the answers.
And if you can't find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid.
When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing.
I want to fix our education system.
I have no idea how to do it.
We're going to test them out. They'll probably all fail.
Then we'll test some other ideas out.
We'll find some that work. We'll build on those.
We'll get rid of the ones that don't." -- when a politician campaigns on that platform, and more importantly, when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician, then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works, and that -- thank you.
(Applause) Until then, until then I'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex.
And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody.
There's this one trial he ran many years after World War II.
They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients, and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment.
Nevertheless, Archie managed to get permission to do this.
And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, "Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results.
They're not statistically significant.
But we have something.
And it turns out that you're right and I'm wrong.
They should be in hospital."
And there's this uproar, and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying, "We always said you were unethical, Archie.
You're killing people with your clinical trials. You need to shut it down now.
And then he says, "Well that's very interesting, gentlemen, because when I gave you the table of results, I swapped the two columns around.
Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room.
But Cochrane would do that kind of thing.
And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say, "Here in my own little world, I am a god, I understand everything.
I do not want to have my opinions challenged.
And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that.
Now I'm not going to pretend that this is easy.
It isn't easy.
And since I started talking about this subject and researching this subject, I've been really haunted by something a Japanese mathematician said on the subject.
So shortly after the war, this young man, Yutaka Taniyama, developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture.
It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
In fact, it turns out it's equivalent to proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
You prove one, you prove the other.
Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true.
And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958, Yutaka Taniyama killed himself.
His friend, Goro Shimura -- who worked on the mathematics with him -- many decades later, reflected on Taniyama's life.
He said, "He was not a very careful person as a mathematician.
He made a lot of mistakes.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Nadia Al-Sakkaf: Well, I'm glad to be here.
And I would like to share with you all some of the pictures that are happening today in Yemen.
This picture shows a revolution started by women, and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest.
So many people are there.
This picture shows that the revolution has allowed opportunities for training, for education.
I love this picture.
I just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the Yemeni population are 15 years and below.
English -- you will see, this is jeans and tights, and an English expression -- the ability to share with the world what is going on in our own country.
Yemenis are using cartoons and art, paintings, comics, to tell the world and each other about what's going on.
Obviously, there's always the dark side of it.
And this is just one of the less-gruesome pictures of the revolution and the cost that we have to pay.
Is it going to be another Somalia?
But we want to tell the world that, no, under the one flag, we'll still remain as Yemeni people.
PM: Thank you for those images, Nadia.
And they do, in many ways, tell a different story than the story of Yemen, the one that is often in the news.
The Yemen Times already has a strong reputation in Yemen as an independent English language newspaper.
How did you then make the decision and assume the responsibilities of running a newspaper, especially in such times of conflict?
NA: Well, let me first warn you that I'm not the traditional Yemeni girl.
(Laughter) In Yemen, most women are veiled and they are sitting behind doors and not very much part of the public life.
I wish I could show you my Yemen.
I wish you could see Yemen through my eyes.
And I was privileged because I was born into a family, my father would always encourage the boys and the girls.
He would say we are equal.
And he was such an extraordinary man.
And even my mother -- I owe it to my family.
A story: I studied in India.
And in my third year, I started becoming confused because I was Yemeni, but I was also mixing up with a lot of my friends in college.
And I went back home and I said, "Daddy, I don't know who I am.
I'm not a Yemeni; I'm not an Indian."
And he said, "You are the bridge."
And that is something I will keep in my heart forever.
So since then I've been the bridge, and a lot of people have walked over me.
"What's this young girl coming in and showing off because it's her family business," or something.
It was very hard at first.
But with all due respect to all the men, and the older men especially, they did not want me around.
It was very hard, you know, to impose my authority.
But a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do.
(Laughter) (Applause) Brought in more women.
And we have a more gender-balanced newsroom today.
The other thing is that it's about professionalism.
It's about proving who you are and what you can do.
One of them is the IPI Free Media Pioneer Award.
So that was the answer to all the Yemeni people.
He has been very supportive of me.
(Applause) PM: And we should point out that he works with you as well at the paper.
And so along with changing who worked there, you must have come up against another positioning that we always run into, in particular with women, and it has to do with outside image, dress, the veiled woman.
So how have you dealt with this on a personal level as well as the women who worked for you?
NA: As you know, the image of a lot of Yemeni women is a lot of black and covered, veiled women.
And this is true.
And a lot of it is because women are not able, are not free, to show their face to their self.
And it's economic empowerment and the ability for a woman to say, "I am as much contributing to this family, or more, than you are."
And the more empowered the women become, the more they are able to remove the veil, for example, or to drive their own car or to have a job or to be able to travel.
So the other face of Yemen is actually one that lies behind the veil, and it's economic empowerment mostly that allows the woman to just uncover it.
We started with, you can take it off in the office.
And I am a role model in Yemen.
And I need to prove to them that, yes, you can still be married, you can still be a mother, and you can still be respected within the society, but at the same time, that doesn't mean you [should] just be one of the crowd.
You can be yourself and have your face.
NA: Well the Yemen Times, across 20 years, has been through so much.
It's an independent newspaper, but tell that to the people in charge.
They think that if there's anything against them, then we are being an opposition newspaper.
And very, very difficult times.
Some of my reporters were arrested.
My father was assassinated.
Today, we are in a much better situation.
We've created the credibility.
And in times of revolution or change like today, it is very important for independent media to have a voice.
It's very important for you to go to YemenTimes.com, and it's very important to listen to our voice.
And this is probably something I'm going to share with you in Western media probably -- and how there's a lot of stereotypes -- thinking of Yemen in one single frame: this is what Yemen is all about.
It's not fair for me; it's not fair for my country.
A lot of reporters come to Yemen and they want to write a story on Al-Qaeda or terrorism.
(Laughter) That thing. (PM: Rap. Break dancing.) Yeah, break dancing.
I'm not so old.
Actually, that's a documentary that's available online; the video's online.
NA: ShaketheDust.org.
PM: "Shake the Dust." (NA: "Shake the Dust.") PM: ShaketheDust.org.
And it definitely does give a different image of Yemen.
And certainly, when we look at the ways in which we have separated ourselves from others and we've created fear and danger, often from lack of knowledge, lack of real understanding, how do you see the way that the Western press in particular is covering this and all other stories out of the region, but in particular, in your country?
NA: Well there is a saying that says, "You fear what you don't know, and you hate what you fear."
So it's about the lack of research, basically.
It's almost, "Do your homework," -- some involvement.
So I wish that the world would know my Yemen, my country, my people.
I am an example, and there are others like me.
We may not be that many, but if we are promoted as a good, positive example, there will be others -- men and women -- who can eventually bridge the gap -- again, coming to the bridge -- between Yemen and the world and telling first about recognition and then about communication and compassion.
I think Yemen is going to be in a very bad situation in the next two or three years.
It's natural.
But after the two years, which is a price we are willing to pay, we are going to stand up again on our feet, but in the new Yemen with a younger and more empowered people -- democratic.
(Applause) PM: Nadia, I think you've just given us a very different view of Yemen.
And certainly you yourself and what you do have given us a view of the future that we will embrace and be grateful for.
And the very best of luck to you.
YemenTimes.com.
(Applause)
I love the Internet.
It's true.
Think about everything it has brought us.
I'm pretty sure that one day we'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now. This time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online, the generation that built something really and truly global.
But yes, it's also true that the Internet has problems, very serious problems, problems with security and problems with privacy.
So let me show you something.
This is a floppy disk -- five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by Brain.A.
It's the first virus we ever found for PC computers.
And we actually know where Brain came from.
We know because it says so inside the code.
That's the boot sector of an infected floppy, and if we take a closer look inside, we'll see that right there, it says, "Welcome to the dungeon."
And Basit and Amjad are first names, Pakistani first names.
(Laughter) Now, 1986.
Now it's 2011.
That's 25 years ago.
The PC virus problem is 25 years old now.
So half a year ago, I decided to go to Pakistan myself.
So let's see, here's a couple of photos I took while I was in Pakistan.
This is from the city of Lahore, which is around 300 kilometers south from Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was caught.
Here's a typical street view.
And here's the street or road leading to this building, which is 730 Nizam block at Allama Iqbal Town.
And I knocked on the door.
(Laughter) You want to guess who opened the door?
Basit and Amjad; they are still there.
(Laughter) (Applause) So here standing up is Basit.
Sitting down is his brother Amjad.
Now of course, we had a very interesting discussion.
I asked them why.
And I got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both Basit and Amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years.
So there is some sort of justice in the world after all.
Now, the viruses that we used to see in the 1980s and 1990s obviously are not a problem any more.
What I'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer.
What we have here is a list of old viruses.
For example, let's go with the Centipede virus first.
And you can see at the top of the screen, there's a centipede scrolling across your computer when you get infected by this one.
You know that you're infected because it actually shows up.
Here's another one. This is the virus called Crash, invented in Russia in 1992.
Today, they are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers.
Today, viruses are a global problem.
In fact, if I just connect back to our lab systems through the Web, we can see in real time just some kind of idea of how many viruses, how many new examples of malware we find every single day.
Here's the latest virus we've found, in a file called Server.exe.
And we found it right over here three seconds ago -- the previous one, six seconds ago.
We find tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands.
Well today, it's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses.
It's gangs like -- let's go to GangstaBucks.com.
This is a website operating in Moscow where these guys are buying infected computers.
So if you are a virus writer and you're capable of infecting Windows computers, but you don't know what to do with them, you can sell those infected computers -- somebody else's computers -- to these guys.
And they'll actually pay you money for those computers.
So how do these guys then monetize those infected computers?
Well there's multiple different ways, such as banking trojans, which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking, or keyloggers.
Keyloggers silently sit on your computer, hidden from view, and they record everything you type.
So you're sitting on your computer and you're doing Google searches.
Because when you do purchases in online stores, you will be typing in your name, the delivery address, your credit card number and the credit card security codes.
And here's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago.
That's the credit card number, that's the expiration date, that's the security code, and that's the name of the owner of the card.
Once you gain access to other people's credit card information, you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information.
And that, obviously, is a problem.
We now have a whole underground marketplace and business ecosystem built around online crime.
We find guys like Bjorn Sundin, originally from Sweden, and his partner in crime, also listed on the INTERPOL wanted pages, Mr. Shaileshkumar Jain, a U.S. citizen.
These guys were running an operation called I.M.U., a cybercrime operation through which they netted millions.
They are both right now on the run.
Nobody knows where they are.
U.S. officials, just a couple of weeks ago, froze a Swiss bank account belonging to Mr. Jain, and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it.
So the amount of money online crime generates is significant.
And that means that the online criminals can actually afford to invest into their attacks.
We know that online criminals are hiring programmers, hiring testing people, testing their code, having back-end systems with SQL databases.
And they can afford to watch how we work -- like how security people work -- and try to work their way around any security precautions we can build.
They also use the global nature of Internet to their advantage.
I mean, the Internet is international.
That's why we call it the Internet.
And if you just go and take a look at what's happening in the online world, here's a video built by Clarified Networks, which illustrates how one single malware family is able to move around the world.
So the Internet is as if someone would have given free plane tickets to all the online criminals of the world.
Now, criminals who weren't capable of reaching us before can reach us.
So how do you actually go around finding online criminals?
Here, I'm looking at the Hex dump of an image file, which contains an exploit.
Now, if you'll take a look at this image file -- well there's the image header, and there the actual code of the attack starts.
And that code has been encrypted, so let's decrypt it.
It has been encrypted with XOR function 97.
Well the yellow part of the code is now decrypted.
And I know, it doesn't really look much different from the original.
But just keep staring at it.
You'll actually see that down here you can see a Web address: unionseek.com/d/ioo.exe And when you view this image on your computer it actually is going to download and run that program.
And that's a backdoor which will take over your computer.
But even more interestingly, if we continue decrypting, we'll find this mysterious string, which says O600KO78RUS.
That code is there underneath the encryption as some sort of a signature.
It's not used for anything.
And I was looking at that, trying to figure out what it means.
So obviously I Googled for it.
And 78 is the city code for the city of St. Petersburg.
For example, you can find it from some phone numbers and car license plates and stuff like that.
So I went looking for contacts in St. Petersburg, and through a long road, we eventually found this one particular website.
Here's this Russian guy who's been operating online for a number of years who runs his own website, and he runs a blog under the popular Live Journal.
And on this blog, he blogs about his life, about his life in St. Petersburg -- he's in his early 20s -- about his cat, about his girlfriend.
And he drives a very nice car.
In fact, this guy drives a Mercedes-Benz S600 V12 with a six-liter engine with more than 400 horsepower.
Now that's a nice car for a 20-something year-old kid in St. Petersburg.
How do I know about this car?
Because he blogged about the car.
He actually had a car accident.
In downtown St. Petersburg, he actually crashed his car into another car.
And he put blogged images about the car accident -- that's his Mercedes -- right here is the Lada Samara he crashed into.
And you can actually see that the license plate of the Samara ends in 78RUS.
And if you actually take a look at the scene picture, you can see that the plate of the Mercedes is O600KO78RUS.
(Laughter) So what happens when online criminals are caught?
Well in most cases it never gets this far.
The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from.
And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome.
I wish it would be easier; unfortunately it isn't.
But things are also changing at a very rapid pace.
You've all heard about things like Stuxnet.
That's a Siemens S7-400 PLC, programmable logic [controller].
And this is what runs our infrastructure.
For example, the elevators in this building most likely are controlled by one of these.
And when Stuxnet infects one of these, that's a massive revolution on the kinds of risks we have to worry about.
You go to any factory, any power plant, any chemical plant, any food processing plant, you look around -- everything is being run by computers.
Everything is being run by computers.
We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working.
And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us.
We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail.
(Laughter) (Applause) So preparedness means that we can do stuff even when the things we take for granted aren't there.
It's actually very basic stuff -- thinking about continuity, thinking about backups, thinking about the things that actually matter.
Now I told you -- (Laughter) I love the Internet. I do.
Think about all the services we have online.
Think about if they are taken away from you, if one day you don't actually have them for some reason or another.
I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I'm worried that we might not see that.
(Laughter) I've spent my life defending the Net, and I do feel that if we don't fight online crime, we are running a risk of losing it all.
We have to do this globally, and we have to do it right now.
What we need is more global, international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs -- these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks.
That's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls.
What actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks, and even more importantly, we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime, but haven't yet done it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self, which I think is worth sharing with you today.
We each have a self, but I don't think that we're born with one.
You know how newborn babies believe they're part of everything; they're not separate?
It's like that initial stage is over -- oneness: infancy, unformed, primitive.
It's no longer valid or real.
Our little portion of oneness is given a name, is told all kinds of things about itself, and these details, opinions and ideas become facts, which go towards building ourselves, our identity.
And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world.
But the self is a projection based on other people's projections.
Is it who we really are?
Or who we really want to be, or should be?
So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up.
But in retrospect, the destruction of my self was so repetitive that I started to see a pattern.
The self was not constant.
I grew up on the coast of England in the '70s.
My dad is white from Cornwall, and my mom is black from Zimbabwe.
Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people.
But nature had its wicked way, and brown babies were born.
I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns.
Because the self likes to fit, to see itself replicated, to belong.
That confirms its existence and its importance.
It has an extremely important function.
Without it, we literally can't interface with others.
My hair wasn't right.
My self became defined by otherness, which meant that, in that social world, I didn't really exist.
And I was "other" before being anything else -- even before being a girl.
Another world was opening up around this time: performance and dancing.
And I was a really good dancer.
I could be in the movement in a way that I wasn't able to be in my real life, in myself.
And at 16, I stumbled across another opportunity, and I earned my first acting role in a film.
It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self -- one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to.
By 19, I was a fully-fledged movie actor, but still searching for definition.
Dr. Phyllis Lee gave me my interview, and she asked me, "How would you define race?"
Well, I thought I had the answer to that one, and I said, "Skin color."
"So biology, genetics?" she said.
Because there's actually more genetic difference between a black Kenyan and a black Ugandan than there is between a black Kenyan and, say, a white Norwegian.
Because we all stem from Africa.
So in Africa, there's been more time to create genetic diversity."
In other words, race has no basis in biological or scientific fact.
On the one hand, result.
Right?
But what was credible, what is biological and scientific fact, is that we all stem from Africa -- in fact, from a woman called Mitochondrial Eve who lived 160,000 years ago.
And race is an illegitimate concept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance.
Strangely, these revelations didn't cure my low self-esteem, that feeling of otherness.
My desire to disappear was still very powerful.
I had a degree from Cambridge; I had a thriving career, but my self was a car crash, and I wound up with bulimia and on a therapist's couch.
And of course I did.
I still believed my self was all I was.
We've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self.
Look at the industry for self-image and the jobs it creates, the revenue it turns over.
We'd be right in assuming that the self is an actual living thing.
But it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death.
But there is something that can give the self ultimate and infinite connection -- and that thing is oneness, our essence.
The self's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it's connected to its creator -- to you and to me.
And that can happen with awareness -- awareness of the reality of oneness and the projection of self-hood.
It happens when I dance, when I'm acting.
In those moments, I'm connected to everything -- the ground, the air, the sounds, the energy from the audience.
All my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as an infant might feel -- that feeling of oneness.
And when I'm acting a role, I inhabit another self, and I give it life for awhile, because when the self is suspended so is divisiveness and judgment.
And no matter how other these selves might be, they're all related in me.
And I honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and my progress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure.
I always wondered why I could feel others' pain so deeply, why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody.
The thing that was a source of shame was actually a source of enlightenment.
But I'm not ashamed of my self.
And over time and with practice, I've tried to live more and more from my essence.
I was in Congo in February, dancing and celebrating with women who've survived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways -- destroyed because other brutalized, psychopathic selves all over that beautiful land are fueling our selves' addiction to iPods, Pads, and bling, which further disconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain, their suffering, their death.
And in that disconnected state, yeah, we can build factory farms with no windows, destroy marine life and use rape as a weapon of war.
So here's a note to self: The cracks have started to show in our constructed world, and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks, and oil and blood, rivers of it.
Crucially, we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness with the Earth and every other living thing.
Only we're not living with each other; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.
If we can get under that heavy self, light a torch of awareness, and find our essence, our connection to the infinite and every other living thing.
We knew it from the day we were born.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)
This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar, and it's real, in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo.
So what you see, that precipice, that high precipice with the valley, is the 2008 financial crisis.
The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there.
I don't know where we are now.
This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong.
And similar topography.
And this is art. This is metaphor.
But I think the point is that this is metaphor with teeth, and it's with those teeth that I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math -- not just financial math, but math in general.
That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it -- the world around us and the world inside us.
And it's specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff.
They acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again, and they ossify and calcify, and they become real.
And I was thinking about this, of all places, on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago, because I happened to be seated next to a Hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the Cold War for physicists in Hungary.
And I said, "So what were you doing?"
And I said, "That's a good job. That's interesting.
How does that work?"
And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works.
And so -- this is an over-simplification -- but basically, it's not like you can just pass a radar signal right through 156 tons of steel in the sky.
But if you can take this big, massive thing, and you could turn it into a million little things -- something like a flock of birds -- well then the radar that's looking for that has to be able to see every flock of birds in the sky.
And if you're a radar, that's a really bad job.
And he said, "Yeah." He said, "But that's if you're a radar.
So we didn't use a radar; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals, electronic communication.
And whenever we saw a flock of birds that had electronic communication, we thought, 'Probably has something to do with the Americans.'" And I said, "Yeah.
That's good.
What do you do when you grow up?"
And he said, "Well, financial services."
And I said, "Oh."
And I said, "How does that work?"
And he said, "Well there's 2,000 physicists on Wall Street now, and I'm one of them."
And I said, "What's the black box for Wall Street?"
And it's also sometimes called algo trading, algorithmic trading."
And algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the United States Air Force had, which is that they're moving these positions -- whether it's Proctor & Gamble or Accenture, whatever -- they're moving a million shares of something through the market.
And if they do that all at once, it's like playing poker and going all in right away.
And so they have to find a way -- and they use algorithms to do this -- to break up that big thing into a million little transactions.
And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what's actually happening in the market.
So if you need to have some image of what's happening in the stock market right now, what you can picture is a bunch of algorithms that are basically programmed to hide, and a bunch of algorithms that are programmed to go find them and act.
And all of that's great, and it's fine.
And that's 70 percent of the United States stock market, 70 percent of the operating system formerly known as your pension, your mortgage.
What could go wrong is that a year ago, nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes, and they called it the Flash Crash of 2:45.
All of a sudden, nine percent just goes away, and nobody to this day can even agree on what happened because nobody ordered it, nobody asked for it.
All they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said, "Stop."
And that's the thing, is that we're writing things, we're writing these things that we can no longer read.
And we've rendered something illegible, and we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world that we've made.
There's a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don't know what, and they reach into all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms.
And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies.
And they do what we've always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don't understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story.
You can find it here: this book about flies that you may have been looking at on Amazon.
You may have noticed it when its price started at 1.7 million dollars.
(Laughter) If you had bought it at 1.7, it would have been a bargain.
A few hours later, it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars, plus shipping and handling.
And you see this behavior on Amazon as surely as you see it on Wall Street.
And when you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other, without any human oversight, without any adult supervision to say, "Actually, 1.7 million is plenty."
(Laughter) And as with Amazon, so it is with Netflix.
And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years.
They started with Cinematch, and they've tried a bunch of others -- there's Dinosaur Planet; there's Gravity.
They're using Pragmatic Chaos now.
Pragmatic Chaos is, like all of Netflix algorithms, trying to do the same thing.
It's trying to get a grasp on you, on the firmware inside the human skull, so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next -- which is a very, very difficult problem.
But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don't really quite have it down, it doesn't take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has.
Pragmatic Chaos, like all Netflix algorithms, determines, in the end, 60 percent of what movies end up being rented.
So one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies.
Well, a few data scientists from the U.K. are in Hollywood, and they have "story algorithms" -- a company called Epagogix.
This isn't information.
These aren't financial stats; this is culture.
And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture.
And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know?
What would it look like?
And they're in your house. They're in your house.
These are two algorithms competing for your living room.
These are two different cleaning robots that have very different ideas about what clean means.
And you can see it if you slow it down and attach lights to them, and they're sort of like secret architects in your bedroom.
And the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched.
You feel it most when you're in a sealed metal box, a new-style elevator; they're called destination-control elevators.
These are the ones where you have to press what floor you're going to go to before you get in the elevator.
And it uses what's called a bin-packing algorithm.
People panic.
It's because the elevator is missing some important instrumentation, like the buttons.
All it has is just the number that moves up or down and that red button that says, "Stop."
And this is what we're designing for.
We're designing for this machine dialect.
Because the algorithms of Wall Street are dependent on one quality above all else, which is speed.
And they operate on milliseconds and microseconds.
And just to give you a sense of what microseconds are, it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse.
But if you're a Wall Street algorithm and you're five microseconds behind, you're a loser.
So if you were an algorithm, you'd look for an architect like the one that I met in Frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper -- throwing out all the furniture, all the infrastructure for human use, and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in -- all so an algorithm could get close to the Internet.
And you think of the Internet as this kind of distributed system.
And of course, it is, but it's distributed from places.
And that's going to keep happening.
We're going to keep hollowing them out, because you, inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar, none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the Boston Shuffler could.
But if you zoom out, if you zoom out, you would see an 825-mile trench between New York City and Chicago that's been built over the last few years by a company called Spread Networks.
This is a fiber optic cable that was laid between those two cities to just be able to traffic one signal 37 times faster than you can click a mouse -- just for these algorithms, just for the Carnival and the Knife.
This is just theoretical.
This is some mathematicians at MIT.
It involves light cones and quantum entanglement, and I don't really understand any of that.
But I can read this map, and what this map says is that, if you're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are, that's where people are, where the cities are, you're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively.
And the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean.
(Laughter) And it's not the money that's so interesting actually.
It's what the money motivates, that we're actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency.
And in that light, you go back and you look at Michael Najjar's photographs, and you realize that they're not metaphor, they're prophecy.
But now there's this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms -- the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It is a dream of mankind to fly like a bird.
Birds are very agile.
So what would be better than to use the herring gull, in its freedom, circling and swooping over the sea, and to use this as a role model?
So we bring a team together.
There are generalists and also specialists in the field of aerodynamics, in the field of building gliders.
And the task was to build an ultralight indoor-flying model that is able to fly over your heads.
So be careful later on.
So why do we do all this?
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Applause) So we can now look at the SmartBird.
So here is one without a skin.
We have a wingspan of about two meters.
The length is one meter and six, and the weight is only 450 grams.
And it is all out of carbon fiber.
In the middle we have a motor, and we also have a gear in it, and we use the gear to transfer the circulation of the motor.
So within the motor, we have three Hall sensors, so we know exactly where the wing is.
And if we now beat up and down -- (Mechanical sounds) We have the possibility to fly like a bird.
So if you go down, you have the large area of propulsion, and if you go up, the wings are not that large, and it is easier to get up.
So, the next thing we did, or the challenges we did, was to coordinate this movement.
We have to turn it, go up and go down.
Also, we see how we measure the aerodynamic efficiency.
We had knowledge about the electromechanical efficiency and then we can calculate the aerodynamic efficiency.
So therefore, it rises up from passive torsion to active torsion, from 30 percent up to 80 percent.
Next thing we have to do, we have to control and regulate the whole structure.
So the overall consumption of energy is about 25 watts at takeoff and 16 to 18 watts in flight.
Thank you.
(Audience) Yeah!
(Laughter) (Gasps) (Cheers) (Applause)
The question today is not: Why did we invade Afghanistan?
The question is: why are we still in Afghanistan one decade later?
Why are we spending $135 billion?
Why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict?
How has this happened?
The last 20 years has been the age of intervention, and Afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy.
In the fourth act, with our hubris, our overconfidence developing, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the fifth act, we plunged into a humiliating mess.
So the question is: What are we doing?
Why are we still stuck in Afghanistan?
And the answer, of course, that we keep being given is as follows: we're told that we went into Afghanistan because of 9/11, and that we remain there because the Taliban poses an existential threat to global security.
In the words of President Obama, "If the Taliban take over again, they will invite back Al-Qaeda, who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."
The story that we're told is that there was a "light footprint" initially -- in other words, that we ended up in a situation where we didn't have enough troops, we didn't have enough resources, that Afghans were frustrated -- they felt there wasn't enough progress and economic development and security, and therefore the Taliban came back -- that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments, but we still didn't put enough troops on the ground.
And that it wasn't until 2009, when President Obama signed off on a surge, that we finally had, in the words of Secretary Clinton, "the strategy, the leadership and the resources."
So, as the president now reassures us, we are on track to achieve our goals.
Afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security.
It is extremely unlikely the Taliban would ever be able to take over the country -- extremely unlikely they'd be able to seize Kabul.
They simply don't have a conventional military option.
And even if they were able to do so, even if I'm wrong, it's extremely unlikely the Taliban would invite back Al-Qaeda.
From the Taliban's point of view, that was their number one mistake last time.
If they hadn't invited back Al-Qaeda, they would still be in power today.
And even if I'm wrong about those two things, even if they were able to take back the country, even if they were to invite back Al-Qaeda, it's extremely unlikely that Al-Qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the United States or harm Europe.
Because this isn't the 1990s anymore.
If the Al-Qaeda base was to be established near Ghazni, we would hit them very hard, and it would be very, very difficult for the Taliban to protect them.
In my experience, in fact, the light footprint was extremely helpful.
When I walked across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002, what I saw was scenes like this.
But in those early days when we're told we didn't have enough troops and enough resources, we made a lot of progress in Afghanistan.
Today, there are 14 health clinics in that area alone.
We went from almost no Afghans having mobile telephones during the Taliban to a situation where, almost overnight, three million Afghans had mobile telephones.
But when we began to bring more money, when we began to invest more resources, things got worse, not better. How?
It's not simply corruption and waste that you create; you essentially replace the priorities of the Afghan government, the elected Afghan government, with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities.
Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj was a great host.
He was very generous, like many of the Afghans I stayed with.
But he was also considerably more conservative, considerably more anti-foreign, considerably more Islamist than we'd like to acknowledge.
This man, for example, Mullah Mustafa, tried to shoot me.
But 18 months later, I asked him why he had tried to shoot me.
And Mullah Mustafa -- he's the man with the pen and paper -- explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph, Nadir Shah had bet him that he couldn't hit me.
Now this is not to say Afghanistan is a place full of people like Mullah Mustafa.
It's not; it's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence.
But it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it.
2005, Anthony Fitzherbert, an agricultural engineer, could travel through Helmand, could stay in Nad Ali, Sangin and Ghoresh, which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place.
Rather than preceding the insurgency, the Taliban followed the troop deployment, and as far as I'm concerned, the troop deployment caused their return.
Now is this a new idea?
No, there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years.
I ran a center at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, and there were people like Michael Semple there who speak Afghan languages fluently, who've traveled to almost every district in the country.
Andrew Wilder, for example, born on the Pakistan-Iranian border, served his whole life in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
These are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making Afghanistan less secure, not more secure -- that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work.
And yet, nobody listened to them.
Beginning in 2004, every general came in saying, "I've inherited a dismal situation, but finally I have the right resources and the correct strategy, which will deliver," in General Barno's word in 2004, the "decisive year."
Or General David Richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the "crunch year."
Or in 2010, the U.K. foreign secretary, David Miliband, who said that at last we would deliver the "decisive year."
And you'll be delighted to hear in 2011, today, that Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, assures us that we are in the "decisive year."
(Applause) How do we allow any of this to happen?
Even the aid agencies, who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the U.S. and the European governments to build schools and clinics, are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security.
They're worried, in other words, that if anybody believes that it wasn't such a threat -- Oxfam, Save the Children wouldn't get the money to build their hospitals and schools.
It's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest.
It's very difficult for a politician, because you're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain.
You feel deep, deep guilt.
You exaggerate your fears, and you're terrified about the humiliation of defeat.
What is the solution to this?
Well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like Michael Semple, or those other people, who are telling the truth, who know the country, who've spent 30 years on the ground -- and most importantly of all, the missing component of this -- Afghans themselves, who understand what is going on.
We need to somehow get their message to the policymakers.
And this is very difficult to do because of our structures.
The first thing we need to change is the structures of our government.
Very, very sadly, our foreign services, the United Nations, the military in these countries have very little idea of what's going on.
When they go out, they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour.
In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level.
We need to make sure that we're a little bit suspicious, that we understand that optimism is in the DNA of the military, that we don't respond to it with quite as much alacrity.
And thirdly, we need to have some humility.
We need to begin from the position that our knowledge, our power, our legitimacy is limited.
This doesn't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster.
It isn't.
Today when you go to Bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened.
A million properties have been returned.
Borders between the Bosniak territory and the Bosnian-Serb territory have calmed down.
The crime rates in Bosnia today are lower than they are in Sweden.
This has been done by an incredible, principled effort by the international community, and, of course, above all, by Bosnians themselves.
And this is what we've lost in Afghanistan and Iraq.
You need to understand that in those places what really mattered was, firstly, the role of Tudman and Milosevic in coming to the agreement, and then the fact those men went, that the regional situation improved, that the European Union could offer Bosnia something extraordinary: the chance to be part of a new thing, a new club, a chance to join something bigger.
And finally, we need to understand that in Bosnia and Kosovo, a lot of the secret of what we did, a lot of the secret of our success, was our humility -- was the tentative nature of our engagement.
We criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees.
One of the saddest things about our involvement in Afghanistan is that we've got our priorities out of sync.
Because if what we're interested in is terrorism, Pakistan is far more important than Afghanistan.
If what we're interested in is regional stability, Egypt is far more important.
If what we're worried about is poverty and development, sub-Saharan Africa is far more important.
This doesn't mean that Afghanistan doesn't matter, but that it's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage.
So if I can finish with a metaphor for intervention, what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue.
Why mountain rescue?
Because when people talk about intervention, they imagine that some scientific theory -- the Rand Corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population.
You need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue.
When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue, you look for somebody who knows the terrain.
It's about context.
But what really matters is two kinds of problems -- problems that occur on the mountain which you couldn't anticipate, such as, for example, ice on a slope, but which you can get around, and problems which you couldn't anticipate and which you can't get around, like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather.
And the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain, in every temperature, at every period -- a guide who, above all, knows when to turn back, who doesn't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them.
What we look for in firemen, in climbers, in policemen, and what we should look for in intervention, is intelligent risk takers -- not people who plunge blind off a cliff, not people who jump into a burning room, but who weigh their risks, weigh their responsibilities.
Because the worst thing we have done in Afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option.
It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.
And if we can resist this crazy slogan, we shall discover -- in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya, and anywhere else we go in the world -- that if we can often do much less than we pretend, we can do much more than we fear.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Rory, you mentioned Libya at the end.
Rory Stewart: Okay, I think Libya poses the classic problem.
And we are always being tempted up to our neck.
What we should have done in Libya is we should have stuck to the U.N. resolution.
We should have limited ourselves very, very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in Benghazi.
We set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because Gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours.
Once more, humility, limits, honesty, realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of.
BG: Rory, thank you very much.
RS: Thank you. (BG: Thank you.)
Cities are the crucible of civilization.
They have been expanding, urbanization has been expanding, at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century, the planet will be completely dominated by cities.
Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy -- they're all problems that are confronted by having cities.
That's where all these problems come from.
And the tsunami of problems that we feel we're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet.
Here's some numbers.
Two hundred years ago, the United States was less than a few percent urbanized.
It's now more than 82 percent.
The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago.
China's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years.
Now listen to this: Every week for the foreseeable future, until 2050, every week more than a million people are being added to our cities.
However, cities, despite having this negative aspect to them, are also the solution.
Because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people, creating ideas, innovation, wealth and so on.
So we have this kind of dual nature.
And so there's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities.
This work has been done with an extraordinary group of people, and they've done all the work, and I'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together.
(Laughter) So here's the problem: This is what we all want.
The 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this, having things like this, doing things like this, with economies that are growing like this, not realizing that entropy produces things like this, this, this and this.
And the question is: Is that what Edinburgh and London and New York are going to look like in 2050, or is it going to be this?
So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities.
And scientific theory means quantifiable -- relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework.
That's the quest.
Is that conceivable?
Are there universal laws?
So here's two questions that I have in my head when I think about this problem.
The first is: Are cities part of biology?
Is London a great big whale?
Is Edinburgh a horse?
Is Microsoft a great big anthill?
What do we learn from that?
We use them metaphorically -- the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city, and so on -- is that just bullshit, metaphorical bullshit, or is there serious substance to it?
You could drop an atom bomb on a city, and 30 years later it's surviving.
All companies die, all companies.
And if you have a serious theory, you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust.
Well we understand this very well.
We have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions.
And the idea is can we do the same for this?
This is just a tiny range actually: It's us mammals; we're one of these.
And that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust -- scalability.
But you know, at a local level, you scale; everybody in this room is scaled.
That's called growth.
We're all pretty much the same.
And that line there is a prediction from the same theory, based on the same principles, that describes that forest.
And here it is for the growth of a rat, and those points on there are data points.
And you see, it stops growing.
Very, very good for biology -- also one of the reasons for its great resilience.
Very, very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm.
This is what we believe.
This is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us, particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner: hockey sticks.
So let's first talk about biology.
This is explicitly showing you how things scale, and this is a truly remarkable graph.
Despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe, there's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this.
It's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms, each subsystem, each cell type, each gene, has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history.
Something else is going on.
Before I talk about that, I've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve, this straight line.
It's three-quarters, roughly, which is less than one -- and we call that sublinear.
It says that, if it were linear, the steepest slope, then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy.
But it's sublinear, and what that translates into is that, if you double the size of the organism, you actually only need 75 percent more energy.
The bigger you are systematically, according to very well-defined rules, less energy per capita.
Now any physiological variable you can think of, any life history event you can think of, if you plot it this way, looks like this.
So you tell me the size of a mammal, I can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology, life history, etc.
All of life is controlled by networks -- from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level.
And you're very familiar with these networks.
That's a little thing that lives inside an elephant.
And here's the summary of what I'm saying.
If you take those networks, this idea of networks, and you apply universal principles, mathematizable, universal principles, all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow, including the description of the forest, the description of your circulatory system, the description within cells.
One of the things I did not stress in that introduction was that, systematically, the pace of life decreases as you get bigger.
Heart rates are slower; you live longer; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower, etc.
But they are networks, and the most important network of cities is you.
This shows that in this very simple example, which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size -- plotted in the same way as the biology -- you see exactly the same kind of thing.
There is a scaling.
The slope of that is less than linear.
It scales in the same way everywhere.
But even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities, quantities that have no analog in biology, that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago.
And what you see is a scaling phenomenon.
And here, they're all plotted together.
Just to show you what we plotted, here is income, GDP -- GDP of the city -- crime and patents all on one graph.
And you can see, they all follow the same line.
And here's the statement.
If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000, from a million to two million, 10 to 20 million, it doesn't matter, then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages, wealth, number of AIDS cases, number of police, anything you can think of.
Because they think that all those wonderful things -- like creative people, wealth, income -- is what attracts them, forgetting about the ugly and the bad.
Well I don't have time to tell you about all the mathematics, but underlying this is the social networks, because this is a universal phenomenon.
This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet -- Japan, Chile, Portugal, Scotland, doesn't matter.
Always, all the data shows it's the same, despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently.
Something universal is going on.
The universality, to repeat, is us -- that we are the city.
And it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions.
So there it is, I've said it again.
So if it is those networks and their mathematical structure, unlike biology, which had sublinear scaling, economies of scale, you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger.
If it's social networks with super-linear scaling -- more per capita -- then the theory says that you increase the pace of life.
The bigger you are, life gets faster.
On the left is the heart rate showing biology.
On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities, showing that increase.
Lastly, I want to talk about growth.
Economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior.
That would be bad for economies and cities.
And indeed, one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation, then indeed you get, from the same theory, a beautiful rising exponential curve -- lovely.
And in fact, if you compare it to data, it fits very well with the development of cities and economies.
But it has a terrible catch, and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse.
And it's destined to collapse for many reasons -- kind of Malthusian reasons -- that you run out of resources.
What we do is, as we grow and we approach the collapse, a major innovation takes place and we start over again, and we start over again as we approach the next one, and so on.
So there's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse.
The catch, however, to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster.
We have to accelerate on a continuous basis.
And the question is: Can we, as socio-economic beings, avoid a heart attack?
See companies, they scale.
The top one, in fact, is Walmart on the right.
It's the same plot.
And we've looked at 23,000 companies in the United States, may I say.
And I'm only showing you a little bit of this.
So if you tell me the size of some company, some small company, I could have predicted the size of Walmart.
If it has this sublinear scaling, the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth.
That's what we like, hockey sticks.
But you notice, I've cheated, because I've only gone up to '94.
Let's go up to 2008.
That red line is from the theory.
So if I'd have done this in 1994, I could have predicted what Walmart would be now.
There they are. That's 23,000 companies.
They all start looking like hockey sticks, they all bend over, and they all die like you and me.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Alright, I want to tell you how I got my superpowers through fatherhood.
I was working a job I hated, OK?
(Laughter) OK, good, because I'm not alone and I have something to confess; I don't want you guys to judge me.
This feels like a safe space, is it a safe space?
Audience: Yes.
Glen Henry: OK, I was working the job I hated, my manager and I were not getting along.
I was sitting in my car, looking in the rearview mirror, trying to figure out which friend I could call to call in a bomb threat, so I didn't have to go back in the building.
(Laughter) OK, this was having a lot of issues for me, I was having a lot of issues at my job and I'd come home every day from work and my wife would ask me the same question.
And when you hate your job, this is the worst question anyone could ask you.
(Laughter) I just left it, I don't want to think about that place again.
See, we were spending about 40 percent of my income on childcare.
We had one child.
And we were pregnant with our second child.
And we were trying to figure out how we were going to fix this whole thing of this money situation, and she said, "Hey, babe, I've got a great idea."
She said, "I think you'd be a great stay-at-home dad."
(Laughter) I was like, "Why would you say something like that?"
(Laughter) She said, "Because babies like you."
She was like, "No, they do like you.
And I think it would be great for our children to see what love looks like, coming from a father."
I was like, OK.
(Laughter) So, I had issues with this, because I haven't seen a lot of stay-at-home dads before and I thought men would judge me, so get this, I said this -- please don't be offended -- I said, "Uh, you know, that sounds boring.
And what do stay-at-home moms do all day, anyway?"
Audience: Ooh!
She smiled at me a smile only a woman full of knowledge can smile (Laughter) and said, "Well, this should be easy for you.
And it will save us some money, it seems like a no-brainer."
(Laughter) I was standing in my bathroom, looking into the mirror (Laughter) crying, tears -- (Laughter) running all down my face.
(Laughter) My one-and-a-half-year-old was banging on the bathroom door -- because I locked them out, you know -- (Laughter) crying, tears running down his face.
I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said ...
"Which friend can you call to call in a bomb threat?
We've got to get out of here."
(Laughter) See, I had traded my manager for my children.
I didn't know what I got myself into.
I thought I knew everything about being a stay-at-home parent, and in fact, I knew nothing at all.
Because even though my manager was -- well, at least my children were a lot cuter than my manager, they were just as demanding.
(Video) Child: Wipe my butt.
(Laughter) Wipe my butt.
(Laughter) GH: What had I gotten myself into?
I thought I knew everything about being a stay-at-home parent -- in fact, I knew nothing.
(Video) Child: Hi.
GH: Where is the powder?
Child: I don't know.
GH: Well, where did you put it, where did it -- Who did it?
Child 1: No, you did it! Child 2: No, you did it!
Child 1: No, you did it! Child 2: No, you did it!
(Laughter) GH: You know what else I thought I knew about being a stay-at-home parent?
In fact, I knew nothing at all.
If you take kids to park every day then that means they get dirty every day.
(Laughter) And a higher probability of getting peed on, and no one likes getting peed on, even if it's from a baby.
(Laughter) But I read this article by Father Lee which cites a survey done by two detergent companies, Omo and Persil.
And they did this study and it said, that at two hours a day, prisoners get more outside time than children.
That convicted me and so we went outside.
(Video) (Music) (Laughter) GH: See, I knew nothing about being a stay-at-home parent, and once I embraced the fact that I knew nothing, I began to learn from my new managers.
But that's not true, because if you sleep when they do, you actually can get some sleep.
(Laughter) You know what else I thought as a stay-at-home parent?
I though I knew that the best way to teach kids right from wrong was to discipline them, because that would make sure they understood right from wrong, the pain, the fear -- that would teach them.
That was the best way.
A lot of these images you're seeing are coming from my YouTube channel, "Beleaf in Fatherhood."
And it's not perfect, it's just showing that I'm trying.
And I'm not trying to be an example but just proof that it's possible for whoever else is doing this.
I knew that children needed love, but I just didn't know what love looked like.
(Video) (Music) GH: It turns out putting diapers on your head and play-fighting until the kids fall asleep is a great way to love your kids.
(Laughter) I asked a group of stay-at-home parents what's the hardest thing, the thing they underestimated most about being stay-at-home parents, and they said that the loneliness was one of those things.
See, I was an artist, so I'd write songs for other artists.
Because that's how I made money from home.
I was talking to a friend of mine, he said, "Man, I come home from work, drawers are open, clothes hanging outside the drawers, the kids are still in their pajamas ...
And it can't be that hard to have dinner ready when I get home, right?"
(Laughter) He was trying to confide in me -- (Laughter) I said, "You have no idea what you're talking about."
Laundry piles up to the skies, he has a conversation on the phone for an hour with your mom about God knows what, takes the dog you wanted for a walk ...
(Laughter) I have become an advocate for stay-at-home parents.
Why?
Because finally, I was standing in their shoes.
Because when you're standing in someone else's shoes, you see the world from a different perspective.
But then they turn into stomps.
And you start making footprints for the next generation to walk in.
See, we're walking on a certain path, as parents.
No one can deny that family is one of the biggest foundations in anyone's life.
And we're all walking on this path, and we're pulling these thickets out of the way, and these thorns, making it easier for the ones coming after us.
It turns out, parenting has a lot more to do with landscaping.
And learning.
More than teaching.
And let your presence be a gift.
(Door unlocking) Hi!
(Children giggling) (Laughter) GH: This was me, coming home from tour one day.
And the children run after him.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life.
And like Hitler, Goering fancied himself a collector of art.
He went through Europe, through World War II, stealing, extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection.
And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer.
Hitler had two of them, and he didn't have any.
So he finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars.
And it was his favorite artwork ever.
World War II came to an end, and Goering was captured, tried at Nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death.
And at some point the Dutch police came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren.
Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of treason, which is itself punishable by death.
Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren confessed.
But he didn't confess to treason.
He said, "I did not sell a great masterpiece to that Nazi.
Now nobody believed him.
And he said, "I'll prove it.
Bring me a canvas and some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi.
I also need alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I can work."
(Laughter) So they brought him in.
He painted a beautiful Vermeer.
And then the charges of treason were dropped.
There's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering, who's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg.
Now Goering was, by all accounts, a terrible man.
Even for a Nazi, he was a terrible man.
But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery.
According to his biographer, "He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world."
(Laughter) And he killed himself soon afterwards.
Once van Meegeren was on trial, he couldn't stop talking.
And he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists.
In particular, "The Supper at Emmaus" which was viewed as Vermeer's finest masterpiece, his best work -- people would come [from] all over the world to see it -- was actually a forgery.
And when that was discovered, it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum.
Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from?
Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs, because we're focused on status.
I don't doubt that that plays some role, but what I want to convince you of today is that there's something else going on.
What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them.
Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
I want to suggest that this is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things.
So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep -- and that this isn't true just for higher level pleasures like art, but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences.
Well, a good answer is, "It depends. What is it?"
That's not so surprising.
But what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you're eating.
So one demonstration of this was done with young children.
How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk, but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk -- to think they taste better?
It's simple, you tell them they're from McDonald's.
They believe McDonald's food is tastier, and it leads them to experience it as tastier.
How do you get adults to really enjoy wine?
There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you're drinking the expensive stuff, it tastes better to you.
This was recently done with a neuroscientific twist.
They get people into a fMRI scanner, and while they're lying there, through a tube, they get to sip wine.
In front of them on a screen is information about the wine.
Everybody, of course, drinks exactly the same wine.
But if you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree.
It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it in a different way.
Or take sex.
These are stimuli I've used in some of my studies.
And if you simply show people these pictures, they'll say these are fairly attractive people.
But how attractive you find them, how sexually or romantically moved you are by them, rests critically on who you think you're looking at.
You probably think the picture on the left is male, the one on the right is female.
(Laughter) It will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are.
It will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter, your mother or father.
Knowing somebody's your kin typically kills the libido.
Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance.
If you like somebody, they look better to you.
(Laughter) A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome.
So Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion.
Sufferers of Capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates.
Now often, a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic.
But there's at least one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy ending.
This was recorded in 1931.
"Research described a woman with Capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover."
But that was before she got Capgras syndrome.
After she got it, "She was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome and aristocratic."
Of course, it was the same man, but she was seeing him in different ways.
As a third example, consider consumer products.
You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn't do anything at all for you.
The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars.
(Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all.
According to an unconfirmed report, a Saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes.
They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference several years ago.
(Applause) Now this attraction to objects doesn't just work for celebrity objects.
Each one of us, most people, have something in our life that's literally irreplaceable, in that it has value because of its history -- maybe your wedding ring, maybe your child's baby shoes -- so that if it was lost, you couldn't get it back.
So one answer was George Clooney.
Then we asked them, "How much would you pay for George Clooney's sweater?"
And the answer is a fair amount -- more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn't adore.
Then we asked other groups of subjects -- we gave them different restrictions and different conditions.
So for instance, we told some people, "Look, you can buy the sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it, and you can't resell it."
But what really causes an effect is you tell people, "Look, you could resell it, you could boast about it, but before it gets to you, it's thoroughly washed."
That causes a huge drop in the value.
(Laughter) So let's go back to art.
If people want to get me something at the end of the conference, you could buy me a Chagall.
But I don't want a duplicate, even if I can't tell the difference.
In the case of artwork, the history is special indeed.
The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book "The Art Instinct" makes the case that, "The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation."
They may look alike, but they have a different history.
I think this approach can explain differences in people's taste in art.
This is a work by Jackson Pollock.
Who here likes the work of Jackson Pollock?
They just don't like it.
I'm not going to make a claim about who's right, but I will make an empirical claim about people's intuitions, which is that, if you like the work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so than the people who don't like it to believe that these works are difficult to create, that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy.
I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there's a young American artist who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars -- in large part because she's a very young artist.
The interesting thing about Marla Olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting.
When this came out on television, the value of her art dropped to nothing.
It was the same art, physically, but the history had changed.
I've been focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to give two examples from music.
This is Joshua Bell, a very famous violinist.
And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment.
The question is: How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if they didn't know they were listening to Joshua Bell?
So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make.
(Violin music) After being there for three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars.
Not bad. It's also not good.
Apparently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell.
She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair.
So she's stunned that he's standing in a subway station.
(Laughter) (Applause) The second example from music is from John Cage's modernist composition, "4'33"."
And people have different views on this.
But what I want to point out is you can buy this from iTunes.
(Laughter) For a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence.
(Laughter) Now I've been talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to suggest is that everything I've said applies as well to pain.
One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner.
And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks.
So it was a series of five painful shocks.
The first shock is recorded as very painful.
It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose.
The most extreme example of this is that in some cases, pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure.
Humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it -- as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides.
The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
(Applause)
Well after many years working in trade and economics, four years ago, I found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability.
And I found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and can't even obtain a meal.
This red cup comes from Rwanda from a child named Fabian.
And I carry this around as a symbol, really, of the challenge and also the hope.
But what I'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning, about a billion people on Earth -- or one out of every seven -- woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup.
For most people, if they think about hunger, they don't have to go far back on their own family history -- maybe in their own lives, or their parents' lives, or their grandparents' lives -- to remember an experience of hunger.
I rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience.
Some are driven by compassion, feel it's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity.
As Gandhi said, "To a hungry man, a piece of bread is the face of God."
Others worry about peace and security, stability in the world.
We saw the food riots in 2008, after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight.
The destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history.
One of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food.
Others think about Malthusian nightmares.
Will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades?
This is not a negotiable thing, hunger.
People have to eat.
There's going to be a lot of people.
This is a picture of me and my three children.
In 1987, I was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television.
And this was yet another famine in Ethiopia.
And the baby's cry really penetrated me, as a mother.
And I thought, there's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food -- the most fundamental expectation of every human being.
This isn't one of those rare diseases that we don't have the solution for.
We know how to fix hunger.
We actually have the technology and systems.
At our time in history, these images are out of place.
This is last week in northern Kenya.
In fact, what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger.
This is more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
One of my mentors in life was Norman Borlaug, my hero.
But today I'm going to talk about access to food, because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis, there was enough food on Earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories.
So why is it that we have a billion people who can't find food?
And I also want to talk about what I call our new burden of knowledge.
Their brains and bodies will be stunted.
And here you see a brain scan of two children -- one who had adequate nutrition, another, neglected and who was deeply malnourished.
And we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children.
And in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain don't form.
And what we know now is this has huge impact on economies, which I'll talk about later.
But also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years.
So this burden of knowledge drives me.
Because actually we know how to fix it very simply.
And yet, in many places, a third of the children, by the time they're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this.
I'd like to talk about some of the things I've seen on the front lines of hunger, some of the things I've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector.
I'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is.
Well first, I'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on Earth, breastfeeding.
You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life.
But in Niger, for example, less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life, exclusively.
In Mauritania, less than three percent.
This is something that can be transformed with knowledge.
This message, this word, can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business; it's a brilliant way of saving your child's life.
And so today we focus on not just passing out food, but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment, and teaching them about breastfeeding.
And I'm very excited about this, because one thing we're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops.
And this is made with chickpeas, dried milk and a host of vitamins, matched to exactly what the brain needs.
It costs 17 cents for us to produce this as, what I call, food for humanity.
We did this with food technologists in India and Pakistan -- really about three of them.
One package, 17 cents a day -- their malnutrition is overcome.
And these types of technologies, I see, have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition, malnutrition out on the front lines.
Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net.
And usually the institutions -- churches, temples, other things -- do not have the resources to provide a safety net.
Many kids in the world can't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal.
It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid's life.
In countries where girls don't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school, we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys.
Families need the help.
We know that there's boom and bust cycles of hunger.
We know this.
Absolutely not.
Cameroon, northern Cameroon, boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades.
Well two years ago, we decided, let's transform the model of fighting hunger, and instead of giving out the food aid, we put it into food banks.
And we said, listen, during the lean season, take the food out.
You manage, the village manages these warehouses.
And the food banks are growing.
And they're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village.
I love this idea that came from the village level: three keys to unlock that warehouse.
And simple ideas can transform the face, not of small areas, of big areas of the world.
I'd like to talk about what I call digital food.
Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine.
We certainly saw that in 2008.
We're seeing that now in the Horn of Africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year.
Food can be there and people can't buy it.
Well this picture -- I was in Hebron in a small shop, this shop, where instead of bringing in food, we provide digital food, a card.
And the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items.
They have to be nutritious, and they have to be locally produced.
And what's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry -- where this card's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus -- the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent.
It is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving.
We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones, transforming even the presence of refugees in countries, and other ways.
What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food -- there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with -- what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere?
And Purchasing for Progress today is in 21 countries.
In virtually every case, when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market -- if you say, "We will buy 300 metric tons of this.
And we're seeing people transform their lives.
Today, food aid, our food aid -- huge engine -- 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world.
Total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food.
Now you'd ask, can this be done at scale?
These are great ideas, village-level ideas.
Well I'd like to talk about Brazil, because I've taken a journey to Brazil over the past couple of years, when I read that Brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on Earth right now.
And what I've found is, rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things, they invested in a school feeding program.
And they're doing this at huge scale after President Lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day.
And this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of GDP and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty.
It is transforming the face of hunger in Brazil, and it's at scale, and it's creating opportunities.
I've gone out there; I've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this.
The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger -- the cost to society, the burden it has to bear -- is on average six percent, and in some countries up to 11 percent, of GDP a year.
And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition, that's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year.
Well, the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars -- 10.3 -- to address malnutrition in those countries.
You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity.
The amazing thing I've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader.
When a leader says, "Not under my watch," everything begins to change.
And the fact that France has put food at the center of the G20 is really important.
What I would like to offer here is a challenge.
I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food.
Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets.
I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers.
And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "No more.
And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a writer-director who tells social-change stories, because I believe stories touch and move us.
Stories humanize and teach us to empathize.
Stories change us.
When I write and direct plays, I'm amplifying voices of disadvantaged groups, I'm fighting the self-censorship that has kept many Ugandan artists away from social, political theater since the persecution of artists by former Ugandan president, Idi Amin.
And most importantly, I am breaking the silence and provoking meaningful conversations on taboo issues, where often "Silence is golden" is the rule of thumb.
Conversations are important because they inform and challenge our minds to think, and change starts with thinking.
One of my struggles with activism is its often one-sided nature that blinds us to alternative view, that numbs our empathy, that makes us view those who see issues differently as ignorant, self-hating, brainwashed, sellout or plain stupid.
We are all experts, only in different fields.
So, what you have is two extremes that shut out all possible avenues of conversations.
I create provocative theater and film to touch, humanize and move disagreeing parties to the conversation table to bridge misunderstandings.
I know that listening to one another will not magically solve all problems.
But it will give a chance to create avenues to start to work together to solve many of humanity's problems.
With my first play, "Silent Voices," based on interviews with victims of the Northern Uganda war between the government and Joseph Kony's LRA rebel group, I brought together victims, political leaders, religious leaders, cultural leaders, the Amnesty Commission and transitional justice leadership for critical conversations on issues of justice for war crime victims -- the first of its kind in the history of Uganda.
And so many powerful things happened, that I can't even cover them all right now.
Victims were given the opportunity to sit at the table with Amnesty Commission leadership, and they expressed the big injustice they suffered when the Commission ignored them and instead facilitated the resettlement of the war perpetrators.
And the Amnesty Commission acknowledged the victims' pain and explained the thinking behind their flawed approaches.
He told me that he didn't want me to leave feeling disappointed, due to some of what I considered inappropriate laughter.
He explained that his was a laughter of embarrassment and a recognition of his own embarrassment.
He saw himself in the actors onstage and saw the meaninglessness of his past actions.
So I say: share your truths.
When I lived in the USA, many of my American friends would be shocked at my ignorance at fancy Western dishes like lasagna, for instance.
Therefore, share your recipe truth.
It makes for a better meal.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Today I want to talk to you about the future, but first I'm going to tell you a bit about the past.
My story starts way before I was born.
My grandmother was on a train to Auschwitz, the death camp.
And she was going along the tracks, and the tracks split.
And somehow -- we don't really know exactly the whole story -- but the train took the wrong track and went to a work camp rather than the death camp.
My grandmother survived and married my grandfather.
They were living in Hungary, and my mother was born.
And when my mother was two years old, the Hungarian revolution was raging, and they decided to escape Hungary.
They got on and didn't know where they were going, and ended up in Canada.
So, to make a long story short, they came to Canada.
My grandmother was a chemist. She worked at the Banting Institute in Toronto, and at 44 she died of stomach cancer. I never met my grandmother, but I carry on her name -- her exact name, Eva Vertes -- and I like to think I carry on her scientific passion, too.
My family was on a road trip and we were in the Grand Canyon.
And I had never been a reader when I was young -- my dad had tried me with the Hardy Boys; I tried Nancy Drew; I tried all that -- and I just didn't like reading books.
And my mother bought this book when we were at the Grand Canyon called "The Hot Zone." It was all about the outbreak of the Ebola virus.
There was this big sort of bumpy-looking virus on the cover, and I just wanted to read it. I picked up that book, and as we drove from the edge of the Grand Canyon to Big Sur, and to, actually, here where we are today, in Monterey, I read that book, and from when I was reading that book, I knew that I wanted to have a life in medicine.
I wanted to be like the explorers I'd read about in the book, who went into the jungles of Africa, went into the research labs and just tried to figure out what this deadly virus was. So from that moment on, I read every medical book I could get my hands on, and I just loved it so much.
It wasn't until I entered high school that I thought, "Maybe now, you know -- being a big high school kid -- I can maybe become an active part of this big medical world."
I was 14, and I emailed professors at the local university to see if maybe I could go work in their lab. And hardly anyone responded.
But I mean, why would they respond to a 14-year-old, anyway?
And I got to go talk to one professor, Dr. Jacobs, who accepted me into the lab.
At that time, I was really interested in neuroscience and wanted to do a research project in neurology -- specifically looking at the effects of heavy metals on the developing nervous system.
So I started that, and worked in his lab for a year, and found the results that I guess you'd expect to find when you feed fruit flies heavy metals -- that it really, really impaired the nervous system.
So that's what led me to Alzheimer's. I started reading about Alzheimer's and tried to familiarize myself with the research, and at the same time when I was in the -- I was reading in the medical library one day, and I read this article about something called "purine derivatives."
And they seemed to have cell growth-promoting properties.
And being naive about the whole field, I kind of thought, "Oh, you have cell death in Alzheimer's which is causing the memory deficit, and then you have this compound -- purine derivatives -- that are promoting cell growth."
And so that's the project that I pursued for that year, and it's continuing now as well, and found that a specific purine derivative called "guanidine" had inhibited the cell growth by approximately 60 percent.
So I presented those results at the International Science Fair, which was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
And there I was awarded "Best in the World in Medicine," which allowed me to get in, or at least get a foot in the door of the big medical world.
And I stumbled across something called "cancer stem cells."
And this is really what I want to talk to you about today -- about cancer.
At first when I heard of cancer stem cells, I didn't really know how to put the two together. I'd heard of stem cells, and I'd heard of them as the panacea of the future -- the therapy of many diseases to come in the future, perhaps.
But I'd heard of cancer as the most feared disease of our time, so how did the good and bad go together?
Last summer I worked at Stanford University, doing some research on cancer stem cells.
And while I was doing this, I was reading the cancer literature, trying to -- again -- familiarize myself with this new medical field.
And it seemed that tumors actually begin from a stem cell.
This fascinated me. The more I read, the more I looked at cancer differently and almost became less fearful of it.
It seems that cancer is a direct result to injury.
If you smoke, you damage your lung tissue, and then lung cancer arises.
If you drink, you damage your liver, and then liver cancer occurs.
And it was really interesting -- there were articles correlating if you have a bone fracture, and then bone cancer arises.
Because what stem cells are -- they're these phenomenal cells that really have the ability to differentiate into any type of tissue.
So, if the body is sensing that you have damage to an organ and then it's initiating cancer, it's almost as if this is a repair response.
And the cancer, the body is saying the lung tissue is damaged, we need to repair the lung. And cancer is originating in the lung trying to repair -- because you have this excessive proliferation of these remarkable cells that really have the potential to become lung tissue.
But it's almost as if the body has originated this ingenious response, but can't quite control it.
So this really, really fascinated me.
And I really think that we can't think about cancer -- let alone any disease -- in such black-and-white terms.
If we eliminate cancer the way we're trying to do now, with chemotherapy and radiation, we're bombarding the body or the cancer with toxins, or with radiation, trying to kill it.
We're removing the cancer cells, but we're revealing the previous damage that the body has tried to fix.
If somehow we can cause these cells to differentiate -- to become bone tissue, lung tissue, liver tissue, whatever that cancer has been put there to do -- it would be a repair process. We'd end up better than we were before cancer.
So, this really changed my view of looking at cancer.
But it struck me that I'd never heard of cancer of the heart, or cancer of any skeletal muscle for that matter.
And skeletal muscle constitutes 50 percent of our body, or over 50 percent of our body. And so at first I kind of thought, "Well, maybe there's some obvious explanation why skeletal muscle doesn't get cancer -- at least not that I know of."
Some articles even went as far as to say that skeletal muscle tissue is resistant to cancer, and furthermore, not only to cancer, but of metastases going to skeletal muscle.
It's the part of cancer that is the most dangerous.
But once it starts moving throughout the body, that's when it becomes deadly.
So these articles were saying, you know, "Skeletal -- metastasis to skeletal muscle -- is very rare."
But it was left at that. No one seemed to be asking why.
Is there a reason for this?" And a lot of the replies I got were that muscle is terminally differentiated tissue.
Meaning that you have muscle cells, but they're not dividing, so it doesn't seem like a good target for cancer to hijack.
But then again, this fact that the metastases didn't go to skeletal muscle made that seem unlikely.
And furthermore, that nervous tissue -- brain -- gets cancer, and brain cells are also terminally differentiated.
And I guess I'll keep investigating until I get the answers.
But I know that in science, once you get the answers, inevitably you're going to have more questions.
So I guess you could say that I'll probably be doing this for the rest of my life.
Some of my hypotheses are that when you first think about skeletal muscle, there's a lot of blood vessels going to skeletal muscle.
And the first thing that makes me think is that blood vessels are like highways for the tumor cells.
Tumor cells can travel through the blood vessels.
So first of all I thought, you know, "Wouldn't it be favorable to cancer getting to skeletal muscle?" And as well, cancer tumors require a process called angiogenesis, which is really, the tumor recruits the blood vessels to itself to supply itself with nutrients so it can grow.
Without angiogenesis, the tumor remains the size of a pinpoint and it's not harmful.
So angiogenesis is really a central process to the pathogenesis of cancer.
16 percent! Meaning that there were these pinpoint tumors in skeletal muscle, but only .16 percent of actual metastases -- suggesting that maybe skeletal muscle is able to control the angiogenesis, is able to control the tumors recruiting these blood vessels.
We use skeletal muscles so much. It's the one portion of our body -- our heart's always beating. We're always moving our muscles.
Is it possible that muscle somehow intuitively knows that it needs this blood supply? It needs to be constantly contracting, so therefore it's almost selfish. It's grabbing its blood vessels for itself.
Therefore, when a tumor comes into skeletal muscle tissue, it can't get a blood supply, and can't grow.
So this suggests that maybe if there is an anti-angiogenic factor in skeletal muscle -- or perhaps even more, an angiogenic routing factor, so it can actually direct where the blood vessels grow -- this could be a potential future therapy for cancer.
And another thing that's really interesting is that there's this whole -- the way tumors move throughout the body, it's a very complex system -- and there's something called the chemokine network.
So a tumor expresses chemokine receptors, and another organ -- a distant organ somewhere in the body -- will have the corresponding chemokines, and the tumor will see these chemokines and migrate towards it.
Is it possible that skeletal muscle doesn't express this type of molecules?
And the other really interesting thing is that when skeletal muscle -- there's been several reports that when skeletal muscle is injured, that's what correlates with metastases going to skeletal muscle.
I mean, there are so many possibilities for why tumors don't go to skeletal muscle.
But it seems like by investigating, by attacking cancer, by searching where cancer is not, there has got to be something -- there's got to be something -- that's making this tissue resistant to tumors.
And can we utilize -- can we take this property, this compound, this receptor, whatever it is that's controlling these anti-tumor properties and apply it to cancer therapy in general?
Now, one thing that kind of ties the resistance of skeletal muscle to cancer -- to the cancer as a repair response gone out of control in the body -- is that skeletal muscle has a factor in it called "MyoD."
And what MyoD essentially does is, it causes cells to differentiate into muscle cells. So this compound, MyoD, has been tested on a lot of different cell types and been shown to actually convert this variety of cell types into skeletal muscle cells.
So, is it possible that the tumor cells are going to the skeletal muscle tissue, but once in contact inside the skeletal muscle tissue, MyoD acts upon these tumor cells and causes them to become skeletal muscle cells?
Maybe tumor cells are being disguised as skeletal muscle cells, and this is why it seems as if it is so rare.
Muscle is constantly being used -- constantly being damaged.
If every time we tore a muscle or every time we stretched a muscle or moved in a wrong way, cancer occurred -- I mean, everybody would have cancer almost.
And I hate to say that. But it seems as though muscle cell, possibly because of all its use, has adapted faster than other body tissues to respond to injury, to fine-tune this repair response and actually be able to finish the process which the body wants to finish. I really believe that the human body is very, very smart, and we can't counteract something the body is saying to do.
But when the body is actually initiating a process and we're calling it a disease, it doesn't seem as though elimination is the right solution. So even to go from there, it's possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could almost think of cancer being used as a therapy.
That's a very far-fetched idea, but I really believe that it may be possible.
(Applause)
We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it.
We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.
(Laughter) Let's define listening as making meaning from sound.
One of them is pattern recognition.
We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name.
If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, (Pink noise) you would literally cease to hear it.
We listen to differences; we discount sounds that remain the same.
And then there is a whole range of filters.
These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to.
But they actually create our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now.
Intention is very important in sound, in listening.
When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time.
(Laughter) But that's not all.
And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it.
In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future.
So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote.
I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening.
Why did I say that?
First of all, we invented ways of recording -- first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well.
Many people take refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles.
We're becoming impatient.
And the art of conversation is being replaced -- dangerously, I think -- by personal broadcasting.
We're becoming desensitized.
Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention.
And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated.
Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening can these things happen.
A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed.
So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening.
Audience: Yes!
Good. The first one is silence.
Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again.
If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet, that's absolutely fine.
Second, I call this "the mixer."
(Noise) So even if you're in a noisy environment like this -- and we all spend a lot of time in places like this -- listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear?
How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to?
You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake.
How many birds am I hearing?
Where are they? Where are those ripples?
It's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening.
It's about enjoying mundane sounds.
This, for example, is my tumble dryer.
(Dryer) It's a waltz -- one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three.
I love it!
Or just try this one on for size.
(Coffee grinder) Wow!
So, mundane sounds can be really interesting -- if you pay attention.
I call that the "hidden choir" -- it's around us all the time.
This is listening positions -- the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to.
This is playing with those filters.
Remember I gave you those filters?
These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use.
There are many.
You can use this in listening, in communication.
If you're in any one of those roles -- and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk -- the acronym is RASA, which is the Sanskrit word for "juice" or "essence."
And RASA stands for "Receive," which means pay attention to the person; "Appreciate," making little noises like "hmm," "oh," "OK"; "Summarize" -- the word "so" is very important in communication; and "Ask," ask questions afterwards.
Now sound is my passion, it's my life.
That's too much to ask for most people.
But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully -- connected in space and in time to the physical world around us, connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected, because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart.
That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill.
And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about, and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time, or at least capable of doing it.
Now, I don't know how to do that, but this is TED, and I think the TED community is capable of anything.
And let's get listening taught in schools, and transform the world in one generation to a conscious, listening world -- a world of connection, a world of understanding and a world of peace.
Thank you for listening to me today.
(Applause)
By the end of this year, there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites.
What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller, who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer.
And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died.
Here's what he wrote in starting that out.
He said, "Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog.
In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote -- the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive."
Now, while as a journalist, Miller's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most, the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that's something completely different than anything that's been created by any previous generation.
Right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute.
There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day.
And the average Facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month.
So when you think about your parents or your grandparents, at best they may have created some photos or home videos, or a diary that lives in a box somewhere.
But today we're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely, years after we're gone.
And I think that's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists.
Now to be clear, I'm a journalist and not a technologist, so what I'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like.
Now we're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die.
One of them actually, fittingly enough, found me when I checked into a deli at a restaurant in New York on foursquare.
(Recording) Adam Ostrow: Hello.
AO: Yeah.
AO: Who is this?
Death: Go to ifidie.net before it's too late.
(Laughter) Adam Ostrow: Kind of creepy, right?
So what that service does, quite simply, is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to Facebook after you die.
Another service right now is called 1,000 Memories.
And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones, complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die.
But what I think comes next is far more interesting.
I think as machines' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve, it's going to become possible to analyze an entire life's worth of content -- the Tweets, the photos, the videos, the blog posts -- that we're producing in such massive numbers.
And I think as that happens, it's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we're gone thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we're creating and technology's ability to make sense of it all.
One service called My Next Tweet analyzes your entire Twitter stream, everything you've posted onto Twitter, to make some predictions as to what you might say next.
You can imagine what something like this might look like five, 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve.
Taking it a step further, MIT's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans.
But what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime?
Finally, think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the United States, where CNN beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with Anderson Cooper.
What if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms -- interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive?
I think that's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we're producing and technology's ability to understand it both expand exponentially.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide?
And these are base stations.
And we also have more than five billion of these devices here.
These are cellular mobile phones.
And with these mobile phones, we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month.
This is a 6 with 14 zeroes -- a very large number.
And wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water.
We use it everyday. We use it in our everyday lives now -- in our private lives, in our business lives.
And we even have to be asked sometimes, very kindly, to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons.
And it's this importance why I decided to look into the issues that this technology has, because it's so fundamental to our lives.
And one of the issues is capacity.
The way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves -- in particular, radio waves.
And radio waves are limited.
They are scarce; they are expensive; and we only have a certain range of it.
And it's this limitation that doesn't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month.
And we are simply running out of spectrum.
That is efficiency.
These 1.4 million cellular radio masts, or base stations, consume a lot of energy.
And mind you, most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves, it is used to cool the base stations.
Then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent.
In hospitals, they are security issues.
And security is another issue.
These radio waves penetrate through walls.
They can be intercepted, and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions.
So these are the main four issues.
But on the other hand, we have 14 billion of these: light bulbs, light.
And light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
So let's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, where we have gamma rays.
Infrared -- due to eye safety regulations, can be only used with low power.
And then we have the radio waves, they have the issues I've just mentioned.
And in the middle there, we have this visible light spectrum.
It's light, and light has been around for many millions of years.
And in fact, it has created us, has created life, has created all the stuff of life.
So it's inherently safe to use.
And wouldn't it be great to use that for wireless communications?
Not only that, I compared [it to] the entire spectrum.
I compared the radio waves spectrum -- the size of it -- with the size of the visible light spectrum.
We have 10,000 times more of that spectrum, which is there for us to use.
So not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum, let's compare that with a number I've just mentioned.
We have 1.4 million expensively deployed, inefficient radio cellular base stations.
And multiply that by 10,000, then you end up at 14 billion.
14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already.
So we have the infrastructure there.
Look at the ceiling, you see all these light bulbs.
Go to the main floor, you see these light bulbs.
Yes.
The one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs, florescent lights, with this new technology of LED, LED light bulbs.
An LED is a semiconductor. It's an electronic device.
And this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology.
So let's show how we do that.
Let's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum -- go to remote controls.
You all know remote controls have an infrared LED -- basically you switch on the LED, and if it's off, you switch it off.
And it creates a simple, low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second, 20,000 bits per second.
What we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb.
And the technology we have developed -- it's called SIM OFDM.
What we've done is we have also developed a demonstrator.
And I'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator.
And what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp.
And the light goes through that hole.
The receiver will convert these little, subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal.
And that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream.
In the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones.
So what happens when I switch on that light?
As you would expect, it's a light, a desk lamp.
It's illuminating the space.
But at the same time, you see this video coming up here.
You're critical.
But let me do this.
(Applause) Once again.
It is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream.
And you see, even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver.
And the answer is yes.
But, you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off.
Capacity: We have 10,000 times more spectrum, 10,000 times more LEDs installed already in the infrastructure there.
And if you do the energy budget, the data transmission comes for free -- highly energy efficient.
That's aside.
You will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital.
Look around. Everywhere. Look at your smart phone.
It has a flashlight, an LED flashlight.
These are potential sources for high-speed data transmission.
And then there's security.
You would agree with me that light doesn't penetrate through walls.
So no one, if I have a light here, if I have secure data, no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data.
And there's only data where there is light.
So if I don't want that receiver to receive the data, then what I could do, turn it away.
So the data goes in that direction, not there anymore.
Now we can in fact see where the data is going to.
So for me, the applications of it, to me, are beyond imagination at the moment.
We have had a century of very nice, smart application developers.
And you only have to notice, where we have light, there is a potential way to transmit data.
But I can give you a few examples.
Well you may see the impact already now.
This is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean.
And they use light to illuminate space down there.
And this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things [use] to communicate with each other.
Intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant -- you can't use RF, it may generate antenna sparks, but you can use light -- you see plenty of light there.
In hospitals, for new medical instruments; in streets for traffic control.
Cars have LED-based headlights, LED-based back lights, and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents in the way that they exchange information.
Traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on.
And then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world.
And every street lamp could be a free access point.
And then we have these aircraft cabins.
There are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin, and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data.
So you could enjoy your most favorite TED video on your long flight back home.
Online life. So that is a vision, I think, that is possible.
So, all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device.
And this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission.
And it's this symbiosis that I personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days.
And in the future, you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs, you may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide -- for a cleaner, a greener, and even a brighter future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised.
It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds.
I'm talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery.
Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television.
It's just that, whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulses, discrete pulses, of sound.
And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests.
And just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that, merely by uttering a sound, it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth.
According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven.
Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt, he scattered the people by giving them different languages -- confused them by giving them different languages.
And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating.
And all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths.
And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species?
Now it's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question, we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees.
Now these chimpanzees are using tools, and we take that as a sign of their intelligence.
But if they really were intelligent, why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel?
Why wouldn't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them?
Why not? I mean, that's what we do.
Now the reason the chimpanzees don't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning.
They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching.
And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again.
In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts.
Now this may sound arrogant, or even full of hubris.
How do we know this?
Because this is exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did.
You can follow it through the fossil record.
It's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning.
Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia.
Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, "monkey see, monkey do," the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that -- at least not very much.
And even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it -- something from a Barnum & Bailey circus.
But by comparison, we can learn.
We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do.
We can benefit from others' ideas.
We can build on their wisdom.
And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progresses.
And this cumulative cultural adaptation, as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas, is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives.
I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.
The chairs you're sitting in, the lights in this auditorium, my microphone, the iPads and iPods that you carry around with you -- all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation.
Our species can make stuff, therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has.
But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story.
Because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma, the resolution of which, it's fair to say, would determine not only the future course of our psychology, but the future course of the entire world.
And most importantly for this, it'll tell us why we have language.
And the reason that dilemma arose is, it turns out, that social learning is visual theft.
If I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas, and I can benefit from your efforts, without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them.
Social learning really is visual theft.
And in any species that acquired it, it would behoove you to hide your best ideas, lest somebody steal them from you.
And so some time around 200,000 years ago, our species confronted this crisis.
And we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring.
Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200,000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago.
And this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas, there are fewer innovations.
And small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck.
So if we'd chosen that path, our evolutionary path would have led into the forest -- and been a short one indeed.
The other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others.
Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own.
Well, we chose the second option, and language is the result.
Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft.
Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation -- for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities.
And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be a like a bird without wings.
And we take this utterly for granted, because we're a species that is so at home with language, but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language.
And to see why, consider two scenarios from early in our evolution.
Let's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads, but you're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached.
So what you do is -- one of those people has not really acquired language yet.
Now you pursue this guy, gesticulating.
A scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads.
You put down your arrowheads and say, "I'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows. I'll split you 50/50."
The other one says, "Fine. Looks good to me.
We'll do that."
That's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites.
All right, if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true, any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity.
And this is exactly what the archeological record shows.
If you look at our ancestors, the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, our immediate ancestors, they're confined to small regions of the world.
But when our species arose about 200,000 years ago, sometime after that we quickly walked out of Africa and spread around the entire world, occupying nearly every habitat on Earth.
Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language, we could transform the environment to suit our needs.
It is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised.
Language really is the voice of our genes.
Now having evolved language, though, we did something peculiar, even bizarre.
As we spread out around the world, we developed thousands of different languages.
Currently, there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth.
As we diverge, our languages are naturally going to diverge.
If we go to the island of Papua New Guinea, we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages, different human languages, spoken on that island alone.
There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles.
Now, incredible as this sounds, I once met a Papuan man, and I asked him if this could possibly be true.
And it's true; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile.
And this is also true of some remote oceanic islands.
And so it seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside.
And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups.
They slow the flow of technologies.
And they even slow the flow of genes.
(Laughter) Now we have to counter that, though, against the evidence we've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.
(Laughter) Okay, this tendency we have, this seemingly natural tendency we have, towards isolation, towards keeping to ourselves, crashes head first into our modern world.
This remarkable image is not a map of the world.
In fact, it's a map of Facebook friendship links.
And when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude, it literally draws a map of the world.
Our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past.
And that communication, that connectivity around the world, that globalization now raises a burden.
Because these different languages impose a barrier, as we've just seen, to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom.
And they impose a barrier to cooperation.
And nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the European Union, whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages.
The European Union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages.
That's something on the order of 1.45 billion U.S. dollars on translation costs alone.
Now think of the absurdity of this situation.
If 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table, speaking their 23 languages, some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities.
The European Union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators.
And in 2007 alone -- and I'm sure there are more recent figures -- something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into English alone.
And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world, we confront a question.
And that question is whether in this modern, globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages.
To put it this way, nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist.
And we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization.
There are lots and lots of ways of measuring things -- weighing them and measuring their length -- but the metric system is winning.
There are many, many ways of imprinting CDs or DVDs, but those are all being standardized as well.
And you can probably think of many, many more in your own everyday lives.
And so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma.
And it's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces, who's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, and yet he is sitting at his blackboard, converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases.
And what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity, his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.
Thank you.
(Applause) Matt Ridley: Mark, one question.
Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us.
Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language?
Mark Pagel: This is a very good question.
So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that's associated with language.
The reason why I don't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is -- here's a simple analogy: Ferraris are cars that have engines.
My car has an engine, but it's not a Ferrari.
Now the simple answer then is that genes alone don't, all by themselves, determine the outcome of very complicated things like language.
What we know about this FOXP2 and Neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths -- who knows.
But that doesn't tell us they necessarily had language.
MR: Thank you very much indeed.
(Applause)
Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms.
Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us, and some that are bad for us.
Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems.
And they are brought inside by humans and other creatures.
The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans, and with the human-built environment.
And today, architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments, like this building here -- environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering, heating and air conditioning.
Given the amount of time that we spend indoors, it's important to understand how this affects our health.
At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air.
And we looked at three different types of rooms.
And we also sampled the outdoor air.
If you look at the x-axis of this graph, you'll see that what we commonly want to do -- which is keeping the outdoors out -- we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation.
So if you look at the green data points, which is air that's outside, you'll see that there's a large amount of microbial diversity, or variety of microbial types.
But if you look at the blue data points, which is mechanically ventilated air, it's not as diverse.
If you look at the y-axis of this graph, you'll see that, in the mechanically ventilated air, you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen, or germ, than if you're outdoors.
The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart.
And the first things that you can see from this graph is, if you look at the blue data points, which are the mechanically ventilated air, they're not simply a subset of the green data points, which are the outdoor air.
What we've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans.
It has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth, our spit.
And this is because we're all constantly shedding microbes.
And when you're outdoors, that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt.
It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States.
Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings.
And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health.
And given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections, or hospital-acquired infections, this is a clue that it's a good time to reconsider our current practices.
So just as we manage national parks, where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others, we're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors.
I've heard somebody say that you're as healthy as your gut.
And for this reason, many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora.
Thank you.
(Applause)
For a long time, there was me, and my body.
Me was trying not to be an outcome of my violent past, but the separation that had already occurred between me and my body was a pretty significant outcome.
My body was often in the way.
It was a way of keeping my head attached.
It was a way of locating myself.
I worried that [if] I took my hat off I wouldn't be here anymore.
I actually had a therapist who once said to me, "Eve, you've been coming here for two years, and, to be honest, it never occurred to me that you had a body."
I never had babies because heads cannot give birth.
As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies -- in particular, their vaginas, because I thought vaginas were kind of important.
This led to me writing "The Vagina Monologues," which led to me obsessively and incessantly talking about vaginas everywhere I could.
One night on stage, I actually entered my vagina.
It was an ecstatic experience.
It scared me, it energized me, and then I became a driven person, a driven vagina.
I began to see my body like a thing, a thing that could move fast, like a thing that could accomplish other things, many things, all at once.
I began to see my body like an iPad or a car.
It had no limits. It was invincible.
It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself.
I was greedy.
If I was tired, I drank more espressos.
If I was afraid, I went to more dangerous places.
My father was really kind to me on my 16th birthday, for example.
I heard people murmur from time to time that I should love my body, so I learned how to do this.
I was a vegetarian, I was sober, I didn't smoke.
But all that was just a more sophisticated way to manipulate my body -- a further disassociation, like planting a vegetable field on a freeway.
As a result of me talking so much about my vagina, many women started to tell me about theirs -- their stories about their bodies.
Actually, these stories compelled me around the world, and I've been to over 60 countries.
I heard about women being molested in their beds, flogged in their burqas, left for dead in parking lots, acid burned in their kitchens.
Some women became quiet and disappeared.
In the middle of my traveling, I turned 40 and I began to hate my body, which was actually progress, because at least my body existed enough to hate it.
Well my stomach -- it was my stomach I hated.
It was proof that I had not measured up, that I was old and not fabulous and not perfect or able to fit into the predetermined corporate image in shape.
My stomach was proof that I had failed, that it had failed me, that it was broken.
My life became about getting rid of it and obsessing about getting rid of it.
In fact, it became so extreme I wrote a play about it.
But the more I talked about it, the more objectified and fragmented my body became.
It became entertainment; it became a new kind of commodity, something I was selling.
Then I went somewhere else.
I went outside what I thought I knew.
I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I heard about a little girl who couldn't stop peeing on herself because so many grown soldiers had shoved themselves inside her.
I heard an 80-year-old woman whose legs were broken and pulled out of her sockets and twisted up on her head as the soldiers raped her like that.
There are thousands of these stories, and many of the women had holes in their bodies -- holes, fistula -- that were the violation of war -- holes in the fabric of their souls.
The raping of the Earth, the pillaging of minerals, the destruction of vaginas -- none of these were separate anymore from each other or me.
Militias were raping six-month-old babies so that countries far away could get access to gold and coltan for their iPhones and computers.
Then I got cancer -- or I found out I had cancer.
It arrived like a speeding bird smashing into a windowpane.
Suddenly, I had a body, a body that was pricked and poked and punctured, a body that was cut wide open, a body that had organs removed and transported and rearranged and reconstructed, a body that was scanned and had tubes shoved down it, a body that was burning from chemicals.
I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world, and it wasn't happening later, it was happening now.
Suddenly, my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants -- and they're usually poor -- the cancer inside the coal miner's lungs, the cancer of stress for not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma, the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish, the cancer in women's uteruses from being raped, the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.
Before cancer, the world was something other.
It was as if I was living in a stagnant pool and cancer dynamited the boulder that was separating me from the larger sea.
Now I am swimming in it.
Now I lay down in the grass and I rub my body in it, and I love the mud on my legs and feet.
Now I make a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow by the Seine, and I hunger for the green fields in the bush outside Bukavu.
And when it rains hard rain, I scream and I run in circles.
I know that everything is connected, and the scar that runs the length of my torso is the markings of the earthquake.
And I am there with the three million in the streets of Port-au-Prince.
And the fire that burned in me on day three through six of chemo is the fire that is burning in the forests of the world.
I know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation, the 16 ounces of puss, is the contaminated Gulf of Mexico, and there were oil-drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish.
And the catheters they shoved into me without proper medication made me scream out the way the Earth cries out from the drilling.
In my second chemo, my mother got very sick and I went to see her.
And in the name of connectedness, the only thing she wanted before she died was to be brought home by her beloved Gulf of Mexico.
So we brought her home, and I prayed that the oil wouldn't wash up on her beach before she died.
And she died quietly in her favorite place.
And a few weeks later, I was in New Orleans, and this beautiful, spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me.
And I was honored.
And I went to her house, and it was morning, and the morning New Orleans sun was filtering through the curtains.
And my friend was preparing this big bowl, and I said, "What is it?"
And she said, "It's for you.
The flowers make it beautiful, and the honey makes it sweet."
And I said, "But what's the water part?"
And in the name of connectedness, she said, "Oh, it's the Gulf of Mexico."
And the other women arrived and they sat in a circle, and Michaela bathed my head with the sacred water.
And she sang -- I mean her whole body sang.
And the other women sang and they prayed for me and my mother.
It was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion.
It was the honey in the water that made it sweet, it was the oil that made it sick.
It was my head that was bald -- and comfortable now without a hat.
It was my whole self melting into Michaela's lap.
It was finding my place and the huge responsibility that comes with connection.
It was the continuing devastating war in the Congo and the indifference of the world.
What I learned is it has to do with attention and resources that everybody deserves.
It was wise doctors and advanced medicine and surgeons who knew what to do with their hands.
It was magic healers and aromatic oils.
It was people who came with spells and rituals.
It was having a vision of the future and something to fight for, because I know this struggle isn't my own.
It was a million prayers.
It was a thousand hallelujahs and a million oms.
It was a lot of anger, insane humor, a lot of attention, outrage.
It was energy, love and joy.
It was all these things in the water, in the world, in my body.
(Applause)
So what's the data?
Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school.
In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls.
Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school.
And as you all know, boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder -- and therefore we drug them with Ritalin.
First, it's a new fear of intimacy.
Intimacy means physical, emotional connection with somebody else -- and especially with somebody of the opposite sex who gives off ambiguous, contradictory, phosphorescent signals.
(Laughter) And every year there's research done on self-reported shyness among college students.
And this is two kinds.
The old shyness was a fear of rejection.
It's a social awkwardness like you're a stranger in a foreign land.
They don't know what to say, they don't know what to do, especially one-on-one [with the] opposite sex.
They don't know the language of face contact, the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else, listen to somebody else.
There's something I'm developing here called social intensity syndrome, which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating.
And this peaks at Super Bowl Sunday when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers, watching a totally overdressed Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers, rather than Jennifer Lopez totally naked in the bedroom.
The problem is they now prefer [the] asynchronistic Internet world to the spontaneous interaction in social relationships.
What are the causes? Well, it's an unintended consequence.
I think it's excessive Internet use in general, excessive video gaming, excessive new access to pornography.
The problem is these are arousal addictions.
Arousal addiction, you want different.
Drugs, you want more of the same -- different.
And the problem is the industry is supplying it.
Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21, he's played 10,000 hours of video games, most of that in isolation.
As you remember, Cindy Gallop said men don't know the difference between making love and doing porn.
The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week.
(Laughter) And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America -- 15 billion annually.
For every 400 movies made in Hollywood, there are 11,000 now made porn videos.
Boys' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal.
That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.
So what's the solution? It's not my job.
(Applause)
I have never been arrested, never spent a night in jail, never had a loved one thrown into the back of a squad car or behind bars, or be at the mercy of a scary, confusing system that at best sees them with indifference, and at worst as monstrous.
Most of you are probably like me -- lucky.
The closest we get to crime and punishment is likely what we see on TV.
While making "Unprisoned," I met a woman who used to be like us -- Sheila Phipps.
(Recording) Sheila Phipps: Before my son went to jail, I used to see people be on television, fighting, saying, "Oh, this person didn't do it and this person is innocent."
And you know, you snub them or you dismiss them, and like, "Yeah, whatever."
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people who deserve to be in prison.
There's a lot of criminals out here.
EA: Sheila's son, McKinley, is one of those innocent people.
He served 17 years of a 30-year sentence on a manslaughter charge.
He had no previous convictions, there was no forensic evidence in the case.
He was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony, and decades of research have shown that eyewitness testimony isn't as reliable as we once believed it to be.
Since 1989, when DNA testing was first used to free innocent people, over 70 percent of overturned convictions were based on eyewitness testimony.
Last year, the district attorney whose office prosecuted McKinley's case was convicted of unrelated corruption charges.
When this district attorney of 30 years stepped down, the eyewitnesses from McKinley's case came forward and said that they had been pressured into testifying by the district attorneys, pressure which included the threat of jail time.
Despite this, McKinley is still in prison.
It really opened my eyes.
It really, really opened my eyes.
I ain't gonna lie to you.
All of those people have family on the outside.
(Recording) Kortney Williams: My brother missed my high school graduation because the night before, he went to jail.
My brother missed my birthday dinner because that day, actually, he went to jail.
My brother missed his own birthday dinner because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
because there was no evidence.
She ended up interviewing her aunt, Troylynn Robertson, for an episode.
(Recording) KW: With everything that you went through with your children, what is any advice that you would give me if I had any kids?
Girl: Yeah, he went to jail on my first birthday.
Girl: My dad works as a guard.
He saw my uncle in jail.
EA: According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the number of young people with a father incarcerated rose 500 percent between 1980 and 2000.
Over five million of today's children will see a parent incarcerated at some point in their childhoods.
But this number disproportionately affects African American children.
By the time they reach the age of 14, one in four black children will see their dad go off to prison.
One key factor determining the future success of both inmates and their children is whether they can maintain ties during the parent's incarceration, but prisoners' phone calls home can cost 20 to 30 times more than regular phone calls, so many families keep in touch through letters.
Guess I'm not a baby anymore.
You still taking me to prom?
I really miss you.
I wish you were here so I can vent to you.
(Voice breaking up) I have some good news.
I won first place in the science fair.
In less than two years, I hope you'll be able to see me walk across the stage.
I want to put a smile on your face.
Anissa wrote these letters to her brother when she was a sophomore in high school.
She keeps the letters he writes to her tucked into the frame of her bedroom mirror, and reads them over and over again.
We all want the wheels of justice to properly turn, but we're coming to understand that the lofty ideals we learned in school look really different in our nation's prisons and jails and courtrooms.
You're like, "There are so many people of color here," and yet I know that the city is not made up of 90 percent African Americans, so why is it that 90 percent of the people who are in orange are African American?
(Recording) EA: Public defender Danny Engelberg isn't the only one noticing how many black people are in municipal court -- or in any court.
Who's sitting in court waiting to see the judge?
What do they look like?
Man: Who's waiting? Mostly black.
I mean, there was a couple of white people in there.
Woman: I think it was about 85 percent African-American that was sitting there.
EA: How does a young black person growing up in America today come to understand justice?
Another "Unprisoned" story was about a troupe of dancers who choreographed a piece called "Hoods Up," which they performed in front of city council.
Dawonta White was in the seventh grade for that performance.
(Recording) Dawonta White: We was wearing black with hoodies because Trayvon Martin, when he was wearing his hoodie, he was killed.
So we looked upon that, and we said we're going to wear hoodies like Trayvon Martin.
(Recording) EA: Who came up with that idea?
DW: The group. We all agreed on it.
I was a little nervous, but I had stick through it though, but I felt like it was a good thing so they could notice what we do.
He says the police criticize people who look like him.
He feels judged based on things other black people may have done.
How would you want the police to look at you, and what would you want them to think?
SB: That I'm not no threat.
EA: Why would they think you're threatening?
What did you say, you're 14?
SB: Yes, I'm 14, but because he said a lot of black males are thugs or gangsters and all that, but I don't want them thinking that about me.
EA: For folks who look like me, the easiest and most comfortable thing to do is to not pay attention -- to assume our criminal legal system is working.
But if it's not our responsibility to question those assumptions, whose responsibility is it?
There's a synagogue here that's taken on learning about mass incarceration, and many congregants have concluded that because mass incarceration throws so many lives into chaos, it actually creates more crime -- makes people less safe.
She says it's crucial for all of us to understand our connection to this issue even if it's not immediately obvious.
And I think as Jews, you know, we've lived that history: "It's not us."
And so it is our responsibility as Jews and as members of this community to educate our community -- at least our congregation -- to the extent that we're able.
EA: I've been using the pronouns "us" and "we" because this is our criminal legal system and our children.
We elect the district attorneys, the judges and the legislators who operate these systems for we the people.
As a society, we are more willing to risk locking up innocent people than we are to let guilty people go free.
We elect politicians who fear being labeled "soft on crime," encouraging them to pass harsh legislation and allocate enormous resources toward locking people up.
We don't put checks on prosecutors.
Across the country, over the last couple of decades, as property and violent crimes have both fell, the number of prosecutors employed and cases they have filed has risen.
One check we do have on prosecutors is defense.
Imagine Lady Liberty: the blindfolded woman holding the scale meant to symbolize the balance in our judicial system.
The majority of defendants in our country are represented by government-appointed attorneys.
These public defenders receive around 30 percent less funding than district attorneys do, and they often have caseloads far outnumbering what the American Bar Association recommends.
As Sheila Phipps said, there are people who belong in prison, but it's hard to tell the guilty from the innocent when everyone's outcomes are so similar.
We all want justice.
But with the process weighed so heavily against defendants, justice is hard to come by.
If we don't like what's going on, it is up to us to change it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Consider the following statement: human beings only use 10 percent of their brain capacity.
Well, as a neuroscientist, I can tell you that while Morgan Freeman delivered this line with the gravitas that makes him a great actor, this statement is entirely false.
(Laughter) The truth is, human beings use 100 percent of their brain capacity.
The brain is a highly efficient, energy-demanding organ that gets fully utilized and even though it is at full capacity being used, it suffers from a problem of information overload.
There's far too much in the environment than it can fully process.
So to solve this problem of overload, evolution devised a solution, which is the brain's attention system.
Attention allows us to notice, select and direct the brain's computational resources to a subset of all that's available.
We can think of attention as the leader of the brain.
Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain follows.
In some sense, it's your brain's boss.
And over the last 15 years, I've been studying the human brain's attention system.
If it is indeed the case that our attention is the brain's boss, is it a good boss?
And to dig in on this big question, I wanted to know three things.
First, how does attention control our perception?
And third, can we do anything about this fogginess, can we train our brain to pay better attention?
A very poignant example of how our attention ends up getting utilized.
And I want to do it using the example of somebody that I know quite well.
He ends up being part of a very large group of people that we work with, for whom attention is a matter of life and death.
Think of medical professionals or firefighters or soldiers or marines.
This is the story of a marine captain, Captain Jeff Davis.
And the scene that I'm going to share with you, as you can see, is not about his time in the battlefield.
He was actually on a bridge, in Florida.
But instead of looking at the scenery around him, seeing the beautiful vistas and noticing the cool ocean breezes, he was driving fast and contemplating driving off that bridge.
You see, he'd just returned from Iraq.
And while his body was on that bridge, his mind, his attention, was thousands of miles away.
His mind was worried and preoccupied and had stressful memories and, really, dread for his future.
And I'm really glad that he didn't take his life.
Because he, as a leader, knew that he wasn't the only one that was probably suffering; many of his fellow marines probably were, too.
And in the year 2008, he partnered with me in the first-of-its-kind project that actually allowed us to test and offer something called mindfulness training to active-duty military personnel.
But before I tell you about what mindfulness training is, or the results of that study, I think it's important to understand how attention works in the brain.
In these brain wave recordings, people wear funny-looking caps that are sort of like swimming caps, that have electrodes embedded in them.
These electrodes pick up the ongoing brain electrical activity.
So we can see these small yet detectable voltage fluctuations over time.
And doing this, we can very precisely plot the timing of the brain's activity.
About 170 milliseconds after we show our research participants a face on the screen, we see a very reliable, detectable brain signature.
It happens right at the back of the scalp, above the regions of the brain that are involved in face processing.
We call it the N170 component.
And we use this component in many of our studies.
It allows us to see the impact that attention may have on our perception.
I'm going to give you a sense of the kind of experiments that we actually do in the lab.
And what we do is we ask our participants as they're viewing a series of these types of overlaid images, to do something with their attention.
On other trials, we ask them to tell what the scene was -- was it indoor or outdoor?
And in this way, we can manipulate attention and confirm that the participants were actually doing what we said.
Our hypotheses about attention were as follows: if attention is indeed doing its job and affecting perception, maybe it works like an amplifier.
And what I mean by this is that when we direct attention to the face, it becomes clearer and more salient, it's easier to see.
So what we wanted to do is look at this brain-wave component of face detection, the N170, and see if it changed at all as a function of where our participants were paying attention -- to the scene or the face.
And here's what we found.
And when they paid attention to the scene, as you can see in red, it was smaller.
And that gap you see between the blue and red lines is pretty powerful.
What it tells us is that attention, which is really the only thing that changed, since the images they viewed were identical in both cases -- attention changes perception.
Within 170 milliseconds of actually seeing a face.
In our follow-up studies, we wanted to see what would happen, how could we perturb or diminish this effect.
And our hunch was that if you put people in a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing, negative images, images of suffering and violence -- sort of like what you might see on the news, unfortunately -- that doing this might actually affect their attention.
And that's indeed what we found.
If we present stressful images while they're doing this experiment, this gap of attention shrinks, its power diminishes.
So in some of our other studies, we wanted to see, OK, great -- not great, actually, bad news that stress does this to the brain -- but if it is the case that stress has this powerful influence on attention through external distraction, what if we don't need external distraction, what if we distract ourselves?
And to do this, we had to basically come up with an experiment in which we could have people generate their own mind-wandering.
This is having off-task thoughts while we're engaged in an ongoing task of some sort.
So we devised what might be considered one of the world's most boring experiments.
All the participants saw were a series of faces on the screen, one after another.
They pressed the button every time they saw the face.
That was pretty much it.
Well, one trick was that sometimes, the face would be upside down, and it would happen very infrequently.
Pretty soon, we could tell that they were successfully mind-wandering, because they pressed the button when that face was upside down.
And what we found was that, very similar to external stress and external distraction in the environment, internal distraction, our own mind wandering, also shrinks the gap of attention.
So what do all of these studies tell us?
They tell us that attention is very powerful in terms of affecting our perception.
Even though it's so powerful, it's also fragile and vulnerable.
But that's all in the context of these very controlled laboratory settings.
What about in the real world?
What about in our actual day-to-day life?
Where is your attention right now?
You will be unaware of what I'm saying for four out of the next eight minutes.
(Laughter) It's a challenge, so pay attention, please.
Now, why am I saying this?
But a growing body of literature suggests that we mind-wander, we take our mind away from the task at hand, about 50 percent of our waking moments.
These might be small, little trips that we take away, private thoughts that we have.
And when this mind-wandering happens, it can be problematic.
Now I don't think there will be any dire consequences with you all sitting here today, but imagine a military leader missing four minutes of a military briefing, or a judge missing four minutes of testimony.
Or a surgeon or firefighter missing any time.
Well, part of the answer is that our mind is an exquisite time-traveling master.
If we think of the mind as the metaphor of the music player, we see this.
We can rewind the mind to the past to reflect on events that have already happened, right?
And we land in this mental time-travel mode of the past or the future very frequently.
And we land there often without our awareness, most times without our awareness, even if we want to be paying attention.
Think of just the last time you were trying to read a book, got to the bottom of the page with no idea what the words were saying.
This happens to us.
And when this happens, when we mind-wander without an awareness that we're doing it, there are consequences.
We miss critical information, sometimes.
And we have difficulty making decisions.
We don't just reflect on the past when we rewind, we end up being in the past ruminating, reliving or regretting events that have already happened.
Or under stress, we fast-forward the mind.
So at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, OK, mind-wandering's happening a lot.
Often, it happens without our awareness.
And under stress, it's even worse -- we mind-wander more powerfully and more often.
Is there anything we can possibly do about this?
And I'm happy to say the answer is yes.
From our work, we're learning that the opposite of a stressed and wandering mind is a mindful one.
Mindfulness has to do with paying attention to our present-moment experience with awareness.
And mindfulness is not just a concept.
It's more like practice, you have to embody this mindful mode of being to have any benefits.
And a lot of the work that we're doing, we're offering people programs that give our participants a suite of exercises that they should do daily in order to cultivate more moments of mindfulness in their life.
And for many of the groups that we work with, high-stress groups, like I said -- soldiers, medical professionals -- for them, as we know, mind-wandering can be really dire.
Why do we want to do this?
Well, we want to, for example, give it to students right around finals season.
Or we want to give the training to accountants during tax season.
Or soldiers and marines while they're deploying.
Why is that?
And those are also the moments in which we want their attention to be in peak shape so they can perform well.
So what we do in our research is we have them take a series of attention tests.
We track their attention at the beginning of some kind of high-stress interval, and then two months later, we track them again, and we want to see if there's a difference.
Is there any benefit of offering them mindfulness training?
Can we protect against the lapses in attention that might arise over high stress?
So here's what we find.
But if we offer mindfulness training, we can protect against this.
They stay stable, even though just like the other groups, they were experiencing high stress.
And perhaps even more impressive is that if people take our training programs over, let's say, eight weeks, and they fully commit to doing the daily mindfulness exercises that allow them to learn how to be in the present moment, well, they actually get better over time, even though they're in high stress.
And this last point is actually important to realize, because of what it suggests to us is that mindfulness exercises are very much like physical exercise: if you don't do it, you don't benefit.
But if you do engage in mindfulness practice, the more you do, the more you benefit.
And I want to just bring it back to Captain Jeff Davis.
As I mentioned to you at the beginning, his marines were involved in the very first project that we ever did, offering mindfulness training.
We had offered them the mindfulness training right before they were deployed to Iraq.
He said in many ways, he felt that the mindfulness training program we offered gave them a really important tool to protect against developing post-traumatic stress disorder and even allowing it to turn into post-traumatic growth.
To us, this was very compelling.
And it ended up that Captain Davis and I -- you know, this was about a decade ago, in 2008 -- we've kept in touch all these years.
And he himself has gone on to continue practicing mindfulness in a daily way.
He was promoted to major, he actually then ended up retiring from the Marine Corps.
He went on to get a divorce, to get remarried, to have a child, to get an MBA.
And through all of these challenges and transitions and joys of his life, he kept up with his mindfulness practice.
And as fate would have it, just a few months ago, Captain Davis suffered a massive heart attack, at the age of 46.
And he ended up calling me a few weeks ago.
I know that the doctors who worked on me, they saved my heart, but mindfulness saved my life.
And I was so relieved to hear that he was OK.
He went from having a really bad boss -- an attention system that nearly drove him off a bridge -- to one that was an exquisite leader and guide, and saved his life.
So I want to actually end by sharing my call to action to all of you.
And here it is.
Pay attention to your attention and incorporate mindfulness training as part of your daily wellness toolkit, in order to tame your own wandering mind and to allow your attention to be a trusted guide in your own life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Climate change is already a heavy topic, and it's getting heavier because we're understanding that we need to do more than we are.
We're understanding, in fact, that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions.
And it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face.
And when we have overwhelming problems in front of us, we tend to seek simple answers.
And I think this is what we've done with climate change.
We look at where the emissions are coming from -- they're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth, and we say, okay, well the problem is that they're coming out of fossil fuels that we're burning, so therefore, the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy.
And the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing.
However, it's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization.
By mid-century, we're going to have about eight billion -- perhaps more -- people living in cities or within a day's travel of one.
In order to provide the kind of energy that it would take for eight billion people living in cities that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global North live in today, we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy.
It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy.
So if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet, we need to look somewhere else for the solution.
The solution, in fact, may be closer to hand than we think, because all of those cities we're building are opportunities.
We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing -- I choose to turn this light switch on -- but really, enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in.
I won't show you very many graphs today, but if I can just focus on this one for a moment, it really tells us a lot of what we need to know -- which is, quite simply, that if you look, for example, at transportation, a major category of climate emissions, there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air.
And the correlation, of course, is that denser places tend to have lower emissions -- which isn't really all that difficult to figure out, if you think about it.
We go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place.
And we're basically using mobility to get the access we need.
But when we live in a denser community, suddenly what we find, of course, is that the things we need are close by.
And since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place, suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable.
And it is possible, of course, to increase the density of the communities around us.
Some places are doing this with new eco districts, developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods, which is nice work if you can get it, but most of the time, what we're talking about is, in fact, reweaving the urban fabric that we already have.
So we're talking about things like infill development: really sharp little changes to where we have buildings, where we're developing.
Increasingly, we're realizing that we don't even need to densify an entire city.
And that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot.
Now we may find that there are places that are really, really dense and still hold onto their cars, but the reality is that, by and large, what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect, where people simply stop driving as much, and increasingly, more and more people, if they're surrounded by places that make them feel at home, give up their cars altogether.
And this is a huge, huge energy savings, because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars.
When you can get rid of all of those because somebody doesn't use any of them really, you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent.
All around the world, we're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life.
People are saying that it's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood.
And when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we're starting to see, what you find is, in fact, even more access suffused into spaces.
This is a Mapnificent map that shows me, in this case, how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation.
This is Google Walking Maps.
I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway, and it told me to go via Guernsey.
(Laughter) But the technologies are getting better, and we're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation.
And as we just heard earlier, of course, we're also learning how to put information on dumb objects.
Part of what we're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption, which is to get a bunch of stuff, is not, in fact, how we really live best in dense environments.
My favorite example is a drill. Who here owns a drill, a home power drill?
The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime, depending on who you ask.
Our cities, I would put to you, are stockpiles of these surplus capacities.
Buildings are becoming bundles of services.
So we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on -- like heating, cooling etc. -- and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on.
We cool them with breezes. We heat them with sunshine.
These things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives.
And if we're going to really, truly become sustainable cities, we need to think a little differently.
This is one way to do it.
This is Vancouver's propaganda about how green a city they are.
Water is energy intensive.
Do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by, for example, connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration?
Do they allow for pollination, pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities?
Do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth, and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon -- take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities?
Because right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said, "by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP."
And if we have another eight billion or seven billion, or six billion, even, people, living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we're going to run out of future really fast.
But if we think differently, I think that, in fact, we can have cities that are not only zero emissions, but have unlimited possibilities as well.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
For as long as I can remember, I have felt a very deep connection to animals and to the ocean.
And at this age, my personal idol was Flipper the dolphin.
And when I first learned about endangered species, I was truly distressed to know that every day, animals were being wiped off the face of this Earth forever.
When these heartbreaking images of oiled birds finally began to emerge from the Gulf of Mexico last year during the horrific BP oil spill, a German biologist by the name of Silvia Gaus was quoted as saying, "We should just euthanize all oiled birds, because studies have shown that fewer than one percent of them survive after being released."
And I want to tell you why I feel so strongly about this.
On June 23, 2000, a ship named the Treasure sank off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, spilling 1,300 tons of fuel, which polluted the habitats of nearly half the entire world population of African penguins.
Now, the ship sank between Robben Island to the south, and Dassen Island to the north -- two of the penguins' main breeding islands.
And exactly six years and three days earlier, on June 20, 1994, a ship named the Apollo Sea sank near Dassen Island, oiling 10,000 penguins, half of which died.
Now when the Treasure sank in 2000, it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the African penguin, which at the time, was listed as a threatened species.
And soon, nearly 20,000 penguins were covered with this toxic oil.
The local seabird rescue center, named SANCCOB, immediately launched a massive rescue operation, and this soon would become the largest animal rescue ever undertaken.
At the time, I was working down the street.
I was a penguin aquarist at the New England Aquarium.
And exactly 11 years ago yesterday, the phone rang in the penguin office.
We have thousands of oiled penguins and thousands of willing but completely inexperienced volunteers.
And we need penguin experts to come train and supervise them."
So two days later, I was on a plane headed for Cape Town with a team of penguin specialists.
And the scene inside of this building was devastating and surreal.
In fact, many people compared it to a war zone.
Last week, a 10-year-old girl asked me: "What did it feel like when you first walked into that building and saw so many oiled penguins?"
And this is what happened.
I was instantly transported back to that moment in time.
Penguins are very vocal birds and really, really noisy, so I expected to walk into this building and be met with this cacophony of honking and braying and squawking.
But instead, when we stepped through those doors and into the building, it was eerily silent.
So it was very clear these were stressed, sick, traumatized birds.
Up to 1,000 people a day came to the rescue center.
Eventually, over the course of this rescue, more than 12-and-a-half thousand volunteers came from all over the world to Cape Town, to help save these birds.
Yet they were.
So for the few of us that were there in a professional capacity, this extraordinary volunteer response to this animal crisis was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring.
So the day after we arrived, two of us from the aquarium were put in charge of room two.
Room two had more than 4,000 oiled penguins in it.
Now, mind you -- three days earlier, we had 60 penguins under our care, so we were definitely overwhelmed and just a bit terrified -- at least I was.
Personally, I really didn't know if I was capable of handling such a monstrous task.
And collectively, we really didn't know if we could pull this off.
So would it be humanly possible to save this many oiled penguins?
We just did not know.
But what gave us hope were these incredibly dedicated and brave volunteers, three of whom here are force-feeding penguins.
You may notice they're wearing very thick gloves.
And what you should know about African penguins is that they have razor-sharp beaks.
And before long, our bodies were covered head to toe with these nasty wounds inflicted by the terrified penguins.
Now the day after we arrived, a new crisis began to unfold.
The oil slick was now moving north towards Dassen Island, and the rescuers despaired, because they knew if the oil hit, it would not be possible to rescue any more oiled birds.
And there really were no good solutions.
(Laughter) So three of those penguins -- Peter, Pamela and Percy -- wore satellite tags, and the researchers crossed their fingers and hoped that by the time they got back home, the oil would be cleaned up from their islands.
And luckily, the day they arrived, it was.
So it had been a huge gamble, but it had paid off.
And so they know now that they can use this strategy in future oil spills.
So in wildlife rescue as in life, we learn from each previous experience, and we learn from both our successes and our failures.
And the main thing learned during the Apollo Sea rescue in '94 was that most of those penguins had died due to the unwitting use of poorly ventilated transport boxes and trucks, because they just had not been prepared to deal with so many oiled penguins at once.
So in these six years between these two oil spills, they've built thousands of these well-ventilated boxes.
So this alone was a huge victory.
Something else learned during the Apollo rescue was how to train the penguins to take fish freely from their hands, using these training boxes.
And we used this technique again during the Treasure rescue.
But an interesting thing was noted during the training process.
The first penguins to make that transition to free feeding were the ones that had a metal band on their wing from the Apollo Sea spill six years earlier.
So penguins learn from previous experience, too.
It would take two people at least an hour just to clean one penguin.
When you clean a penguin, you first have to spray it with a degreaser.
And this brings me to my favorite story from the Treasure rescue.
About a year prior to this oil spill, a 17-year-old student had invented a degreaser.
And they'd been using it at SANCCOB with great success, so they began using it during the Treasure rescue.
So in a panic, Estelle from SANCCOB called the student and said, "Please, you have to make more!"
So he raced to the lab and made enough to clean the rest of the birds.
So I just think it is the coolest thing that a teenager invented a product that helped save the lives of thousands of animals.
So what happened to those 20,000 oiled penguins?
Should we routinely euthanize all oiled birds because most of them are going to die anyway?
Well, she could not be more wrong.
After half a million hours of grueling volunteer labor, more than 90 percent of those oiled penguins were successfully returned to the wild.
And we know from follow-up studies that they have lived just as long as never-oiled penguins, and bred nearly as successfully.
And in addition, about 3,000 penguin chicks were rescued and hand raised.
And again, we know from long-term monitoring that more of these hand-raised chicks survive to adulthood and breeding age than do parent-raised chicks.
Armed with this knowledge, SANCCOB has a chick-bolstering project, and every year, they rescue and raise abandoned chicks, and they have a very impressive, 80 percent success rate.
This is critically important, because one year ago, the African penguin was declared endangered.
And they could be extinct in less than 10 years if we don't do something now to protect them.
So what did I learn from this intense and unforgettable experience?
And I learned that one person can make a huge difference.
Just look at that 17-year-old.
And when we come together and work as one, we can achieve extraordinary things.
And truly, to be a part of something so much larger than yourself is the most rewarding experience you can possibly have.
So I'd like to leave you with one final thought and a challenge, if you will.
My mission as The Penguin Lady is to raise awareness and funding to protect penguins.
But why should any of you care about penguins?
And we ultimately will be affected, because, as Sylvia Earle says, "The oceans are our life-support system."
And the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming.
And these are two things that each one of us actually has the power to do something about.
So if we each do our part, together, we can make a difference, and we can help keep penguins from going extinct.
Humans have always been the greatest threat to penguins, but we are now their only hope.
(Applause)
I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world.
I couldn't understand the starvation, the destruction, the killing of innocent people.
And when I was 12, I became an actor.
I was bottom of the class. I haven't got any qualifications.
I was told I was dyslexic.
And at that point, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist, and he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward.
And then I thought, well maybe I could do something.
Maybe I can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference.
Maybe there's a little change I can get involved in.
So I started thinking about peace, and I was obviously, as I said to you, very much moved by these images, trying to make sense of that.
Because it's obviously incredibly frightening.
But I realized that, having been messing around with structure as an actor, that a series of sound bites in itself wasn't enough, that there needed to be a mountain to climb, there needed to be a journey that I had to take.
Is the destruction of the world inevitable? Should I have children?
So I was thinking about peace, and then I was thinking, well where's the starting point for peace?
There was no starting point for peace.
That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces -- if we did it just for a day.
So obviously we didn't have any money.
And we started writing letters to everybody.
And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad's favorite number.
He was a prisoner of war.
He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki.
It poisoned his blood. He died when I was 11.
So he was like my hero.
And the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left, 23 came back, two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground.
And that's why we wanted it to be the 21st of September as the date of peace.
So we began this journey, and we launched it in 1999.
And we wrote to heads of state, their ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, NGOs, faiths, various organizations -- literally wrote to everybody.
And I remember the first letter.
One of the first letters was from the Dalai Lama.
A letter came through from the Dalai Lama saying, "This is an amazing thing. Come and see me.
Could you give me a flight? Because we're going to go see him."
And of course, we went and saw him and it was amazing.
And then Dr. Oscar Arias came forward.
And actually, let me go back to that slide, because when we launched it in 1999 -- this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence -- we invited thousands of people.
Well not thousands -- hundreds of people, lots of people -- all the press, because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day, a peace day.
There were 114 people there -- they were mostly my friends and family.
It wasn't about the end result.
They used to say the pen is mightier than the sword. I think the camera is.
And just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually.
So anyway, we began the journey.
And here you see people like Mary Robinson, I went to see in Geneva.
I'm cutting my hair, it's getting short and long, because every time I saw Kofi Annan, I was so worried that he thought I was a hippie that I cut it, and that was kind of what was going on.
(Laughter) Yeah, I'm not worried about it now.
So Mary Robinson, she said to me, "Listen, this is an idea whose time has come. This must be created."
Kofi Annan said, "This will be beneficial to my troops on the ground."
The OAU at the time, led by Salim Ahmed Salim, said, "I must get the African countries involved."
I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks, and so on and so on and so on -- while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense.
76 countries in the last 12 years, I've visited.
And I've always spoken to women and children wherever I've gone.
I've recorded 44,000 young people.
I've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts.
I'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry, their art, their literature, their music, their sport, whatever it might be.
And we were listening to everybody.
and working with NGOs and building this case.
If this is the only film that I ever make, I'm going to document until this becomes a reality."
Because we've got to stop, we've got to do something where we unite -- separate from all the politics and religion that, as a young person, is confusing me.
I don't know how to get involved in that process.
And then on the seventh of September, I was invited to New York.
The Costa Rican government and the British government had put forward to the United Nations General Assembly, with 54 co-sponsors, the idea of the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September, as a fixed calendar date, and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world.
(Applause) Yeah, but there were hundreds of individuals, obviously, who made that a reality.
And thank you to all of them.
That was an incredible moment.
And as I mentioned, when it started, we were at the Globe, and there was no press.
And now I was thinking, "Well, the press it really going to hear this story."
And suddenly, we started to institutionalize this day.
Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference.
And it was 8:00 AM when I stood there.
And I was waiting for him to come down, and I knew that he was on his way.
And obviously he never came down. The statement was never made.
And it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives, there and then subsequently all over the world.
It never happened.
And we have to make this day work.
But we have to continue this journey, and we have to tell people, and we have to prove it can work."
And I left New York freaked, but actually empowered.
And I felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did, then maybe we wouldn't see things like that.
I remember putting that film out and going to cynics.
Children can lead their projects.
They can unite. They can come together. If people would stop, lives will be saved."
That's what I'd heard.
And so I went back to the United Nations.
I decided that I'd continue filming and make another movie.
And I went back to the U.N. for another couple of years.
And after lots and lots of meetings obviously, I'm delighted that this man, Ahmad Fawzi, one of my heroes and mentors really, he managed to get UNICEF involved.
And UNICEF, God bless them, they said, "Okay, we'll have a go."
And then UNAMA became involved in Afghanistan.
It was historical. Could it work in Afghanistan with UNAMA and WHO and civil society, etc., etc., etc.?
And I was getting it all on film and I was recording it, and I was thinking, "This is it. This is the possibility of it maybe working.
But even if it doesn't, at least the door is open and there's a chance."
And so I went back to London, and I went and saw this chap, Jude Law.
And I saw him because he was an actor, I was an actor, I had a connection to him, because we needed to get to the press, we needed this attraction, we needed the media to be involved.
Because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there'd be more -- when we got into certain areas, maybe there would be more people interested.
I won't go into that.
So Jude said, "Okay, I'll do some statements for you."
While I was filming these statements, he said to me, "Where are you going next?"
I said, "I'm going to go to Afghanistan." He said, "Really?"
And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest.
So I said to him, "Do you want to come with me?
It'd be really interesting if you came.
I think there's a number of pillars to success.
One is you've got to have a great idea.
So he said yes, and we found ourselves in Afghanistan.
It was a really incredible thing that when we landed there, I was talking to various people, and they were saying to me, "You've got to get everybody involved here.
I mean, we basically sat down with everybody -- in and out of schools with ministers of education, holding these press conferences, which of course, now were loaded with press, everybody was there.
This amazing woman, Fatima Gailani, was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the Russians.
And she was really crucial in getting the message in.
We had to wait now and see what happened.
And I got home, and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban.
We see it as a window of opportunity.
And days later, 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping.
(Applause) And like the General Assembly, obviously the most wonderful, wonderful moment.
They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it, etc., etc. -- and they made it real.
And we wanted to go back and show them the film and say, "Look, you guys made this possible. And thank you very much."
Obviously it was shown, and it was amazing.
And then that year, that year, 2008, this ISAF statement from Kabul, Afghanistan, September 17th: "General Stanley McChrystal, commander of international security assistance forces in Afghanistan, announced today ISAF will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of September."
They were saying they would stop.
And that completely blew my mind almost more than anything.
And I remember being stuck in New York, this time because of the volcano, which was obviously much less harmful.
And I kept thinking about this 70 percent.
And that made me think that, if we can get 70 percent in Afghanistan, then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere.
We have to go for a global truce.
That's exactly what we must do.
And on the 21st of September this year, we're going to launch that campaign at the O2 Arena to go for that process, to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities.
And it's in the six official languages of the United Nations.
And you can see the education box there.
We've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce.
Linking up with the Olympics -- I went and saw Seb Coe. I said, "London 2012 is about truce.
Why don't we all team up? Why don't we bring truce to life?
We'll make a new film about this process.
On the Day of Peace, there's thousands of football matches all played, from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be.
We have to work together.
I was with Brahimi, Ambassador Brahimi.
And I sat with him a few weeks ago.
And I said to him, "Mr. Brahimi, is this nuts, going for a global truce?
Is this possible? Is it really possible that we could do this?"
He said, "It's absolutely possible."
I said, "What would you do?
It's all about you and me.
It's all about partnerships.
It's about your constituencies; it's about your businesses.
Because together, by working together, I seriously think we can start to change things.
And there's a wonderful man sitting in this audience, and I don't know where he is, who said to me a few days ago -- because I did a little rehearsal -- and he said, "I've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares, and one of them is white."
And it then made me think about a glass of water, which is clear.
Thank you TED. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thanks a lot.
(Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you.
The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this.
And mostly, I want to persuade you that we have to do better if we're going to continue the project of civilization in America.
By the way, this doesn't help.
Nobody's having a better day down here because of that.
There are a lot of ways you can describe this.
You know, I like to call it "the national automobile slum."
You can call it suburban sprawl.
I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
You can call it a technosis externality clusterfuck.
And it's a tremendous problem for us.
The outstanding -- the salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not worth caring about.
A sense of place: your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.
The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good.
And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.
And your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design.
And consequently, we can see the result all around us.
The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture.
You know, this happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town.
And remember, to create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space.
So how is that being accomplished here?
If you stand on the apron of the Wal-Mart over here and try to look at the Target store over here, you can't see it because of the curvature of the Earth. (Laughter) That's nature's way of telling you that you're doing a poor job of defining space.
We have about, you know, 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today.
I hope it's not the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store because that's not good enough for Americans to be spilling their blood for. (Applause) We need better places in this country.
Public space. This is a good public space.
It has something that is terribly important -- it has what's called an active and permeable membrane around the edge.
That's a fancy way of saying it's got shops, bars, bistros, destinations -- things go in and out of it. It's permeable.
The beer goes in and out, the waitresses go in and out, and that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out in.
You know, in these places in other cultures, people just go there voluntarily because they like them.
We don't have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here. (Laughter) You know, you don't have to have a Kwanzaa festival.
People just go because it's pleasurable to be there.
But this is how we do it in the United States.
Probably the most significant public space failure in America, designed by the leading architects of the day, Harry Cobb and I.M. Pei: Boston City Hall Plaza.
A public place so dismal that the winos don't even want to go there. (Laughter) And we can't fix it because I.M. Pei's still alive, and every year Harvard and M.I.T. have a joint committee to repair it.
And every year they fail to because they don't want to hurt I.M. Pei's feelings.
This is the other side of the building.
This was the winner of an international design award in, I think, 1966, something like that.
It wasn't Pei and Cobb, another firm designed this, but there's not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel OK about going down this block.
This is the back of Boston City Hall, the most important, you know, significant civic building in Albany -- excuse me -- in Boston.
This, in fact, would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building, because then we'd honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us.
You know, that it's a despotic building; it wants us to feel like termites. (Laughter) This is it on a smaller scale: the back of the civic center in my town, Saratoga Springs, New York.
By the way, when I showed this slide to a group of Kiwanians in my town, they all rose in indignation from their creamed chicken, (Laughter) and they shouted at me and said, "It was raining that day when you took that picture!"
Because this was perceived to be a weather problem. (Laughter) You know, this is a building designed like a DVD player. (Laughter) Audio jack, power supply -- and look, you know these things are important architectural jobs for firms, right?
You know, we hire firms to design these things.
You know, eight hours before deadline, four architects trying to get this building in on time, right?
And they're sitting there at the long boardroom table with all the drawings, and the renderings, and all the Chinese food caskets are lying on the table, and -- I mean, what was the conversation that was going on there? (Laughter) Because you know what the last word was, what the last sentence was of that meeting.
It was: "Fuck it." (Laughter) (Applause) That -- that is the message of this form of architecture.
The pattern of Main Street USA -- in fact, this pattern of building downtown blocks, all over the world, is fairly universal.
Other activities are allowed to occur upstairs, you know, apartments, offices, and so on.
If you go out to the corner right at the main intersection right in front of this conference center, you'll see an intersection with four blank walls on every corner.
It's really incredible.
Anyway, this is how you compose and assemble a downtown business building, and this is what happened when in Glens Falls, New York, when we tried to do it again, where it was missing, right?
And that's how we do it.
And in fact, the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings.
Not just flower beds, not just cartoons of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
We have to do good buildings.
And that's it. Those are the four jobs of the street trees.
You know, one of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural.
They're not the same thing.
And we're not going to cure the problems of the urban by dragging the country into the city, which is what a lot of us are trying to do all the time.
Here you see it on a small scale -- the mothership has landed, R2-D2 and C-3PO have stepped out to test the bark mulch to see if they can inhabit this planet. (Laughter) A lot of this comes from the fact that the industrial city in America was such a trauma that we developed this tremendous aversion for the whole idea of the city, city life, and everything connected with it.
And that starts to be delivered in the form of the railroad suburb: the country villa along the railroad line, which allows people to enjoy the amenity of the city, but to return to the countryside every night.
And believe me, there were no Wal-Marts or convenience stores out there then, so it really was a form of country living.
And that's the great non-articulated agony of suburbia and one of the reasons that it lends itself to ridicule.
And these are typically the kind of dwellings we find there, you know.
Basically, a house with nothing on the side because this house wants to state, emphatically, "I'm a little cabin in the woods. There's nothing on either side of me.
So you have this one last facade of the house, the front, which is really a cartoon of a facade of a house.
Because -- notice the porch here.
Unless the people that live here are Munchkins, nobody's going to be using that.
This is really, in fact, a television broadcasting a show 24/7 called "We're Normal."
We're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal.
Please respect us, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal.
But we know what's going on in these houses, you know.
We know that little Skippy is loading his Uzi down here, getting ready for homeroom. (Laughter) We know that Heather, his sister Heather, 14 years old, is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit.
Because these places, these habitats, are inducing immense amounts of anxiety and depression in children, and they don't have a lot of experience with medication.
These are the schools we are sending them to: The Hannibal Lecter Central School, Las Vegas, Nevada.
This is a real school!
You know, but there's obviously a notion that if you let the inmates of this thing out, that they would snatch a motorist off the street and eat his liver.
So every effort is made to keep them within the building.
Notice that nature is present. (Laughter) We're going to have to change this behavior whether we like it or not.
We are entering an epochal period of change in the world, and -- certainly in America -- the period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era.
Forget it. It's not going to happen.
We're going to have -- (Applause) -- we're going to have to live closer to where we work.
We're going have to grow more food closer to where we live.
The age of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad is coming to an end.
We gotta do better than that!
And we should have started two days before yesterday.
The dead malls: what are we going to do with them?
Some of them we're going to fix, though.
And we're going to fix them by imposing back on them street and block systems and returning to the building lot as the normal increment of development.
And if we're lucky, the result will be revivified town centers and neighborhood centers in our existing towns and cities.
And by the way, our towns and cities are where they are, and grew where they were because they occupy all the important sites.
We are sleepwalking into the future.
We're not ready for what's coming at us.
Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally.
Be prepared to be good neighbors.
Consumers are different than citizens.
And as long as you're using that word consumer in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having.
So thank you very much.
Planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling, but whose streets we can't walk.
By studying those twinkling lights though, we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life.
In this image of the Tokyo skyline, I've hidden data from the newest planet-hunting space telescope on the block, the Kepler Mission.
Can you see it?
This is just a tiny part of the sky the Kepler stares at, where it searches for planets by measuring the light from over 150,000 stars, all at once, every half hour, and very precisely.
And what we're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us.
In just over two years of operations, we've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars.
To give you some perspective, in the previous two decades of searching, we had only known about 400 prior to Kepler.
When we see these little dips in the light, we can determine a number of things.
For one thing, we can determine that there's a planet there, but also how big that planet is and how far it is away from its parent star.
That distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall.
And that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it's a little like you or I sitting around a campfire: You want to be close enough to the campfire so that you're warm, but not so close that you're too toasty and you get burned.
However, there's more to know about your parent star than just how much light you receive overall.
And I'll tell you why.
This is our star. This is our Sun.
You'll notice that it looks pretty much like the iconic yellow ball -- that Sun that we all draw when we're children.
But you'll notice something else, and that's that the face of the Sun has freckles.
These freckles are called sunspots, and they are just one of the manifestations of the Sun's magnetic field.
They also cause the light from the star to vary.
And we can measure this very, very precisely with Kepler and trace their effects.
However, these are just the tip of the iceberg.
If we had UV eyes or X-ray eyes, we would really see the dynamic and dramatic effects of our Sun's magnetic activity -- the kind of thing that happens on other stars as well.
Just think, even when it's cloudy outside, these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time.
So when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable, whether it might be amenable to life, we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is, but we want to know about its space weather -- this high-energy radiation, the UV and the X-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation.
And so, we can't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system.
But what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe.
Kepler won't find a planet around every single star it looks at.
But really, every measurement it makes is precious, because it's teaching us about the relationship between stars and planets, and how it's really the starlight that sets the stage for the formation of life in the universe.
While it's Kepler the telescope, the instrument that stares, it's we, life, who are searching.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So the type of magic I like, and I'm a magician, is magic that uses technology to create illusions.
It's an application that I think will be useful for artists -- multimedia artists in particular.
It synchronizes videos across multiple screens of mobile devices.
I borrowed these three iPods from people here in the audience to show you what I mean.
(Music) One of my favorite magicians is Karl Germain.
He had this wonderful trick where a rosebush would bloom right in front of your eyes.
(Recording) Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the creation of life.
(Applause) (Music) Marco Tempest: When asked about deception, he said this: Announcer: Magic is the only honest profession.
MT: I like to think of myself as an honest magician.
I use a lot of tricks, which means that sometimes I have to lie to you.
But people lie every day.
Phone: Hey, where are you?
MT: Stuck in traffic. I'll be there soon.
Left: You were great.
MT: Deception, it's a fundamental part of life.
Now polls show that men tell twice as many lies as women -- assuming the women they asked told the truth.
The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception.
Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance.
Let's play a game.
Three cards, three chances.
Announcer: One five will get you 10, 10 will get you 20.
Sorry. You lose.
That's when we convince ourselves that a lie is the truth.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart.
Compulsive gamblers are experts at self-deception.
(Slot machine) They believe they can win.
The brain is very good at forgetting.
Bad experiences are quickly forgotten.
Bad experiences quickly disappear.
Which is why in this vast and lonely cosmos, we are so wonderfully optimistic.
Our self-deception becomes a positive illusion -- why movies are able to take us onto extraordinary adventures; why we believe Romeo when he says he loves Juliet; and why single notes of music, when played together, become a sonata and conjure up meaning.
Its composer, called Debussy, said that art was the greatest deception of all.
Art is a deception that creates real emotions -- a lie that creates a truth.
And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.
[MAGIC] (Music fades slowly) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So, I was in the hospital for a long time.
And a few years after I left, I went back, and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me -- said, "Dan, I have a fantastic new treatment for you."
I was very excited. I walked with him to his office.
He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric.
It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave.
Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life -- because I had to keep the width the same.
When I got back to his office, I wasn't really sure.
So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots -- not very informative.
"Oh, don't worry about it," he said.
But I was still concerned, so I said, "You know what, I'm not going to do it."
And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life.
(Laughter) And he said, "Dan, what's wrong with you?
Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently?"
None of those happened.
But I decided not to have this treatment.
And I went to his deputy and asked him, "What was going on?
Where was this guilt trip coming from?"
But let me give you a different perspective on the same story.
A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab.
And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another.
There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly.
And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test.
He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample.
And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy.
But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, "What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition?
Would we have thrown him out then?"
We probably wouldn't have looked at the data at all, and if we did look at the data, we'd probably have said, "Fantastic! What a smart guy who is performing this low," because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving us even stronger statistical results than we could.
But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me.
They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased.
And I'm sure that it's something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens.
Maybe we don't recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens.
And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account.
When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was helping science.
I wasn't doing something bad.
In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move along.
I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions.
And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances.
I do want to leave you with one positive thought.
I mean, this is all very depressing, right -- people have conflicts of interest, we don't see it, and so on.
The positive perspective, I think, of all of this is that, if we do understand when we go wrong, if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail, we can actually hope to fix things.
And that, I think, is the hope. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
What I want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans.
But before doing that, I just briefly want to remind you about what you already know: that our genomes, our genetic material, are stored in almost all cells in our bodies in chromosomes in the form of DNA, which is this famous double-helical molecule.
And the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters A, T, C and G.
And the information is there twice -- one on each strand -- which is important, because when new cells are formed, these strands come apart, new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process.
And we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare DNA sequences among us here in the room, for example.
If we compare my genome to the genome of you, approximately every 1,200, 1,300 letters will differ between us.
And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time.
So if we add in a chimpanzee here, we will see more differences.
Approximately one letter in a hundred will differ from a chimpanzee.
And if you're then interested in the history of a piece of DNA, or the whole genome, you can reconstruct the history of the DNA with those differences you observe.
And generally we depict our ideas about this history in the form of trees like this.
In this case, it's very simple.
The two human DNA sequences go back to a common ancestor quite recently.
And because these mutations happen approximately as a function of time, you can transform these differences to estimates of time, where the two humans, typically, will share a common ancestor about half a million years ago, and with the chimpanzees, it will be in the order of five million years ago.
So we can now, in a matter of hours, determine a whole human genome.
Each of us, of course, contains two human genomes -- one from our mothers and one from our fathers.
And we will find that the two genomes in me, or one genome of mine we want to use, will have about three million differences in the order of that.
And what you can then also begin to do is to say, "How are these genetic differences distributed across the world?"
And if you do that, you find a certain amount of genetic variation in Africa.
And if you look outside Africa, you actually find less genetic variation.
This is surprising, of course, because in the order of six to eight times fewer people live in Africa than outside Africa.
Yet the people inside Africa have more genetic variation.
Moreover, almost all these genetic variants we see outside Africa have closely related DNA sequences that you find inside Africa.
But if you look in Africa, there is a component of the genetic variation that has no close relatives outside.
So a model to explain this is that a part of the African variation, but not all of it, [has] gone out and colonized the rest of the world.
And together with the methods to date these genetic differences, this has led to the insight that modern humans -- humans that are essentially indistinguishable from you and me -- evolved in Africa, quite recently, between 100 and 200,000 years ago.
And later, between 100 and 50,000 years ago or so, went out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world.
So what I often like to say is that, from a genomic perspective, we are all Africans.
We either live inside Africa today, or in quite recent exile.
Another consequence of this recent origin of modern humans is that genetic variants are generally distributed widely in the world, in many places, and they tend to vary as gradients, from a bird's-eye perspective at least.
And since there are many genetic variants, and they have different such gradients, this means that if we determine a DNA sequence -- a genome from one individual -- we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from, provided that its parents or grandparents haven't moved around too much.
But does this then mean, as many people tend to think, that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people -- on different continents, for example?
There is, for example, a project that's underway to sequence a thousand individuals -- their genomes -- from different parts of the world.
They've sequenced 185 Africans from two populations in Africa.
And we can begin to say how much variance do we find, how many letters that vary in at least one of those individual sequences.
And it's a lot: 38 million variable positions.
But we can then ask: Are there any absolute differences between Africans and non-Africans?
Perhaps the biggest difference most of us would imagine existed.
And with absolute difference -- and I mean a difference where people inside Africa at a certain position, where all individuals -- 100 percent -- have one letter, and everybody outside Africa has another letter.
And the answer to that, among those millions of differences, is that there is not a single such position.
Maybe a single individual is misclassified or so.
So we can relax the criterion a bit and say: How many positions do we find where 95 percent of people in Africa have one variant, 95 percent another variant, and the number of that is 12.
So this is very surprising.
This may be surprising, because we can, of course, look at these people and quite easily say where they or their ancestors came from.
There is another thing with those traits that we so easily observe in each other that I think is worthwhile to consider, and that is that, in a very literal sense, they're really on the surface of our bodies.
They are what we just said -- facial features, hair structure, skin color.
There are also a number of features that vary between continents like that that have to do with how we metabolize food that we ingest, or that have to do with how our immune systems deal with microbes that try to invade our bodies.
But so those are all parts of our bodies where we very directly interact with our environment, in a direct confrontation, if you like.
It's easy to imagine how particularly those parts of our bodies were quickly influenced by selection from the environment and shifted frequencies of genes that are involved in them.
But if we look on other parts of our bodies where we don't directly interact with the environment -- our kidneys, our livers, our hearts -- there is no way to say, by just looking at these organs, where in the world they would come from.
So there's another interesting thing that comes from this realization that humans have a recent common origin in Africa, and that is that when those humans emerged around 100,000 years ago or so, they were not alone on the planet.
There were other forms of humans around, most famously perhaps, Neanderthals -- these robust forms of humans, compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right -- that existed in Western Asia and Europe since several hundreds of thousands of years.
So an interesting question is, what happened when we met?
What happened to the Neanderthals?
And to begin to answer such questions, my research group -- since over 25 years now -- works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old.
So this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the DNA, how you convert it to a form you can sequence.
You have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with DNA from yourself.
And this then, in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly, allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome, so that any one of you can now look on the Internet, on the Neanderthal genome, or at least on the 55 percent of it that we've been able to reconstruct so far.
And you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today.
And one question that you may then want to ask is, what happened when we met?
And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today.
So we then look to do this with pairs of individuals, starting with two Africans, looking at the two African genomes, finding places where they differ from each other, and in each case ask: What is a Neanderthal like?
Does it match one African or the other African?
We would expect there to be no difference, because Neanderthals were never in Africa.
They should be equal, have no reason to be closer to one African than another African.
Statistically speaking, there is no difference in how often the Neanderthal matches one African or the other.
But this is different if we now look at the European individual and an African.
The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African, the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often.
This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China.
So the model we've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago, they met Neanderthals.
Presumably, they did so first in the Middle East, where there were Neanderthals living.
If they then mixed with each other there, then those modern humans that became the ancestors of everyone outside Africa carried with them this Neanderthal component in their genome to the rest of the world.
So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.
So having now a Neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the DNA, we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world.
And the first place we've done that is in Southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains at a place called Denisova, a cave site in this mountain here, where archeologists in 2008 found a tiny little piece of bone -- this is a copy of it -- that they realized came from the last phalanx of a little finger of a pinky of a human.
And it was well enough preserved so we could determine the DNA from this individual, even to a greater extent than for the Neanderthals actually, and start relating it to the Neanderthal genome and to people today.
And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago.
And further back, 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans.
So this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with Neanderthals, but far back and then have a long independent history.
We call this group of humans, that we then described for the first time from this tiny, tiny little piece of bone, the Denisovans, after this place where they were first described.
So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals: Did they mix with ancestors of present day people?
If we ask that question, and compare the Denisovan genome to people around the world, we surprisingly find no evidence of Denisovan DNA in any people living even close to Siberia today.
But we do find it in Papua New Guinea and in other islands in Melanesia and the Pacific.
So this presumably means that these Denisovans had been more widespread in the past, since we don't think that the ancestors of Melanesians were ever in Siberia.
So from studying these genomes of extinct humans, we're beginning to arrive at a picture of what the world looked like when modern humans started coming out of Africa.
In the West, there were Neanderthals; in the East, there were Denisovans -- maybe other forms of humans too that we've not yet described.
We don't know quite where the borders between these people were, but we know that in Southern Siberia, there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past.
Then modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa, came out of Africa, presumably in the Middle East.
They meet Neanderthals, mix with them, continue to spread over the world, and somewhere in Southeast Asia, they meet Denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the Pacific.
And then these earlier forms of humans disappear, but they live on a little bit today in some of us -- in that people outside of Africa have two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, and people in Melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the Denisovans.
Presumably, modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa.
They spread across Africa also, of course, and there were older, earlier forms of humans there.
And since we mixed elsewhere, I'm pretty sure that one day, when we will perhaps have a genome of also these earlier forms in Africa, we will find that they have also mixed with early modern humans in Africa.
So to sum up, what have we learned from studying genomes of present day humans and extinct humans?
We learn perhaps many things, but one thing that I find sort of important to mention is that I think the lesson is that we have always mixed.
We mixed with these earlier forms of humans, wherever we met them, and we mixed with each other ever since.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
I'm a filmmaker.
For the last 8 years, I have dedicated my life to documenting the work of Israelis and Palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means.
When I travel with my work across Europe and the United States, one question always comes up: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?
Why aren't Palestinians using nonviolent resistance?
These leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region.
This divide between what's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we don't have yet a Palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful.
So I'm here today to talk about the power of attention, the power of your attention, and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere -- but today, my case study is going to be Palestine.
I believe that what's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for Palestinians to start adopting nonviolence, but for us to start paying attention to those who already are.
Allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called Budrus.
About seven years ago, they faced extinction, because Israel announced it would build a separation barrier, and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village.
They would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded, so they would lose free access to the rest of the West Bank.
Through inspired local leadership, they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening.
Let me show you some brief clips, so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground.
(Music) Palestinian Woman: We were told the wall would separate Palestine from Israel.
Here in Budrus, we realized the wall would steal our land.
Israeli Man: The fence has, in fact, created a solution to terror.
Man: Today you're invited to a peaceful march.
You are joined by dozens of your Israeli brothers and sisters.
Israeli Activist: Nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition.
Woman: We saw the men trying to push the soldiers, but none of them could do that.
But I think the girls could do it.
Fatah Party Member: We must empty our minds of traditional thinking.
Hamas Party Member: We were in complete harmony, and we wanted to spread it to all of Palestine.
Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front!
News Anchor: The clashes over the fence continue.
Reporter: Israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd.
They were allowed to use any force necessary.
(Gunshots) Man: These are live bullets.
Israeli Activist: I was sure we were all going to die.
Israeli Soldier: A nonviolent protest is not going to stop the [unclear].
Protester: This is a peaceful march.
Chanting: We can do it! We can do it!
Julia Bacha: When I first heard about the story of Budrus, I was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago, in 2003.
What was even more surprising was the fact that Budrus was successful.
The residents, after 10 months of peaceful resistance, convinced the Israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
The resistance in Budrus has since spread to villages across the West Bank and to Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
Yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories.
This silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow, or even survive, in Palestine.
Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause.
If violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the Palestinian issue, it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight.
The tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior, since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it.
Parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children.
In fact, the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced, depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention.
I believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the Middle East and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today.
In the course of taking my film to villages in the West Bank, in Gaza and in East Jerusalem, I have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation.
They had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention.
A week later, they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date.
The organizers say that the villagers, upon seeing the story of Budrus documented in a film, felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing, that people cared.
So they kept on going.
On the Israeli side, there is a new peace movement called Solidariot, which means solidarity in Hebrew.
The leaders of this movement have been using Budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools.
They report that Israelis who had never been active before, upon seeing the film, understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities.
I believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we don't pay attention to these efforts, they are invisible, and it's as if they never happened.
If they multiply, their influence will grow in the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation.
These leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like Budrus.
Let's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling, replicating and repairing themselves.
So I'm going to show you what I believe is the current state of manufacturing, and then compare that to some natural systems.
So in the current state of manufacturing, we have skyscrapers -- two and a half years [of assembly time], 500,000 to a million parts, fairly complex, new, exciting technologies in steel, concrete, glass.
We have exciting machines that can take us into space -- five years [of assembly time], 2.5 million parts.
But on the other side, if you look at the natural systems, we have proteins that have two million types, can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds, or DNA with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour.
So there's all of this complexity in our natural systems, but they're extremely efficient, far more efficient than anything we can build, far more complex than anything we can build.
They're far more efficient in terms of energy.
So there's something super interesting about natural systems.
And if we can translate that into our built environment, then there's some exciting potential for the way that we build things.
And we need to decode that into simple sequences -- basically the DNA of how our buildings work.
Then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence and use that to fold up, or reconfigure.
So I'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and I at MIT are working on to achieve this self-assembling future.
The first two are the MacroBot and DeciBot.
So these projects are large-scale reconfigurable robots -- 8 ft., 12 ft. long proteins.
You decode what you want to fold up into, into a sequence of angles -- so negative 120, negative 120, 0, 0, 120, negative 120 -- something like that; so a sequence of angles, or turns, and you send that sequence through the string.
Each unit takes its message -- so negative 120 -- it rotates to that, checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor.
So these are the brilliant scientists, engineers, designers that worked on this project.
I mean, thousands of dollars, lots of man hours made to make this eight-foot robot.
Can we really scale this up? Can we really embed robotics into every part?
It basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing, the digital logic gate, directly into your parts.
So this is a NAND gate.
You have one tetrahedron which is the gate that's going to do your computing, and you have two input tetrahedrons.
One of them is the input from the user, as you're building your bricks.
And then it gives you an output in 3D space.
So what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do.
And now it starts moving in three-dimensional space -- so up or down.
So on the left-hand side, [1,1] input equals 0 output, which goes down.
On the right-hand side, [0,0] input is a 1 output, which goes up.
And so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build.
In this case I call it self-guided replication, because your structure contains the exact blueprints.
If you have errors, you can replace a part.
So it takes the reconfigurability and programmability and makes it a completely passive system.
So basically you have a chain of elements.
Each element is completely identical, and they're biased.
So each chain, or each element, wants to turn right or left.
So as you assemble the chain, you're basically programming it.
So when you shake the chain, it then folds up into any configuration that you've programmed in -- so in this case, a spiral, or in this case, two cubes next to each other.
So what does this tell us about the future?
I think that it's telling us that there's new possibilities for self-assembly, replication, repair in our physical structures, our buildings, machines.
And from that you have new possibilities for computing.
Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, machines, all of our bricks could actually compute.
That's amazing parallel and distributed computing power, new design possibilities.
So it's exciting potential for this.
So I think these projects I've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future, if we implement these new technologies for a new self-assembling world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I want to address the issue of compassion.
Compassion has many faces.
A line that the Dalai Lama once said, he said, "Love and compassion are necessities.
They are not luxuries.
Without them, humanity cannot survive."
And I would suggest, it is not only humanity that won't survive, but it is all species on the planet, as we've heard today.
Two weeks ago, I was in Bangalore in India.
And early in the morning, I went into the ward.
In that hospice, there were 31 men and women who were actively dying.
And I walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly, fragile, obviously in the latter phase of active dying.
I looked into her face.
I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her, and his face was just riven with grief and confusion.
And I remembered a line from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic: "What is the most wondrous thing in the world, Yudhisthira?"
I looked up.
Tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around Bangalore.
I looked into the face of one of these women, and I saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present.
I watched her hands as she bathed an old man.
My gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person.
Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau.
And on the first day at Simikot in Humla, far west of Nepal, the most impoverished region of Nepal, an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags.
And he walked in, and somebody said something to him, we realized he was deaf, and we looked into the rags, and there was this pair of eyes.
I know those hands and eyes; they touched me as well.
They touched me at that time.
They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed.
And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me.
She had phenomenal strength.
And it was really her strength, I believe, that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life.
So we can ask: What is compassion comprised of?
And there's referential and non-referential compassion.
But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering.
It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I'm not separate from this suffering.
But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering.
And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering.
But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential.
Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years.
I had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security [prison] for six years.
It is there within every human being.
But the conditions for compassion to be activated, to be aroused, are particular conditions.
Eve Ensler, whom you'll hear later, has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through.
And what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.
And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralyzed by fear.
And in that paralysis, of course, our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed.
So our work, in a certain way, is to address this imago, this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche of our entire globe.
Now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities.
This is called resilience.
Another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what's called neural integration.
It hooks up all parts of the brain.
Another, which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on, is that compassion enhances our immune system.
But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity.
You know, if compassion is so good for us, I have a question.
(Applause) If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to really transform suffering?
And if compassion is so good for us, why don't we vote on compassion?
Why don't we vote for people in our government based on compassion, so that we can have a more caring world?
It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions.
And that is the mental quality of equanimity.
It's a female archetype: she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world.
She stands with 10,000 arms, and in every hand, there is an instrument of liberation, and in the palm of every hand, there are eyes, and these are the eyes of wisdom.
Women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered, unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is.
They have infused societies with kindness, and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half.
And they have actualized compassion through direct action.
Jody Williams called it: It's good to meditate.
(Laughter) But the other side of the equation is you've got to come out of your cave.
You have to come into the world like Asanga did, who was looking to realize Maitreya Buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave.
He said, "I'm out of here."
He sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg.
He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots, so as not to harm them.
And at that moment, the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness.
I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men -- with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president, and with all beings.
The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And I'd like to review just how unintended consequences play the part that they do.
Let's go to 40,000 years before the present, to the time of the cultural explosion, when music, art, technology, so many of the things that we're enjoying today, so many of the things that are being demonstrated at TED were born.
And the anthropologist Randall White has made a very interesting observation: that if our ancestors 40,000 years ago had been able to see what they had done, they wouldn't have really understood it.
They were responding to immediate concerns.
Now let's advance to 10,000 years before the present.
And this is when it really gets interesting.
What about the origins of agriculture?
What would our ancestors 10,000 years ago have said if they really had technology assessment?
And I could just imagine the committees reporting back to them on where agriculture was going to take humanity, at least in the next few hundred years.
It was really bad news.
It was simply awful for women.
And politically, it was awful.
It was the beginning of a much higher degree of inequality among people.
Even now, our choices are having unintended effects.
Historically, for example, chopsticks -- according to one Japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the University of Michigan -- resulted in long-term changes in the dentition, in the teeth, of the Japanese public.
And we are also changing our teeth right now.
There is evidence that the human mouth and teeth are growing smaller all the time.
That's not necessarily a bad unintended consequence.
So these things are kind of relative to where you or your ancestors happen to stand.
In the ancient world there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences, and there was a very healthy sense of caution, reflected in the Tree of Knowledge, in Pandora's Box, and especially in the myth of Prometheus that's been so important in recent metaphors about technology.
The physicians of the ancient world -- especially the Egyptians, who started medicine as we know it -- were very conscious of what they could and couldn't treat.
They were very conscious.
So were the followers of Hippocrates.
More recently, Harvey Cushing, who really developed neurosurgery as we know it, who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook, he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing.
Now if we look forward a bit to the 19th century, we find a new style of technology.
What we find is, no longer simple tools, but systems.
And the first people who saw that were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century, who were the original hackers.
Thomas Edison would have been very, very comfortable in the atmosphere of a software firm today.
And these hackers had a word for those mysterious bugs in telegraph systems that they called bugs.
That was the origin of the word "bug."
Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times -- at least until 1918 -- registered with the U.S. Patent Office.
The patent had 64 pages of text and 271 figures.
It was such a beautiful machine because it did everything that a human being did in setting type -- including returning the type to its place, which was a very difficult thing.
And Mark Twain, who knew all about typesetting, really was smitten by this machine.
And this was an important thing about 19th century technology, that all these relationships among parts could make the most brilliant idea fall apart, even when judged by the most expert people.
Now there is something else, though, in the early 20th century that made things even more complicated.
And that was that safety technology itself could be a source of danger.
The lesson of the Titanic, for a lot of the contemporaries, was that you must have enough lifeboats for everyone on the ship.
However, there was another case, the Eastland, a ship that capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915, and it killed 841 people -- that was 14 more than the passenger toll of the Titanic.
And that again proves that when you're talking about unintended consequences, it's not that easy to know the right lessons to draw.
It's really a question of the system, how the ship was loaded, the ballast and many other things.
So the 20th century, then, saw how much more complex reality was, but it also saw a positive side.
It saw that invention could actually benefit from emergencies.
Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but even by 1940, no commercially and medically useful quantities of it were being produced.
A number of pharmaceutical companies were working on it.
And not only did they do it, but within two years, they scaled up penicillin from preparation in one-liter flasks to 10,000-gallon vats.
That was how quickly penicillin was produced and became one of the greatest medical advances of all time.
In the Second World War, too, the existence of solar radiation was demonstrated by studies of interference that was detected by the radar stations of Great Britain.
Now when we come to the period after the Second World War, unintended consequences get even more interesting.
And my favorite example of that occurred beginning in 1976, when it was discovered that the bacteria causing Legionnaires disease had always been present in natural waters, but it was the precise temperature of the water in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems that raised the right temperature for the maximum reproduction of Legionella bacillus.
But something else happened in the early 1980s, and that was that there was a mysterious epidemic of failures of tape drives all over the United States.
And IBM, which made them, just didn't know what to do.
They commissioned a group of their best scientists to investigate, and what they found was that all these tape drives were located near ventilation ducts.
But what's interesting to me is that this was the first case of a mechanical device suffering, at least indirectly, from a human disease.
(Laughter) In fact, it also shows something interesting, that although our capabilities and technology have been expanding geometrically, unfortunately, our ability to model their long-term behavior, which has also been increasing, has been increasing only arithmetically.
One other very positive consequence of 20th century technology, though, was the way in which other kinds of calamities could lead to positive advances.
There are two historians of business at the University of Maryland, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch, who have done some extremely interesting work, much of it still unpublished, on the history of major innovations.
They have combined the list of major innovations, and they've discovered that the greatest number, the greatest decade, for fundamental innovations, as reflected in all of the lists that others have made -- a number of lists that they have merged -- was the Great Depression.
It was the origin of the Xerox copier, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.
And Chester Carlson, the inventor, was a patent attorney.
He really was not intending to work in patent research, but he couldn't really find an alternative technical job.
So this was the best job he could get.
So we see that sometimes, as a result of these dislocations, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity.
What does this mean?
It means, I think, that we're living in a time of unexpected possibilities.
Think of the financial world, for example.
The mentor of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, developed his system of value investing as a result of his own losses in the 1929 crash.
So many important creative things can happen when people learn from disasters.
Now think of the large and small plagues that we have now -- bed bugs, killer bees, spam -- and it's very possible that the solutions to those will really extend well beyond the immediate question.
If we think, for example, of Louis Pasteur, who in the 1860s was asked to study the diseases of silk worms for the silk industry, and his discoveries were really the beginning of the germ theory of disease.
So very often, some kind of disaster -- sometimes the consequence, for example, of over-cultivation of silk worms, which was a problem in Europe at the time -- can be the key to something much bigger.
So this means that we need to take a different view of unintended consequences.
We need to take a really positive view.
We need to see what they can do for us.
We need to learn, for example, from Dr. Cushing, who killed patients in the course of his early operations.
He had to have some errors. He had to have some mistakes.
And as a result, when we say, "This isn't brain surgery," that pays tribute to how difficult it was for anyone to learn from their mistakes in a field of medicine that was considered so discouraging in its prospects.
And we can also remember how the pharmaceutical companies were willing to pool their knowledge, to share their knowledge, in the face of an emergency, which they hadn't really been for years and years.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Now this may seem a bit ambitious, but when you look at yourself, you look at your hands, you realize that you're alive.
Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth.
There's been four billion years of organic, biological life.
And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world.
And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology.
Before we do that, I want to kind of put biology in its place.
And I'm absolutely enthralled by biology.
I love to do synthetic biology.
But within that infrastructure, we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution.
And when I talk about Darwinian evolution, I mean one thing and one thing only, and that is survival of the fittest.
And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way.
Think about evolution in terms of offspring competing, and some winning.
So bearing that in mind, as a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution?
And as a chemist, we're not used to profound questions every day.
So when I thought about it, then suddenly I realized that biology gave us the answer.
And in fact, the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is, in fact, a single cell -- a bacteria.
So this raises three really important questions: What is life?
Is biology special?
Biologists seem to think so.
So here's some inorganic life.
And you can see, it's kind of pollinating, germinating, growing.
This is an inorganic tube.
And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago, and they look alive.
Of course, they're not alive.
It's a chemistry experiment where I've made a crystal garden.
And as I pause for a few seconds, have a look at the screen.
You can see there's architecture growing, filling the void.
And this is dead.
But there's a problem, because up until maybe a decade ago, we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe.
In fact, we were the only people in the universe.
Now, that's a bit boring.
So as a chemist, I wanted to say, "Hang on. What is going on here?
Is life that improbable?"
And this is really the question.
I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars.
And in fact, let's take that one step further.
Let's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe, maybe the physics of life is as well.
And so the problem with chemists -- and this is a massive advantage as well -- is we like to focus on our elements.
And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology, then we have all this wonderful diversity of life.
In fact, we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate.
We're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards.
Well what about matter?
If your pen could replicate, that would be a bit of a problem.
But before we can make life, let's think for a second what life really is characterized by.
And the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing.
Synthetic biologists are manipulating it.
Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease.
But what does a cell do?
Well it divides, it competes, it survives.
And I think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life.
Well, I like think of it as a flame in a bottle.
And so we have to understand that if we're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life, we need to power it somehow.
And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere -- maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else.
Imagine way back, four and a half billion years ago, there is a vast chemical soup of stuff.
And from this stuff we came.
The RNA people would talk about the RNA world.
We somehow got to proteins and DNA.
And here we are.
You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ancestor, the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history.
So we don't know how we got here.
So there are two options: intelligent design, direct and indirect -- so God, or my friend.
I'm not a politician, I'm a scientist.
The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity.
This seems most likely.
And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids.
And somehow these amino acids are combined, and life begins.
But life begins, what does that mean?
So in the 1950s, Miller-Urey did their fantastic chemical Frankenstein experiment, where they did the equivalent in the chemical world.
They took the basic ingredients, put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through.
And they had a look at what was in the soup, and they found amino acids, but nothing came out, there was no cell.
In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats.
So what we're trying to do is do reactions -- not in one flask, but in tens of flasks, and connect them together, as you can see with this flow system, all these pipes.
We can do it microfluidically, we can do it lithographically, we can do it in a 3D printer, we can do it in droplets for colleagues.
And the answer, of course, lies with mice.
This is how I remember what I need as a chemist.
I say, "Well I want molecules."
I need some information, and I need a container.
So if you have a container, it's like getting in your car.
"This is my car, and I'm going to drive around and show off my car."
So these things together give us evolution, perhaps.
And the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal.
So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules.
And so forgive the molecules on the screen, but these are a very simple kit.
But we need to make some containers.
And just a few months ago in my lab, we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them.
And all I wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes, in real cells, and then it sets up a kind of molecular Darwinism, a molecular survival of the fittest.
And this movie here shows this competition between molecules.
Molecules are competing for stuff.
They're all made of the same stuff, but they want their shape to win.
And that is the key.
If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete, they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete.
Let's zoom out to what that could mean.
So we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology, to us.
If we could get evolution into the material world, then I propose we should have a general theory of evolution.
And that's really worth thinking about.
Does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe?
Is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete?
So that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution.
So you imagine, if we're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form, not only will this tell us about the origin of life -- that it's possible that the universe doesn't need carbon to be alive; it can use anything -- we can then take [it] one step further and develop new technologies, because we can then use software control for evolution to code in.
So imagine we make a little cell.
We want to put it out in the environment, and we want it to be powered by the Sun.
What we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on.
And we don't use design anymore. We find what works.
We should take our inspiration from biology.
Biology doesn't care about the design unless it works.
So this will reorganize the way we design things.
But not only just that, we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology.
Wouldn't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we couldn't really deal with?
The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything, because it's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution.
Evolution cannot be cut apart.
You need to somehow find the fitness function.
And the profound realization for me is that, if this works, the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level, and we really start talking about selfish matter.
But you are made of stuff, and you are using stuff, and you enslave stuff.
So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting.
And again, when you're thinking about how improbable this is, remember, five billion years ago, we were not here, and there was no life.
So what will that tell us about the origin of life and the meaning of life?
So what does it mean about defining life?
And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life.
I propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive, and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Just a quick question on timeline.
When?
CA: And when do you think that will happen?
LC: Hopefully within the next two years.
Because the thing is, we are so chauvinistic to biology, if you take away carbon, there's other things that can happen.
So the other thing that if we were able to create life that's not based on carbon, maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for.
CA: Lee Cronin, good luck. (LC: Thank you very much.) (Applause)
Thank you.
And I want to share with you my latest art project.
It's a little quirky and silly.
It's called "Pop-It," And it's about the things little kids do with their parents.
(Music) So this is about potty training -- as most of you, I hope, know.
You can tickle the rug.
You can make the baby poop.
You can do all those fun things.
You can burst bubbles.
But you know, I have a problem with children's books: I think they're full of propaganda.
So I said, "I'm going to counter this with my own propaganda."
If you notice carefully, it's a homosexual couple bringing up a child.
Shake it, and you have a lesbian couple.
(Laughter) Shake it, and you have a heterosexual couple.
You know, I don't even believe in the concept of an ideal family.
I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns, fathers, brothers, sisters.
Basically, I was brought up to be a good Samaritan, and I am.
And I'd go at the end of the day to a traditional Hindu house, which was probably the only Hindu house in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood.
Basically, I celebrated every religious function.
In fact, when there was a wedding in our neighborhood, all of us would paint our houses for the wedding.
(Laughter) We all had to fast during Ramadan.
It was a very beautiful time.
But I must say, I'll never forget, when I was 13 years old, this happened.
Babri Masjid -- one of the most beautiful mosques in India, built by King Babur, I think, in the 16th century -- was demolished by Hindu activists.
This caused major riots in my city.
And for the first time, I was affected by this communal unrest.
You know the Hindus are killing us Muslims. Be careful."
You know, my work is inspired by events such as this.
Even in my gallery shows, I try and revisit historic events like Babri Masjid, distill only its emotional residue and image my own life.
Imagine history being taught differently.
I have another idea.
It's a children's book about Indian independence -- very patriotic.
Even my books on children have cute, fuzzy animals.
But they're playing geopolitics.
And my argument [is] that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage.
After all, children's books are manuals on parenting, so you better give them children's books that teach them perspectives.
And conversely, only when you teach perspectives will a child be able to imagine and put themselves in the shoes of someone who is different from them.
I'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
There's a lot of exciting things happening in the design world and at IDEO this past year, and I'm pleased to get a chance to share some of those with you.
I didn't attend the first TED back in 1984 but I've been to a lot of them since that time.
I thought it [would] kind of be interesting to think back to that time when Richard got the whole thing started. Thank you very much, Richard; it's been a big, enjoyable part of my life, coming here.
And so thinking back, I was thinking those of us in Silicon Valley were really focused on products or objects -- certainly technological objects.
We'd come in with some prototype underneath a black cloth and we'd put it on the conference table, and we'd pull off the black cloth and everybody would "ooh" and "ah."
That was a really good time.
And if you were here last year, I probably wrestled you to the floor and tried to show you my new EyeModule 2, which was a camera that plugged into the Handspring.
And I took a lot of pictures last year; very few people knew what I was up to, but I took a lot of pictures.
This year -- maybe you could show the slides -- this year we're carrying this Treo, which we had a lot to do with and helped Handspring design it.
Also, though we designed it a few years ago -- it's just become ubiquitous in the last year or so -- this Heartstream defibrillator which is saving lives.
Maybe you've seen them in the airports? They seem to be everywhere now.
Lots of lives are being saved by those.
And, we're just about to announce the Zinio Reader product that I believe will make magazines even more enjoyable to read.
So, we really will continue to focus on products.
But something's happened in the last 18 years since Richard started TED, and that's that people like us -- I know people in other places have caught onto this for a long time, but for us, we've really just started ... we've kind of climbed Maslow's hierarchy a little bit -- and so we're now focused more and more on human-centered design, human-centeredness in an approach to design.
That really involves designing behaviors and personality into products.
And I think you're starting to see that, and it's making our job even more enjoyable.
Then we'd go and we'd show those as communicating our ideas.
But firms like ours are having to move to a point where we get those objects that we're designing and get them in motion, showing how they'll be used.
And so in order to do that we've been forming internal video-production groups in order to make these kind of experience prototypes that show just what we mean about the man-machine relationship.
So I thought that I would show you a few videos to show off this new, broader definition of design in products and services and environments.
I have a few of them -- they're no more than a minute or a minute-and-a-half apiece -- but I thought you might be interested in seeing some of our work over the last year, and how it responds in video.
So, Prada New York: we were asked by Rem Koolhaas and OMA to help us conceive the technology that's in their retail store in New York.
He wanted a new kind of store -- a new one -- a store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one.
And that meant actually designing custom technology as opposed to just buying things off the shelf and putting them to use.
So, there're lots of things. Everything has RF tags: there's RF tags on the user, on the cards, there's the staff devices that are all around the store.
You pick them up, and once you see something that you're interested in, the staff person can scan them in and then they can be shown on any screen throughout the store.
You can look at color, and sizes, and how it appeared on the runway, or whatever.
We can put that up on a touch screen and you can play with that, and get more information about the clothing that you're interested in as you're trying it on.
It's been used a lot of places, but I particularly like the use here of liquid crystal displays in the changing room.
The last time I went to see this store, there was a huge buzz about people standing outside and wondering, "Am I going to actually get to see the people changing clothes here?"
And then one of my favorite features of the technology is the magic mirror, where you put on the clothes.
There's a big display in the mirror, and you can turn around -- but there's a three second delay.
(Applause) About a year and a half ago we were asked to design an installation in the museum -- this is a new wing of the Science Museum in London, and it's primarily about digital and biomedical issues.
And a group at Itch, which is now part of IDEO, designed this interactive wall that's about four stories tall.
I don't know if anybody's seen this -- it's pretty spectacular in the room.
Anyway, it's based on the London subway system.
And so you can see that the goal is to bring some of the feedback that the people who had gone to the museum were giving, and get it up on the wall so everybody could see. Just for everybody to see.
And then when you get to a station, it's expanded so that you can actually read it.
Then when you exit the IMAX theatre on the fourth floor -- mostly teenagers coming out of there -- there's this big open space that has these tables in it that have interactive games which are quite fun, also designed by Durrell [Bishop] and Andrew [Hirniak] of Itch.
And the topics include things that the museum is about: male fertility, choosing the sex of your baby or what a driverless car might be like.
They go to the top of the wall and when they reach all the way to the top, after they've bounced around, they disperse into bits and go off into the atmosphere.
This is CBS Sunday Morning that aired about two weeks ago.
Scott Adams ran into us and asked us if we wouldn't help to design the ultimate cubicle for Dilbert, which sounded like a fun thing and so we couldn't pass it up.
So we thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to get together with some of the smartest design guys in the world and try to figure out if we could make the cubicle better?
Narrator: Though they work in a wide-open office space spectacularly set under San Francisco's Oakland Bay Bridge, the team built their own little cubicles to fully experience the problems.
Narrator: They took pictures.
Woman: You feel so trapped, when someone kind of leans over and you're sort of held captive there for a minute.
We'll see what happens.
In the second group's scenario, the walls are alive and actually give Dilbert a group hug.
(Laughter) Behind the humor is the idea of making the cubicle more human.) David Kelley: So here's the final thing, complete with orange lighting that follows the sun across -- that follows the tracks of the sun -- across the sky.
And my favorite feature, which is a flower in a vase that wilts when you leave in disappointment, and then when you come back, it comes up to greet you, happy to see you.
(SA: Customizable for the boss of your choice.) DK: And of course: a hammock for your afternoon nap that stretches across your cubicle.
(SA: Life would be sweet in a cubicle like this.) DK: This next project, we were asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the recycling of the water on the Millennium Dome in London.
The dome has an incredible amount of water that washes off of it, as well as wastewater.
So this building actually celebrates the water as it comes out of the recycling plant and goes into the reed bed so that it can be filtered for the final time.
The pavilion's design goal was to be kind of quiet and peaceful.
In contrast to if you went inside the dome, where it's kind of wild and crazy and everybody's learning all kinds of things, or fooling around, or whatever they're doing.
But it was intended to be quite quiet.
And then, if you saw, the panels actually rotate. So you can get the information on the front side, but as they rotate, you can see the actual recycling plant behind, with all the machines as they actually process the water.
These are all very low-budget videos, like quick prototypes.
And we're announcing a new product here tonight, which is the first time this has ever been shown in public.
It's called Spyfish, and it's a company called H2Eye, started by Nigel Jagger in London.
And it's a company that's trying to bring the experience -- many people have boats, or enjoy being on boats, but a very small percentage of people actually have the capability or the interest in going under the water and actually seeing what's there, and enjoying what scuba divers do.
This product, it has two cameras.
You throw it over the side of your boat and you basically scuba dive without getting wet.
For us -- there's the object -- for us, it was two projects. One, to design the interface so that the interface doesn't get in your way.
You could have that kind of immersive experience of being underwater -- of feeling like you're underwater -- seeing what's going on.
And the other one was to design the object and make sure that it was a consumer product and not a research tool.
And so we spent a lot of time -- this has been going on for about seven or eight years, this project -- and [we're] just ready to start building them.
(Narrator: The Spyfish is a revolutionary subaquatic video camera.
It can dive to 500 feet, to where sunlight does not penetrate, and is equipped with powerful lights.
The battery-powered Spyfish sends the live video-feed through a slender cable.) DK: This slender cable was a huge technological advancement and it allowed the whole thing to be the size that it is.
(Narrator: And this central box connects the whole system together.
Maneuvering the Spyfish is simple with the wireless remote control.
You watch the video with superimposed graphics that indicate your depth and compass heading.
The fluid graphics and ambient sounds combine to help you completely lose yourself underwater.) (Applause) DK: And the last thing I'll talk about is ApproTEC, which is a project that I'm very excited about.
ApproTEC is a company started by Dr. Martin Fisher, who's a good friend of mine. He's a Ph.D. from Stanford.
He found himself in Kenya on a Fulbright and he had a very interesting insight, which is that he said, "There must be entrepreneurs in Kenya; there must be entrepreneurs everywhere."
And he noticed that for weddings and funerals there they could find enough money to put something together.
So he decided to start manufacturing products in Kenya with Kenyan manufacturers -- designed by people like us, but taken there.
He's made 30,000 new jobs.
This is one guy doing this. This is a pretty spectacular thing.
So we're in the process of helping them design deep-well, low-cost manual pumps in order for these people who have a quarter acre of land to be able to grow crops in the off-season.
And so by doing that, the woman that you saw in the first thing -- she's a school teacher -- always wanted to send her kids to college and she's going to be able to do it because of these things.
We also were thinking about the experience of Richard, and so -- (Laughter) -- we designed this hat, because I knew I'd be the last one in the day and I needed to deal with him. So I just have one more thing to say.
(Laughter) Well, it's always kind of funny when he comes up and hovers.
(Laughter) (Applause) So we saw a lot of interesting things being designed today in this session, and from all the different presenters.
And in my own practice, from product to ApproTEC, it's really exciting that we're taking a more human-centered approach to design, that we're including behaviors and personalities in the things we do, and I think this is great.
Designers are more trusted and more integrated into the business strategy of companies, and I have to say, for one, I feel very lucky at the progress that design has made since the first TED. Thanks a lot.
My topic is economic growth in China and India.
And the question I want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth.
You may say this is not fair, because I'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy.
I'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy, rather than against democracy.
The first question there is why China has grown so much faster than India.
Over the last 30 years, in terms of the GDP growth rates, China has grown at twice the rate of India.
In the last five years, the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth.
But over the last 30 years, China undoubtedly has done much better than India.
One simple answer is China has Shanghai and India has Mumbai.
Look at the skyline of Shanghai.
This is the Pudong area.
The picture on India is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai in India.
The idea there behind these two pictures is that the Chinese government can act above rule of law.
Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees with that view.
In an interview printed in the financial press of India, He said that he wants to make Mumbai another Shanghai.
This is an Oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values, and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of Shanghai.
So let me call it the Shanghai model of economic growth, that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development: infrastructures, airports, highways, bridges, things like that.
You need also state ownership, especially of land assets, in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly.
The implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth, rather than a facilitator of economic growth.
Just how important are infrastructures for economic growth?
If you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth, then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth.
If you believe that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe, then you will put less emphasis on strong government.
So to illustrate that question, let me give you two countries.
And for the sake of brevity, I'll call one country Country 1 and the other country Country 2.
Country 1 has a systematic advantage over Country 2 in infrastructures.
Country 1 has more telephones, and Country 1 has a longer system of railways.
So if I were to ask you, "Which is China and which is India, and which country has grown faster?"
if you believe in the infrastructure view, then you will say, "Country 1 must be China.
They must have done better, in terms of economic growth.
And Country 2 is possibly India."
Actually the country with more telephones is the Soviet Union, and the data referred to 1989.
That's not too good.
The picture there is Khrushchev.
I know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the Soviet Union, but that's the best picture that I can find.
(Laughter) Telephones, infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth.
If you know nothing about China and the Soviet Union other than the fact about their telephones, you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades.
Country 1, that has a longer system of railways, is actually India.
And Country 2 is China.
This is a very little known fact about the two countries.
Yes, today China has a huge infrastructure advantage over India.
But for many years, until the late 1990s, China had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis India.
In developing countries, the most common mode of transportation is the railways, and the British built a lot of railways in India.
India is the smaller of the two countries, and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s.
So clearly, infrastructure doesn't explain why China did better before the late 1990s, as compared with India.
In fact, if you look at the evidence worldwide, the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth.
The economy grows, government accumulates more resources, and the government can invest in infrastructure -- rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth.
And this is clearly the story of the Chinese economic growth.
Let me look at this question more directly.
Is democracy bad for economic growth?
Now let's turn to two countries, Country A and Country B.
Country A, in 1990, had about $300 per capita GDP as compared with Country B, which had $460 in per capita GDP.
By 2008, Country A has surpassed Country B with $700 per capita GDP as compared with $650 per capita GDP.
Both countries are in Asia.
If I were to ask you, "Which are the two Asian countries?
And which one is a democracy?"
you may argue, "Well, maybe Country A is China and Country B is India."
In fact, Country A is democratic India, and Country B is Pakistan -- the country that has a long period of military rule.
And it's very common that we compare India with China.
That's because the two countries have about the same population size.
But the more natural comparison is actually between India and Pakistan.
Those two countries are geographically similar.
They have a complicated, but shared common history.
By that comparison, democracy looks very, very good in terms of economic growth.
So why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments?
One reason is the East Asian Model.
In East Asia, we have had successful economic growth stories such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s.
The problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries, "Have you won the lottery?"
And they all tell you, "Yes, we have won the lottery."
And then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent.
Taiwan succeeded, China under Mao Zedong didn't.
Burma didn't succeed.
The Philippines didn't succeed.
If you look at the statistical evidence worldwide, there's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth.
So the East Asian model has this massive selection bias -- it is known as selecting on a dependent variable, something we always tell our students to avoid.
So exactly why did China grow so much faster?
I will take you to the Cultural Revolution, when China went mad, and compare that country's performance with India under Indira Gandhi.
The question there is: Which country did better, China or India?
China was during the Cultural Revolution.
It turns out even during the Cultural Revolution, China out-perfomed India in terms of GDP growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita GDP.
The whole country went mad.
The advantage the country had was human capital -- nothing else but human capital.
This is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s.
The adult literacy rate in China is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in India.
The contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between Chinese women and Indian women.
In China, the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 Chinese characters.
In India, the definition of literacy, operating definition of literacy, is the ability, the grand ability, to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak.
The gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated.
If you go to other sources of data such as Human Development Index, that data series, go back to the early 1970s, you see exactly the same contrast.
China held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis India.
Life expectancies: as early as 1965, China had a huge advantage in life expectancy.
On average, as a Chinese in 1965, you lived 10 years more than an average Indian.
So if you have a choice between being a Chinese and being an Indian, you would want to become a Chinese in order to live 10 years longer.
If you made that decision in 1965, the down side of that is the next year we have the Cultural Revolution.
So you have to always think carefully about these decisions.
If you cannot chose your nationality, then you will want to become an Indian man.
Because, as an Indian man, you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis Indian women.
This is an extremely strange fact.
It's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern.
It shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the Indian society against women.
The good news is, by 2006, India has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy.
Today, Indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over Indian men.
So India is reverting to the normal.
But India still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality.
These are the two pictures taken of garment factories in Guangdong Province and garment factories in India.
60 to 80 percent of the workforce in China is women in the coastal part of the country, whereas in India, it's all men.
Financial Times printed this picture of an Indian textile factory with the title, "India Poised to Overtake China in Textile."
By looking at these two pictures, I say no, it won't overtake China for a while.
If you look at other East Asian countries, women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off -- in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with East Asia.
India still has a long way to go to catch up with China.
You talk about human capital, you talk about education and public health.
What about the political system?
Isn't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in China?
Actually, the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that.
It depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system.
Statically, China is a one-party system, authoritarian -- there's no question about it.
Dynamically, it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic.
Sometimes a fixed effect can explain change, but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change.
In terms of the political changes, they have introduced village elections.
There are also financial reforms in rural China.
There is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in China.
To me, the pace of political changes is too slow, too gradual.
And my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges, because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms.
But nevertheless, the system has moved in a more liberal direction, moved in a more democratic direction.
You can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on India.
In fact, when India was growing at a Hindu rate of growth -- about one percent, two percent a year -- that was when India was least democratic.
Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975.
The Indian government owned and operated all the TV stations.
A little-known fact about India in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms, the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule, privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts.
So the dynamic perspective fits both with China and in India in terms of the direction.
Why do many people believe that India is still a growth disaster?
One reason is they are always comparing India with China.
But China is a superstar in terms of economic growth.
If you are a NBA player and you are always being compared to Michael Jordan, you're going to look not so impressive.
But that doesn't mean that you're a bad basketball player.
Comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark.
In fact, if you compare India with the average developing country, even before the more recent period of acceleration of Indian growth -- now India is growing between eight and nine percent -- even before this period, India was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies.
This is a very impressive record indeed.
Let's think about the future: the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant.
But I believe that India has the momentum.
The government has invested in basic education, has invested in basic health.
I believe the government should do more, but nevertheless, the direction it is moving in is the right direction.
India has the right institutional conditions for economic growth, whereas China is still struggling with political reforms.
I believe that the political reforms are a must for China to maintain its growth.
And it's very important to have political reforms, to have widely shared benefits of economic growth.
I don't know whether that's going to happen or not, but I'm an optimist.
Hopefully, five years from now, I'm going to report to TEDGlobal that political reforms will happen in China.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Now this is a very un-TED-like thing to do, but let's kick off the afternoon with a message from a mystery sponsor.
We are anonymous. We are legion.
We are but the base of chaos.
Misha Glenny: Anonymous, ladies and gentlemen -- a sophisticated group of politically motivated hackers who have emerged in 2011.
And they're pretty scary.
You never know when they're going to attack next, who or what the consequences will be.
But interestingly, they have a sense of humor.
These guys hacked into Fox News' Twitter account to announce President Obama's assassination.
Now you can imagine the panic that would have generated in the newsroom at Fox.
"What do we do now?
Put on a black armband, or crack open the champagne?"
(Laughter) And of course, who could escape the irony of a member of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
(Laughter) (Applause) Sometimes you turn on the news and you say, "Is there anyone left to hack?"
In fact, a friend of mine from the security industry told me the other day that there are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.
I mean three companies providing cybersecurity services to the FBI have been hacked.
Anyway, this mysterious group Anonymous -- and they would say this themselves -- they are providing a service by demonstrating how useless companies are at protecting our data.
But there is also a very serious aspect to Anonymous -- they are ideologically driven.
They claim that they are battling a dastardly conspiracy.
They say that governments are trying to take over the Internet and control it, and that they, Anonymous, are the authentic voice of resistance -- be it against Middle Eastern dictatorships, against global media corporations, or against intelligence agencies, or whoever it is.
And their politics are not entirely unattractive.
There's a strong whiff of half-baked anarchism about them.
But one thing is true: we are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the Internet.
The Web links everything, and very soon it will mediate most human activity.
Because the Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an old-age dilemma that pits the demands of security with the desire for freedom.
Now this is a very complicated struggle.
But in order to try and explain the whole thing, I would need another 18 minutes or so to do it, so you're just going to have to take it on trust from me on this occasion, and let me assure you that all of these issues are involved in cybersecurity and control of the Internet one way or the other, but in a configuration that even Stephen Hawking would probably have difficulty trying to get his head around.
So there you are.
And as you see, in the middle, there is our old friend, the hacker.
They're completely anonymous, as it were.
Well, I say nothing, but actually there is one teeny weeny little research unit in Turin, Italy called the Hackers Profiling Project.
And they are doing some fantastic research into the characteristics, into the abilities and the socialization of hackers.
Because it's a U.N. operation, of course, it lacks funding.
But I think they're doing very important work.
Because where we have a surplus of technology in the cybersecurity industry, we have a definite lack of -- call me old-fashioned -- human intelligence.
Now, so far I've mentioned the hackers Anonymous who are a politically motivated hacking group.
Of course, the criminal justice system treats them as common old garden criminals.
But interestingly, Anonymous does not make use of its hacked information for financial gain.
But what about the real cybercriminals?
Well real organized crime on the Internet goes back about 10 years when a group of gifted Ukrainian hackers developed a website, which led to the industrialization of cybercrime.
Welcome to the now forgotten realm of CarderPlanet.
Now CarderPlanet was very interesting.
Cybercriminals would go there to buy and sell stolen credit card details, to exchange information about new malware that was out there.
And remember, this is a time when we're seeing for the first time so-called off-the-shelf malware.
And so CarderPlanet became a sort of supermarket for cybercriminals.
And its creators were incredibly smart and entrepreneurial, because they were faced with one enormous challenge as cybercriminals.
And that challenge is: How do you do business, how do you trust somebody on the Web who you want to do business with when you know that they're a criminal?
So the family, as the inner core of CarderPlanet was known, came up with this brilliant idea called the escrow system.
And the officer would then verify if the stolen credit card worked.
And if they did, he then passed on the money to the vendor and the stolen credit card details to the purchaser.
And it was this which completely revolutionized cybercrime on the Web.
He was making, on average a week, $150,000 -- tax free of course.
But that's a slightly different story, which I won't go into now.
Now the interesting thing about RedBrigade is that he wasn't an advanced hacker.
And this is because hackers are only one element in a cybercriminal enterprise.
And often they're the most vulnerable element of all.
Dimitry Golubov, aka SCRIPT -- born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1982.
Now he developed his social and moral compass on the Black Sea port during the 1990s.
And he did a great job in it.
Then we have Renukanth Subramaniam, aka JiLsi -- founder of DarkMarket, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
As an eight year-old, he and his parents fled the Sri Lankan capital because Singhalese mobs were roaming the city, looking for Tamils like Renu to murder.
At 11, he was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military, accused of being a terrorist, and his parents sent him on his own to Britain as a refugee seeking political asylum.
At 13, with only little English and being bullied at school, he escaped into a world of computers where he showed great technical ability, but he was soon being seduced by people on the Internet.
He was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud, and he will be released from Wormwood Scrubs jail in London in 2012.
Matrix001, who was an administrator at DarkMarket.
Born in Southern Germany to a stable and well-respected middle class family, his obsession with gaming as a teenager led him to hacking.
And he was soon controlling huge servers around the world where he stored his games that he had cracked and pirated.
Max Vision, aka ICEMAN -- mastermind of CardersMarket.
Born in Meridian, Idaho.
Max Vision was one of the best penetration testers working out of Santa Clara, California in the late 90s for private companies and voluntarily for the FBI.
But also, because he was an inveterate hacker, he left a tiny digital wormhole through which he alone could crawl.
But this was spotted by an eagle-eye investigator, and he was convicted.
At his open prison, he came under the influence of financial fraudsters, and those financial fraudsters persuaded him to work for them on his release.
And this man with a planetary-sized brain is now serving a 13-year sentence in California.
Adewale Taiwo, aka FreddyBB -- master bank account cracker from Abuja in Nigeria.
He set up his prosaically entitled newsgroup, bankfrauds@yahoo.co.uk before arriving in Britain in 2005 to take a Masters in chemical engineering at Manchester University.
He impressed in the private sector, developing chemical applications for the oil industry while simultaneously running a worldwide bank and credit card fraud operation that was worth millions until his arrest in 2008.
And then finally, Cagatay Evyapan, aka Cha0 -- one of the most remarkable hackers ever, from Ankara in Turkey.
He combined the tremendous skills of a geek with the suave social engineering skills of the master criminal.
One of the smartest people I've ever met.
He also had the most effective virtual private network security arrangement the police have ever encountered amongst global cybercriminals.
Now the important thing about all of these people is they share certain characteristics despite the fact that they come from very different environments.
They are all people who learned their hacking skills in their early to mid-teens.
Remember that, when they developed those hacking skills, their moral compass had not yet developed.
And most of them, with the exception of SCRIPT and Cha0, they did not demonstrate any real social skills in the outside world -- only on the Web.
And the other thing is the high incidence of hackers like these who have characteristics which are consistent with Asperger's syndrome.
Now I discussed this with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge.
And he has done path-breaking work on autism and confirmed, also for the authorities here, that Gary McKinnon -- who is wanted by the United States for hacking into the Pentagon -- suffers from Asperger's and a secondary condition of depression.
And Baron-Cohen explained that certain disabilities can manifest themselves in the hacking and computing world as tremendous skills, and that we should not be throwing in jail people who have such disabilities and skills because they have lost their way socially or been duped.
Now I think we're missing a trick here, because I don't think people like Max Vision should be in jail.
They are recruiting hackers both before and after they become involved in criminal and industrial espionage activities -- are mobilizing them on behalf of the state.
And if we rely, as we do at the moment, solely on the criminal justice system and the threat of punitive sentences, we will be nurturing a monster we cannot tame.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So your idea worth spreading is hire hackers.
How would someone get over that kind of fear that the hacker they hire might preserve that little teensy wormhole?
They're just relentless and obsessive about what they do.
We just never knew how to get there, what we were doing.
(Applause)
My name is Kate Hartman.
And I like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate.
So I'm specifically interested in how we, as humans, relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us.
(Laughter) So just to give you a bit of context, as June said, I'm an artist, a technologist and an educator.
I teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics.
And much of what I do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form.
It's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world.
And so when working as an interaction designer, or as an artist who deals with participation -- creating things that live on, in or around the human form -- it's really a powerful space to work within.
So within my own work, I use a broad range of materials and tools.
So I communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing.
And to tell you a bit about the things that I make, the easiest place to start the story is with a hat.
And so it all started several years ago, late one night when I was sitting on the subway, riding home, and I was thinking.
And I tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little.
And so I went home, and I made a prototype of this hat.
This one is called the Talk to Yourself Hat.
(Laughter) It's fairly self-explanatory.
And when you speak out loud, the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears.
(Laughter) And so when I make these things, it's really not so much about the object itself, but rather the negative space around the object.
So many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves.
So this particular device is called the Gut Listener.
(Laughter) And so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication.
And so the Inflatable Heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves.
So they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions.
(Laughter) And some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences.
(Laughter) And so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange, but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered.
(Laughter) And in the end, some of these things just act as invitations.
So the Ear Bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say.
So even though I'm really interested in the relationship between people, I also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us.
And so when I was first living in New York City a few years back, I was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how I would like to better relate to them.
So I made a wearable wall that I could wear as a backpack.
And so I would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that I could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me.
(Laughter) And so jumping off of that, thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world, I have this ongoing project called Botanicalls -- which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols.
So when a plant is thirsty, it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like Twitter.
And so this really shifts the human/plant dynamic, because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time.
And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers -- of course.
And so glaciers are these magnificent beings, and there's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them, but what I'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations.
(Laughter) Because there seems to be an issue.
The glaciers are actually leaving us.
They're both shrinking and retreating -- and some of them have disappeared altogether.
And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers.
And this one's particularly interesting, because, of all the glaciers in North America, it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year.
They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier.
When I meet a glacier for the very first time, what do I do?
There's no kind of social protocol for this.
I really just don't even know how to say hello.
Do I carve a message in the snow?
Or perhaps I can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes -- ice cube Morse code.
Or perhaps I need to make myself a speaking tool, like an icy megaphone that I can use to amplify my voice when I direct it at the ice.
But really the most satisfying experience I've had is the act of listening, which is what we need in any good relationship.
And I was really struck by how much it affected me.
This very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier.
And so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days, I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit.
(Laughter) And so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice.
And once again, it's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug.
So, yea, this is actually just the beginning.
And just as with the wall, how I wanted to be more wall-like, with this project, I'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace.
And so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where I work with people from different disciplines -- artists, technologists, scientists -- to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations.
(Applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the human genome.
(Applause) Chromosome one -- top left, bottom right -- are the sex chromosomes.
Women have two copies of that big X chromosome; men have the X and, of course, that small copy of the Y.
So if you zoom in on this genome, then what you see, of course, is this double-helix structure -- the code of life spelled out with these four biochemical letters, or we call them bases: A, C, G and T.
How many are there in the human genome? Three billion.
Is that a big number?
But in fact, if I were to place one base on each pixel of this 1280x800-resolution screen, we would need 3,000 screens to take a look at the genome.
So it's really quite big.
And perhaps because of its size, a group of people -- all, by the way, with Y chromosomes -- decided they would want to sequence it.
(Laughter) And so 15 years, actually, and about four billion dollars later, the genome was sequenced and published.
That was all done on a machine like this.
So now what we do is take a genome, we make maybe 50 copies of it, we cut all those copies up into little 50-base reads, and then we sequence them, massively parallel.
So to give you a picture of what this looks like, the Human Genome Project: 3 gigabases, right?
One run on one of these modern machines: 200 gigabases in a week.
That's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998, waiting until 2011, and now you can drive to Jupiter and back twice.
Guys, this is a long scale; you don't typically see lines that go up like that.
So the worldwide capacity to sequence human genomes is something like 50,000 to 100,000 human genomes this year.
This is expected to double, triple or maybe quadruple year over year for the foreseeable future.
In fact, there's one lab in particular that represents 20 percent of all that capacity: It's called the Beijing Genomics Institute.
The Chinese are absolutely winning this race to the new Moon, by the way.
What does this mean for medicine?
So a woman, age 37, presents with stage 2 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
She is treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
She goes home.
Two years later, she comes back with stage 3C ovarian cancer, unfortunately; treated again with surgery and chemotherapy.
She comes back three years later at age 42 with more ovarian cancer, more chemotherapy.
Six months later, she comes back with acute myeloid leukemia.
She goes into respiratory failure and dies eight days later.
And it's because of people like my colleague, Rick Wilson, at the Genome Institute at Washington University, who decided to take a look at this woman postmortem.
And he took skin cells, healthy skin and cancerous bone marrow, and sequenced the whole genomes of both of them in a couple of weeks, no big deal.
Then he compared those two genomes in software, and what he found, among other things, was a deletion -- a 2,000-base deletion across three billion bases in a particular gene called TP53.
If you have this deleterious mutation in this gene, you're 90 percent likely to get cancer in your life.
So unfortunately, this doesn't help this woman, but it does have severe -- profound, if you will -- implications to her family.
I mean, if they have the same mutation, and they get this genetic test and they understand it, then they can get regular screens and can catch cancer early, and potentially live a significantly longer life.
Let me introduce you to the Beery twins, diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two.
Their mom is a very brave woman who didn't believe it; the symptoms weren't matching up.
And through some heroic efforts and a lot of Internet searching, she was able to convince the medical community that, in fact, they had something else.
They had dopa-responsive dystonia.
And so they were given L-Dopa, and their symptoms did improve, but they weren't totally asymptomatic.
Significant problems remained.
Turns out the gentleman in this picture is a guy named Joe Beery, who was lucky enough to be the CIO of a company called Life Technologies.
They're one of two companies that makes these massive whole-genome sequencing tools.
What they found was a series of mutations in a gene called SPR, which is responsible for producing serotonin, among other things.
So on top of L-Dopa, they gave these kids a serotonin precursor drug, and they're effectively normal now.
At the time -- this was a few years ago -- it cost $100,000.
Today it's $10,000, next year, $1,000, the year after, $100, give or take a year.
That's how fast this is moving.
So here's little Nick -- likes Batman and squirt guns.
And it turns out Nick shows up at the children's hospital with this distended belly, like a famine victim.
And it's not that he's not eating; it's that when he eats, his intestine basically opens up and feces spill out into his gut.
So a hundred surgeries later, he looks at his mom and says, "Mom, please pray for me.
His pediatrician happens to have a background in clinical genetics and he has no idea what's going on, but he says, "Let's get this kid's genome sequenced."
And what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death.
So the theory is that he's having some immunological reaction to what's going on -- to the food, essentially.
And that's a natural reaction, which causes some programmed cell death, but the gene that regulates that down is broken.
And so this informs, among other things, of course, a treatment for bone marrow transplant, which he undertakes.
And after nine months of grueling recovery, he's now eating steak with A1 sauce.
(Laughter) The prospect of using the genome as a universal diagnostic is upon us today.
And what it means for all of us is that everybody in this room could live an extra 5, 10, 20 years, just because of this one thing.
Which is a fantastic story, unless you think about humanity's footprint on the planet, and our ability to keep up food production.
So it turns out that the very same technology is also being used to grow new lines of corn, wheat, soybean and other crops that are highly tolerant of drought, of flood, of pests and pesticides.
Now, look -- as long as we continue to increase the population, we'll have to continue to grow and eat genetically modified foods.
And that's the only position I'll take today.
This is a typewriter, a staple of every desktop for decades.
And, in fact, the typewriter was essentially deleted by this thing.
And then more general versions of word processors came about.
It was Bob Metcalfe inventing the Ethernet, and the connection of all these computers that fundamentally changed everything.
Suddenly we had Netscape, we had Yahoo.
And we had, indeed, the entire dot-com bubble.
(Laughter) Not to worry though, that was quickly rescued by the iPod, Facebook and, indeed, Angry Birds.
(Laughter) Look, this is where we are today.
This is the genomic revolution today. This is where we are.
What I'd like you to consider is: What does it mean when these dots don't represent the individual bases of your genome, but they connect to genomes all across the planet?
Thankfully, I was able to answer A, and I say that honestly, in case my life insurance agent is listening.
But what would have happened if I had said C?
Consumer applications for genomics will flourish.
Do you want to see if you're genetically compatible with your girlfriend?
DNA sequencing on your iPhone? There's an app for that.
(Laughter) So anybody who's here today with your significant other, just turn over to them, swab their mouth, send it to the lab and you'll know for sure.
(Laughter) Do you really want to elect a president whose genome suggests cardiomyopathy?
And it looks really good.
Then she challenges all her competitors to do the same.
(Laughter) How many people in the audience have the last name Resnick, like me?
Raise your hand.
Typically, there's one or two.
They all hated each other, and all moved to different parts of the planet.
So imagine if my genome were De-identified, sitting in software, And a third cousin's genome was also sitting there, and there was software that could compare the two and make these associations.
Not hard to imagine. My company has software that does this right now.
Imagine one more thing, that that software is able to ask both parties for mutual consent: "Would you be willing to meet your third cousin?"
And if we both say yes -- voilà!
(Laughter) Now this is probably a good thing, right?
Bigger clan gatherings and so on.
How many fathers in the room? Raise your hands.
OK, so experts think that one to three percent of you are not actually the father of your child.
(Laughter) Look -- (Laughter) These genomes, these 23 chromosomes, they don't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society -- at least not yet.
And like any new technology, it's really in humanity's hands to wield it for the betterment of mankind or not.
And so I urge you all to wake up and to tune in and to influence the genomic revolution that's happening all around you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I want to say that really and truly, after these incredible speeches and ideas that are being spread, I am in the awkward position of being here to talk to you today about television.
So most everyone watches TV.
We like it. We like some parts of it.
Here in America, people actually love TV.
The average American watches TV for almost 5 hours a day.
Now I happen to make my living these days in television, so for me, that's a good thing.
But a lot of people don't love it so much.
They call it stupid, and worse, believe me.
But my idea today is not to debate whether there's such a thing as good TV or bad TV; my idea today is to tell you that I believe television has a conscience.
So why I believe that television has a conscience is that I actually believe that television directly reflects the moral, political, social and emotional need states of our nation -- that television is how we actually disseminate our entire value system.
Now today, we're not talking about good and bad TV.
We're talking about popular TV.
We're talking about top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over the course of 50 years.
How do these Nielsen ratings reflect not just what you've heard about, which is the idea of our social, collective unconscious, but how do these top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over 50 years reflect the idea of our social conscience?
How does television evolve over time, and what does this say about our society?
Now speaking of evolution, from basic biology, you probably remember that the animal kingdom, including humans, have four basic primal instincts.
As humans, what's important to remember is that we've developed, we've evolved over time to temper, or tame, these basic animal instincts.
We have the capacity to laugh and cry.
We feel awe, we feel pity.
That is separate and apart from the animal kingdom.
The other thing about human beings is that we love to be entertained.
We love to watch TV.
This is something that clearly separates us from the animal kingdom.
So I had an ambition to discover what could be understood from this uniquely human relationship between television programs and the human conscious.
Why has television entertainment evolved the way it has?
I kind of think of it as this cartoon devil or angel sitting on our shoulders.
Is television literally functioning as our conscience, tempting us and rewarding us at the same time?
So to begin to answer these questions, we did a research study.
We went back 50 years to the 1959/1960 television season.
We surveyed the top-20 Nielsen shows every year for 50 years -- a thousand shows.
We talked to over 3,000 individuals -- almost 3,600 -- aged 18 to 70, and we asked them how they felt emotionally.
Did you feel a sense of moral ambiguity?
So to our global TED audiences, I want to say that this was a U.S. sample.
But as you can see, these emotional need states are truly universal.
And on a factual basis, over 80 percent of the U.S.'s most popular shows are exported around the world.
Two acknowledgments before our first data slide: For inspiring me to even think about the idea of conscience and the tricks that conscience can play on us on a daily basis, I thank legendary rabbi, Jack Stern.
And for the way in which I'm going to present the data, I want to thank TED community superstar Hans Rosling, who you may have just seen.
So here you see, from 1960 to 2010, the 50 years of our study.
Two things we're going to start with -- the inspiration state and the moral ambiguity state, which, for this purpose, we defined inspiration as television shows that uplift me, that make me feel much more positive about the world.
Moral ambiguity are televisions shows in which I don't understand the difference between right and wrong.
That's what we're watching TV for.
Moral ambiguity starts to climb.
Why?
The Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK is shot, the Civil Rights movement, race riots, the Vietnam War, MLK is shot, Bobby Kennedy is shot, Watergate.
In 1970, inspiration plummets.
But look, it can't: AIDS, Iran-Contra, the Challenger disaster, Chernobyl.
Moral ambiguity becomes the dominant meme in television from 1990 for the next 20 years.
Take a look at this.
This chart is going to document a very similar trend.
Now this time on TV you have "Bonanza," don't forget, you have "Gunsmoke," you have "Andy Griffith," you have domestic shows all about comfort.
Irreverence starts to rise.
Social commentary is all of a sudden spiking up.
What's number one?
The socially irreverent hippie show, "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In."
Viewers had responded dramatically.
It means in the 1966 television season, The "Smothers Brothers" came out of nowhere.
This was the first show that allowed viewers to say, "My God, I can comment on how I feel about the Vietnam War, about the presidency, through television?"
That's what we mean by a breakout show.
Comfort is no longer why we watch television.
Social commentary and irreverence rise throughout the 70s.
Now look at this.
Only one generation, 20 years in, and we discovered, Wow! TV can do that?
It can change us?
Archie Bunker was shoved out of his easy chair along with the rest of us 40 years ago.
This is a quick chart. Here's another attribute: fantasy and imagination, which are shows defined as, "takes me out of my everyday realm" and "makes me feel better."
That's mapped against the red dot, unemployment, which is a simple Bureau of Labor Department statistic.
You'll see that every time fantasy and imagination shows rise, it maps to a spike in unemployment.
No. In the 70s you have the bellwether show "The Bionic Woman" that rocketed into the top-10 in 1973, followed by the "Six Million-Dollar Man" and "Charlie's Angels."
What were those shows?
Glamorous and rich.
"Dallas," "Fantasy Island."
Incredible mapping of our national psyche with some hard and fast facts: unemployment.
So here you are, in my favorite chart, because this is our last 20 years.
Whether or not you're in my business, you have surely heard or read of the decline of the thing called the three-camera sitcom and the rise of reality TV.
The 90s -- the big bubbles of humor -- we're watching "Friends," "Frasier," "Cheers" and "Seinfeld."
In 2001, the September 2001 television season, humor succumbs to judgment once and for all.
Why not?
We had a 2000 presidential election decided by the Supreme Court.
We had the bursting of the tech bubble.
We had 9/11.
Anthrax becomes part of the social lexicon.
At the turn of the century, the Internet takes off, reality television has taken hold.
I would have thought revenge or nostalgia.
Give me some comfort; my world is falling apart.
No, they want judgment.
I can keep Sarah Palin's daughter dancing.
I can choose the next American Idol. You're fired.
That's all great, right?
So as dramatically different as these television shows, pure entertainment, have been over the last 50 years -- what did I start with? -- one basic instinct remains.
We're animals, we need our moms.
There has not been a decade of television without a definitive, dominant TV mom.
The 1950s: June Cleever in the original comfort show, "Leave it to Beaver."
Lucille Ball kept us laughing through the rise of social consciousness in the 60s.
Maude Findlay, the epitome of the irreverent 1970s, who tackled abortion, divorce, even menopause on TV.
The 1980s, our first cougar was given to us in the form of Alexis Carrington.
Now I don't know if this is the devil or the angel sitting on our conscience, sitting on television's shoulders, but I do know that I absolutely love this image.
So to you all, the women of TEDWomen, the men of TEDWomen, the global audiences of TEDWomen, thank you for letting me present my idea about the conscience of television.
But let me also thank the incredible creators who get up everyday to put their ideas on our television screens throughout all these ages of television.
They give it life on television, for sure, but it's you as viewers, through your collective social consciences, that give it life, longevity, power or not.
(Applause)
Let's talk about billions.
Let's talk about past and future billions.
We know that about 106 billion people have ever lived.
And we know that most of them are dead.
And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia.
And we also know that most of them were or are very poor -- did not live for very long.
Let's talk about billions.
Let's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today.
We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800.
And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians.
19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth.
Economic historians call this "The Great Divergence."
It's basically two ratios of per capita GDP, per capita gross domestic product, so average income.
One, the red line, is the ratio of British to Indian per capita income.
And the blue line is the ratio of American to Chinese.
And this chart goes back to 1500.
And you can see here that there's an exponential Great Divergence.
In fact, in 1500, the average Chinese was richer than the average North American.
And that's allowing for differences in the cost of living.
It's based on purchasing power parity.
The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s.
So why?
If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny -- five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income.
By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires -- 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output.
Now you can't just blame this on imperialism -- though many people have tried to do so -- for two reasons.
One, empire was the least original thing that the West did after 1500.
So it really doesn't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great Divergence.
In any case, as you may remember, the Great Divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s, some considerable time after decolonization.
This is not a new question.
And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners -- by the people in the rest of the world -- like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire -- who said in a book published in 1731, "Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?"
It's not geography.
You may think we can explain the Great Divergence in terms of geography.
We know that's wrong, because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions.
We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result.
And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism.
And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany.
This must be true because a Scotsman said it.
And I think I'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh TED.
So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a Scotsman.
He was Adam Smith -- not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery -- though he is very smart indeed.
(Laughter) Smith -- and I want you to go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile; it's a wonderful statue -- Smith, in the "Wealth of Nations" published in 1776 -- that's the most important thing that happened that year ...
There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies, but ...
But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of."
That is so right and so cool.
And he said it such a long time ago.
Let's call them the killer apps.
I want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest.
They're just icons; you click on them.
But behind the icon, there's complex code.
It's the same with institutions.
There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence.
One, competition.
Two, the scientific revolution.
Three, property rights.
Four, modern medicine.
Five, the consumer society.
(Laughter) Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this, synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process.
Competition means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns.
The ancestor of the modern corporation, the City of London Corporation, existed in the 12th century.
Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing.
The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most important being that, through the experimental method, it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before.
Example: Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics.
That really was a killer application.
(Laughter) Meanwhile, there's no scientific revolution anywhere else.
The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there.
That's what makes the difference between North America and South America.
That's not possible in Latin America where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors.
Most people in rural North America owned some land by 1900.
That's another killer app.
Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people.
And this was another killer app -- the very opposite of a killer, because it doubled, and then more than doubled, human life expectancy.
Even in places like Senegal, beginning in the early 20th century, there were major breakthroughs in public health, and life expectancy began to rise.
The empires weren't all bad.
The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution to have a point.
That's the consumer society, and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself.
Japan was the first non-Western society to embrace it.
The alternative, which was proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent.
Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant.
He was wrong.
Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work.
We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon.
In fact, the West has lost its work ethic.
And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon, and that is the end of the Great Divergence.
Who's got the work ethic now?
The gap between Shanghai and the United Kingdom and the United States is as big as the gap between the U.K. and the U.S.
and Albania and Tunisia.
You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation.
You're wrong.
In terms of patents, there's no question that the East is ahead.
Not only has Japan been ahead for some time, South Korea has gone into third place, and China is just about to overtake Germany.
Why?
Because the killer apps can be downloaded.
It's open source.
Any society can adopt these institutions, and when they do, they achieve what the West achieved after 1500 -- only faster.
This is the Great Reconvergence, and it's the biggest story of your lifetime.
The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese.
So I want to end with three questions for the future billions, just ahead of 2016, when the United States will lose its place as number one economy to China.
One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've established secure private property rights.
And third, can China do without killer app number three?
That's the one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law.
That's the basis for the Western model of representative government.
Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier this year.
But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt.
Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938.
It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained.
That is civilization -- and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture," what all TEDsters care about most.
"When civilization reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people."
I don't think the decline of Western civilization is inevitable, because I don't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model, beautifully illustrated by Thomas Cole's "Course of Empire" paintings.
That's not the way history works.
That's not the way the West rose, and I don't think it's the way the West will fall.
The West may collapse very suddenly.
Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
That's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations.
No, we may hang on, despite the huge burdens of debt that we've accumulated, despite the evidence that we've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo.
But one thing is for sure, the Great Divergence is over, folks.
Thanks very much.
Niall Ferguson: Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the East; I'm talking about the rise of the Rest, and that includes South America.
I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, "Hey, is South America part of the West?"
He was an expert in Latin American history.
He said, "I don't know; I'll have to think about that."
I think if you look at what is happening in Brazil in particular, but also Chile, which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life, there's a very bright future indeed.
So my story really is as much about that convergence in the Americas as it's a convergence story in Eurasia.
BG: And there is this impression that North America and Europe are not really paying attention to these trends.
Mostly they're worried about each other.
The Americans think that the European model is going to crumble tomorrow.
The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow.
NF: I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right now -- both sides of the Atlantic -- is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture.
And it's a crisis that has its structural facet -- it's partly to do with demographics.
But it's also, of course, to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage, excessive borrowing in the private sector.
The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has just accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy.
I think that's its real importance.
BG: Niall, thank you. (NF: Thank you very much, Bruno.) (Applause)
Erez Lieberman Aiden: Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words.
But we at Harvard were wondering if this was really true.
(Laughter) So we assembled a team of experts, spanning Harvard, MIT, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Encyclopedia Britannica and even our proud sponsors, the Google.
And we cogitated about this for about four years.
And we came to a startling conclusion.
In fact, we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words.
Jean-Baptiste Michel: So how did we get to this conclusion?
So Erez and I were thinking about ways to get a big picture of human culture and human history: change over time.
So many books actually have been written over the years.
So we were thinking, well the best way to learn from them is to read all of these millions of books.
This is very, very low.
(Applause) Now people tend to use an alternative approach, which is to take a few sources and read them very carefully.
So it turns out there was a company across the river called Google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach.
They have digitized millions of books.
So what that means is, one could use computational methods to read all of the books in a click of a button.
ELA: Let me tell you a little bit about where books come from.
These authors have been striving to write books.
And this became considerably easier with the development of the printing press some centuries ago.
Since then, the authors have won on 129 million distinct occasions, publishing books.
Now if those books are not lost to history, then they are somewhere in a library, and many of those books have been getting retrieved from the libraries and digitized by Google, which has scanned 15 million books to date.
Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format.
Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata.
We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published.
And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data.
What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome -- a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over -- a veritable shard of our cultural genome.
Of course what we did when faced with such outrageous hyperbole ...
We're going to try science."
(Laughter) JM: Now of course, we were thinking, well let's just first put the data out there for people to do science to it.
Well of course, you want to take the books and release the full text of these five million books.
So you have five million, that is, five million authors and five million plaintiffs is a massive lawsuit.
(Laughter) Now again, we kind of caved in, and we did the very practical approach, which was a bit less awesome.
We said, well instead of releasing the full text, we're going to release statistics about the books.
We're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801, 1802, 1803, all the way up to 2008.
ELA: So those two billion lines, we call them two billion n-grams.
Well which one should I use?
How to know?
What should I do?"
And you also knew, more or less, that if you were to go back in time 200 years and ask the following statesman with equally fabulous hair, (Laughter) "Tom, what should I say?"
So now what I'm just going to show you is raw data.
Two rows from this table of two billion entries.
Now this is just two out of two billion rows.
So the entire data set is a billion times more awesome than this slide.
(Laughter) (Applause) JM: Now there are many other pictures that are worth 500 billion words.
ELA: If you were not yet convinced, sea levels are rising, so is atmospheric CO2 and global temperature.
JM: You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist.
(Laughter) ELA: You can get at some pretty abstract concepts with this sort of thing.
Pretty much for the vast majority of history, no one gave a damn about 1950.
In 1700, in 1800, in 1900, no one cared.
Through the 30s and 40s, no one cared.
People realized that 1950 was going to happen, and it could be big.
(Laughter) But nothing got people interested in 1950 like the year 1950.
They couldn't stop talking about all the things they did in 1950, all the things they were planning to do in 1950, all the dreams of what they wanted to accomplish in 1950.
In fact, 1950 was so fascinating that for years thereafter, people just kept talking about all the amazing things that happened, in '51, '52, '53.
Finally in 1954, someone woke up and realized that 1950 had gotten somewhat passé.
(Laughter) And just like that, the bubble burst.
(Laughter) And the story of 1950 is the story of every year that we have on record, with a little twist, because now we've got these nice charts.
We can say, "Well how fast does the bubble burst?"
Equations were derived, graphs were produced, and the net result is that we find that the bubble bursts faster and faster with each passing year.
We are losing interest in the past more rapidly.
JM: Now a little piece of career advice.
So for those of you who seek to be famous, we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures, authors, actors and so on.
So if you want to become famous early on, you should be an actor, because then fame starts rising by the end of your 20s -- you're still young, it's really great.
Now if you can wait a little bit, you should be an author, because then you rise to very great heights, like Mark Twain, for instance: extremely famous.
But if you want to reach the very top, you should delay gratification and, of course, become a politician.
So here you will become famous by the end of your 50s, and become very, very famous afterward.
Like for instance, biologists and physics tend to be almost as famous as actors.
One mistake you should not do is become a mathematician.
For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887.
He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German.
If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward.
And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany.
Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored.
We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing.
Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after.
So that's sort of what we expect.
And we compare that to the fame that we observe.
If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed.
If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda.
What you expect is basically what you observe.
This is distribution as seen in Germany -- very different, it's shifted to the left.
But much more importantly, the distribution is much wider.
There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been.
But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda.
This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record.
ELA: So culturomics is what we call this method.
It's kind of like genomics.
It's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture.
Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record.
The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it.
We have to make this available for people."
So in two weeks flat -- the two weeks before our paper came out -- they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public.
JM: Now this was used over a million times on the first day, and this is really the best of all the queries.
So people want to be their best, put their best foot forward.
But it turns out in the 18th century, people didn't really care about that at all.
So what happened is, of course, this is just a mistake.
It's not that strove for mediocrity, it's just that the S used to be written differently, kind of like an F.
Now of course, Google didn't pick this up at the time, so we reported this in the science article that we wrote.
But it turns out this is just a reminder that, although this is a lot of fun, when you interpret these graphs, you have to be very careful, and you have to adopt the base standards in the sciences.
ELA: People have been using this for all kinds of fun purposes.
We think that might have something to do with Reagan.
(Laughter) JM: There are many usages of this data, but the bottom line is that the historical record is being digitized.
Google has started to digitize 15 million books.
That's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published.
There's much more in culture: there's manuscripts, there newspapers, there's things that are not text, like art and paintings.
These all happen to be on our computers, on computers across the world.
And when that happens, that will transform the way we have to understand our past, our present and human culture.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I am a reformed marketer, and I now work in international development.
In October, I spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the [second] largest country in Africa.
In fact, it's as large as Western Europe, but it only has 300 miles of paved roads.
In the past 10 years, five million people have died due to a war in the east.
There are many health issues as well.
In fact, the HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults.
This might not sound like a large number, but in a country with 76 million people, it means there are 930,000 that are infected.
And due to the poor infrastructure, only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need.
Which is why, in part, donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost.
And so while I was in the DRC, I spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms, including Damien.
But it is a place where sex workers and their clients come.
Now Damien knows all about condoms, but he doesn't sell them.
It's not surprising, because only three percent of people in the DRC use condoms.
And so I started to look at what the marketing looked like.
And it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms: fear, financing and fidelity.
They name the condoms things like Vive, "to live" or Trust.
Now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom.
(Laughter) What is it that you think about just before you get a condom?
Sex!
And the private companies that sell condoms in these places, they understand this.
Their marketing is slightly different.
Some brands are aspirational, and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative.
And this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing: understanding who's the audience.
And for donor agencies, unfortunately, the audience tends to be people that aren't even in the country they're working [in].
But if what we're really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV, we need to think about the customer, the people whose behavior needs to change -- the couples, the young women, the young men -- whose lives depend on it.
And so the lesson is this: it doesn't really matter what you're selling; you just have to think about who is your customer, and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior.
It might just save their lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Everyone's familiar with cancer, but we don't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease.
So first of all, what is a Tasmanian devil?
Many of you might be familiar with Taz, the cartoon character, the one that spins around and around and around.
But not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the Tasmanian devil, and it's the world's largest carnivorous marsupial.
A marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo.
The Tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes.
(Screaming) (Laughter) The Tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger, and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals.
[The] Tasmanian devil is found only on the island of Tasmania, which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of Australia.
And despite their ferocious appearance, Tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals.
In fact, growing up in Tasmania, it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild.
And in fact, there's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years.
And the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease, a contagious cancer.
The story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a Tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face.
At the time, this was thought to be a one-off.
Animals, just like humans, sometimes get strange tumors.
However, we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease, which is now an epidemic spreading through Tasmania.
The disease was first sighted in the northeast of Tasmania in 1996 and has spread across Tasmania like a huge wave.
This disease appears first as tumors, usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils.
These tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors, such as these ones here.
But inevitably, these tumors progress towards being enormous, ulcerating tumors like this one here.
This one in particular sticks in my mind, because this is the first case of this disease that I saw myself.
And I remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating, foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw.
She hadn't eaten for days.
Her guts were swimming with parasitic worms.
Her body was riddled with secondary tumors.
And yet, she was feeding three little baby Tasmanian devils in her pouch.
They were too young to survive without their mother.
In fact, in the area where she comes from, more than 90 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease.
Scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer, this infectious cancer, that was spreading through the Tasmanian devil population.
And our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women, which is spread by a virus, and to the AIDS epidemic, which is associated with a number of different types of cancer.
All the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus.
However, we now know -- and I'll tell you right now -- that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus.
In fact, the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister, and something that we hadn't really thought of before.
But in order for me to explain what that is, I need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself.
Cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year.
One in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives.
I myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when I was only 14.
Cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself.
Paradoxically, once established, natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer.
Natural selection is survival of the fittest.
And when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells, if one of them acquires new mutations, which allow them to grow more quickly, acquire nutrients more successfully, invade the body, they'll be selected for by evolution.
That's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat.
It evolves.
Throw a drug at it, and resistant cells will grow back.
An amazing fact is that, given the right environment and the right nutrients, a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever.
However cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies, and its continued growth, its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues, leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself.
So cancer could be thought of as a strange, short-lived, self-destructive life form -- an evolutionary dead end.
But that is where the Tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation.
This was work from many people, but I'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that I did a few years ago.
The next slide is going to be gruesome.
He's a Tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face.
And being a geneticist, I'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations.
So I took this opportunity to collect some samples from Jonas' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body.
I took these back to the lab.
I extracted DNA from them.
And when I looked at the sequence of the DNA, and compared the sequence of Jonas' tumor to that of the rest of his body, I discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile.
In fact, Jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you.
What this told us was that Jonas' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body.
In fact, more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in Jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female Tasmanian devil -- and Jonas was clearly a male.
So how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on Jonas' face?
Well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of Tasmanian devil cancers from all around Tasmania.
That means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil, that have broken free of that first devil's body and spread through the entire Tasmanian devil population.
But how can a cancer spread in a population?
They tend to bite each other, often quite ferociously and usually on the face.
We think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor, get into the saliva.
So this Tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer.
It spreads through the population, has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system, and it's the only cancer that we know of that's threatening an entire species with extinction.
But if this can happen in Tasmanian devils, why hasn't it happened in other animals or even humans?
This is Kimbo.
Last year, his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region.
She took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting.
He discovered this, a huge bleeding tumor at the base of Kimbo's penis.
The vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor, a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs.
And just as the Tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells, so is this dog cancer.
But this dog cancer is quite remarkable, because it spread all around the world.
And in fact, these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City, in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia.
We also believe this cancer might be very old.
In fact, genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old, which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals.
This cancer is remarkable.
It's a living relic of the distant past.
So we've seen that this can happen in animals.
Could cancers be contagious between people?
Well this is a question which fascinated Chester Southam, a cancer doctor in the 1950s.
And this is a photograph of Dr. Southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer, who in this case was an inmate in Ohio State Penitentiary.
Most of the people that Dr. Southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells.
But a small number of them did, and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill -- whose immune systems were probably compromised.
(Laughter) it's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people.
However, under some circumstances, it can happen.
And I think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future.
So just finally, cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments.
But that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer.
In fact, I believe, given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer's growth, we can defeat cancer.
Let's prevent the Tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Basically, there's a major demographic event going on.
And it may be that passing the 50 percent urban point is an economic tipping point. So the world now is a map of connectivity.
It used to be that Paris and London and New York were the largest cities.
What we have now is the end of the rise of the West. That's over.
The question is, why?
And here's the unromantic truth -- and the city air makes you free, they said in Renaissance Germany. So some people go to places like Shanghai but most go to the squatter cities where aesthetics rule.
They're the dominant builders and to a large extent, the dominant designers.
They have home-brewed infrastructure and vibrant urban life.
One-sixth of the GDP in India is coming out of Mumbai.
They are constantly upgrading, and in a few cases, the government helps.
Education is the main event that can happen in cities.
What's going on in the street in Mumbai?
There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works.
One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
So here's the first punch line: cities have defused the population bomb.
And here's the second punch line.
That's the news from downtown. Here it is in perspective.
Thank you.
So I just want to tell you my story.
I spend a lot of time teaching adults how to use visual language and doodling in the workplace.
And naturally, I encounter a lot of resistance, because it's considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning.
But I have a problem with that belief, because I know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems.
So I discovered some very interesting things.
In the 17th century, a doodle was a simpleton or a fool -- as in Yankee Doodle.
In the 18th century, it became a verb, and it meant to swindle or ridicule or to make fun of someone.
In the 19th century, it was a corrupt politician.
No wonder people are averse to doodling at work.
Doing nothing at work is akin to masturbating at work; it's totally inappropriate.
And additionally, there is a psychological aversion to doodling -- thank you, Freud.
But that does contribute to people not wanting to share their doodles.
And here is the real deal. Here's what I believe.
And here's the truth: doodling is an incredibly powerful tool, and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn.
Here's another interesting truth about the doodle: People who doodle when they're exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts.
We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus, but in reality, it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus.
Additionally, it has a profound effect on creative problem-solving and deep information processing.
There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions.
The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience.
So they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children, and they found that, across space and time, all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow.
In other words, they have a shared and growing complexity in visual language that happens in a predictable order.
This is but one: this is Frank Gehry the architect's precursor to the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.
On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high.
In reality, it is one of its greatest allies.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I grew up white, secular and middle class in 1950s America.
That meant watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, trick-or-treating on Halloween and putting presents under a tree at Christmas.
But by the time those traditions got to me, they were hollow, commercial enterprises, which just left me feeling empty.
So from a relatively young age, I found myself looking to fill an existential hole, to connect with something bigger than myself.
There hadn't been a bar mitzvah in my family in over a century, so I thought I'd take a shot at that -- (Laughter) only to be devastated when my one encounter with the rabbi, a really tall, godlike figure with flowing white hair, consisted of him asking me for my middle name so we could fill out a form.
Yep, that was it.
(Laughter) So I got the fountain pen, but I didn't get the sense of belonging and confidence I was searching for.
Many years later, I couldn't bear the thought of my son turning 13 without some kind of rite of passage.
So I came up with the idea of a 13th birthday trip, and I offered to take Murphy anywhere in the world that had meaning for him.
And when my daughter, Katie, turned 13, she and I spent two weeks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where Katie learned for the first time that she was powerful and brave.
Since then, my partner, Ashton, and lots of our friends and relatives have taken their kids on 13th birthday trips, with everyone finding it transformative for both the child and the parent.
But for the last 20 years, we've been holding hands before every meal.
It's a beautiful bit of shared silence that brings us all together in the moment.
Ashton tells everyone to "pass the squeeze," while she assures them it's not religious.
(Laughter) So recently, when my family asked me if I could please do something with the more than 250 boxes of stuff that I've collected over a lifetime, my ritual-making impulse kicked in.
"Death cleaning" is the Swedish term for clearing out your closets, your basement and your attic before you die, so your kids don't have to do it later.
(Laughter) I pictured my children opening up box after box and wondering why I'd kept any of that stuff.
(Laughter) And then I imagined them looking at a specific picture of me with a beautiful young woman, and asking, "Who on earth is that with Dad?"
Could using the objects to tell the stories be the seed of a new ritual, a rite of passage -- not for a 13-year-old, but for someone much further down the road?
So I started experimenting.
I got a few dozen things out of the boxes, I put them about in a room, and I invited people to come in and ask me about anything that they found interesting.
The results were terrific.
A good story became a launching pad for a much deeper discussion, in which my visitors made meaningful connections to their own lives.
And giving it to him felt just about perfect.
And I started seeing myself with a renewed sense of purpose -- not as the old guy on the way out, but as someone with a role to play going forward.
When I was growing up, life ended for most people in their 70s.
People are living far longer now, and for the first time in human history, it's common for four generations to be living side by side.
I'm 71, and with a bit of luck, I've got 20 or 30 more years ahead of me.
Turns out to be just what I was looking for: a ritual that's less about dying and more about opening the door to whatever comes next.
Thank you.
(Applause)
A few months ago, a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where I live, and she was brought in confused.
Her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170.
She was resuscitated, stabilized, whisked over to a CAT scan suite right next to the emergency room, because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung.
And the real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years.
Unfortunately, it happens all the time.
I am not a Luddite.
I teach at Stanford.
I'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology.
We're losing a ritual.
We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
This may actually be heresy to say this at TED, but I'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation, I think, in medicine to come in the next 10 years, and that is the power of the human hand -- to touch, to comfort, to diagnose and to bring about treatment.
This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Since we're in Edinburgh, I'm a big fan of Conan Doyle.
You might not know that Conan Doyle went to medical school here in Edinburgh, and his character, Sherlock Holmes, was inspired by Sir Joseph Bell.
Joseph Bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts.
And Conan Doyle, writing about Bell, described the following exchange between Bell and his students.
So picture Bell sitting in the outpatient department, students all around him, patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in.
And a woman comes in with a child, and Conan Doyle describes the following exchange.
The woman says, "Good Morning."
Bell says, "What sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from Burntisland?"
And he says, "What did you do with the other child?"
She says, "I left him with my sister at Leith."
And he says, "And did you take the shortcut down Inverleith Row to get here to the infirmary?"
She says, "I did."
And she says, "I am."
He says, "You see, when she said, 'Good morning,' I picked up her Fife accent.
And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland.
And so she must have taken the ferry over.
You notice the clay on the soles of her feet.
Such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of Edinburgh, except in the botanical gardens.
And finally, she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland."
And when Bell actually strips the patient, begins to examine the patient, you can only imagine how much more he would discern.
And as a teacher of medicine, as a student myself, I was so inspired by that story.
The picture I'm showing you is of Leopold Auenbrugger who, in the late 1700s, discovered percussion.
And the story is that Leopold Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper.
And his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder.
And so when Auenbrugger became a physician, he began to do the same thing.
And basically everything we know about percussion, which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day -- organ enlargement, fluid around the heart, fluid in the lungs, abdominal changes -- all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript "Inventum Novum," "New Invention," which would have disappeared into obscurity, except for the fact that this physician, Corvisart, a famous French physician -- famous only because he was physician to this gentleman -- Corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work.
And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope.
Laennec, it is said, was walking in the streets of Paris and saw two children playing with a stick.
One was scratching at the end of the stick, another child listened at the other end.
Later he renamed it the stethoscope.
So within a few years, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of a sudden, the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis.
And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut -- short on the sides, long in the back -- and pull your tooth while he was at it.
He made no attempt at diagnosis.
In fact, some of you might well know that the barber pole, the red and white stripes, represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon, and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected.
But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change, a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body.
And this particular painting, I think, represents the pinnacle, the peak, of that clinical era.
This is a very famous painting: "The Doctor" by Luke Fildes.
Luke Fildes was commissioned to paint this by Tate, who then established the Tate Gallery.
And Tate asked Fildes to paint a painting of social importance.
Fildes' oldest son, Philip, died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness.
I've often wondered, what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era, in the year 2011?
I've gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who's in the computer.
I call it the iPatient.
There's a real disjunction between the patient's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care.
The focus was around the patient.
We went from bed to bed. The attending physician was in charge.
Now I've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that I want to share with you.
One had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer, had a small breast cancer detected -- had her lumpectomy in the town in which I lived.
This is when I was in Texas.
And she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care.
And she found the place and decided to go there, went there.
Which is why I was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town, getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist.
And I pressed her, and I asked her, "Why did you come back and get your care here?"
And she was reluctant to tell me.
She said, "The cancer center was wonderful.
It had a beautiful facility, giant atrium, valet parking, a piano that played itself, a concierge that took you around from here to there.
But," she said, "but they did not touch my breasts."
They had her scanned inside out.
They understood her breast cancer at the molecular level; they had no need to touch her breasts.
It was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who, every time she went, examined both breasts including the axillary tail, examined her axilla carefully, examined her cervical region, her inguinal region, did a thorough exam.
I was very influenced by that anecdote.
I was also influenced by another experience that I had, again, when I was in Texas, before I moved to Stanford.
I had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue.
This is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy.
I say that because these are difficult patients.
They have often been rejected by their families, have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who's about to disappoint them.
And if I tried, I'd disappoint them.
And if I ever get to heaven, it will be because I held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient.
And I remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit.
And I began my ritual.
And when my ritual began, this very voluble patient began to quiet down.
And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role.
I then proceeded to tell the patient, once the patient was dressed, the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions, which is, "This is not in your head.
This is real.
The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection.
The bad news is we don't know exactly what's causing this, but here's what you should do, here's what we should do."
And I would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere.
I took this to my colleagues at Stanford in anthropology and told them the same story.
And they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation.
We marry, for example, with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss.
I'm not sure why you're laughing.
We signal transitions of power with rituals.
Rituals are terribly important.
They're all about transformation.
And if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient, by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown, by not doing a complete exam, you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship.
I'm an infectious disease physician, and in the early days of HIV, before we had our medications, I presided over so many scenes like this.
I remember so many patients, their names still vivid on my tongue, their faces still so clear.
I remember so many huge, hollowed out, haunted eyes staring up at me as I performed this ritual.
"I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications.
When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth, his hands moved as if in slow motion.
And as I wondered what he was up to, his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt, fumbling with his buttons.
It was an offering, an invitation.
I think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him.
Neither of us could skip this ritual, which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung, or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure.
We seem to have forgotten -- as though, with the explosion of knowledge, the whole human genome mapped out at our feet, we are lulled into inattention, forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician, necessary for the patient -- forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient.
I will never abandon you.
I will be with you through the end."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
It's an idea for a new kind of school, which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work.
And about five years ago, we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the U.K.
One was large numbers of bored teenagers who just didn't like school, couldn't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs.
And employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school weren't actually ready for real work, didn't have the right attitudes and experience.
And after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia, and looking at some of the academic research, which showed the importance of what's now called non-cognitive skills -- the skills of motivation, resilience -- and that these are as important as the cognitive skills -- formal academic skills -- we came up with an answer, a very simple answer in a way, which we called the Studio School.
And we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated.
You work by learning, and you learn by working.
And the design we came up with had the following characteristics.
Underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real -- all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does.
Now that was a nice idea, so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase.
We tried it out, first in Luton -- famous for its airport and not much else, I fear -- and in Blackpool -- famous for its beaches and leisure.
They found it much more motivational, much more exciting than traditional education.
The minister of education down south in London described himself as a "big fan."
And the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today.
And next year, we're expecting about 35 schools open across England, and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening -- a pretty rapid spread of this idea.
This is one from Yorkshire where, in fact, my nephew, I hope, will be able to attend it.
And this one is focused on creative and media industries.
Other ones have a focus on health care, tourism, engineering and other fields.
It's not perfect yet, but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands, possibly millions, of teenagers who are really bored by schooling.
They want to do things, they want to get their hands dirty, they want education to be for real.
And my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us.
We feel we're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the Studio School idea into something which is present, not as a universal answer for every child, but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world.
And I hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I was born in Switzerland and raised in Ghana, West Africa.
Ghana felt safe to me as a child.
I was free, I was happy.
But then by the end of the decade, the country had fallen back into political instability and mismanagement.
In 1979, I witnessed my first military coup.
We the children had gathered at a friend's house.
There was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background, and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole.
The firing squad aimed, fired -- the general was dead.
Now this was being broadcast live.
And shortly after, we left the country, and we returned to Switzerland.
I wanted to blend in like a chameleon.
I think it was a tactic of survival.
And it worked, or so I believed.
So here I was in 2008 wondering where I was in my life.
I was always playing the exotic African.
I was playing the violent African, the African terrorist.
And I was thinking, how many terrorists could I possibly play before turning into one myself?
And I had become ashamed of the other, the African in me.
And fortunately I decided in 2008 to return to Ghana, after 28 years of absence.
I wanted to document on film the 2008 presidential elections.
And there, I started by searching for the footprints in my childhood.
And before I even knew it, I was suddenly on a stage surrounded by thousands of cheering people during a political rally.
And I realized that, when I'd left the country, free and fair elections in a democratic environment were a dream.
And now that I'd returned, that dream had become reality, though a fragile reality.
And I was thinking, was Ghana searching for its identity like I was looking for my identity?
Was what was happening in Ghana a metaphor for what was happening in me?
And it was as if through the standards of my Western life, I hadn't lived up to my full potential.
Now in 1957, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence.
In the late 50s, Ghana and Singapore had the same GDP.
I mean, today, Singapore is a First World country and Ghana is not.
But maybe it was time to prove to myself, yes, it's important to understand the past, it is important to look at it in a different light, but maybe we should look at the strengths in our own culture and build on those foundations in the present.
The polling stations opened to the voters at 7:00 AM, but voters, eager to take their own political fate into their hands, were starting to line up at 4:00 AM in the morning.
And they had traveled from near, they had traveled from far, because they wanted to make their voices heard.
And I asked one of the voters, I said, "Whom are you going to vote for?"
And he said, "I'm sorry, I can't tell you."
And I understood, this was their election, and they weren't going to let anyone take it away from them.
Now the first round of the voting didn't bring forth a clear winner -- so nobody had achieved the absolute majority -- so voting went into a second round three weeks later.
And then the cliche came to haunt us.
There were claims of intimidation at the polling stations, of ballot boxes being stolen.
Inflated results started coming in and the mob was starting to get out of control.
People were being beaten brutally.
Here is another proof that the African is not capable of governing himself.
And not only that, I am documenting it -- documenting my own cultural shortcomings.
We want peace."
So the sounds that were before distorted and loud, were suddenly a melody.
So it could happen.
A democracy could be upheld peacefully.
Now here's an interesting comparison.
We in the West, we preach the values, the golden light of democracy, that we are the shining example of how it's done.
But when it comes down to it, Ghana found itself in the same place in which the U.S. election stalled in the 2000 presidential elections -- Bush versus Gore.
But instead of the unwillingness of the candidates to allow the system to proceed and the people to decide, Ghana honored democracy and its people.
It didn't leave it up to the Supreme Court to decide; the people did.
Now the second round of voting did not bring forth a clear winner either.
I mean, it was so incredibly close.
So the people went back to the polls to determine their own president, not the legal system.
And guess what, it worked.
The defeated candidate gave up power and made way for Ghana to move into a new democratic cycle.
I mean, at the absolute time for the absolute need of democracy, they did not abuse their power.
The belief in true democracy and in the people runs deep, proving that the African is capable of governing himself.
Now the uphill battle for Ghana and for Africa is not over, but I have proof that the other side of democracy exists, and that we must not take it for granted.
Now I have learned that my place is not just in the West or in Africa, and I'm still searching for my identity, but I saw Ghana create democracy better.
Ghana taught me to look at people differently and to look at myself differently.
And yes, we Africans can.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I'm a doctor, but I kind of slipped sideways into research, and now I'm an epidemiologist.
And nobody really knows what epidemiology is.
Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you.
And it's best understood through example as the science of those crazy, wacky newspaper headlines.
And these are just some of the examples.
These are from the Daily Mail.
Every country in the world has a newspaper like this.
It has this bizarre, ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer.
Here are some of the things they said cause cancer: divorce, Wi-Fi, toiletries and coffee.
So you can see there are contradictions.
Coffee both causes and prevents cancer.
For women, housework prevents breast cancer, but for men, shopping could make you impotent.
(Laughter) So we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this.
But it's also an extremely valuable explanatory tool, because real science is about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else's position.
(Laughter) So what I'm going to show you is all of the main things, all of the main features of my discipline, evidence-based medicine.
We'll start with the absolute weakest form of evidence known to man, and that is authority.
How do you know that something is good for us or bad for us?
This is somebody called Dr. Gillian McKeith, PhD, or, to give her full medical title, Gillian McKeith.
She has five series of prime-time television, giving out very lavish and exotic health advice.
She, it turns out, has a non-accredited correspondence course PhD from somewhere in America.
She also boasts that she's a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, which sounds very glamorous; you get a certificate.
This one belongs to my dead cat, Hettie. She was a horrible cat.
She also says things like eat lots of dark green leaves, they contain chlorophyll and really oxygenate your blood.
And anybody who's done school biology remembers that chlorophyll and chloroplasts only make oxygen in sunlight, and it's quite dark in your bowels after you've eaten spinach.
So: "Red wine can help prevent breast cancer."
This is a headline from The Daily Telegraph in the UK.
"A glass of red wine a day could help prevent breast cancer."
And that's a really useful thing to describe in a scientific paper.
Actually, it turns out that your risk of breast cancer increases slightly with every amount of alcohol you drink.
And here's another example.
This is from Britain's "leading" diet nutritionist in the Daily Mirror, our second-biggest selling newspaper.
"An Australian study in 2001 found that olive oil, in combination with fruits, vegetables and pulses, offers measurable protection against skin wrinklings," and give the advice: "If you eat olive oil and vegetables, you'll have fewer wrinkles."
They helpfully tell you how to find the paper, and what you find is an observational study.
You have to take a snapshot of how people are now.
And what you find is, of course: people who eat veg and olive oil have fewer wrinkles.
(Laughter) So ideally, what you want to do is a trial.
People think they're familiar with the idea of a trial.
I'm going to tell you about one trial, which is probably the most well-reported trial in the UK news media over the past decade.
The claim: fish oil pills improve school performance and behavior in mainstream children.
Either you've rigged it by design, or you've got enough data so there's no need to randomize people anymore.
Now, can anybody spot a flaw in this design?
They got older; we all develop over time.
And of course, there's the placebo effect, one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine.
It's not just taking a pill and performance or pain improving; it's about our beliefs and expectations, the cultural meaning of a treatment.
And this has been demonstrated in a whole raft of fascinating studies comparing one kind of placebo against another.
So we know, for example, that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for gastric ulcers than one sugar pill.
That's an outrageous and ridiculous finding, but it's true.
So we know that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated, which is why we do trials where we control against a placebo, where one half of the people get the real treatment, and the other half get placebo.
But that's not enough.
What I've just shown you are examples of the very simple and straightforward ways that journalists and food supplement pill peddlers and naturopaths can distort evidence for their own purposes.
What I find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices, but slightly more sophisticated versions of them, in order to distort the evidence they give to doctors and patients, and which we use to make vitally important decisions.
So we don't want to know that your alternative new treatment is better than nothing, but that it's better than the best available treatment we have.
You can give the competing drug in too low a dose, so people aren't properly treated.
You can give the competing drug in too high a dose, so people get side effects.
And this is exactly what happened with antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia.
Twenty years ago, a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were brought in; the promise was they would have fewer side effects.
So people set about doing trials of the new drugs against the old drugs.
But they gave the old drugs in ridiculously high doses: 20 milligrams a day of haloperidol.
And it's a foregone conclusion if you give a drug at that high a dose, it will have more side effects, and your new drug will look better.
Ten years ago, history repeated itself, when risperidone, the first of the new-generation antipsychotic drugs, came off copyright, so anybody could make copies.
Everybody wanted to show their drug was better than risperidone, so you see trials comparing new antipsychotic drugs against risperidone at eight milligrams a day.
Again, not an insane dose, not an illegal dose, but very much at the high end of normal.
And so it's no surprise that overall, industry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials.
But -- and it's a big but -- (Laughter) it turns out, when you look at the methods used by industry-funded trials, that they're actually better than independently sponsored trials.
And yet, they always manage to get the result that they want.
So how does this work?
(Laughter) How can we explain this strange phenomenon?
And this is the most important aspect of the whole story.
It's at the top of the pyramid of evidence.
We need to have all of the data on a particular treatment to know whether or not it really is effective.
I prefer statistics, so that's what I'll do first.
This is a funnel plot.
A funnel plot is a very clever way of spotting if small negative trials have disappeared, have gone missing in action.
This is a graph of all of the trials done on a particular treatment.
As you go up towards the top of the graph, what you see is each dot is a trial.
If there is publication bias, if small negative trials have gone missing in action, you can see it on one of these graphs.
So you see here that the small negative trials that should be on the bottom left have disappeared.
This is a graph demonstrating the presence of publication bias in studies of publication bias.
And I think that's the funniest epidemiology joke you will ever hear.
(Laughter) That's how you can prove it statistically.
Well, they're heinous, they really are.
This is a drug called reboxetine.
And I'm a very nerdy doctor.
In fact, 76 percent of all of the trials that were done on this drug were withheld from doctors and patients.
Now if you think about it, if I tossed a coin a hundred times, and I'm allowed to withhold from you the answers half the times, then I can convince you that I have a coin with two heads.
If we remove half of the data, we can never know what the true effect size of these medicines is.
And this is not an isolated story.
Around half of all of the trial data on antidepressants has been withheld, but it goes way beyond that.
The Nordic Cochrane Group were trying to get ahold of the data on that to bring it all together.
And they need to have access to all of the trial data.
So did the European Medicines Agency -- for three years.
And to show how big it goes, this is a drug called Tamiflu, which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on.
And they spend that money on the promise that this is a drug which will reduce the rate of complications with flu.
I'm sorry if you have the flu, I know it's horrible, but we're not going to spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the duration of your flu symptoms by half a day.
We stockpile them for emergencies on the understanding they'll reduce the number of complications, which means pneumonia and death.
The infectious diseases Cochrane Group, which are based in Italy, has been trying to get the full data in a usable form out of the drug companies, so they can make a full decision about whether this drug is effective or not, and they've not been able to get that information.
This is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical problem facing medicine today.
But I would say this: I think that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
(Applause)
The history of civilization, in some ways, is a history of maps: How have we come to understand the world around us?
One of the most famous maps works because it really isn't a map at all.
They needed a map to represent that system so people would know where to ride.
The map they made is complicated.
You can see rivers, bodies of water, trees and parks -- the stations were all crammed together at the center of the map, and out in the periphery, there were some that couldn't even fit on the map.
So the map was geographically accurate, but maybe not so useful.
Enter Harry Beck.
Harry Beck was a 29-year-old engineering draftsman who had been working on and off for the London Underground.
And he had a key insight, and that was that people riding underground in trains don't really care what's happening aboveground.
They just want to get from station to station -- "Where do I get on? Where do I get off?"
It's the system that's important, not the geography.
He's taken this complicated mess of spaghetti, and he's simplified it.
The lines only go in three directions: they're horizontal, they're vertical, or they're 45 degrees.
What it is is a diagram, just like circuitry, except the circuitry here isn't wires conducting electrons, it's tubes containing trains conducting people from place to place.
In 1933, the Underground decided, at last, to give Harry Beck's map a try.
They were gone in one hour.
They realized they were onto something, they printed 750,000 more, and this is the map that you see today.
Beck's design really became the template for the way we think of metro maps today.
Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Sydney, Washington, D.C. -- all of them convert complex geography into crisp geometry.
They all are part of a universal language, seemingly.
I bet Harry Beck wouldn't have known what a user interface was, but that's really what he designed and he really took that challenge and broke it down to three principles that I think can be applied in nearly any design problem.
Focus on who you're doing this for.
The second principle is simplicity.
Who would've thought that an electrical engineer would be the person to hold the key to unlock what was then one of the most complicated systems in the world -- all started by one guy with a pencil and an idea.
The hoodie is an amazing object.
It's one of those timeless objects that we hardly think of, because they work so well that they're part of our lives.
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Paola Antonelli on the Hoodie] The hoodie has been -- even if it was not called so -- it's been an icon throughout history for good and for bad reasons.
The earliest ones that we can trace are from ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
Ladies in the 17th century would wear hoodies to kind of hide themselves when they were going to meet their lovers.
There's the image of the hoodie connected to the grim reaper.
It was meant to keep athletes warm.
Of course, though, it was such a functional, comfortable garment that it was very rapidly adopted by workmen everywhere.
And then, around the 1980s, it also gets adopted by hip-hop and B-boys, skateboarders, and it takes on this kind of youth street culture.
It was, at the same time, super-comfortable, perfect for the streets and also had that added value of anonymity when you needed it.
And then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who defies convention of respectable attire for businesspeople.
But interestingly, it's also a way to show how power has changed.
If you're wearing a two-piece suit, you might be the bodyguard.
It's easy to think of the physical aspects of the hoodie.
I mean, think of donning a hoodie, all of a sudden, you feel more protected, you feel that you are in your own shell.
We know very well what the hoodie has come to signify in the past few years in the United States.
When Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American kid, was shot by a neighborhood vigilante, and Million Hoodie Marches happened all over the United States, in which people wore hoodies with the hood up and marched in the streets against this kind of prejudice.
It doesn't happen that often for a garment to have so much symbolism and history and that encompasses so many different universes as the hoodie.
So, like all garments, especially all truly utilitarian garments, it is very basic in its design.
But at the same time, it has a whole universe of possibilities attached.
The sound is a really big part, I think, of the experience of using a pencil, and it has this really audible scratchiness.
(Scratching) [Small thing. Big idea.] [Caroline Weaver on the Pencil] The pencil is a very simple object.
It's made of wood with some layers of paint an eraser and a core, which is made out of graphite, clay and water.
Yeah, it took hundreds of people over centuries to come to this design.
And it's that long history of collaboration that, to me, makes it a very perfect object.
The story of the pencil starts with graphite.
People started finding really useful applications for this new substance.
They cut it into small sticks and wrapped it in string or sheepskin or paper and sold it on the streets of London to be used for writing or for drawing or, a lot of times, by farmers and shepherds, who used it to mark their animals.
From there, this paste was filled into a mold and fired in a kiln, and the result was a really strong graphite core that wasn't breakable, that was smooth, usable -- it was so much better than anything else that existed at the time, and to this day, that's the method that's still used in making pencils.
Meanwhile, over in America, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was Henry David Thoreau who came up with the grading scale for different hardnesses of pencil.
The softer the pencil, the more graphite it had in it, and the darker and smoother the line will be.
The firmer the pencil, the more clay it had in it and the lighter and finer it will be.
Originally, when pencils were handmade, they were made round.
There was no easy way to make them, and it was the Americans who really mechanized the craft.
A lot of people credit Joseph Dixon for being one of the first people to start developing actual machines to do things like cut wood slats, cut grooves into the wood, apply glue to them ...
And they figured out it was easier and less wasteful to do a hexagonal pencil, and so that became the standard.
Originally, it was bread crumbs that were used to scratch away pencil marks and later, rubber and pumice.
The attached eraser happened in 1858, when American stationer Hymen Lipman patented the first pencil with an attached eraser, which really changed the pencil game.
The world's first yellow pencil was the KOH-I-NOOR 1500.
KOH-I-NOOR did this crazy thing where they painted this pencil with 14 coats of yellow paint and dipped the end in 14-carat gold.
There is a pencil for everyone, and every pencil has a story.
The Blackwing 602 is famous for being used by a lot of writers, especially John Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov.
And then, you have the Dixon pencil company.
They're responsible for the Dixon Ticonderoga.
It's an icon, it's what people think of when they think of a pencil and what they think of when they think of school.
In my opinion, there's nothing that can be done to make the pencil better than it is.
It's perfect.
[Small thing. Big idea.] [Daniel Engber on the Progress Bar] The progress bar is just an indicator on a computer that something's happening inside the device.
The classic one that's been used for years is a horizontal bar.
I mean, this goes back to pre-computer versions of this on ledgers, where people would fill in a horizontal bar from left to right to show how much of a task they had completed at a factory.
Something happened in the 70s that is sometimes referred to as "the software crisis," where suddenly, computers were getting more complicated more quickly than anyone had been prepared for, from a design perspective.
So you might have a graphical countdown clock, or they would have a line of asterisks that would fill out from left to right on a screen.
He found that it didn't really matter if the percent-done indicator was giving you the accurate percent done.
Just seeing it there made people feel better, and that was the most surprising thing.
Maybe it could make people relax effectively.
They would look and say, "Oh, the progress bar is half done.
That took five minutes.
So now I have five minutes to send this fax," or whatever people were doing in 1985.
Both of those things are wrong.
Like, when you see that progress bar, it sort of locks your attention in a tractor beam, and it turns the experience of waiting into this exciting narrative that you're seeing unfold in front of you: that somehow, this time you've spent waiting in frustration for the computer to do something, has been reconceptualized as: "Progress! Oh! Great stuff is happening!"
[Progress...] But once you start thinking about the progress bar as something that's more about dulling the pain of waiting, well, then you can start fiddling around with the psychology.
So if you have a progress bar that just moves at a constant rate -- let's say, that's really what's happening in the computer -- that will feel to people like it's slowing down.
We get bored.
That's exciting, people feel like, "Oh! Something's really happening!"
Then you can move back into a more naturalistic growth of the progress bar as you go along.
You're assuming that people are focusing on the passage of time -- they're trying to watch grass grow, they're trying to watch a pot of water, waiting for it to boil, and you're just trying to make that less boring, less painful and less frustrating than it was before.
So the progress bar at least gives you the vision of a beginning and an end, and you're working towards a goal.
I think in some ways, it mitigates the fear of death.
Too much?
(Music) ♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they keep talking of love, ♫ ♫ if they come near me, ♫ ♫ if they look into my eyes and kiss my hand. ♫ ♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they talk of magic, ♫ ♫ that no one withstands, ♫ ♫ if he sees me, if he passes by. ♫ ♫ But if the red light is on ♫ ♫ in the middle of the night ♫ ♫ and everybody listens to my song, ♫ ♫ then it is plain to see. ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ ♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ My feet, they glide and float, ♫ ♫ my eyes, they lure and glow. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced, 'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫ ♫ In my veins, ♫ ♫ runs a dancer's blood, ♫ ♫ because my beautiful mother ♫ ♫ was the Queen of dance ♫ ♫ in the gilded Alcazar. ♫ ♫ She was so very beautiful, ♫ ♫ I often saw her in my dreams. ♫ ♫ If she beat the tambourine ♫ ♫ to her beguiling dance, all eyes were glowing admiringly. ♫ ♫ She reawakened in me, ♫ ♫ mine is the same lot. ♫ ♫ I dance like her at midnight ♫ ♫ and from deep within I feel: ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ ♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced, 'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫ (Applause)
If you do it right, it should sound like: TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat.
It can be made out of rope, a clothesline, twine.
What's important is that it has a certain weight, and that they have that kind of whip sound.
It's not clear what the origin of the jump rope is.
There's some evidence that it began in ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, and then it most likely traveled to North America with Dutch settlers.
The rope became a big thing when women's clothes became more fitted and the pantaloon came into being.
And so, girls were able to jump rope because their skirts wouldn't catch the ropes.
Even formerly enslaved African children in the antebellum South jumped rope, too.
In the 1950s, in Harlem, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, you could see on the sidewalk, lots of girls playing with ropes.
The skipping rope was like a steady timeline -- tick, tick, tick, tick -- upon which you can add rhymes and rhythms and chants.
Double Dutch jump rope remains a powerful symbol of culture and identity for black women.
Back from the 1950s to the 1970s, girls weren't supposed to play sports.
Boys played baseball, basketball and football, and girls weren't allowed.
A lot has changed, but in that era, girls would rule the playground.
It's their space, it's a girl-power space.
It's where they get to shine.
But I also think it's for boys, because boys overheard those, which is why, I think, so many hip-hop artists sampled from things that they heard in black girls' game songs.
(Chanting) ... cold, thick shake, act like you know how to flip, Filet-O-Fish, Quarter Pounder, french fries, ice cold, thick shake, act like you know how to jump.
All people who grew up in any black urban community would know that music.
And so, it was a ready-made hit.
It's the thing that gets passed down over generations.
In some ways, the rope is the thing that helps carry it.
So, a jump rope, you can use it for all different kinds of things.
And I think it lasted because people need to move.
And I think sometimes the simplest objects can make the most creative uses.
There are no bad buttons, there are only bad people.
How does that sound? OK?
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Isaac Mizrahi on the Button] No one knows who invented the button.
It might have shown up as early as 2000 BCE.
Then about 3,000 years later, someone finally invented the buttonhole, and buttons were suddenly useful.
The button and the buttonhole is such a great invention.
It's one of the most enduring designs in history.
For me, the best buttons are usually round.
Before buttons, clothes were bigger -- they were more kind of amorphous, and people, like, wriggled into them or just kind of wrapped themselves in things.
But then fashion moved closer to the body as we discovered uses for the button.
I think the reason buttons have endured for so long, historically, is because they actually work to keep our clothes shut.
Zippers break; Velcro makes a lot of noise, and it wears out after a while.
If a button falls off, you just literally sew that thing on.
When I was a kid, my mom knit me this beautiful sweater.
I didn't like it.
And then I found these buttons, and the minute the buttons were on the sweater, I loved it.
I think stairs may be one of the most emotionally malleable physical elements that an architect has to work with.
[Small thing. Big idea.] [David Rockwell on the Stairs] At its most basic, a stair is a way to get from point A to point B at different elevations.
Stairs have a common language.
Treads, which is the thing that you walk on.
Riser, which is the vertical element that separates the two treads.
A lot of stairs have nosings that create a kind of edge.
And then, the connected piece is a stringer.
People climbed using whatever was available: stepped logs, ladders and natural pathways that were worn over time.
Some of the earliest staircases, like the pyramids in Chichén Itzá or the roads to Mount Tai in China, were a means of getting to a higher elevation, which people sought for worship or for protection.
As engineering has evolved, so has what's practical.
Stairs can be made from all kinds of material.
There are linear stairs, there are spiraled stairs.
Stairs can be indoors, they can be outdoors.
They clearly help us in an emergency.
But they're also a form of art in and of themselves.
As we move across a stairway, the form dictates our pacing, our feeling, our safety and our relationship and engagement with the space around us.
So for a second, think about stepping down a gradual, monumental staircase like the one in front of the New York Public Library.
That's a totally different experience than going down the narrow staircase to, say, an old pub, where you spill into the room.
There, you encounter tall risers, so you move more quickly.
Stairs add enormous drama.
Stairs can even be heroic.
The staircase that remained standing after September 11th and the attack on the World Trade Center was dubbed the "Survivors' Staircase," because it played such a central role in leading hundreds of people to safety.
But small stairs can have a huge impact, too.
The stoop is a place that invites neighbors to gather, blast music, and watch the city in motion.
It's fascinating to me that you see people wanting to hang out on the stairs.
And so if you're able to sit halfway up there, you're in a kind of magical place.
I remember thinking to myself, "This is going to change everything about how we communicate."
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Margaret Gould Stewart on the Hyperlink] A hyperlink is an interface element, and what I mean by that is, when you're using software on your phone or your computer, there's a lot of code behind the interface that's giving all the instructions for the computer on how to manage it, but that interface is the thing that humans interact with: when we press on this, then something happens.
Designers today have a huge range of options.
The hyperlink uses what's called a markup language -- HTML.
And then you put the address of where you want to send the person.
It's actually remarkably easy to learn how to do.
Back when I was in school -- this is before people had wide access to the internet -- if I was going to do a research paper, I would have to physically walk to the library, and if they had the book that you needed, great.
And it's kind of crazy to think about that now, because, like all great innovations, it's not long after we get access to something that we start to take it for granted.
Back in 1945, there was this guy, Vannevar Bush.
He was working for the US government, and one of the ideas that he put forth was, "Wow, humans are creating so much information, and we can't keep track of all the books that we've read or the connections between important ideas."
And he had this idea called the "memex," where you could put together a personal library of all of the books and articles that you have access to.
And that idea of connecting sources captured people's imaginations.
Later, in the 1960s, Ted Nelson launches Project Xanadu, and he said, "Well, what if it wasn't just limited to the things that I have?
What if I could connect ideas across a larger body of work?"
In 1982, researchers at the University of Maryland developed a system they called HyperTIES.
They were the first to use text itself as a link marker.
They figured out that this blue link on a gray background was going to work really well in terms of contrast, and people would be able to see it.
Apple invented HyperCard in 1987.
These kinds of notions of nonlinear storytelling got a huge boost when the hyperlink came along, because it gave people the opportunity to influence the narrative.
These ideas and inventions, among others, inspired Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
The hyperlink almost feels like a LEGO block, this very basic building block to a very complex web of connections that exists all around the world.
Because of the way that hyperlinks were first constructed, they were intended to be not only used by many people, but created by many people.
To me, it's one of the most democratic designs ever created.
It's like my "thing," it's what I'm known for.
(Laughter) But what no one knows ...
is that I was a bully.
Honestly, I didn't think about it much myself.
(Laughter) But the more people started to praise me for being a liberal who could get along with conservatives, and the more I wrote articles about being nice and gave talks about being nice, the more I felt this hypocrisy creeping up inside me.
When I was 10 years old, there was a girl in my class at school named Vicky.
(Sigh) And I tormented her ...
mercilessly.
I mean, everyone did.
She would hit herself and give herself bloody noses and she had hygiene problems -- she had big hygiene problems.
But instead of helping this girl, who was plainly suffering from hardships in her life ...
we called her "Sticky Vicky."
I called her "Sticky Vicky."
My clearest memory is standing in the empty hallway outside the fifth grade classrooms waiting for Vicky to come out of the bathroom, and I have a clipboard and a pen and a survey I've made up, asking about shampoo preferences, like I'm doing a study for science class or something.
Now, to put this in perspective, I can't remember the names of my teachers, I can't remember the names of any of the books I read that year, I pretty much can't remember anything from fifth grade, but I remember that Vicky told me she used White Rain shampoo.
And as classes let out, I ran down the hall shouting at all the other kids, "Sticky Vicky uses White Rain shampoo.
Don't use White Rain shampoo or you'll smell like Sticky Vicky."
I forgot about this memory for a long time.
When I finally started remembering it, I immediately needed to know more.
I reached out to friends and eventually social media, and I did everything I could to try to find Vicky.
I needed to know that she was OK, and that I hadn't ruined her life.
(Sigh) But what I quickly realized was I wasn't just trying to figure out what happened to Vicky.
I was trying to figure out what happened to me.
like I was better than her, and she was garbage.
Most kids don't do that, right?
So, what if I wasn't nice after all?
I was really just a hateful monster.
Then I started to notice myself having these mean impulses, thinking mean thoughts and wanting to say them.
Admittedly, most of my mean thoughts were about conservatives.
(Laughter) But not just conservatives.
I also caught myself thinking mean things about mushy, centrist liberals and greedy Wall Street bankers and Islamophobes and slow drivers, because I really hate slow drivers.
And as I felt more hateful -- rageful, really -- I noticed the world around me seemed to be getting more hateful, too.
So I did what all overly intellectual people do when they have a problem that they want to understand, and I wrote a book.
(Laughter) I wrote a book about hate.
Spoiler alert: I'm against it.
(Laughter) Now at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, "Why are y'all worried about hate?
Bullying isn't hate."
Isn't it?
Gordon Allport, the psychologist who pioneered the study of hate in the early 1900s, developed what he called a "scale of prejudice."
At one end are things like genocide and other bias-motivated violence.
Isn't that all hate?
Poor kids and gay kids are more likely to be bullied, even by kids who also end up being gay.
I know there was a lot going on in my little 10-year-old mind.
I'm not saying hate was the only reason I picked on Vicky or even that I was consciously hateful or anything, but the fact is, the people we discriminate against in our public policies and in our culture are also the groups of people most likely to be bullied in school.
That is not just a coincidence.
That's hate.
I am defining hate in a broad way because I think we have a big problem.
So for instance, we probably all agree that marching down the street, chanting about you should take away rights from some group of people because of their skin color or their gender, we'd all agree that's hate, right? OK.
What if you believe that group of people is inferior, but you don't say it?
Or what if you believe that group of people is inferior but you aren't aware that you believe it -- what's known as implicit bias.
I mean they all have the same roots, don't they?
In the historic patterns of racism and sexism that have shaped our history and still infect our society today.
Isn't it all hate?
I'm not saying they're the same thing, just like I am not saying that being a bully is as bad as being a Nazi, just like I'm not saying that being a Nazi is the same thing as punching a Nazi ...
(Laughter) But hating a Nazi is still hate, right?
What about hating someone who isn't as enlightened as you?
See, what I learned is that we all are against hate and we all think hate is a problem.
We think it's their problem, not our problem.
I mean, if I think the people who didn't vote like me are stupid racist monsters who don't deserve to call themselves Americans, alright, fine, I'm not being nice, I get it.
We all hate.
And I do not mean that in some abstract, generic sense.
me and you.
That sanctimonious pedestal of superiority on which we all place ourselves, that they are hateful and we are not, is a manifestation of the essential root of hate: that we are fundamentally good and they are not, which is what needs to change.
Let me give you just one example of the former terrorist I spent time with in the West Bank.
When Bassam Aramin was 16 years old, he tried to blow up an Israeli military convoy with a grenade.
He failed, fortunately, but he was still sentenced to seven years in prison.
When he was in prison, they showed a film about the Holocaust.
Up until that point, Bassam had thought the Holocaust was mostly a myth.
He went to go watch the film because he thought he would enjoy seeing Jews get killed.
But when he saw what really happened, he broke down crying.
And eventually, after prison, Bassam went on to get a master's degree in Holocaust studies and he founded an organization where former Palestinian combatants and Israeli combatants come together, work together, try to find common ground.
By his own account, Bassam used to hate Israelis, but through knowing Israelis and learning their stories and working together for peace, he overcame his hate.
Bassam says he still doesn't hate Israelis, even after the Israeli military -- shot and killed his [10]-year-old daughter, Abir, while she was walking to school.
(Sigh) Bassam even forgave the soldier who killed his daughter.
That soldier, he taught me, was just a product of the same hateful system as he was.
If a former terrorist ...
if a terrorist can learn to stop hating and still not hate when their child is killed, surely the rest of us can stop our habits of demeaning and dehumanizing each other.
And I will tell you there are stories like Bassam's all over the world, plus study after study after study that says, no, we are neither designed nor destined as human beings to hate, but rather taught to hate by the world around us.
I promise you, none of us pops out of the womb hating black people or Republicans.
There is nothing in our DNA that makes us hate Muslims or Mexicans.
For better or for worse, we are all a product of the culture around us.
And the good news is, we're also the ones who shape that culture, which means we can change it.
The first step is starting to recognize the hate inside ourselves.
and work to challenge our ideas and assumptions.
That doesn't happen overnight, I am telling you right here, it is a lifelong journey, but it's one we all need to take.
And then second: if we want to challenge the hate in our societies, we need to promote policies and institutions and practices that connect us as communities.
That by the way is the reason to support integration.
There are studies that teenagers who participate in racially integrated classes and activities reduce their racial bias.
And when little kids go to racially integrated kindergartens and elementary schools -- they develop less bias to begin with.
But the fact is in so many ways and in so many places around our world, we are separated from each other.
In the United States, for instance, three-quarters of white people don't have any non-white friends.
We need to change that.
Again, it will not happen overnight.
It needs to happen.
when we connect together in these connection spaces, facilitated by connection systems, we need to change the way we talk to each other and connect with one another and relate with generosity and open-mindedness and kindness and compassion and not hate.
That's it.
That's it.
That is pretty much -- there's a few details -- but that's pretty much all we have to do.
It's not that complicated, right?
But it's hard.
The hate that we feel towards certain groups of people because of who they are or what they believe is so ingrained in our minds and in our society that it can feel inevitable and impossible to change.
Change is possible.
Just look at the terrorist who became a peace activist.
The entire time I was traveling around the Middle East and Rwanda and across the United States, hearing these unbelievable stories of people in communities who had left entire histories of hate behind, I was still looking for Vicky.
It was so hard find her that I hired a private investigator and he found her.
The truth is, it became clear that the person I'm calling Vicky had gone to extraordinary lengths to hide her identity.
But anyway, a year after I began my journey, I wrote Vicky an apology.
And a few months later, she wrote back.
(Sigh) She offered me sort of conditional forgiveness.
What she wrote was ...
"Messages such as yours cannot absolve you of your past actions.
The only way to do that is to improve the world, prevent others from behaving in similar ways and foster compassion."
And Vicky's right.
Which is why I'm here.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the final of "China's Got Talent" show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium.
Susan Boyle.
And I told her, "I'm going to Scotland the next day."
Why did she say that?
So [as] Susan Boyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang together.
They were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent brought them through.
And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams.
Well, being different is not that difficult.
We are all different from different perspectives.
But I think being different is good, because you present a different point of view.
You may have the chance to make a difference.
My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past 20, 30 years.
I remember that in the year of 1990, when I was graduating from college, I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in Beijing, Great Wall Sheraton -- it's still there.
So after being interrogated by this Japanese manager for a half an hour, he finally said, "So, Miss Yang, do you have any questions to ask me?"
I summoned my courage and poise and said, "Yes, but could you let me know, what actually do you sell?"
That was the first day I set my foot in a five-star hotel.
Around the same time, I was going through an audition -- the first ever open audition by national television in China -- with another thousand college girls.
The producer told us they were looking for some sweet, innocent and beautiful fresh face.
So when it was my turn, I stood up and said, "Why [do] women's personalities on television always have to be beautiful, sweet, innocent and, you know, supportive?
But actually, they were impressed by my words.
After seven rounds of competition, I was the last one to survive it.
So I was on a national television prime-time show.
And believe it or not, that was the first show on Chinese television that allowed its hosts to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script.
(Applause) And my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people.
Well after a few years, I decided to go to the U.S. and Columbia University to pursue my postgraduate studies, and then started my own media company, which was unthought of during the years that I started my career.
So we do a lot of things.
And sometimes I have young people approaching me say, "Lan, you changed my life," and I feel proud of that.
But then we are also so fortunate to witness the transformation of the whole country.
I was in Beijing's bidding for the Olympic Games.
I was representing the Shanghai Expo.
I saw China embracing the world and vice versa.
How are they different, and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of China, or at large, the world?
So today I want to talk about young people through the platform of social media.
First of all, who are they? [What] do they look like?
Well this is a girl called Guo Meimei -- 20 years old, beautiful.
She showed off her expensive bags, clothes and car on her microblog, which is the Chinese version of Twitter.
And she claimed to be the general manager of Red Cross at the Chamber of Commerce.
She didn't realize that she stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national questioning, almost a turmoil, against the credibility of Red Cross.
The controversy was so heated that the Red Cross had to open a press conference to clarify it, and the investigation is going on.
So far, as of today, we know that she herself made up that title -- probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity.
All those expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend, who used to be a board member in a subdivision of Red Cross at Chamber of Commerce.
It's very complicated to explain.
It is still boiling.
It shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institutions, which lacked transparency in the past.
And also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog.
Microblog boomed in the year of 2010, with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled.
Sina.com, a major news portal, alone has more than 140 million microbloggers.
On Tencent, 200 million.
The most popular blogger -- it's not me -- it's a movie star, and she has more than 9.5 million followers, or fans.
About 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people, under 30 years old.
And because, as you know, the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government, social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit.
But because you don't have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.
So through microblogging, we are able to understand Chinese youth even better.
So how are they different?
First of all, most of them were born in the 80s and 90s, under the one-child policy.
And because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls, now we have ended up with 30 million more young men than women.
That could pose a potential danger to the society, but who knows; we're in a globalized world, so they can look for girlfriends from other countries.
Most of them have fairly good education.
The illiteracy rate in China among this generation is under one percent.
In cities, 80 percent of kids go to college.
But they are facing an aging China with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some percent this year, and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030.
And you know we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially, and taking care of them when they're sick.
So it means young couples will have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old.
So making a living is not that easy for young people.
In urban areas, college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 U.S. dollars a month, while the average rent is above $500.
So what do they do? They have to share space -- squeezed in very limited space to save money -- and they call themselves "tribe of ants."
And for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment, they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their first apartment.
Among the 200 million migrant workers, 60 percent of them are young people.
They find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas and the rural areas.
Most of them don't want to go back to the countryside, but they don't have the sense of belonging.
They work for longer hours with less income, less social welfare.
And they're more vulnerable to job losses, subject to inflation, tightening loans from banks, appreciation of the renminbi, or decline of demand from Europe or America for the products they produce.
Last year, though, an appalling incident in a southern OEM manufacturing compound in China: 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide, just one by one like causing a contagious disease.
But this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the isolation, both physical and mental, of these migrant workers.
For those who do return back to the countryside, they find themselves very welcome locally, because with the knowledge, skills and networks they have learned in the cities, with the assistance of the Internet, they're able to create more jobs, upgrade local agriculture and create new business in the less developed market.
So for the past few years, the coastal areas, they found themselves in a shortage of labor.
These diagrams show a more general social background.
But then in the last two years, it goes up again to 39 percent, indicating a rising living cost.
Now it's 0.5 -- even worse than that in America -- showing us the income inequality.
And so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility.
And also, the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful is quite widespread.
So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging, we can see what young people care most about.
For the past decade or so, a massive urbanization and development have let us witness a lot of reports on the forced demolition of private property.
And it has aroused huge anger and frustration among our young generation.
Sometimes people get killed, and sometimes people set themselves on fire to protest.
So when these incidents are reported more and more frequently on the Internet, people cry for the government to take actions to stop this.
So the good news is that earlier this year, the state council passed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and passed the right to order forced demolition from local governments to the court.
Similarly, many other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the Internet.
We heard about polluted air, polluted water, poisoned food.
And then lately, people are very concerned about cooking oil, because thousands of people have been found [refining] cooking oil from restaurant slop.
So all these things have aroused a huge outcry from the Internet.
And fortunately, we have seen the government responding more timely and also more frequently to the public concerns.
While young people seem to be very sure about their participation in public policy-making, but sometimes they're a little bit lost in terms of what they want for their personal life.
But you know what, half of those consumers are earning a salary below 2,000 U.S. dollars.
They're taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status.
And this is a girl explicitly saying on a TV dating show that she would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.
But of course, we do have young people who would still prefer to smile, whether in a BMW or [on] a bicycle.
So in the next picture, you see a very popular phenomenon called "naked" wedding, or "naked" marriage.
It does not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding, but it shows that these young couples are ready to get married without a house, without a car, without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquet, to show their commitment to true love.
And also, people are doing good through social media.
And the first picture showed us that a truck caging 500 homeless and kidnapped dogs for food processing was spotted and stopped on the highway with the whole country watching through microblogging.
People were donating money, dog food and offering volunteer work to stop that truck.
And after hours of negotiation, 500 dogs were rescued.
And here also people are helping to find missing children.
A father posted his son's picture onto the Internet.
So happiness is the most popular word we have heard through the past two years.
Happiness is not only related to personal experiences and personal values, but also, it's about the environment.
People are thinking about the following questions: Are we going to sacrifice our environment further to produce higher GDP?
How are we going to perform our social and political reform to keep pace with economic growth, to keep sustainability and stability?
I guess these are the questions people are going to answer.
And our younger generation are going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Laughter) And I can see their point, because I started my career as a theoretical nuclear physicist.
And I was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy ion collisions, and I was only 14 years old -- No, no, I wasn't 14 years old.
But after that, I actually had my own lab in the Computational Neuroscience department, and I wasn't doing any neuroscience.
Later, I would work on evolutionary genetics, and I would work on systems biology.
I'm going to tell you about how I learned something about life.
And I was actually a rocket scientist.
I wasn't really a rocket scientist, but I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny California, where it's warm; whereas now I am in the mid-West, and it's cold.
But it was an exciting experience.
And that came as a surprise to me, because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation.
And he said, "It's any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate the presence of life."
And I said, "Really?
I mean, we have life.
Can't you apply a definition, for example, a Supreme Court-like definition of life?"
And then I thought about it a little bit, and I said, "Well, is it really that easy?
Because, yes, if you see something like this, then all right, fine, I'm going to call it life -- no doubt about it.
But here's something."
And he goes, "Right, that's life too. I know that."
It grows up into the adult stage like that and then goes through a Benjamin Button phase, and actually goes backwards and backwards until it's like a little embryo again, and then actually grows back up, and back down and back up -- sort of yo-yo -- and it never dies.
Anyone know?
So once you start looking and looking at smaller and smaller things -- so this particular person wrote a whole article and said, "Hey, these are bacteria."
Except, if you look a little bit closer, you see, in fact, that this thing is way too small to be anything like that.
So he was convinced, but, in fact, most people aren't.
And then, of course, NASA also had a big announcement, and President Clinton gave a press conference, about this amazing discovery of life in a Martian meteorite.
If you take the lesson of all these pictures, then you realize, well, actually, maybe it's not that easy.
Maybe I do need a definition of life in order to make that kind of distinction.
So can life be defined?
And then you might get something.
(Laughter) And what you might get -- and anything that actually refers to things that we are used to, you throw away.
And then you might come up with something like this.
And it says something complicated with lots and lots of concepts.
Oh, it's actually a really, really, important set of concepts.
So I'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to, but in fact on processes only.
And if you take a look at that, this was actually in a book that I wrote that deals with artificial life.
And that explains why that NASA manager was actually in my office to begin with.
Because the idea was that, with concepts like that, maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life.
And so if you go and ask yourself, "What on Earth is artificial life?", let me give you a whirlwind tour of how all this stuff came about.
And it started out quite a while ago, when someone wrote one of the first successful computer viruses.
But the interesting thing about these computer virus infections was that, if you look at the rate at which the infection worked, they show this spiky behavior that you're used to from a flu virus.
And it is in fact due to this arms race between hackers and operating system designers that things go back and forth.
And the result is kind of a tree of life of these viruses, a phylogeny that looks very much like the type of life that we're used to, at least on the viral level.
So is that life?
In fact, they have hackers writing them.
But the idea was taken very quickly a little bit further, when a scientist working at the Santa Fe Institute decided, "Why don't we try to package these little viruses in artificial worlds inside of the computer and let them evolve?"
And this was Steen Rasmussen.
And he designed this system, but it really didn't work, because his viruses were constantly destroying each other.
But there was another scientist who had been watching this, an ecologist.
And he went home and says, "I know how to fix this."
And he wrote the Tierra system, and, in my book, is in fact one of the first truly artificial living systems -- except for the fact that these programs didn't really grow in complexity.
And I decided to create a system that has all the properties that are necessary to see, in fact, the evolution of complexity, more and more complex problems constantly evolving.
They are now, actually, respectable professors at Michigan State University, but I can assure you, back in the day, we were not a respectable team.
And I'm really happy that no photo survives of the three of us anywhere close together.
There's about 10,000 programs sitting here.
And all different strains are colored in different colors.
And as you see here, there are groups that are growing on top of each other, because they are spreading.
Any time there is a program that's better at surviving in this world, due to whatever mutation it has acquired, it is going to spread over the others and drive the others to extinction.
And these kinds of experiments are started with programs that we wrote ourselves.
We write our own stuff, replicate it, and are very proud of ourselves.
And we put them in, and what you see immediately is that there are waves and waves of innovation.
By the way, this is highly accelerated, so it's like a 1000 generations a second.
But immediately, the system goes like, "What kind of dumb piece of code was this?
This can be improved upon in so many ways, so quickly."
And this type of activity goes on for quite a while, until the main easy things have been acquired by these programs.
And this process goes on and on and on.
Can we measure this type of life?
Because if we can, maybe we have a chance of actually discovering life somewhere else without being biased by things like amino acids."
So I said, "Well, perhaps we should construct a biosignature based on life as a universal process.
And the thing I came up with -- I have to first give you an introduction about the idea, and maybe that would be a meaning detector, rather than a life detector.
And I would like to do it in such a way that I don't actually have to be able to read the language, because I'm sure I won't be able to.
As long as I know that there's some sort of alphabet.
So here would be a frequency plot of how often you find each of the 26 letters of the alphabet in a text written by random monkeys.
And if I look at French texts, it looks a little bit different, or Italian or German.
They all have their own type of frequency distribution, but it's robust.
It doesn't matter whether it's a poem or whether it's a mathematical text.
It's a robust signature, and it's very stable.
But first I have to ask: what are these building blocks, like the alphabet, elements that I showed you?
We could use amino acids, we could use nucleic acids, carboxylic acids, fatty acids.
In fact, chemistry's extremely rich, and our body uses a lot of them.
So that we actually, to test this idea, first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids.
And here's the result.
What you find is mostly glycine and then alanine and there's some trace elements of the other ones.
But suppose you take some dirt and dig through it and then put it into these spectrometers, because there's bacteria all over the place; or you take water anywhere on Earth, because it's teaming with life, and you make the same analysis; the spectrum looks completely different.
Of course, there is still glycine and alanine, but in fact, there are these heavy elements, these heavy amino acids, that are being produced because they are valuable to the organism.
So this also turns out to be extremely robust.
It doesn't matter what kind of sediment you're using to grind up, whether it's bacteria or any other plants or animals.
Anywhere there's life, you're going to have this distribution, as opposed to that distribution.
And it is detectable not just in amino acids.
Now you could ask: Well, what about these Avidians?
They have about 28 of these instructions.
And if you have a system where they're being replaced one by the other, it's like the monkeys writing on a typewriter.
Each of these instructions appears with roughly the equal frequency.
So there are some instructions that are extremely valuable to these organisms, and their frequency is going to be high.
So they are either poisonous or really should be used at less of a level than random.
In this case, the frequency is lower.
So I'm going to show you now a little experiment that we did.
And I have to explain to you, the top of this graph shows you that frequency distribution that I talked about.
And below there, I show, in fact, the mutation rate in the environment.
And I'm starting this at a mutation rate that is so high that even if you would drop a replicating program that would otherwise happily grow up to fill the entire world, if you drop it in, it gets mutated to death immediately.
And indeed, we're going to be dropping these guys into that soup all the time.
Too hot, too hot.
And of course, it reaches the viability threshold.
And then, once you hit the threshold where the mutation rate is so high that you cannot self-reproduce, you cannot copy the information forward to your offspring without making so many mistakes that your ability to replicate vanishes.
What do we learn from that?
One of them is, if we are able to think about life in abstract terms -- and we're not talking about things like plants, and we're not talking about amino acids, and we're not talking about bacteria, but we think in terms of processes -- then we could start to think about life not as something that is so special to Earth, but that, in fact, could exist anywhere.
And if you can do that, then you have life.
So the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone, without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear, as far as the type of life on Earth is.
Well, we can make life; we can make life in the computer.
And once we have that, then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say, if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate, then we can go out and try other worlds, figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be, figure enough about the normal chemistry, the geochemistry of the planet, so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life, and then look for large deviations from this -- this thing sticking out, which says, "This chemical really shouldn't be there."
Life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets.
And if we remove the mystery of life, then I think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live, and how perhaps we're not as special as we always think we are.
And thank you very much.
(Applause)
What's in the box?
Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment.
(Laughter) (Applause) Sound familiar?
Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago?
Three times.
So you'd think, with all this extra space, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff.
Nope.
There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage.
So where does this lead?
Whatever it was for you, I bet that, among other things, this gave you a little more freedom, a little more time.
It's actually a great way to save you some money.
So I started a project called Life Edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area.
First up: crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan with partners Mutopo and Jovoto.com.
I wanted it all -- home office, sit down dinner for 10, room for guests, and all my kite surfing gear.
By buying a space that was 420 sq. ft.
And because it's really designed around an edited set of possessions -- my favorite stuff -- and really designed for me, I'm really excited to be there.
Three main approaches.
We've got to clear the arteries of our lives.
It's time for me to let it go.
We need to think before we buy.
Secondly, our new mantra: small is sexy.
We want space efficiency.
Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three?
In the winning Life Edited scheme in a render here, we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space.
My office folds away, easily hidden.
My bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers.
Guests? Move the moving wall, have some fold-down guest beds.
So I'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft.
But consider the benefits of an edited life.
Go from 3,000 to 2,000, from 1,500 to 1,000.
Most of us, maybe all of us, are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags, maybe a small space, a hotel room.
So when you go home and you walk through your front door, take a second and ask yourselves, "Could I do with a little life editing?
What's in the box?
It doesn't really matter.
Maybe, just maybe, less might equal more.
So let's make room for the good stuff.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life.
And I'd like to start at the very beginning.
Think back when you were just a kid.
(Laughter) Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it's become pretty clear to me that we don't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults.
Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people's discarded stuff.
In fact, the United Nations estimates that there's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year -- and that's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream.
And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles.
And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains.
Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage.
And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place.
And it's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams.
Because as we've heard all week at TED, the world's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff.
And of course, they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted.
And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day?
It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals.
And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world.
And the plastics, we get from oil, which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract.
And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we're already starting to see today.
To put that in perspective -- and I'm using steel as a proxy here for metals, because it's the most common metal -- if your stuff makes it to a recycler, probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose.
Most of it's incinerated or landfilled.
But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel.
So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material?
Well it's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another.
They have very different densities.
They have different electrical and magnetic properties.
And they even have different colors.
So it's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials.
Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range.
They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties.
And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know.
Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world -- and sadly to say, particularly from the United States, where we don't have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe -- finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling.
They extract what they can, which is mostly the metals -- circuit boards and so forth -- and they leave behind mostly what they can't recover, which is, again, mostly the plastics.
And they extract the metals by hand.
Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution, this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution.
I call this environmental arbitrage.
This is just one example.
This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India.
They store the plastics on the roofs.
And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the "burn and sniff" technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic.
And by the way, please don't try this technique at home.
So what are we to do about this space-age material, at least what we used to call a space-aged material, these plastics?
So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world.
Because after all, we're doing above-ground mining.
This is the last frontier of recycling.
It's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth.
And we finally figured out how to do it.
The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals.
You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day.
We said, there's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics.
And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint, sustainable from an economic standpoint as well.
Well a good place to start is with waste.
And because we're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them, we're using a mining approach to extract the materials.
We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment.
I don't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way.
And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that's made from petrochemicals.
They get to close the loop with their products.
It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits.
They recover the metals and leave behind what's called shredder residue -- it's their waste -- a very complex mixture of materials, but predominantly plastics.
And it goes in the first part of our process here, which is more like traditional recycling.
It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point.
At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite: many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics.
This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process, and the really hard work, multi-step separation process begins.
We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics, not only by type, but by grade.
We then use optical sorting to color sort this material.
We push that material to extruders where we melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands.
And we chop those strands into what are called pellets.
And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry.
(Applause) So now, instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke, you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products, in your office, or back at work in your home.
And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products.
Mother nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything.
Thank you for your time.
(Applause)
I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust.
My job depends upon it.
There has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in.
Now in the old days, conducting, music making, was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion.
But I'm happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it.
We now have a more democratic view and way of making music -- a two-way street.
I, as the conductor, have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine.
For myself, of course, I have to completely trust my body language.
(Music) Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Ensemble.
(Applause) So in order for all this to work, obviously I have got to be in a position of trust.
I have to trust the orchestra, and, even more crucially, I have to trust myself.
You overcompensate.
You end up like some kind of rabid windmill.
And I remember at the beginning of my career, again and again, on these dismal outings with orchestras, I would be going completely insane on the podium, trying to engender a small scale crescendo really, just a little upsurge in volume.
I spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms.
And how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis who said, "Conducting, Charles, is like holding a small bird in your hand.
I have to say, in those days, I couldn't really even find the bird.
Now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me, in terms of music, has been my adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view, but a country which, through its musical culture, has taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust.
Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company.
So I went out there, and I auditioned, mainly in rural township locations, right around the country.
I heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers, the majority of whom were black, but there were a handful of white performers.
Now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had, in his previous incarnation, been a member of the South African police force.
Now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room, the general atmosphere.
Let's be under no illusions.
In South Africa, the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community.
Simply through singing.
We sang, we sang, we sang, and amazingly new trust grew, and indeed friendship blossomed.
And that showed me such a fundamental truth, that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot.
One of them was "Carmen."
We then thought we'd make a movie of "Carmen," which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha.
The piece was sung entirely in Xhosa, which is a beautifully musical language, if you don't know it.
It's called "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" -- literally "Carmen of Khayelitsha."
(Music) (Applause) Something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music making is that it's so free.
They trust their ears.
Therefore it's the exclusive preserve of an elite, talented body.
And yet, ladies and gentlemen, every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis.
Why is this?
And what I'm going to say to you now is I'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence, to take the plunge, to believe that you can trust your ears, you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue, fiber, DNA, what makes a great piece of music great.
I've got a little experiment I want to try with you.
A very simple tune based on three notes -- T, E, D.
Well ladies and gentlemen, there's a time-honored system, which composers have been using for hundreds of years, which proves actually that it does.
If I sing you a musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G -- and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet, same scale: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T -- there you go.
T, see it's the same as F in music.
So T is F.
So T, E, D is the same as F, E, D.
Now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme, which is TED.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly time for tea.
We're going to sing those three wonderful notes: T, E, D.
Audience: T, E, D.
Charles Hazlewood: Yeah, you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings.
And look, if you're adventurous, you go up the octave.
Audience: T, E, D.
Now we're going to put that in the context of the music.
It wasn't a bad debut for the TED choir, not a bad debut at all.
The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which as you can imagine, if you don't have an experience of it yourself, is quite a big thing to take on board.
But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden, the community of disabled people.
And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement.
Of course there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust, to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion.
You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people, in the U.K. alone, with massive musical potential.
So I decided to create a platform for that potential.
It's going to be Britain's first ever national disabled orchestra.
It's called Paraorchestra.
I'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had.
Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians.
Normally when you improvise -- and I do it all the time around the world -- there's this initial period of horror, like everyone's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring, an awful pregnant silence.
Now in this room with these four disabled musicians, within five minutes a rapt listening, a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music.
(Video) (Music) Nicholas:: My name's Nicholas McCarthy.
I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist.
And I was born without my left hand -- right hand.
(Music) Lyn: When I'm making music, I feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane.
(Music) Clarence: I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk.
(Music) (Applause) CH: I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today, so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are.
Paraorchestra is the name of that project.
If any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point, please let me know.
Now this prince loved his music, but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time, which is just on the Austro-Hungarian border, a place called Esterhazy -- a long way from the big city of Vienna.
Now one day in 1772, the prince decreed that the musicians' families, the orchestral musicians' families, were no longer welcome in the castle.
They weren't allowed to stay there anymore; they had to be returned to Vienna -- as I say, an unfeasibly long way away in those days.
Haydn remonstrated with the prince, but to no avail.
So given the prince loved his music, Haydn thought he'd write a symphony to make the point.
And you'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt.
I'm pleased to say, the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance, and the musicians were reunited with their families.
Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away.
(Music) (Applause)
What is going on in this baby's mind?
In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture.
So in some ways, we think that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give you just one example of this.
One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby.
After all, one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.
And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel.
Anyone who's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get.
We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people.
Babies, after all, can't talk, and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that.
Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli.
What we did -- Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I -- was actually to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers.
(Laughter) But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl.
And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't.
So half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli -- just like a baby and any other sane person.
But half the time, what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, "Mmmmm, broccoli.
I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm."
So she'd act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted.
We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies.
But then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like.
And what's more, they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted.
So children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought.
And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that's actually demonstrated it.
The question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much?
I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless.
And actually in many ways, they're worse than useless, because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive.
But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there's actually an answer.
If we look across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
On one side is a New Caledonian crow.
And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds.
They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects.
And this is a bird on the cover of science who's learned how to use a tool to get food.
And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps.
They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird.
Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months.
So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
There's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning.
Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well.
So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment.
Other creatures, like the crows, aren't very good at doing anything in particular, but they're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments.
We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal.
We're smarter, we're more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space.
And our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species.
My son is 23.
All right, why would we see this correlation?
Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage.
So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, "A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?"
You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up.
And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor.
So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected.
And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world.
So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species.
So they're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we're production and marketing.
We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use.
Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species -- kind of like caterpillars and butterflies -- except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn -- and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that's what they're for -- we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms.
And in fact, the baby's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet.
But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better.
And there's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently.
And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century.
And essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists find out about the world.
They go out and test it against the evidence.
And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that.
And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now.
And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing.
So if you want to know what's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something like this.
This is Reverend Bayes's notebook.
So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they're revising to figure out how the world works.
Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid.
How could it be that children are doing statistics?
This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others.
And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world.
But actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way.
Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times.
So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence.
It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy.
And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector.
Now there are two things that are really interesting about this.
The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds.
They're just learning how to count.
But unconsciously, they're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure.
And the other interesting thing is that they're using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with.
So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments.
And what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't, and then she showed them an anomaly.
And what you'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this?
Same as the other side.
(Laughter) I don't know.
AG: Every scientist will recognize that expression of despair.
(Laughter) Boy: Oh, it's because this needs to be like this, and this needs to be like this.
AG: Okay, hypothesis two.
Boy: That's why.
Oh.
(Laughter) AG: Now this is his next idea.
He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out onto the other location.
Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity in here, but this doesn't have electricity.
AG: Okay, that's a fourth hypothesis.
AG: Okay,there's his fifth hypothesis.
If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments.
Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature?
What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes?
And I think just the opposite is true.
I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults.
Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works.
And adults' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight.
Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark.
And we even know something about the way the brain does this.
So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains.
So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention.
If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different.
I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness.
So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing.
But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once.
And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet.
So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention.
That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home.
And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters.
So what's it like to be a baby?
It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double-espressos.
I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are.
And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do.
But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children.
(Applause)
I'm here to talk to you about a new way of doing journalism.
Some people call this "citizen journalism," other people call it "collaborative journalism."
But really, it kind of means this: for the journalists, people like me, it means accepting that you can't know everything, and allowing other people, through technology, to be your eyes and your ears.
And I believe this can be a really empowering process.
It can enable ordinary people to hold powerful organizations to account.
So I'm going to explain this to you today with two cases, two stories that I've investigated.
And they both involve controversial deaths.
And in both cases, the authorities put out an official version of events, which was somewhat misleading.
We were able to tell an alternative truth utilizing new technology, utilizing social media, particularly Twitter.
Essentially, what I'm talking about here is, as I said, citizen journalism.
So, to take the first case: this is Ian Tomlinson, the man in the foreground.
He had an encounter with a man behind him, and as you can see, the man behind him has covered his face with a balaclava.
And, in fact, he wasn't showing his badge numbers.
But I can tell you now, he was PC Simon Harwood, a police officer with London's Metropolitan Police Force.
In fact, he belonged to the elite territorial support group.
Now, moments after this image was shot, Harwood struck Tomlinson with a baton, and he pushed him to ground, and Tomlinson died moments later.
But that wasn't the story the police wanted us to tell.
Initially, through official statements and off-the-record briefings, they said that Ian Tomlinson had died of natural causes.
In fact, they said that when police tried to resuscitate him, the police medics were impeded from doing so, because protesters were throwing missiles, believed to be bottles, at police.
I show you this slide, because this was the newspaper that Ian Tomlinson had been selling for 20 years of his life.
And if any news organization had an obligation to properly forensically analyze what had been going on, it was the Evening Standard newspaper.
But they, like everyone else -- including my news organization -- were misled by the official version of events put out by police.
But you can see here, the bottles that were supposedly being thrown at police were turned into bricks by the time they reached this edition of the newspaper.
We needed to find those protesters you see in the image, but, of course, they had vanished by the time we started investigating.
We turned to the internet.
This is Twitter; you've heard a lot about it today.
I discovered that Twitter was a microblogging site.
But it was a social arena in which other people were gathering with a common motive.
And in this case, independently of journalists, people themselves were interrogating exactly what had happened to Ian Tomlinson in his last 30 minutes of life.
They went to Ian Tomlinson's aid after he collapsed.
They phoned the ambulance.
So they were concerned that the stories weren't quite as accurate as police were claiming them to be.
Now, this does not show the attack on Ian Tomlinson, but he appears to be in some distress.
Was he drunk? Did he fall over?
Did this have anything to do with the police officers next to him?
Here he appears to be talking to them.
For us, this was enough to investigate further, to dig deeper.
One of the most amazing things about the internet is: the information that people put out is freely available to anyone, as we all know.
That doesn't just go for citizen journalists, or for people putting out messages on Facebook or Twitter.
That goes for journalists themselves, people like me.
As long as your news is the right side of a paywall, i.e, it's free, anybody can access it.
They were online magnets.
And after six days, we had managed to track down around 20 witnesses.
We've plotted them here on the map.
This is the scene of Ian Tomlinson's death, the Bank of England in London.
And each of these witnesses that we plotted on the map, you could click on these small bullet points, and you could hear what they had to say, see their photographic image and at times, see their videographic images as well.
But still, at this stage, with witnesses telling us that they'd seen police attack Ian Tomlinson before his death, still, police refused to accept that.
There was no official investigation into his death.
And then something changed.
I got an email from an investment fund manager in New York.
On the day of Ian Tomlinson's death, he'd been in London on business, and he'd taken out his digital camera, and he'd recorded this.
(Video) Narrator: This is the crowd at G20 protest on April the 1st, around 7:20pm.
They were on Cornhill, near the Bank of England.
This footage will form the basis of a police investigation into the death of this man.
Ian Tomlinson was walking through this area, attempting to get home from work.
(People yelling) We've slowed down the footage to show how it poses serious questions about police conduct.
He had his hands in his pockets.
Here the riot officer appears to strike Tomlinson's leg area with a baton.
He then lunges at Tomlinson from behind.
Tomlinson is propelled forward and hits the floor.
(People yelling) Paul Lewis: OK. So, shocking stuff.
That video wasn't playing too well, but I remember when I first watched the video for myself, I'd been in touch with this investment fund manager in New York, and I had become obsessed with this story.
I had spoken to so many people who said they had seen this happen, and the guy on the other end of the phone was saying, "Look, the video shows it."
I didn't want to believe him until I saw it for myself.
Within 15 hours, we put it on our website.
The first thing police did was they came to our office -- senior officers came to our office -- and asked us to take the video down.
We said no.
And the officer in that film, in two days' time, will appear before an inquest jury in London, and they have the power to decide that Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed.
So that's the first case; I said two cases today.
The second case is this man.
Now, like Ian Tomlinson, he was a father, he lived in London.
But he was a political refugee from Angola.
And six months ago, the British government decided they wanted to return him to Angola; he was a failed asylum seeker.
So they booked him a seat on an airline, a flight from Heathrow.
He'd become unwell on the flight, the plane had returned to Heathrow, and then he was transferred to hospital and pronounced dead.
So you have to imagine: there were other passengers on the plane, and they could hear him saying, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe! They're killing me!"
And then he stopped breathing.
So how did we find these passengers?
In the case of Ian Tomlinson, the witnesses were still in London.
But these passengers, many of them, had returned to Angola.
Again, we turned to the internet.
The tone of some these stories, journalism professors might frown upon because they were skeptical; they were asking questions, perhaps speculative, maybe the kind of things journalists shouldn't do.
But we needed to do it, and we needed to use Twitter also.
Here I'm saying an Angolan man dies on a flight.
This story could be big; a level of speculation.
This next tweet says, "Please RT."
That means "please retweet," please pass down the chain.
And one of the fascinating things about Twitter is that the pattern of flow of information is unlike anything we've ever seen before.
We don't really understand it, but once you let go of a piece of information, it travels like wind.
But strangely, tweets have an uncanny ability to reach their intended destination.
And in this case, it was this man.
This was Michael.
He was on an Angolan oil field when he sent me this tweet.
I was in my office in London.
He'd gone onto his laptop, he typed in the flight number.
He realized we had an intention to tell a different version of events; we were skeptical.
And he contacted me.
And this is what Michael said.
The last thing we heard the man saying was he couldn't breathe.
And you've got three security guards, each one of them looked like 100-kilo plus, bearing down on him, holding him down -- from what I could see, below the seats.
What I saw was the three men trying to pull him down below the seats.
And all I could see was his head sticking up above the seats, and he was hollering out, you know, "Help me!"
He just kept saying, "Help me! Help me!"
And then he disappeared below the seats.
For the rest of my life, I'm always going to have that in the back of my mind.
Wow; I didn't get involved because I was scared I might get kicked off the flight and lose my job.
And Michael was actually one of five witnesses that we eventually managed to track down, most of them, as I said, through the internet, through social media.
And I should say at this stage that one really important dimension to all of this for journalists who utilize social media and who utilize citizen journalism is making sure we get our facts correct.
So in the case of the Ian Tomlinson witnesses, I got them to return to the scene of the death and physically walk me through and tell me exactly what they had seen.
The danger in all of this for journalists -- for all of us -- is that we're victims of hoaxes, or that there's deliberate misinformation fed into the public domain.
So we have to be careful.
But nobody can deny the power of citizen journalism.
Now, think of the two biggest news stories of the year.
We had the Japanese earthquake and the tsunami.
They were houses being moved along, as if in the sea.
Water lifting up inside people's living rooms, supermarkets shaking -- these were images shot by citizen journalists and instantly shared on the internet.
And the other big story of the year: the political crisis, the political earthquake in the Middle East.
And it doesn't matter if it was Egypt or Libya or Syria or Yemen.
Individuals have managed to overcome the repressive restrictions in those regimes by recording their environment and telling their own stories on the internet.
This image -- and I could have shown you any, actually; YouTube is full of them -- This image is of an apparently unarmed protester in Bahrain.
It doesn't matter if the individual being mistreated, possibly even killed, is in Bahrain or in London.
But citizen journalism and this technology has inserted a new layer of accountability into our world, and I think that's a good thing.
So to conclude: the theme of the conference, "Why not?" -- I think for journalists, it's quite simple, really.
I mean, why not utilize this technology, which massively broadens the boundaries of what's possible, accept that many of the things that happen in our world now go recorded, and we can obtain that information through social media?
That's new for journalists.
The stories I showed you, I don't think we would have been able to investigate 10 years ago, possibly even five years ago.
And "Why not?" for people like yourselves?
Well, I think that's very simple, too.
If you encounter something that you believe is problematic, that disturbs you, that concerns you, an injustice of some kind, something that just doesn't feel quite right, then why not witness it, record it and share it?
That process of witnessing, recording and sharing is journalism.
And we can all do it. Thank you.
When I was little -- and by the way, I was little once -- my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker.
And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches.
And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he'd bought.
And the guy took it apart, and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels.
And the watchmaker turned around and said, "God can see it."
Now I'm not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here.
I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess.
But I felt something.
And it was a physiological response.
And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way.
And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it?
Now you probably know the answer to this already.
You probably think, well, I don't know which one you think it is, but I think it's about feeling beauty.
And so I then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things.
One of the most early work was done in automotive design -- some very exciting work was done there.
And during a lot of this work, we found something, or I found something, that really fascinated me, and maybe you can remember it.
Do you remember when lights used to just go on and off, click click, when you closed the door in a car?
And then somebody, I think it was BMW, introduced a light that went out slowly.
Remember that?
I remember it clearly.
I remember sitting there thinking, this is fantastic.
So I started to ask myself questions about it.
And the first was, I'd ask other people: "Do you like it?" "Yes."
Can we cut down a little bit further, because, as a designer, I need the vocabulary, I need the keyboard, of how this actually works.
And so I did some experiments.
And this isn't a think, it's a feel.
And would you do me a favor?
And that thing that I found was the cinema or the theater.
It's actually just happened here -- light to dark in six seconds.
And when that happens, are you sitting there going, "No, the movie's about to start," or are you going, "That's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it.
Now I'm not a neuroscientist.
I don't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex.
And some of the people I speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater don't get it in the same way.
Everybody likes it, but some like it more than others.
We're not feeling it. We're thinking beauty is in the limbic system -- if that's not an outmoded idea.
These are the bits, the pleasure centers, and maybe what I'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking.
The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit, the cortex.
They arrive first.
So how do we make that actually work?
And how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know, or what we're going to learn, about something?
This is one of the most beautiful things I know.
It's a plastic bag.
And when I looked at it first, I thought, no, there's no beauty in that.
And all of a sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me.
Look at that. What are you feeling about it?
Is it beautiful? Is it exciting?
I'm watching your faces very carefully.
Maybe there's an innocence to it.
This is the last act on this Earth of a little girl called Heidi, five years old, before she died of cancer to the spine.
It's the last thing she did, the last physical act.
Look at that picture.
Look at the innocence. Look at the beauty in it.
Stop. Stop. How do you feel?
I'm feeling it here. I feel it here.
And I'm watching your faces, because your faces are telling me something.
The lady over there is actually crying, by the way.
But what are you doing?
Because I have to know how people react to things.
And one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty, something stupefyingly delicious, is what I call the OMG.
And by the way, there's no pleasure in that face.
It's not a "this is wonderful!"
The eyebrows are doing this, the eyes are defocused, and the mouth is hanging open.
That's not the expression of joy.
There's something else in that.
There's something weird happening.
So pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in.
It means something triggering a big emotional response, often quite a sad emotional response, but it's part of what we do.
And this is the dilemma, this is the paradox, of beauty.
Now what I'm also interested in is: Is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty?
By that, I mean intrinsically beautiful things, just something that's exquisitely beautiful, that's universally beautiful.
Very hard to find. Maybe you've got some examples of it.
Now when talking about beauty you can't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you.
This is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people, and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face.
So it wasn't about symmetry.
In fact, this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face, of which both sides are beautiful.
But they're both different.
And as a designer, I can't help meddling with this, so I pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this, and tried to understand what the individual elements were, but feeling it as I go.
And as I say, I'm not a neuroscientist, but to understand how I can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements.
Anais Nin and the Talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are, but as we are.
And this is the F1 MV Agusta.
And I feel that here.
It's not about the shapes, it's how the shapes reflect light.
This little relief on the footplate, by the way, to a rider means there's something going on underneath it -- in this case, a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably, taking the power from the engine.
I can't tell you how wonderful this is.
That's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel.
And of course, a racing bike doesn't have a prop stand, but this one, because it's a road bike, it all goes away and it folds into this little gap.
So it disappears.
Why would you do that?
Massimo Tamburini.
They call him "The Plumber" in Italy, as well as "Maestro," because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time.
But unfortunately, the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty.
We have to deal with it.
And so look at her.
Did you see what I did?
Beautiful? Maybe lesser.
But then, of course, the consumer says that doesn't really matter.
So that's okay, isn't it?
It's that easy to lose beauty, because beauty's incredibly difficult to do.
And only a few people can do it.
And a focus group cannot do it.
And a team rarely can do it.
This is a beautiful water bottle -- some of you know of it -- done by Ross Lovegrove, the designer.
This is pretty close to intrinsic beauty. This one, as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this.
It's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that, that comes out of the tool correctly, that goes down the line without falling over.
It's a fantastic example, a simple object.
You all, I guess, like me, enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance.
You also may be taking into account the fact that it's incredibly painful.
Anybody seen a ballet dancer's toes when they come out of the points?
While she's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you, something horrible's going on down here.
The comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what's actually going on.
So we're going to have a little experiment.
Did you think that was a bicycle when I showed it to you at the first flash?
It's not.
Tell me something, did you think it was quick when you first saw it? Yes you did.
Did you think it was modern? Yes you did.
But you're a slave of that first flash.
We are slaves to the first few fractions of a second -- and that's where much of my work has to win or lose, on a shelf in a shop.
And finally, the layer that I love, of knowledge.
Look at that. Do you want to see it again?
No time. It says I have two minutes left, so we can't do this.
But just go to the Web, YouTube, pull it down, "folding T-shirt."
You didn't maybe know it.
It feels fantastic when you do it, you look forward to doing it, and when you tell somebody else about it -- like you probably have -- you look really smart.
Only sometimes. Only sometimes.
Form is function. Form is function.
And so I've stopped using words like "form," and I've stopped using words like "function" as a designer.
What I try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things.
And you know what those products and services are, because you own some of them.
Forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Well we all know the World Wide Web has absolutely transformed publishing, broadcasting, commerce and social connectivity, but where did it all come from?
And I'll quote three people: Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee.
This is Vannevar Bush.
Vannevar Bush was the U.S. government's chief scientific adviser during the war.
And in 1945, he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly.
And the article was called "As We May Think."
And what Vannevar Bush was saying was the way we use information is broken.
We don't work in terms of libraries and catalog systems and so forth.
The brain works by association.
And so he suggested a machine, and he called it the memex.
And the memex would link information, one piece of information to a related piece of information and so forth.
Now this was in 1945.
A computer in those days was something the secret services used to use for code breaking.
And nobody knew anything about it.
So this was before the computer was invented.
And he proposed this machine called the memex.
So spinning forward, one of the guys who read this article was a guy called Doug Engelbart, and he was a U.S. Air Force officer.
And he was reading it in their library in the Far East.
And he was so inspired by this article, it kind of directed the rest of his life.
He built a system.
The system was designed to augment human intelligence, it was called.
And in a premonition of today's world of cloud computing and softwares of service, his system was called NLS for oN-Line System.
And this is Doug Engelbart.
He was giving a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968.
What he showed -- he sat on a stage like this, and he demonstrated this system.
He had his head mic like I've got.
And you can see, he's working between documents and graphics and so forth.
And he's driving it all with this platform here, with a five-finger keyboard and the world's first computer mouse, which he specially designed in order to do this system.
So this is where the mouse came from as well.
So this is Doug Engelbart.
The trouble with Doug Engelbart's system was that the computers in those days cost several million pounds.
So for a personal computer, a few million pounds was like having a personal jet plane; it wasn't really very practical.
But spin on to the 80s when personal computers did arrive, then there was room for this kind of system on personal computers.
And my company, OWL built a system called Guide for the Apple Macintosh.
And we delivered the world's first hypertext system.
Apple introduced a thing called HyperCard, and they made a bit of a fuss about it.
They had a 12-page supplement in the Wall Street Journal the day it launched.
Byte magazine and Communications at the ACM had special issues covering hypertext.
We developed a PC version of this product as well as the Macintosh version.
These are some examples of this system in action in the late 80s.
We developed a system such that it had a markup language based on html.
We called it hml: hypertext markup language.
And the system was capable of doing very, very large documentation systems over computer networks.
So I took this system to a trade show in Versailles near Paris in late November 1990.
And I was approached by a nice young man called Tim Berners-Lee who said, "Are you Ian Ritchie?" and I said, "Yeah."
And he said, "I need to talk to you."
And he told me about his proposed system called the World Wide Web.
And I thought, well, that's got a pretentious name, especially since the whole system ran on his computer in his office.
But he was completely convinced that his World Wide Web would take over the world one day.
And he tried to persuade me to write the browser for it, because his system didn't have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything; it was just plain text.
So we didn't do it.
In 1992, his paper was rejected for the Hypertext Conference.
In 1993, there was a table at the conference in Seattle, and a guy called Marc Andreessen was demonstrating his little browser for the World Wide Web.
And I saw it, and I thought, yep, that's it.
And the very next year, in 1994, we had the conference here in Edinburgh, and I had no opposition in having Tim Berners-Lee as the keynote speaker.
There was a guy called Gary Kildall who went flying his plane when IBM came looking for an operating system for the IBM PC, and he wasn't there, so they went back to see Bill Gates.
And the 12 publishers who turned down J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, I guess.
On the other hand, there's Marc Andreessen who wrote the world's first browser for the World Wide Web.
And according to Fortune magazine, he's worth 700 million dollars.
But is he happy?
(Laughter) (Applause)
(Guitar music starts) I've been looking Several days now Where did they go?
My mama told me long ago I've lost so many precious things, I know They won't be back Where did they go?
My mama told me long ago Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my old friend Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my good memories at all I've seen so many pretty things They don't mean a thing now Listen to the song My mama told me long ago Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to doubt my good old days Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my good memories at all Abandon my good memories at all Abandon my good memories at all (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you for giving me the opportunity to perform tonight at TED New York.
I've been a dedicated TED fan and viewer, and also, I actually used to live in Manhattan when I was younger, so New York is like a second home to me, and it's great to be back.
Just like fruit ripens when the time is right.
So it's my interpretation of building the future.
(Guitar music starts) Clap your hands.
One!
Two!
(Applause) (Guitar music) (Music ends) (Applause)
Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar.
(Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar.
Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar.
We're all liars.
They say, "It's okay, we'll email you."
My husband's like, "Honey, deception?
Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril.
I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying."
They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times.
And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act.
Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance.
Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.
So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to.
Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act.
Now not all lies are harmful.
Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret.
"Honey, you don't look fat in that, no."
So sorry."
But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception.
And that can have dramatic costs for us.
Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States.
Deception can cost billions.
Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis.
Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us.
And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere.
He was interviewed once, and he said the following.
He said, "Look, I've got one rule."
And this was Henry's rule, he said, "Look, everyone is willing to give you something.
They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for."
And we all kind of hate to admit it.
And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies.
On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times.
But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other.
(Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil.
We're essentially against lying.
But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens.
We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers.
Extroverts lie more than introverts.
Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people.
Women lie more to protect other people.
If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions.
Now, you may think that's bad.
If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.
It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives.
That's truth number two about lying.
It's as old as breathing.
It's part of our culture, it's part of our history.
Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.
(Laughter) Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species.
Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive.
Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language?
Koko was taught to communicate via sign language.
It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten.
(Laughter) We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack.
It's starts really, really early.
How early?
They manipulate via flattery.
By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions.
The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate.
Why is it so easy to learn?
There are good liars and bad liars.
(Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me.
I'm going to say this again.
I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.
And these allegations are false.
And I need to go back to work for the American people.
Thank you.
(Applause) Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs?
We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool.
Now if Bill Clinton had said, "Well, to tell you the truth ..."
Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail -- and we're all really glad he didn't do that -- he would have further discredited himself.
Freud had it right.
And we all do it no matter how powerful you are.
We all chatter with our fingertips.
(Laughter) Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language.
Because we think liars fidget all the time.
Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying.
We think liars won't look you in the eyes.
Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth.
We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity.
You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks.
Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest.
Can you tell what's happening in a conversation?
Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions?
Now, I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators.
They're going to show they're on your side.
They're going to be enthusiastic.
They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth.
They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks."
They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview.
Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive.
That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky.
Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places.
And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order.
And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells.
Why do they do that? Well, we all do the same thing.
We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures.
We say "yes," we shake our heads "no."
And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start -- for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock.
We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test.
See now if you can spot him saying, "yes" while shaking his head "no," slightly shrugging his shoulders.
(Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one.
I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events.
So I know it's not possible.
Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen.
Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody -- JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test.
But I'm happy to participate in one.
Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger.
And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt.
It's associated with moral superiority.
And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from.
Here's what it looks like.
And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows -- and it doesn't always follow -- look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, "No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you."
We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit.
They're not proof of deception.
They're red flags.
We're human beings.
Don't try to be like those folks on "Law & Order" and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission.
Now, we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie.
And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like.
But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers -- one is lying, one is telling the truth.
And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California.
And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like.
This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it.
And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother.
(Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth.
And that -- maybe it'll fade too with time -- but I don't think so.
That bothers me the most.
PM: Now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court.
And she fought, and I know she fought you.
But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her.
And I don't understand it, and I never will.
Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it.
We know, for example, that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive.
And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day.
But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door?
And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness.
Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency -- character integrity -- that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter.
You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one.
My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized."
And that's the truth. Thank you.
(Applause)
So I'm here to explain why I'm wearing these ninja pajamas.
And to do that, I'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies.
So some of you may know about the chemical Bisphenol A, BPA.
It's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics.
So BPA mimics the body's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems.
And it's everywhere.
A recent study found BPA in 93 percent of people six and older.
The Center for Disease Control in the U.S.
says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies, and this includes preservatives, pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury.
To me, this says three things.
First, don't become a cannibal.
Second, we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution.
And third, our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins.
So what happens to all these toxins when we die?
The short answer is: They return to the environment in one way or another, continuing the cycle of toxicity.
But our current funeral practices make the situation much worse.
If you're cremated, all those toxins I mentioned are released into the atmosphere.
And this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year.
And in a traditional American funeral, a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive.
It's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition -- a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel.
So by trying to preserve our dead bodies, we deny death, poison the living and further harm the environment.
Green or natural burials, which don't use embalming, are a step in the right direction, but they don't address the existing toxins in our bodies.
I think there's a better solution.
I'm an artist, so I'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art, science and culture.
The Infinity Burial Project, an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies.
The Infinity Burial Project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom -- a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost.
But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom.
I also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil.
So I thought maybe I could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body.
So today, I'm collecting what I shed or slough off -- my hair, skin and nails -- and I'm feeding these to edible mushrooms.
As the mushrooms grow, I pick the best feeders to become Infinity Mushrooms.
It's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife.
So when I die, the Infinity Mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it.
(Laughter) Just a little.
I realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food.
But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment.
See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay.
It's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet.
Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture, a concept that was developed by an entomologist, Timothy Myles.
And now about these ninja pajamas.
Once it's completed, I plan to integrate the Infinity Mushrooms into a number of objects.
First, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, the Mushroom Death Suit.
(Laughter) I'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit.
It's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores.
The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots.
These capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly, a kind of second skin, which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms.
So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two, and then I'd like to begin testing them, first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects.
And believe it or not, a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms.
(Laughter) What I've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment.
I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms, so I formed the Decompiculture Society, a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options, seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom.
The Decompiculture Society shares a vision of a cultural shift, from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture, a radical acceptance of death and decomposition.
Accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment, as the research on environmental toxins confirms.
And the saying goes, we came from dust and will return to dust.
And once we understand that we're connected to the environment, we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet.
I believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'd like to take you to another world.
And I'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor, living on less than one dollar a day.
I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me.
I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor -- all laid out.
Then, I don't look it, but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years.
Everything was at my feet.
I could do nothing wrong.
And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like.
So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time.
It changed my life.
I came back home, told my mother, "I'd like to live and work in a village."
Mother went into a coma.
(Laughter) "What is this?
It made me think.
And I wanted to give something back in my own way."
"What do you want to do in a village?
No job, no money, no security, no prospect."
I said, "I want to live and dig wells for five years."
"Dig wells for five years?
You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to dig wells for five years?"
She didn't speak to me for a very long time, because she thought I'd let my family down.
And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College -- college only for the poor.
I went to this village for the first time.
Elders came to me and said, "Are you running from the police?"
I said, "No."
(Laughter) "You failed in your exam?"
I said, "No."
"You didn't get a government job?" I said, "No."
"What are you doing here?
Why are you here?
The education system in India makes you look at Paris and New Delhi and Zurich; what are you doing in this village?
I said, "No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor.
So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice.
They said, "Please, don't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college."
You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community.
So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism.
Who is a professional?
A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief.
These are professionals all over the world.
You find them in any inaccessible village around the world.
And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal.
It needs to be used, needs to be applied, needs to be shown to the world outside -- that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today.
You eat on the floor, you sleep on the floor, you work on the floor.
And no one can get more than $100 a month.
You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College.
That is where we want you to try crazy ideas.
It doesn't matter if you fail.
You are certified by the community you serve.
You don't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer.
So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986.
It was built by 12 Barefoot architects who can't read and write, built on $1.50 a sq. ft.
150 people lived there, worked there.
They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002.
But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it.
I said, "Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college."
I asked a forester -- high-powered, paper-qualified expert -- I said, "What can you build in this place?"
Not even worth it.
No water, rocky soil."
And I said, "Okay, I'll go to the old man in village and say, 'What should I grow in this spot?'" He looked quietly at me and said, "You build this, you build this, you put this, and it'll work."
This is waterproofing the roof."
(Laughter) It is a bit of jaggery, a bit of urens and a bit of other things I don't know.
But it actually doesn't leak.
(Laughter) It's the only college which is fully solar-electrified.
All the power comes from the sun.
45 kilowatts of panels on the roof.
He knows more about solar than anyone I know anywhere in the world guaranteed.
Food, if you come to the Barefoot College, is solar cooked.
It's a parabolic Scheffler solar cooker.
And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking.
We have a dentist -- she's a grandmother, illiterate, who's a dentist.
She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children.
Barefoot technology: this was 1986 -- no engineer, no architect thought of it -- but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs.
Very little water is wasted.
All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank, and no water is wasted.
If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we collect rainwater.
60 percent of children don't go to school, because they have to look after animals -- sheep, goats -- domestic chores.
So we thought of starting a school at night for the children.
Because it's for the convenience of the child; it's not for the convenience of the teacher.
Democracy, citizenship, how you should measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick.
This is what we teach in the night schools.
Every five years we have an election.
Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process, and they elect a prime minister.
The prime minister is 12 years old.
She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening.
She has a cabinet, a minister of education, a minister for energy, a minister for health.
And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children.
She got the World's Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden.
And the Queen of Sweden, who's there, turned to me and said, "Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from?
And the girl, who's on her left, turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said, "Please tell her I'm the prime minister."
(Laughter) (Applause) Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry.
You have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old.
He is my psychoanalyst. He is my teacher.
He's my doctor. He's my lawyer.
He's my donor.
He actually raises money, solves my disputes.
He solves my problems in the village.
If there's tension in the village, if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and the parent, the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says, "Shake hands.
(Laughter) (Applause) So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan -- all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained.
And we went to Ladakh, and we asked this woman -- this, at minus 40, you have to come out of the roof, because there's no place, it was all snowed up on both sides -- and we asked this woman, "What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?"
And she thought for a minute and said, "It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter."
(Laughter) Went to Afghanistan.
(Laughter) Men are restless, men are ambitious, men are compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate.
Why? Because they want to leave the village and go to a city, looking for a job.
What's the best way of communicating in the world today?
Telegraph? No.
Telephone? No.
Tell a woman.
(Laughter) (Applause) So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, "We want to take them to India."
Of course, the women were much more intelligent than the men.
Sign language.
You use sign language.
And in six months they can become solar engineers.
And they haven't collapsed.
She actually went and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between AC and DC.
He didn't know.
Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan.
We went to Africa, and we did the same thing.
All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different language.
But their body language is great.
They're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers.
They said, "These two grandmothers ... " "Grandmothers?" The minister couldn't believe what was happening.
"Where did they go?" "Went to India and back."
Went straight to the president.
He said, "Do you know there's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone?"
I said, "I can't, Mr. President.
So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone.
And 150 grandmothers have been trained in Sierra Leone.
Gambia: we went to select a grandmother in Gambia.
Went to this village.
I knew which woman I would like to take.
The community got together and said, "Take these two women."
I said, "No, I want to take this woman."
They said, "Why? She doesn't know the language. You don't know her."
I said, "I like the body language. I like the way she speaks."
"Why not?" "The woman, look how beautiful she is."
I said, "Yeah, she is very beautiful."
"What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?"
That was his biggest fear.
I said, "She'll be happy. She'll ring you up on the mobile."
She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger.
She walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran.
And when I went back six months later, I said, "Where's your husband?"
"Oh, somewhere. It doesn't matter."
(Laughter) Success story.
And listen to people. They have the solutions in front of you.
They're all over the world.
Don't listen to the World Bank, listen to the people on the ground.
They have all the solutions in the world.
I'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Why can't we solve these problems?
We know what they are.
Why?
I remember March the 15th, 2000.
In the newspaper it said "it was all part of a normal process."
A little bit further on in the article it said "a loss that would normally take the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace."
If we walk into the B15 iceberg when we leave here today, we're going to bump into something a thousand feet tall, 76 miles long, 17 miles wide, and it's going to weigh two gigatons.
And yet I think it's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions.
Only 90 days after this, arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred.
This is the code that's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are.
Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness.
And I wondered, what if the answer to some of our biggest problems could be found in the smallest of places, where the difference between what is valuable and what is worthless is merely the addition or subtraction of a few atoms?
And what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy, the electron?
So I started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists I could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there, and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas.
Six and a half years later, a hundred and eighty researchers, they have some amazing developments in the lab, and I will show you three of those today, such that we can stop burning up our planet and instead, we can generate all the energy we need right where we are, cleanly, safely, and cheaply.
Think of the space that we spend most of our time.
A tremendous amount of energy is coming at us from the sun.
We like the light that comes into the room, but in the middle of summer, all that heat is coming into the room that we're trying to keep cool.
In winter, exactly the opposite is happening.
Wouldn't it be really great if the window could flick back the heat into the room if we needed it or flick it away before it came in?
It's a thousand times more conductive than copper.
One of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently.
You think of carbon as black.
Carbon at the nanoscale is actually transparent and flexible.
To change its state, by the way, takes two volts from a millisecond pulse.
As we were working on this incredible discovery at University of Florida, we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist, and he was working on a pretty incredible thing.
Imagine if we didn't have to rely on artificial lighting to get around at night.
It's a nanomaterial, two nanomaterials, a detector and an imager.
Transparency is key.
And you can see, off a tiny film, incredible clarity.
As we were working on this, it dawned on us: this is taking infrared radiation, wavelengths, and converting it into electrons.
What if we combined it with this?
Suddenly you've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window.
But because it's flexible, it can be on any surface whatsoever.
We want to talk about storing energy, and unfortunately the best thing we've got going is something that was developed in France a hundred and fifty years ago, the lead acid battery.
Knowing that we're not going to put fifty of these in our basements to store our power, we went to a group at University of Texas at Dallas, and we gave them this diagram.
It was in actually a diner outside of Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.
And these scientists, instead of laughing at us, said, "Yeah."
And what they built was eBox.
EBox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside, hold it until you need it, and then be able to release it and pass it off.
Being able to do that means that I can generate energy cleanly, efficiently and cheaply right where I am.
It's my energy.
The grid of tomorrow is no grid, and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free.
If you do this, you get the last puzzle piece, which is water.
When we run out of water, as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world, we're going to have to get this from the sea, and that's going to require us to build desalination plants.
These also require tremendous amounts of energy.
In fact, it's going to require twice the world's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water.
But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply, we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need.
I'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists, no kinder than many of the people in the world, but they have a magic look at the world.
And I'm glad to see their discoveries coming out of the lab and into the world.
It's been a long time in coming for me.
18 years ago, I saw a photograph in the paper.
I've carried this photograph with me every day since then.
It's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst.
By any standard this is wrong.
We should do better than this.
It'll never happen. You don't have enough money.
This is why we have to solve our problems, and I know the answer as to how is to be able to get exquisite control over a building block of nature, the stuff of life: the simple electron.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I consider myself one part artist and one part designer.
And I work at an artificial intelligence research lab.
And we're taking a moonshot that we'll want to be interacting with computers in deeply emotional ways.
So in order to do that, the technology has to be just as much human as it is artificial.
Or that look of disappointment that you can just smell from miles away.
I view art as the gateway to help us bridge this gap between human and machine: to figure out what it means to get each other so that we can train AI to get us.
See, to me, art is a way to put tangible experiences to intangible ideas, feelings and emotions.
And I think it's one of the most human things about us.
We have what feels like an infinite range of emotions, and to top it off, we're all different.
We have different family backgrounds, different experiences and different psychologies.
And this is what makes life really interesting.
But this is also what makes working on intelligent technology extremely difficult.
And that makes a lot of sense.
See, for every qualitative thing about us -- you know, those parts of us that are emotional, dynamic and subjective -- we have to convert it to a quantitative metric: something that can be represented with facts, figures and computer code.
The issue is, there are many qualitative things that we just can't put our finger on.
So, think about hearing your favorite song for the first time.
What were you doing?
How did you feel?
See, parts of us feel so simple, but under the surface, there's really a ton of complexity.
And translating that complexity to machines is what makes them modern-day moonshots.
So, in the lab, I've been creating art as a way to help me design better experiences for bleeding-edge technology.
And it's been serving as a catalyst to beef up the more human ways that computers can relate to us.
Through art, we're tacking some of the hardest questions, like what does it really mean to feel?
And how does intuition affect the way that we interact?
So, take for example human emotion.
But what about the more complex emotions?
You know, those emotions that we have a hard time describing to each other?
Like nostalgia.
So, to explore this, I created a piece of art, an experience, that asked people to share a memory, and I teamed up with some data scientists to figure out how to take an emotion that's so highly subjective and convert it into something mathematically precise.
So, we created what we call a nostalgia score and it's the heart of this installation.
To do that, the installation asks you to share a story, the computer then analyzes it for its simpler emotions, it checks for your tendency to use past-tense wording and also looks for words that we tend to associate with nostalgia, like "home," "childhood" and "the past."
It then creates a nostalgia score to indicate how nostalgic your story is.
And that score is the driving force behind these light-based sculptures that serve as physical embodiments of your contribution.
And the higher the score, the rosier the hue.
You know, like looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.
So, when you see your score and the physical representation of it, sometimes you'd agree and sometimes you wouldn't.
It's as if it really understood how that experience made you feel.
So, even the more objective parts about being human are hard to describe.
Like, conversation.
So think about sitting with your friend at a coffee shop and just having small talk.
And how do you even know what topics to discuss?
See, most of us don't really think about it, because it's almost second nature.
But when it comes to teaching AI systems how to interact with people, we have to teach them step by step what to do.
If you've ever tried to talk with Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant, you can tell that it or they can still sound cold.
And have you ever gotten annoyed when they didn't understand what you were saying and you had to rephrase what you wanted 20 times just to play a song?
Alright, to the credit of the designers, realistic communication is really hard.
And there's a whole branch of sociology, called conversation analysis, that tries to make blueprints for different types of conversation.
Types like customer service or counseling, teaching and others.
I've been collaborating with a conversation analyst at the lab to try to help our AI systems hold more human-sounding conversations.
This way, when you have an interaction with a chatbot on your phone or a voice-based system in the car, it sounds a little more human and less cold and disjointed.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it gets into these, well, loops of misunderstanding.
So even though the machine-to-machine conversation can make sense, grammatically and colloquially, it can still end up feeling cold and robotic.
So while it might be grammatically correct and uses all the right hashtags and emojis, it can end up sounding mechanical and, well, a little creepy.
And we call this the uncanny valley.
So there are other things that get lost in translation, too, like human intuition.
Right now, computers are gaining more autonomy.
They can take care of things for us, like change the temperature of our houses based on our preferences and even help us drive on the freeway.
But there are things that you and I do in person that are really difficult to translate to AI.
So think about the last time that you saw an old classmate or coworker.
Did you give them a hug or go in for a handshake?
And as an artist, I feel that access to one's intuition, your unconscious knowing, is what helps us create amazing things.
Big ideas, from that abstract, nonlinear place in our consciousness that is the culmination of all of our experiences.
And if we want computers to relate to us and help amplify our creative abilities, I feel that we'll need to start thinking about how to make computers be intuitive.
So I wanted to explore how something like human intuition could be directly translated to artificial intelligence.
The piece is called Wayfinding, and it's set up as a symbolic compass that has four kinetic sculptures.
And there are sensors set up on the top of each sculpture that capture how far away you are from them.
And the data that gets collected ends up changing the way that sculptures move and the direction of the compass.
The thing is, the piece doesn't work like the automatic door sensor that just opens when you walk in front of it.
See, your contribution is only a part of its collection of lived experiences.
So when you walk in front of it, it starts to use all of the data that it's captured throughout its exhibition history -- or its intuition -- to mechanically respond to you based on what it's learned from others.
And what ends up happening is that as participants we start to learn the level of detail that we need in order to manage expectations from both humans and machines.
We can almost see our intuition being played out on the computer, picturing all of that data being processed in our mind's eye.
My hope is that this type of art will help us think differently about intuition and how to apply that to AI in the future.
So these are just a few examples of how I'm using art to feed into my work as a designer and researcher of artificial intelligence.
And I see it as a crucial way to move innovation forward.
Because right now, there are a lot of extremes when it comes to AI.
Popular movies show it as this destructive force while commercials are showing it as a savior to solve some of the world's most complex problems.
But regardless of where you stand, it's hard to deny that we're living in a world that's becoming more and more digital by the second.
Our lives revolve around our devices, smart appliances and more.
So, I'm trying to embed more humanness from the start.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I do two things: I design mobile computers and I study brains.
(Laughter) If I could have my first slide, you'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations.
I have two affiliations.
Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days, but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park.
We study theoretical neuroscience and how the neocortex works.
I have one slide on my other life, the computer life, and that's this slide here.
These are some of the products I've worked on over the last 20 years, starting from the very original laptop to some of the first tablet computers and so on, ending up most recently with the Treo, and we're continuing to do this.
I've done this because I believe mobile computing is the future of personal computing, and I'm trying to make the world a little bit better by working on these things.
I really didn't want to do any of these products.
Very early in my career I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry.
Before that, I just have to tell you about this picture of Graffiti I picked off the web the other day.
I was looking for a picture for Graffiti that'll text input language.
(Laughter) So what happened was, when I was young and got out of engineering school at Cornell in '79, I went to work for Intel and was in the computer industry, and three months into that, I fell in love with something else.
This is not a real brain.
And I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I have one recollection, which was pretty strong in my mind.
In September of 1979, Scientific American came out with a single-topic issue about the brain.
They talked about the neuron, development, disease, vision and all the things you might want to know about brains.
It was really quite impressive.
But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame.
Today is, I think, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA.
And he wrote a story basically saying, this is all well and good, but you know, we don't know diddly squat about brains, and no one has a clue how they work, so don't believe what anyone tells you.
This is a quote from that article, he says: "What is conspicuously lacking" -- he's a very proper British gentleman -- "What is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas in which to interpret these different approaches."
I thought the word "framework" was great.
So I fell in love with this.
I said, look: We have all this knowledge about brains -- how hard can it be?
It's something we can work on in my lifetime; I could make a difference.
So I tried to get out of the computer business, into the brain business.
First, I went to MIT, the AI lab was there.
I said, I want to build intelligent machines too, but I want to study how brains work first.
And they said, "Oh, you don't need to do that.
I said, you really ought to study brains.
(Laughter) I was a little disappointed -- pretty young -- but I went back again a few years later, this time in California, and I went to Berkeley.
So I got in the PhD program in biophysics.
I was like, I'm studying brains now. Well, I want to study theory.
They said, "You can't study theory about brains.
And as a graduate student, you can't do that."
I went back in the computer industry and said, I'll have to work here for a while.
That's when I designed all those computer products.
But I'm doing it now, and I'm going to tell you about it.
So why should we have a good brain theory?
Well, there's lots of reasons people do science.
We're curious, and we go out and get knowledge.
Why do we study ants? It's interesting.
But sometimes a science has other attributes which makes it really interesting.
Sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves; it'll tell us who we are.
Evolution did this and Copernicus did this, where we have a new understanding of who we are.
And after all, we are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain.
Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain.
And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we need to understand brains.
Another thing is sometimes science leads to big societal benefits, technologies, or businesses or whatever.
This is one, too, because when we understand how brains work, we'll be able to build intelligent machines.
That's a good thing on the whole, with tremendous benefits to society, just like a fundamental technology.
People have been working on it for 100 years.
Let's first take a look at what normal science looks like.
This is normal science.
The theorist guy says, "I think this is what's going on," the experimentalist says, "You're wrong."
It goes back and forth, this works in physics, this in geology.
But if this is normal science, what does neuroscience look like?
This is what neuroscience looks like.
There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains.
A lot of data, but no theory.
But if you ask them, they say, there's various reasons we don't have a good brain theory.
Some say we still don't have enough data, we need more information, there's all these things we don't know.
Well, I just told you there's data coming out of your ears.
Another one is sometimes people say, "Brains are so complex, it'll take another 50 years."
I even think Chris said something like this yesterday, something like, it's one of the most complicated things in the universe.
You've got a brain.
And although the brain looks very complicated, things look complicated until you understand them.
So we can say, my neocortex, the part of the brain I'm interested in, has 30 billion cells.
In fact, it looks like it's the same thing repeated over and over again.
It's not as complex as it looks. That's not the issue.
Some people say, brains can't understand brains.
It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver.
And finally, some people say, "I don't feel like a bunch of cells -- I'm conscious.
I've got this experience, I'm in the world.
And there's really no evidence, other than that people just disbelieve that cells can do what they do.
So some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism, some really smart people, too, but we can reject all that.
(Laughter) No, there's something else, something really fundamental, and it is: another reason why we don't have a good brain theory is because we have an intuitive, strongly held but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer.
Now, there's a history of this in science and before I tell you what it is, I'll tell you about the history of it in science.
Look at other scientific revolutions -- the solar system, that's Copernicus, Darwin's evolution, and tectonic plates, that's Wegener.
They all have a lot in common with brain science.
First, they had a lot of unexplained data. A lot of it.
We're not smarter now than they were then; it just turns out it's really hard to think of things, but once you've thought of them, it's easy to understand.
My daughters understood these three theories, in their basic framework, in kindergarten.
It's not that hard -- here's the apple, here's the orange, the Earth goes around, that kind of stuff.
Another thing is the answer was there all along, but we kind of ignored it because of this obvious thing.
It was an intuitive, strongly held belief that was wrong.
In the case of the solar system, the idea that the Earth is spinning, the surface is going a thousand miles an hour, and it's going through the solar system at a million miles an hour -- this is lunacy; we all know the Earth isn't moving.
Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour?
If you said Earth was spinning around in space and was huge -- they would lock you up, that's what they did back then.
So it was intuitive and obvious. Now, what about evolution?
Evolution, same thing.
The fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor.
We all have a common ancestor with the plant in the lobby!
This is what evolution tells us. And it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.
And the same thing about tectonic plates.
I'll tell you. It'll seem obvious that it's correct. That's the point.
The intuitive but obvious thing is: somehow, intelligence is defined by behavior; we're intelligent because of how we do things and how we behave intelligently.
Intelligence is defined by prediction.
I'm going to work you through this in a few slides, and give you an example of what this means.
They say, we have a thing in a box. We have its inputs and outputs.
The AI people said, the thing in the box is a programmable computer, because it's equivalent to a brain.
Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which essentially says, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human -- a behavioral metric of what intelligence is that has stuck in our minds for a long time.
Reality, though -- I call it real intelligence.
We experience the world through a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them.
When we recall them, we match them up against reality, and we're making predictions all the time.
What I'm saying is, the internal prediction is the output in the neocortex, and somehow, prediction leads to intelligent behavior.
And the alligator has some very sophisticated senses.
It's got good eyes and ears and touch senses and so on, a mouth and a nose.
It can attack. It can do all kinds of stuff.
Now in evolution, what happened?
First thing that happened in evolution with mammals is we started to develop a thing called the neocortex.
I'm going to represent the neocortex by this box on top of the old brain.
Neocortex means "new layer." It's a new layer on top of your brain.
(Laughter) Literally, it's about the size of a table napkin and doesn't fit, so it's wrinkly.
The old brain is still there.
You still have that alligator brain. You do. It's your emotional brain.
On top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex.
And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain.
So as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex.
And in the future, when it sees something similar to that again, in a similar environment, or the exact same environment, it'll start playing it back: "Oh, I've been here before," and when you were here before, this happened next.
It literally feeds back the signals into your brain; they'll let you see what's going to happen next, will let you hear the word "sentence" before I said it.
This is the most important slide of my talk, so I'll dwell on it a little.
And all the time you say, "Oh, I can predict things," so if you're a rat and you go through a maze, and you learn the maze, next time you're in one, you have the same behavior.
But suddenly, you're smarter; you say, "I recognize this maze, I know which way to go; I've been here before; I can envision the future."
That's what it's doing.
This is true for all mammals -- in humans, it got a lot worse.
Humans actually developed the front of the neocortex, called the anterior part of the neocortex.
I don't have time to explain, but to understand how a brain works, you have to understand how the first part of the mammalian neocortex works, how it is we store patterns and make predictions.
I already said the word "sentence."
In music, if you've heard a song before, when you hear it, the next note pops into your head already -- you anticipate it.
It happens all the time, you make predictions.
I have this thing called the "altered door" thought experiment.
It says, you have a door at home; when you're here, I'm changing it -- I've got a guy back at your house right now, moving the door around, moving your doorknob over two inches.
When you go home tonight, you'll put your hand out, reach for the doorknob, notice it's in the wrong spot and go, "Whoa, something happened."
I can change your doorknob in other ways -- make it larger, smaller, change its brass to silver, make it a lever, I can change the door; put colors on, put windows in.
I can change a thousand things about your door and in the two seconds you take to open it, you'll notice something has changed.
Now, the engineering approach, the AI approach to this, is to build a door database with all the door attributes.
We don't do that. Your brain doesn't do that.
Your brain is making constant predictions all the time about what will happen in your environment.
When I walk, every step, if I missed it by an eighth of an inch, I'll know something has changed.
You're constantly making predictions about your environment.
I'll talk about vision, briefly.
We're not aware of it, but our eyes are always moving.
When we look at a face, we typically go from eye to eye to nose to mouth.
When your eye moves from eye to eye, if there was something else there like a nose, you'd see a nose where an eye is supposed to be and go, "Oh, shit!"
(Laughter) "There's something wrong about this person."
No, you have an expectation of what you're going to see.
Every single moment.
We test it by prediction: What is the next word in this ...?
This is to this as this is to this. What is the next number in this sentence?
Here's three visions of an object. What's the fourth one?
So what is the recipe for brain theory?
First of all, we have to have the right framework.
And the framework is a memory framework, not a computational or behavior framework, it's a memory framework.
I've found the best people to work with are physicists, engineers and mathematicians, who tend to think algorithmically.
Then they have to learn the anatomy and the physiology.
You have to make these theories very realistic in anatomical terms.
Anyone who tells you their theory about how the brain works and doesn't tell you exactly how it's working and how the wiring works -- it's not a theory.
What will brain theory look like?
It's very different.
It's also memory of sequences: you cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence.
And these sequences are auto-associatively recalled, so if I see something, I hear something, it reminds me of it, and it plays back automatically.
And as I said, the theory must be biologically accurate, it must be testable and you must be able to build it.
One more slide.
Are we going to really build intelligent machines?
First of all, we're going to build this stuff out of silicon.
The same techniques we use to build silicon computer memories, we can use here.
But they're very different types of memories.
And we'll attach these memories to sensors, and the sensors will experience real-live, real-world data, and learn about their environment.
Now, it's very unlikely the first things you'll see are like robots.
Not that robots aren't useful; people can build robots.
But the robotics part is the hardest part. That's old brain. That's really hard.
The new brain is easier than the old brain.
(Laughter) We can also do intelligent security systems.
I don't know how this will turn out.
I know a lot of people who invented the microprocessor.
And if you talk to them, they knew what they were doing was really significant, but they didn't really know what was going to happen.
They couldn't anticipate cell phones and the Internet and all this kind of stuff.
They just knew like, "We're going to build calculators and traffic-light controllers.
In the same way, brain science and these memories are going to be a very fundamental technology, and it will lead to unbelievable changes in the next 100 years.
And I'm most excited about how we're going to use them in science.
If you have followed diplomatic news in the past weeks, you may have heard of a kind of crisis between China and the U.S.
regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google.
Many things have been said about this.
However, this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the Western world regarding these emerging cyber weapons.
It so happens that these weapons are dangerous.
They're of a new nature: they could lead the world into a digital conflict that could turn into an armed struggle.
These virtual weapons can also destroy the physical world.
In 1982, in the middle of the Cold War in Soviet Siberia, a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons, the equivalent of a fourth of the Hiroshima bomb.
Now we know today -- this was revealed by Thomas Reed, Ronald Reagan's former U.S. Air Force Secretary -- this explosion was actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation, in which they had managed to infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline.
Even more worrying for the Americans, in December 2008 the holiest of holies, the IT systems of CENTCOM, the central command managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have been infiltrated by hackers who used these: plain but infected USB keys.
And with these keys, they may have been able to get inside CENTCOM's systems, to see and hear everything, and maybe even infect some of them.
As a result, the Americans take the threat very seriously.
I'll quote General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says in a report to Congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons of mass destruction.
Moreover, the Americans have decided to spend over 30 billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities.
And across the world today, we see a sort of cyber arms race, with cyberwar units built up by countries like North Korea or even Iran.
Yet, what you'll never hear from spokespeople from the Pentagon or the French Department of Defence is that the question isn't really who's the enemy, but actually the very nature of cyber weapons.
And to understand why, we must look at how, through the ages, military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace.
For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we would have talked about the military innovation of the day -- the massive Vauban-style fortifications -- and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe.
which was indeed the case in Europe between 1650 and 1750.
Similarly, if we'd had this talk 30 or 40 years ago, we would have seen how the rise of nuclear weapons, and the threat of mutually assured destruction they imply, prevents a direct fight between the two superpowers.
However, if we'd had this talk 60 years ago, we would have seen how the emergence of new aircraft and tank technologies, which give the advantage to the attacker, make the Blitzkrieg doctrine very credible and thus create the possibility of war in Europe.
So military technologies can influence the course of the world, can make or break world peace -- and there lies the issue with cyber weapons.
The first issue: Imagine a potential enemy announcing they're building a cyberwar unit, but only for their country's defense.
It gets even more complicated when the doctrines of use become ambiguous.
Just 3 years ago, both the U.S. and France were saying they were investing militarily in cyberspace, strictly to defend their IT systems.
But today both countries say the best defense is to attack.
The second issue: Your country could be under cyberattack with entire regions plunged into total darkness, and you may not even know who's attacking you.
This gives a tremendous advantage to the attacker, because the defender doesn't know who to fight back against.
And if the defender retaliates against the wrong adversary, they risk making one more enemy and ending up diplomatically isolated.
In May 2007, Estonia was the victim of cyberattacks, that damaged its communication and banking systems.
But NATO, though it defends Estonia, reacted very prudently. Why?
Because NATO couldn't be 100% sure that the Kremlin was indeed behind these attacks.
On the other hand, we know that these weapons give an advantage to attacking.
In this context, when you don't know if the potential enemy is preparing for defense or attack, and if the weapons give an advantage to attacking, then this environment is most likely to spark a conflict.
This is the environment that's being created by cyber weapons today, and historically it was the environment in Europe at the onset of World War I.
If you remember the Cold War, it was a very hard game, but a stable one played only by two players, which allowed for some coordination between the two superpowers.
Today we're moving to a multipolar world in which coordination is much more complicated, as we have seen at Copenhagen.
Why? Because no nation knows for sure whether its neighbor is about to attack.
So nations may live under the threat of what Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling called the "reciprocal fear of surprise attack," as I don't know if my neighbor is about to attack me or not -- I may never know -- so I might take the upper hand and attack first.
Just last week, in a New York Times article dated January 26, 2010, it was revealed for the first time that officials at the National Security Agency were considering the possibility of preemptive attacks in cases where the U.S. was about to be cyberattacked.
In May 2009, General Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. nuclear forces, stated that in the event of cyberattacks against the U.S., all options would be on the table.
Cyber weapons do not replace conventional or nuclear weapons -- they just add a new layer to the existing system of terror.
But in doing so, they also add their own risk of triggering a conflict -- as we've just seen, a very important risk -- and a risk we may have to confront with a collective security solution which includes all of us: European allies, NATO members, our American friends and allies, our other Western allies, and maybe, by forcing their hand a little, our Russian and Chinese partners.
The information technologies Joël de Rosnay was talking about, which were historically born from military research, are today on the verge of developing an offensive capability of destruction, which could tomorrow, if we're not careful, completely destroy world peace.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Recently, we've seen the effects of cyber attacks on the business world.
Data breaches at companies like JP Morgan, Yahoo, Home Depot and Target have caused losses of hundreds of millions and in some cases, billions of dollars.
In 2012 to 2014, there was a significant data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management.
Security clearance and fingerprint data was compromised, affecting 22 million employees.
And you may have heard of the attempt by state-sponsored hackers to use stolen data to influence election outcomes in a number of countries.
Two recent examples are the compromise of a large amount of data from the Bundestag, the national Parliament of Germany, and the theft of emails from the US Democratic National Committee.
The cyber threat is now affecting our democratic processes.
As computer technology is becoming more powerful, the systems we use to protect our data are becoming more vulnerable.
Adding to the concern is a new type of computing technology, called quantum computing, which leverages microscopic properties of nature to deliver unimaginable increases in computational power.
So is the situation hopeless?
Should we start packing our digital survival gear and prepare for an upcoming data apocalypse?
For me, this is a particularly exciting time in the history of secure communications.
About 15 years ago, when I learned of our new-found ability to create quantum effects that don't exist in nature, I was excited.
The idea of applying the fundamental laws of physics to make encryption stronger really intrigued me.
Today, a select groups of companies and labs around the world, including mine, are maturing this technology for practical applications.
That's right.
We are now preparing to fight quantum with quantum.
So how does this all work?
For that, you'll need a briefcase, some important documents that you want to send your friend, James Bond, and a lock to keep it all safe.
Because the documents are top secret, we're going to use an advanced briefcase.
When he gets the briefcase, he enters the code, the documents get unscrambled, and voilà, you've just sent an encoded message to James Bond.
The code -- we call this an encryption key.
You can think of it as a password.
We call this key exchange.
And the lock, which encodes and decodes the document.
We call this an encryption algorithm.
Using the key, it encodes the text in the documents to random numbers.
A good algorithm will encode in such a way that without the key it's very difficult to unscramble.
What makes encryption so important is that if someone were to capture the briefcase and cut it open without the encryption key and the encryption algorithm, they wouldn't be able to read the documents.
Most security systems rely on a secure method for key exchange to communicate the encryption key to the right place.
Consider one of the very widely used systems today -- RSA.
When it was invented, in 1977, it was estimated that it would take 40 quadrillion years to break a 426-bit RSA key.
In 1994, just 17 years later, the code was broken.
As computers have become more and more powerful, we've had to use larger and larger codes.
Today we routinely use 2048 or 4096 bits.
As you can see, code makers and breakers are engaged in an ongoing battle to outwit each other.
And when quantum computers arrive in the next 10 to 15 years, they will even more rapidly crack the complex mathematics that underlies many of our encryption systems today.
Indeed, the quantum computer is likely to turn our present security castle into a mere house of cards.
We have to find a way to defend our castle.
And there have been some exciting breakthroughs.
Remember those three things important for encryption -- high-quality keys, secure key exchange and a strong algorithm?
Well, advances in science and engineering are putting two of those three elements at risk.
Random numbers are the foundational building blocks of encryption keys.
But today, they're not truly random.
Currently, we construct encryption keys from sequences of random numbers generated from software, so-called pseudo-random numbers.
The less random the numbers are, or in scientific terms, the less entropy they contain, the easier they are to predict.
Recently, several casinos have been victims of a creative attack.
The output of slot machines was recorded over a period of time and then analyzed.
This allowed the cyber criminals to reverse engineer the pseudo-random number generator behind the spinning wheels.
Similar risks apply to encryption keys.
So having a true random number generator is essential for secure encryption.
For years, researchers have been looking at building true random number generators.
But most designs to date are either not random enough, fast enough or aren't easily repeatable.
But the quantum world is truly random.
So it makes sense to take advantage of this intrinsic randomness.
Devices that can measure quantum effects can produce an endless stream of random numbers at high speed.
A select group of universities and companies around the world are focused on building true random number generators.
We were then able to reduce it to a server-size box.
Today, it's miniaturized into a PCI card that plugs into a standard computer.
This is the world's fastest true random number generator.
It measures quantum effects to produce a billion random numbers per second.
And it's in use today to improve security at cloud providers, banks and government agencies around the world.
(Applause) But even with a true random number generator, we've still got the second big cyber threat: the problem of secure key exchange.
The quantum solution to this problem is called quantum key distribution or QKD, which leverages a fundamental, counterintuitive characteristic of quantum mechanics.
The very act of looking at a quantum particle changes it.
Let me give you an example of how this works.
Except this time, instead of a call to give James the code, we're going to use quantum effects on a laser to carry the code and send it over standard optic fiber to James.
Luckily, Dr. No's attempt to intercept the quantum keys while in transit will leave fingerprints that James and you can detect.
And because the security is based on the fundamental laws of physics, a quantum computer, or indeed any future supercomputer will not be able to break it.
My team and I are collaborating with leading universities and the defense sector to mature this exciting technology into the next generation of security products.
The internet of things is heralding a hyperconnected era with 25 to 30 billion connected devices forecast by 2020.
For the correct functioning of our society in an IoT world, trust in the systems that support these connected devices is vital.
We're betting that quantum technologies will be essential in providing this trust, enabling us to fully benefit from the amazing innovations that are going to so enrich our lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So today, I would like to talk with you about bionics, which is the popular term for the science of replacing part of a living organism with a mechatronic device, or a robot.
And specifically, I'd like to talk with you about how bionics is evolving for people with arm amputations.
This is our motivation.
Arm amputation causes a huge disability.
Our hands are amazing instruments.
We talk with our hands.
We greet with our hands.
And we interact with the physical world with our hands.
And when they're missing, it's a barrier.
Arm amputation is usually caused by trauma, with things like industrial accidents, motor vehicle collisions or, very poignantly, war.
There are also some children who are born without arms, called congenital limb deficiency.
Unfortunately, we don't do great with upper-limb prosthetics.
They're called body-powered prostheses, which were invented just after the Civil War, refined in World War I and World War II.
Here you see a patent for an arm in 1912.
And that bicycle cable can open or close a hand or a hook or bend an elbow.
And we still use them commonly, because they're very robust and relatively simple devices.
The state of the art is what we call myoelectric prostheses.
These are motorized devices that are controlled by little electrical signals from your muscle.
Every time you contract a muscle, it emits a little electricity that you can record with antennae or electrodes and use that to operate the motorized prosthesis.
They work pretty well for people who have just lost their hand, because your hand muscles are still there.
You squeeze your hand, these muscles contract.
You open it, these muscles contract.
So it's intuitive, and it works pretty well.
Now you've lost your arm above the elbow.
Well our patients have to use very code-y systems of using just their arm muscles to operate robotic limbs.
We have robotic limbs.
We built our own arm at the Rehab Institute of Chicago where we've added some wrist flexion and shoulder joints to get up to six motors, or six degrees of freedom.
And we've had the opportunity to work with some very advanced arms that were funded by the U.S. military, using these prototypes, that had up to 10 different degrees of freedom including movable hands.
But at the end of the day, how do we tell these robotic arms what to do?
How do we control them?
Well we need a neural interface, a way to connect to our nervous system or our thought processes so that it's intuitive, it's natural, like for you and I.
Well the body works by starting a motor command in your brain, going down your spinal cord, out the nerves and to your periphery.
You touch yourself, there's a stimulus that comes up those very same nerves back up to your brain.
When you lose your arm, that nervous system still works.
Those nerves can put out command signals.
So you might say, let's go to the brain and put something in the brain to record signals, or in the end of the peripheral nerve and record them there.
And these are very exciting research areas, but it's really, really hard.
You have to put in hundreds of microscopic wires to record from little tiny individual neurons -- ordinary fibers that put out tiny signals that are microvolts.
And it's just too hard to use now and for my patients today.
Muscles will amplify the nerve signals about a thousand-fold, so that we can record them from on top of the skin, like you saw earlier.
So our approach is something we call targeted reinnervation.
Imagine, with somebody who's lost their whole arm, we still have four major nerves that go down your arm.
And we can use electrodes or antennae to pick that up and tell the arm to move.
That's the idea.
So this is the first man that we tried it on.
His name is Jesse Sullivan.
He's just a saint of a man -- 54-year-old lineman who touched the wrong wire and had both of his arms burnt so badly they had to be amputated at the shoulder.
I'm still using that old technology with a bicycle cable on his right side.
On the left side he's got a modern motorized prosthesis with those three joints, and he operates little pads in his shoulder that he touches to make the arm go.
And Jesse's a good crane operator, and he did okay by our standards.
He also required a revision surgery on his chest.
And that gave us the opportunity to do targeted reinnervation.
So my colleague, Dr. Greg Dumanian, did the surgery.
First, we cut away the nerve to his own muscle, then we took the arm nerves and just kind of had them shift down onto his chest and closed him up.
And after six months, the nerves grew in well, and you could see strong contractions.
You can see the movements on his chest, and those little hash marks are where we put our antennae, or electrodes.
He has not learned how to do this with the chest.
That's why it's intuitive.
So here's Jesse in our first little test with him.
On the left-hand side, you see his original prosthesis, and he's using those switches to move little blocks from one box to the other.
He's had that arm for about 20 months, so he's pretty good with it.
On the right side, two months after we fit him with his targeted reinnervation prosthesis -- which, by the way, is the same physical arm, just programmed a little different -- you can see that he's much faster and much smoother as he moves these little blocks.
Then we had one of those little surprises in science.
So we're all motivated to get motor commands to drive robotic arms.
And after a few months, you touch Jesse on his chest, and he felt his missing hand.
So you touch Jesse here, he feels his thumb; you touch it here, he feels his pinky.
He feels hot, cold, sharp, dull, all in his missing hand, or both his hand and his chest, but he can attend to either.
So this is really exciting for us, because now we have a portal, a portal, or a way to potentially give back sensation, so that he might feel what he touches with his prosthetic hand.
Imagine sensors in the hand coming up and pressing on this new hand skin.
So it was very exciting.
We've also gone on with what was initially our primary population of people with above-the-elbow amputations.
This was one of our first patients, Chris.
You see him with his original device on the left there after eight months of use, and on the right, it is two months.
He's about four or five times as fast with this simple little performance metric.
So one of the best parts of my job is working with really great patients who are also our research collaborators.
And we're fortunate today to have Amanda Kitts come and join us.
(Applause) So Amanda, would you please tell us how you lost your arm?
Amanda Kitts: Sure. In 2006, I had a car accident.
And I was driving home from work, and a truck was coming the opposite direction, came over into my lane, ran over the top of my car and his axle tore my arm off.
Todd Kuiken: Okay, so after your amputation, you healed up.
Can you tell us how it worked?
AK: A little slow, and it was just hard to work.
Then we fit her with a prosthesis.
AK: It works good.
AK: A little faster. And much more easy, much more natural.
TK: Okay, this was my goal.
And we now have over 50 patients around the world who have had this surgery, including over a dozen of our wounded warriors in the U.S. armed services.
It's like 96 percent.
Our functional testing, those little tests, all show that they're a lot quicker and a lot easier.
And the most important thing is our patients have appreciated it.
So that was all very exciting.
You can move each finger. You can move your thumb, your wrist.
Can we get more out of it?
So we did some experiments where we saturated our poor patients with zillions of electrodes and then had them try to do two dozen different tasks -- from wiggling a finger to moving a whole arm to reaching for something -- and recorded this data.
And then we used some algorithms that are a lot like speech recognition algorithms, called pattern recognition.
(Laughter) And here you can see, on Jesse's chest, when he just tried to do three different things, you can see three different patterns.
But I can't put in an electrode and say, "Go there."
So we collaborated with our colleagues in University of New Brunswick, came up with this algorithm control, which Amanda can now demonstrate.
And I have the wrist flexion and extension.
TK: Thank you, Amanda.
Now this is a research arm, but it's made out of commercial components from here down and a few that I've borrowed from around the world.
It's about seven pounds, which is probably about what my arm would weigh if I lost it right here.
And in fact, it feels even heavier, because it's not glued on the same.
She's carrying all the weight through harnesses.
So the exciting part isn't so much the mechatronics, but the control.
So we've developed a small microcomputer that is blinking somewhere behind her back and is operating this all by the way she trains it to use her individual muscle signals.
So Amanda, when you first started using this arm, how long did it take to use it?
I can wear it around.
If it stops working for some reason, I can retrain it.
TK: So we're really excited, because now we're getting to a clinically practical device.
Here's Amanda using an arm made by DEKA Research Corporation.
And I believe Dean Kamen presented it at TED a few years ago.
So Amanda, you can see, has really good control.
It's all the pattern recognition.
I had the key grip, I had a chuck grip, I had a power grasp and I had a fine pinch.
TK: That hand's not so good for clapping.
TK: All right. So that's exciting on where we may go with the better mechatronics, if we make them good enough to put out on the market and use in a field trial.
(Video) Claudia: Oooooh!
TK: That's Claudia, and that was the first time she got to feel sensation through her prosthetic.
She had a little sensor at the end of her prosthesis that then she rubbed over different surfaces, and she could feel different textures of sandpaper, different grits, ribbon cable, as it pushed on her reinnervated hand skin.
But here's another video that shows some of our challenges.
And the harder he squeezes -- you see a little black thing in the middle that's pushing on his skin proportional to how hard he squeezes.
But look at all the electrodes around it.
I've got a real estate problem.
You're supposed to put a bunch of these things on there, but our little motor's making all kinds of noise right next to my electrodes.
So we're really challenged on what we're doing there.
The future is bright.
We're excited about where we are and a lot of things we want to do.
We want to develop these little tiny capsules about the size of a piece of risotto that we can put into the muscles and telemeter out the EMG signals, so that it's not worrying about electrode contact.
And we can have the real estate open to try more sensation feedback.
This arm -- they're always made for the 50th percentile male -- which means they're too big for five-eighths of the world.
So rather than a super strong or super fast arm, we're making an arm that is -- we're starting with, the 25th percentile female -- that will have a hand that wraps around, opens all the way, two degrees of freedom in the wrist and an elbow.
So it'll be the smallest and lightest and the smartest arm ever made.
Once we can do it that small, it's a lot easier making them bigger.
So those are just some of our goals.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about the dark side, with yesterday's theme.
So Amanda came jet-lagged, she's using the arm, and everything goes wrong.
And thankfully Dr. Annie Simon was with us and worked really hard yesterday to fix it.
That's science.
And fortunately, it worked today.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Music) What you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded of Hurricane Noel in 2007.
The musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this.
Every single bead, every single colored band, represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note.
Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us.
So I use sculpture and music to make it, not just visible, but also tactile and audible.
All of my work begins very simple.
I extract information from a specific environment using very low-tech data collecting devices -- generally anything I can find in the hardware store.
I then compare my information to the things I find on the Internet -- satellite images, weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys.
That's both historical as well as real data.
These clipboards are filled with numbers.
And from all of these numbers, I start with only two or three variables.
That begins my translation process.
My translation medium is a very simple basket.
A basket is made up of horizontal and vertical elements.
When I assign values to the vertical and horizontal elements, I can use the changes of those data points over time to create the form.
I use natural reed, because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that I cannot fully control.
That means that it is the numbers that control the form, not me.
And together, these elements, not only construct the form, but they also reveal behavioral relationships that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph.
When you step closer, you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers.
The vertical elements are assigned a specific hour of the day.
So all the way around, you have a 24-hour timeline.
But it's also used to assign a temperature range.
On that grid, I can then weave the high tide readings, water temperature, air temperature and Moon phases.
Every single color, dot, every single line, is a weather element.
And together, these variables construct a score.
I use these scores to collaborate with musicians.
This is the 1913 Trio performing one of my pieces at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
What I love about this work is that it challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art, versus science.
You place it in an art museum, it becomes a sculpture.
You place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data.
The other reason why I really like this is because it offers an alternative entry point into the complexity of science.
And not everyone has a Ph.D. in science.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You all know the truth of what I'm going to say.
I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution.
What's changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does.
I'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links I'm going to be showing you exist.
But first, see what a miserable lot we are.
(Laughter) I want to start though with a paradox.
This shows you life expectancy against gross national income -- how rich countries are on average.
And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left.
This, again, is life expectancy.
These are small areas of England and Wales -- the poorest on the right, the richest on the left.
Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top.
So income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them.
And as soon as you've got that idea, you should immediately wonder: what happens if we widen the differences, or compress them, make the income differences bigger or smaller?
And you see in the more equal countries on the left -- Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden -- the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent.
But on the more unequal end -- U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore -- the differences are twice as big.
On that measure, we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies.
We collected data on problems with social gradients, the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder.
Internationally comparable data on life expectancy, on kids' maths and literacy scores, on infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness -- which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction -- and social mobility.
They're all weighted equally.
Where a country is is a sort of average score on these things.
And there, you see it in relation to the measure of inequality I've just shown you, which I shall use over and over again in the data.
The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems.
But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there's nothing there, no correlation anymore.
We were a little bit worried that people might think we'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence, so we also did a paper in the British Medical Journal on the UNICEF index of child well-being.
It has 40 different components put together by other people.
It contains whether kids can talk to their parents, whether they have books at home, what immunization rates are like, whether there's bullying at school.
What all the data I've shown you so far says is the same thing.
The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth.
That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the rich developed world.
But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much.
Here, for instance, is trust.
It's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted.
It comes from the World Values Survey.
You see, at the more unequal end, it's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others.
But in the more equal societies, it rises to 60 or 65 percent.
And if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital, very similar relationships closely related to inequality.
I may say, we did all this work twice.
We did it first on these rich, developed countries, and then as a separate test bed, we repeated it all on the 50 American states -- asking just the same question: do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures?
Same thing is going on.
We're not just talking about a fluke.
This is mental illness.
WHO put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society.
This is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year.
And it goes from about eight percent up to three times that -- whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others.
And again, closely related to inequality.
This is violence.
These red dots are American states, and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces.
But look at the scale of the differences.
It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150.
This is the proportion of the population in prison.
That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime.
In some places, that's part of it.
But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing.
And the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty.
Again, quite big differences.
This is social mobility.
It's actually a measure of mobility based on income.
Basically, it's asking: do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two?
And at the more unequal end, fathers' income is much more important -- in the U.K., USA.
And in Scandinavian countries, fathers' income is much less important.
There's more social mobility.
And as we like to say -- and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here -- if Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark.
(Laughter) (Applause) I've shown you just a few things in italics here.
They're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient.
But there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries -- not just a little bit worse, but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common.
Think of the expense, the human cost of that.
I want to go back though to this graph that I showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points.
One is that, in graph after graph, we find the countries that do worse, whatever the outcome, seem to be the more unequal ones, and the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan.
It's not just one or two things that go wrong, it's most things.
The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that, if you look at the bottom, Sweden and Japan, they're very different countries in all sorts of ways.
The position of women, how closely they keep to the nuclear family, are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world.
But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality.
Japan is rather different though.
It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax.
It has lower taxes.
And in our analysis of the American states, we find rather the same contrast.
There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax.
So we conclude that it doesn't much matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get there somehow.
I am not talking about perfect equality, I'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies.
Another really surprising part of this picture is that it's not just the poor who are affected by inequality.
There seems to be some truth in John Donne's "No man is an island."
And in a number of studies, it's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy.
This is just one example.
It's infant mortality.
Some Swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the British register of general socioeconomic classification.
It goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle, then the junior non-manual, going up high to the professional occupations -- doctors, lawyers, directors of larger companies.
The biggest differences are at the bottom of society.
But even at the top, there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society.
We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally.
And that seems to be the general picture -- that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom, but has some benefits even at the top.
But I should say a few words about what's going on.
I think I'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality.
More to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority, of being valued and devalued, respected and disrespected.
And of course, those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society.
It also leads to status insecurity.
We worry more about how we're judged and seen by others, whether we're regarded as attractive, clever, all that kind of thing.
Interestingly, some parallel work going on in social psychology: some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones, their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured.
And in the review, what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol, the central stress hormone.
And the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat -- threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance.
Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress.
Now we have been criticized.
What about other countries?
There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals.
The same countries, the same measure of inequality, one problem after another.
Why don't we control for other factors?
What about causality?
Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality.
And indeed, people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes.
The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system.
Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on.
I should say that to deal with this, we've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things.
I think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can.
I think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us.
Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies, and that's exciting.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
I last did a TED Talk I think about seven years ago or so.
I talked about spaghetti sauce.
And so many people, I guess, watch those videos.
People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in the short term -- (Laughter) but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven years.
(Laughter) The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make.
And so I thought I would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era.
And the man's name is Carl Norden.
Carl Norden was born in 1880.
And he was Swiss.
And of course, the Swiss can be divided into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite, expensive objects.
And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp.
He's an engineer.
In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small, expensive, exquisite objects.
And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word.
He wears three-piece suits; and he has a very, very small, important mustache; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego; and he works 16-hour days; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness; and he drinks lots of coffee; and he does his best work sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule.
In any case, Carl Norden emigrates to the United States just before the First World War and sets up shop on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan.
And he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an airplane.
Now if you think about it, in the age before GPS and radar, that was obviously a really difficult problem.
It's a complicated physics problem.
The bombsights that were available were incredibly crude.
And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device.
It weighs about 50 lbs.
It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.
And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings and gadgets and gauges.
And he makes this complicated thing.
And as Norden famously says, "Before that bombsight came along, bombs would routinely miss their target by a mile or more."
But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft.
Now I cannot tell you how incredibly excited the U.S. military was by the news of the Norden bombsight.
It was like manna from heaven.
And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars -- billion dollars in 1940 dollars -- developing the Norden bombsight.
And to put that in perspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars.
And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military who genuinely thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the Nazis and against the Japanese.
And for Norden as well, this device had incredible moral importance, because Norden was a committed Christian.
In fact, he would always get upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention, because in his eyes, only God could invent things.
He was simply the instrument of God's will.
And what was God's will?
Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as possible.
And what did the Norden bombsight do?
It allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb.
So in the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $14,000 each -- again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money.
And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane, it's escorted there by a series of armed guards.
And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it.
And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards.
And there's a little incendiary device inside of it, so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it.
The Norden bombsight is the Holy Grail.
Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail.
In practice, the Norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft., but that's under perfect conditions.
And of course, in wartime, conditions aren't perfect.
First of all, it's really hard to use -- really hard to use.
It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings, and they don't work as well as they ought to in the heat of battle.
Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes.
Well in a real war, you can't do that; you'll get shot down.
So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds.
And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well under those conditions.
But most of all, the Norden bombsight required the bombardier to make visual contact with the target.
Well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945?
Not a lot.
And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was, there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany.
And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres.
And over the course of 22 bombing missions, the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant, using the Norden bombsight.
Well what percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant?
10 percent. 10 percent.
And of those 10 percent that landed, 16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds.
The Leuna chemical plant, after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war, was up and running within weeks.
And by the way, all those precautions to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis?
Well it turns out that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss, was very enamored of German engineers.
So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them, including a man named Hermann Long who, in 1938, gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis.
So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war -- which also, by the way, didn't work very well.
(Laughter) So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight?
Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights.
We live in a time where there are all kinds of really, really smart people running around, saying that they've invented gadgets that will forever change our world.
They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing that will make our world forever better.
If you go into the military, you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well.
If you go to the Pentagon, they will say, "You know what, now we really can put a bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft."
And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now.
In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, the U.S. military, the air force, sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor.
And their mission was to find and to destroy -- remember the Scud missile launchers, those surface-to-air missiles that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis?
The mission of the two squadrons was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers.
And so they flew missions day and night, and they dropped thousands of bombs, and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge.
And after the war was over, there was an audit done -- as the army always does, the air force always does -- and they asked the question: how many Scuds did we actually destroy?
You know what the answer was?
Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate.
They could have destroyed this little thing right here from 25,000 ft.
The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were.
What is the signature weapon of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan?
It's the drone. What is the drone?
Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.
It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision.
And over the course of the last six years in Northwest Pakistan, the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles, and it's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants.
Now what is the accuracy of those drones?
We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to drone strikes.
95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right?
That is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare.
In that exact same period that we've been using these drones with devastating accuracy, the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, against American forces in Afghanistan has increased tenfold.
As we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them, they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us.
We think the things we make can solve our problems, but our problems are much more complex than that.
The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have, and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all.
There's a postscript to the Norden story of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight.
And that is, on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay flew over Japan and, using a Norden bombsight, dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima.
And as was typical with the Norden bombsight, the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft.
But of course, it didn't matter.
And that's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the Norden bombsight.
the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb, which didn't need a bombsight at all.
Meanwhile, back in New York, no one told Carl Norden that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima.
He was a committed Christian.
He thought he had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war.
It would have broken his heart.
(Applause)
I moved to Boston 10 years ago from Chicago, with an interest in cancer and in chemistry.
You might know that chemistry is the science of making molecules or, to my taste, new drugs for cancer.
And you might also know that, for science and medicine, Boston is a bit of a candy store.
You can't roll a stop sign in Cambridge without hitting a graduate student.
The bar is called the Miracle of Science.
We know more about the patients that enter our clinic now than ever before.
And we're able, finally, to answer the question that's been so pressing for so many years: Why do I have cancer?
You might know that, so far, in just the dawn of this revolution, we know that there are perhaps 40,000 unique mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes, and that there are 500 of these genes that are bona-fide drivers, causes of cancer.
Yet comparatively, we have about a dozen targeted medications.
And this inadequacy of cancer medicine really hit home when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
We didn't fly him to Boston.
We didn't sequence his genome.
It's been known for decades what causes this malignancy.
It's three proteins: ras, myc, p53.
This is old information we've known since about the 80s, yet there's no medicine I can prescribe to a patient with this or any of the numerous solid tumors caused by these three ...
And you might fairly ask: Why is that?
And the very unsatisfying yet scientific answer is: it's too hard.
That for whatever reason, these three proteins have entered a space, in the language of our field, that's called the undruggable genome -- which is like calling a computer unsurfable or the Moon unwalkable.
But what it means is that we've failed to identify a greasy pocket in these proteins, into which we, like molecular locksmiths, can fashion an active, small, organic molecule or drug substance.
Now, as I was training in clinical medicine and hematology and oncology and stem-cell transplantation, what we had instead, cascading through the regulatory network at the FDA, were these substances: arsenic, thalidomide, and this chemical derivative of nitrogen mustard gas.
And this is the 21st century.
And so, I guess you'd say, dissatisfied with the performance and quality of these medicines, I went back to school, in chemistry, with the idea that perhaps by learning the trade of discovery chemistry and approaching it in the context of this brave new world of the open source, the crowd source, the collaborative network that we have access to within academia, that we might more quickly bring powerful and targeted therapies to our patients.
And so, please consider this a work in progress, but I'd like to tell you today a story about a very rare cancer called midline carcinoma, about the undruggable protein target that causes this cancer, called BRD4, and about a molecule developed at my lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, called JQ1, which we affectionately named for Jun Qi, the chemist that made this molecule.
Now, BRD4 is an interesting protein.
And the reason is that cancer, like every cell in the body, places little molecular bookmarks, little Post-it notes, that remind the cell, "I'm cancer; I should keep growing."
And those Post-it notes involve this and other proteins of its class -- so-called bromodomains.
So we developed an idea, a rationale, that perhaps if we made a molecule that prevented the Post-it note from sticking by entering into the little pocket at the base of this spinning protein, then maybe we could convince cancer cells, certainly those addicted to this BRD4 protein, that they're not cancer.
And so we started to work on this problem.
We developed libraries of compounds and eventually arrived at this and similar substances called JQ1.
Now, not being a drug company, we could do certain things, we had certain flexibilities, that I respect that a pharmaceutical industry doesn't have.
I have a small lab.
We thought we'd just send it to people and see how the molecule behaves.
We sent it to Oxford, England, where a group of talented crystallographers provided this picture, which helped us understand exactly how this molecule is so potent for this protein target.
It's what we call a perfect fit of shape complementarity, or hand in glove.
Now, this is a very rare cancer, this BRD4-addicted cancer.
And so we worked with samples of material that were collected by young pathologists at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
And as we treated these cells with this molecule, we observed something really striking.
The cancer cells -- small, round and rapidly dividing, grew these arms and extensions.
They were changing shape.
In effect, the cancer cell was forgetting it was cancer and becoming a normal cell.
This got us very excited.
The next step would be to put this molecule into mice.
The only problem was there's no mouse model of this rare cancer.
And so at the time we were doing this research, I was caring for a 29-year-old firefighter from Connecticut who was very much at the end of life with this incurable cancer.
This BRD4-addicted cancer was growing throughout his left lung.
And he had a chest tube in that was draining little bits of debris.
And so we approached this patient and asked if he would collaborate with us.
At the Lurie Family Center for Animal Imaging, our colleague, Andrew Kung, grew this cancer successfully in mice without ever touching plastic.
And you can see this PET scan of a mouse -- what we call a pet PET.
The cancer is growing as this red, huge mass in the hind limb of this animal.
And as we treat it with our compound, this addiction to sugar, this rapid growth, faded.
And on the animal on the right, you see that the cancer was responding.
We've completed, now, clinical trials in four mouse models of this disease.
And every time, we see the same thing.
The mice with this cancer that get the drug live, and the ones that don't rapidly perish.
So we started to wonder, what would a drug company do at this point?
Well, they probably would keep this a secret until they turn the prototype drug into an active pharmaceutical substance.
So we did just the opposite.
We published a paper that described this finding at the earliest prototype stage.
We gave the world the chemical identity of this molecule, typically a secret in our discipline.
We told people exactly how to make it.
We gave them our email address, suggesting that if they write us, we'll send them a free molecule.
(Laughter) We basically tried to create the most competitive environment for our lab as possible.
And this was, unfortunately, successful.
(Laughter) Because now, we've shared this molecule, just since December of last year, with 40 laboratories in the United States and 30 more in Europe -- many of them pharmaceutical companies, seeking now to enter this space, to target this rare cancer that, thankfully right now, is quite desirable to study in that industry.
But the science that's coming back from all of these laboratories about the use of this molecule has provided us insights we might not have had on our own.
Mice with multiple myeloma, an incurable malignancy of the bone marrow, respond dramatically to the treatment with this drug.
You might know that fat has memory.
(Laughter) In fact, this molecule prevents this adipocyte, this fat stem cell, from remembering how to make fat, such that mice on a high-fat diet, like the folks in my hometown of Chicago -- (Laughter) fail to develop fatty liver, which is a major medical problem.
What this research taught us -- not just my lab, but our institute, and Harvard Medical School more generally -- is that we have unique resources in academia for drug discovery; that our center, which has tested perhaps more cancer molecules in a scientific way than any other, never made one of its own.
For all the reasons you see listed here, we think there's a great opportunity for academic centers to participate in this earliest, conceptually tricky and creative discipline of prototype drug discovery.
We have this molecule, but it's not a pill yet.
It's not orally bioavailable.
And everyone in the lab, especially following the interaction with these patients, feels quite compelled to deliver a drug substance based on this molecule.
It's here where I'd say that we could use your help and your insights, your collaborative participation.
Unlike a drug company, we don't have a pipeline that we can deposit these molecules into.
We don't have a team of salespeople and marketeers to tell us how to position this drug against the other.
What we do have is the flexibility of an academic center to work with competent, motivated, enthusiastic, hopefully well-funded people to carry these molecules forward into the clinic while preserving our ability to share the prototype drug worldwide.
This molecule will soon leave our benches and go into a small start-up company called Tensha Therapeutics.
And, really, this is the fourth of these molecules to kind of "graduate" from our little pipeline of drug discovery, two of which -- a topical drug for lymphoma of the skin and an oral substance for the treatment of multiple myeloma -- will actually come to the bedside for the first clinical trial in July of this year -- for us, a major and exciting milestone.
I want to leave you with just two ideas.
This, for us, was a social experiment -- an experiment in "What would happen if we were as open and honest at the earliest phase of discovery chemistry research as we could be?"
This string of letters and numbers and symbols and parentheses that can be texted, I suppose, or Twittered worldwide, is the chemical identity of our pro compound.
It's the information that we most need from pharmaceutical companies, the information on how these early prototype drugs might work.
And so we seek, really, to download from the amazing successes of the computer-science industry, two principles -- that of open source and that of crowdsourcing -- to quickly, responsibly accelerate the delivery of targeted therapeutics to patients with cancer.
Now, the business model involves all of you.
And one thing I've learned in Boston is that you people will do anything for cancer, and I love that.
You bike across the state, you walk up and down the river.
(Laughter) I've never seen, really, anywhere, this unique support for cancer research.
And so I want to thank you for your participation, your collaboration and most of all, for your confidence in our ideas.
(Applause)
(Applause) (Applause) I am a papercutter.
So my process is very straightforward.
I take a piece of paper, I visualize my story, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I don't.
In fact, I see it more as a spiral.
I was not born with a blade in my hand.
As a teenager, I was sketching, drawing, and I wanted to be an artist.
But I was also a rebel.
So among them, I have been a shepherdess, a truck driver, a factory worker, a cleaning lady.
I worked in tourism for one year in Mexico, one year in Egypt.
I moved for two years in Taiwan.
And I still worked as a tour leader, traveled back and forth in China, Tibet and Central Asia.
So of course, it took time, and I was nearly 40, and I decided it's time to start as an artist.
And I chose the language of silhouette because graphically it's very efficient.
So the word "silhouette" comes from a minister of finance, Etienne de Silhouette.
And he slashed so many budgets that people said they couldn't afford paintings anymore, and they needed to have their portrait "a la silhouette."
(Laughter) So I made series of images, cuttings, and I assembled them in portfolios.
And people told me -- like these 36 views of the Empire State building -- they told me, "You're making artist books."
So artist books have a lot of definitions.
They come in a lot of different shapes.
But to me, they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story.
And I have a passion for images and for words.
I love pun and the relation to the unconscious.
I love oddities of languages.
And everywhere I lived, I learned the languages, but never mastered them.
So I'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages.
So as you can guess, my mother tongue is French.
And my daily language is English.
So one of these works is the "Spelling Spider."
So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee.
(Laughter) But it's much more connected to the Web.
(Laughter) And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet.
So you can read "architecture active" or "active architecture."
And one ancient form of the book is scrolls.
And I'm making all those kinds of windows.
So it's to look beyond the surface.
And very often I've been an outsider.
So I want to see how things work and what's happening.
So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit.
And I revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do, and what are the words, colloquialisms, that we have with the expressions.
So what if we were living in balloon houses?
So sometimes I view from the inside, like EgoCentriCity and the inner circles.
Sometimes it's a global view, to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams.
And we can use them also as a safety net.
And my inspirations are very eclectic.
(Laughter) Other ones are historical.
People tell me their lives, their memories, their aspirations, and I create a mindscape.
I call them Freudian cities.
"ModiCity."
"ElectriCity."
"MAD Growth on Columbus Circle."
"A Web of Time."
"Chaos City."
"Daily Battles."
"FeliCity."
"Floating Islands."
And at one point, I had to do "The Whole Nine Yards."
So it's actually a papercut that's nine yards long.
(Laughter) So in life and in papercutting, everything is connected.
One story leads to another.
I started with small images, I started with a few miles.
Then I went to run 50K, then 60K.
Then I ran 50 miles -- ultramarathons.
(Laughter) And running gives me a lot of energy.
Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
The result is "Hells and Heavens."
It's two panels 13 ft. high.
That's the border.
You have sweatshops in hells.
So the whole "Hells and Heavens" is about free will and determinism.
Here it's an artist book installation called "Identity Project."
It's not autobiographical identities.
They are more our social identities.
And then you can just walk behind them and try them on.
So it's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity.
That's another artist book project.
It's one I'm wearing and one that's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City.
Why do I call it a book?
You take them for a walk.
You can also install them as public art.
Here it's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it's called "Floating Memories."
I love public art.
After eight years of rejection, I was thrilled to get my first commission with the Percent for Art in New York City.
I made an artist book that's in stainless steel instead of paper.
I called it "Working in the Same Direction."
But I added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions.
Here it's faceted glass in the Bronx.
And each time I make public art, I want something that's really relevant to the place it's installed.
And Bronx literature, it's all about Bronx writers and their stories.
Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose, California.
So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose.
And it's still growing.
So the technique, it's cut, sandblasted, etched and printed glass into architectural glass.
And outside the library, I wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind.
I took library material that had fruit in their title and I used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge.
So it's a tree, and in its trunk you have the roots of languages.
And it's all about international writing systems.
And on the branches you have library material growing.
You can also have function and form with public art.
So in Aurora, Colorado it's a bench.
But you have a bonus with this bench.
Because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts, you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs.
(Laughter) Another functional work, it's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station.
And it's called "Seeds of the Future are Planted Today."
It's a story about transformation and connections.
So it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter, and not to have objects falling on the rails.
To be able to change fences and window guards into flowers, it's fantastic.
And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing.
So each building has its own personality.
And sometimes it's about a legacy of the neighborhood, like in Morrisania, about the jazz history.
And for other projects, like in Paris, it's about the name of the street.
It's called Rue des Prairies -- Prairie Street.
And in 2009, I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year.
And I wanted to give them an escape.
And along the way, I'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques.
So the stories, they have a lot of possibilities.
They have a lot of scenarios.
I don't know the stories.
I take images from our global imagination, from cliché, from things we are thinking about, from history.
And everybody's a narrator, because everybody has a story to tell.
But more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world.
And in all these universes, it's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with, but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic.
And it's what story cutting is all about.
(Applause)
In 2009, I bought a house in Detroit for 500 dollars.
It had no windows, no plumbing, no electricity and it was filled with trash.
The first floor held nearly 10,000 pounds of garbage, and that included the better part of a Dodge Caravan, cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw.
(Laughter) I lived nearly two years without heat, woke up out of a dead sleep multiple times to gunshots, was attacked by a pack of wild dogs and ripped my kitchen cabinets from an abandoned school as they were actively tearing that school down.
This, of course, is the Detroit that your hear about.
Make no mistake, it's real.
But there's another Detroit, too.
Another Detroit that's more hopeful, more innovative, and may just provide some of the answers to cities struggling to reinvent themselves everywhere.
These answers, however, do not necessarily adhere to conventional wisdom about good development.
I think Detroit's real strength boils down to two words: radical neighborliness.
And I wasn't able to see it myself until I lived there.
About a decade ago, I moved to Detroit with no friends, no job and no money, at a time when it seemed like everyone else was moving out.
This included about half of the elementary-aged children.
A city built for almost two million was down to less than 800,000.
What you usually don't hear is that people didn't go very far.
The population of the Detroit metro area itself has largely remained steady since the '70s.
Most people who left Detroit just went to the suburbs, while the 139 square miles of the city deteriorated, leaving some estimates as high as 40 square miles of abandoned land -- about the size of San Francisco.
Aside from platitudes such as the vague and agentless "deindustrialization," Detroit's exodus can be summed up with two structures: freeways and walls.
In multiple places, brick and concrete walls separate city and suburbs, white and black, running directly across municipal streets and through neighborhoods.
They're mere physical manifestations of racist housing practices such as redlining, [Denying services to people of color] restrictive covenants and outright terror.
In 1971, the Ku Klux Klan bombed 10 school buses rather than have them transport integrated students.
I grew up in a small town in Michigan, the son of a relatively blue-collar family.
And after university, I wanted to do something -- probably naïvely -- to help.
I didn't want to be one of the almost 50 percent of college graduates leaving the state at the time, and I thought I might use my fancy college education at home for something positive.
I'd been reading this great American philosopher named Grace Lee Boggs who happened to live in Detroit, and she said something I can't forget.
"The most radical thing that I ever did was to stay put."
I thought buying a house might indelibly tie me to the city while acting as a physical protest to these walls and freeways.
I eventually found an abandoned house in a neighborhood called Poletown.
It looked like the apocalypse had descended.
Just a 15-minute bike ride from the baseball stadium downtown, the neighborhood was positively rural.
This was my house on the day I boarded it up to protect it from the elements and further decay.
I eventually purchased it from the county in a live auction.
I'd assumed the neighborhood was dead.
That I was some kind of pioneer.
One of the first things I learned was to add my voice to the chorus, not overwrite what was already happening.
It had just transformed in a way that was difficult to see if you didn't live there.
Poletown was home to an incredibly resourceful, incredibly intelligent and incredibly resilient community.
Paul was a teacher in a Detroit public school for pregnant and parenting mothers, and his idea was to teach the young women to raise their children by first raising plants and animals.
While the national average graduation rate for pregnant teens is about 40 percent, at Catherine Ferguson Academy it was often above 90, in part due to Paul's ingenuity.
Paul brought much of this innovation to his block in Poletown, which he'd stewarded for more than 30 years, purchasing houses when they were abandoned, convincing his friends to move in and neighbors to stay and helping those who wanted to buy their own and fix them up.
It's an incredible testament to the power of community, to staying in one place and to taking ownership of one's own surroundings -- of simply doing it yourself.
Each year, neighbors assemble to bale hay for the farm animals on the block, teaching me just how much a small group of people can get done when they work together, and the magnetism of fantastical yet practical ideas.
It's where residents are experimenting with renewable energy and urban farming and offering their skills and discoveries to others, illustrating we don't necessarily have to beg the government to provide solutions.
We can start ourselves.
It's where, for months, one of my neighbors left her front door unlocked in one of the most violent and dangerous cities in America so I could have a shower whenever I needed to go to work, as I didn't yet have one.
It's realizing we have the power to create the world anew together and to do it ourselves when our governments refuse.
This is the Detroit that you don't hear much about.
There's a third way to rebuild, and it declines to make the same mistakes of the past.
While building my house, I found something I didn't know I was looking for -- what a lot of millennials and people who are moving back to cities are looking for.
And now, as you may have heard, Detroit is having a renaissance and pulling itself up from the ashes of despair, and the children and grandchildren of those who fled are returning, which is true.
What isn't true is that this renaissance is reaching most Detroiters, or even more than a small fraction of them that don't live in the central areas of the city.
These are the kind of people that have been in Detroit for generations and are mostly black.
Excuse me.
And since 2005, one in three houses -- think about this, please -- one in every three houses has been foreclosed in the city, representing a population about the size of Buffalo, New York.
(Sniffles) One in three houses foreclosed is not a crisis of personal responsibility; it is systemic.
Many Detroiters, myself included, are worried segregation is now returning to the city itself on the coattails of this renaissance.
Ten years ago, it was not possible to go anywhere in Detroit and be in a crowd completely made of white people.
This is the price that we're paying for conventional economic resurgence.
We're creating two Detroits, two classes of citizens, cracking the community apart.
This is a grave mistake for all of us.
When economic development comes at the cost of community, it's not just those who have lost their homes or access to water who are harmed, but it breaks little pieces of our own humanity as well.
None of us can truly be free, none of us can truly be comfortable, until our neighbors are, too.
In Detroit, that means average citizens deputizing themselves to create water stations and deliveries for those who have lost access to it.
Or clergy and teachers engaging in civil disobedience to block water shutoff trucks.
For me, it means helping others to raise the beams on their own formerly abandoned houses, or helping to educate those with privilege, now increasingly moving into cities, how we might come in and support rather than stress existing communities.
And for you, for all of us, it means finding a role to play in our own communities.
It means living your life as a reflection of the world that you want to live in.
I know a third way is possible because I have lived it.
I live it right now in a neighborhood called Poletown in one of the most maligned cities in the world.
What I've learned over the last decade, building my house, wasn't so much about wiring or plumbing or carpentry -- although I did learn these things -- is that true change, real change, starts first with community, with a radical sense of what it means to be a neighbor.
It turned at least one abandoned house into a home.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi there. I'm Hasan. I'm an artist.
And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, "Do you paint?"
or "What kind of medium do you work in?"
Well most of my work that I work with is really a little bit about methodologies of working rather than actually a specific discipline or a specific technique.
So what I'm really interested in is creative problem solving.
And this is the Detroit airport in June 19th of 2002.
And as I was coming back, well I was taken by the FBI, met by an FBI agent, and went into a little room and he asked me all sorts of questions -- "Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you talking with?
Why were you there? Who pays for your trips?" -- all these little details.
And then literally just out of nowhere, the guy asks me, "Where were you September 12th?"
And when most of us get asked, "Where were you September 12th?"
From 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., I met with Judith who was one of my graduate students at the time.
From 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., I taught my intro class, 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., I taught my advanced class.
"Where were you the 29th? the 30th?"
"Where were you October 5th?"
And I don't think he was expecting me to have such detailed records of what I did.
Just assorted garage sale junk, because I'm a pack rat."
And he looks at me really confused and says, "No explosives?"
(Laughter) I was like, "No, no. I'm pretty certain there were no explosives.
And if there were, I would have remembered that one."
And he's still a little confused, but I think that anyone who talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes I'm not exactly a terrorist threat.
And so we're sitting there, and eventually after about an hour, hour and a half of just going back and forth, he says, "Okay, I have enough information here.
I'm going to pass this onto the Tampa office. They're the ones who initiated this.
So I got home and the phone rings, and a man introduced himself.
Basically this is the FBI offices in Tampa where I spent six months of my life -- back and forth, not six months continuously.
By the way, you folks know that in the United States, you can't take photographs of federal buildings, but Google can do it for you.
So to the folks from Google, thank you.
(Applause) So I spent a lot of time in this building.
Questions like: "Have you ever witnessed or participated in any act that may be detrimental to the United States or a foreign nation?"
And you also have to consider the state of mind you're in when you're doing this.
You're basically face-to-face with someone that essentially decides life or death.
"Are we in Florida?" "Yes." "Is today Tuesday?" "Yes."
Because you have to base it on a yes or no.
Then, of course, the next question is: "Do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?"
I work at a university.
But they said, "Okay, aside from what we had discussed, do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?"
I was like, "No."
I was like, "I know. That's what I've been trying to tell you guys all along.
I know everything's fine."
This is with the FBI.
Northwest flight seven coming into Seattle on March 12th" or whatever.
It wasn't that I had to, but I chose to.
Just wanted to say, "Hey guys.
Just letting you know. Heads up."
And so I just kept doing this over and over and over.
And then the phone calls turned into emails, and the emails got longer and longer and longer ...
with pictures, with travel tips.
And then I built this over here. Let me go back to it over here.
So I actually designed this back in 2003.
But I'll watch myself. It's okay.
And I'll help you out.
So in the process, I start thinking, well what else might they know about me?
Well they probably have all my flight records, so I decided to put all my flight records from birth online.
So you can see, Delta 1252 going from Kansas City to Atlanta.
This was on Delta 719 going from JFK to San Francisco.
(Laughter) These are the airports that I hang out in, because I like airports.
That's Kennedy airport, May 19th, Tuesday.
Singapore. You can see, they're kind of empty.
But if you can cross-reference this with the other data, then you're basically replaying the roll of the FBI agent and putting it all together.
And when you're in a situation where you have to justify every moment of your existence, you're put in the situation where you react in a very different manner.
But after going through this, after realizing, well what just happened?
And after piecing together this, this and this, this way of actually trying to figure out what happened for myself eventually evolved into this, and it actually became this project.
So these are the stores that I shop in -- some of them -- because they need to know.
This is me buying some duck flavored paste at the Ranch 99 in Daly City on Sunday, November 15th.
And laundry too. Laundry detergent at West Oakland -- East Oakland, sorry.
And then my pickled jellyfish at the Hong Kong Supermarket on Route 18 in East Brunswick.
Now if you go to my bank records, it'll actually show something from there, so you know that, on May 9th, that I bought $14.79 in fuel from Safeway Vallejo.
So not only that I'm giving this information here and there, but now there's a third party, an independent third party, my bank, that's verifying that, yes indeed, I was there at this time.
So there's points, and these points are actually being cross-referenced.
Sometimes they're really small purchases.
So 34 cents foreign transaction fee.
All of these are extracted directly from my bank accounts, and everything pops up right away.
Sometimes there's a lot of information.
This is exactly where my old apartment in San Francisco was.
And then sometimes you get this.
And I can tell you exactly who I was with, where I was, because this is what I had to do with the FBI.
I had to tell them every little detail of everything.
I spend a lot of time on the road.
This is a parking lot in Elko, Nevada off of Route 80 at 8:01 p.m. on August 19th.
I spend a lot of time in gas stations too -- empty train stations.
So there's multiple databases.
And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of images.
There's actually 46,000 images right now on my site, and the FBI has seen all of them -- at least I trust they've seen all of them.
And then sometimes you don't get much information at all, you just get this empty bed.
And sometimes you get a lot of text information and no visual information.
So you get something like this.
This, by the way, is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in California -- Vietnamese sandwich.
So there's different categorizations of meals eaten outside empty train stations, empty gas stations.
So how do you know these are meals eaten at home?
Well the same plate shows up a whole bunch of times.
So again, you have to do some detective work here.
These are all tacos eaten in Mexico City near a train station on July fifth to July sixth.
Now it's all done on my iPhone, and it all goes straight up to my server, and my server does all the backend work and categorizes things and puts everything together.
They need to know where I'm doing my business, because they want to know about my business.
So on December 4th, I went here.
And really, it's not the most user-friendly interface.
So by me putting all this information out there, what I'm basically telling you is I'm telling you everything.
But in this barrage of noise that I'm putting out, I actually live an incredibly anonymous and private life.
And you know very little about me actually.
And really so I've come to the conclusion that the way you protect your privacy, particularly in an era where everything is cataloged and everything is archived and everything is recorded, there's no need to delete information anymore.
And if I give you this information directly, it's a very different type of identity than if you were to try to go through and try to get bits and pieces.
The other thing that's also interesting that's going on here is the fact that intelligence agencies -- and it doesn't matter who they are -- they all operate in an industry where their commodity is information, or restricted access to information.
And by me cutting out the middle man and giving it straight to you, the information that the FBI has has no value, so thus devaluing their currency.
And I understand that, on an individual level, it's purely symbolic.
But if 300 million people in the U.S.
started doing this, we would have to redesign the entire intelligence system from the ground up.
And we're getting to that.
When I first started this project, people were looking at me and saying, "Why would you want to tell everybody what you're doing, where you're at?
Why are you posting these photos?"
This was an age before people were Tweeting everywhere and 750 million people were posting status messages or poking people.
This is something that we all are doing on a daily basis, whether we're aware of it or not.
So we're creating our own archives and so on.
So one of the things that I do is I actually look through my server logs very carefully.
And I came up with these.
So these are some of my sample logs.
And I cleaned up the list a little bit so you can see.
You can see the National Security Agency likes to come by.
I actually moved very close to them. I live right down the street from them now.
Central Intelligence Agency.
I think they kind of like to look at art.
So thank you very much. I appreciate it.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Hasan, just curious.
So how many hours of the day does that take?
It's no different than sending a text.
It's no different than checking an email.
And everything's automated at the other end.
HE: Well it goes to the last point that I was at.
So if I'm on a 12-hour flight, you'll see the last airport that I departed from.
BG: Hasan, thank you very much. (HE: Thank you.) (Applause)
There is.
We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments.
We need to know why people are doing what they're doing.
And I personally am obsessed with morality.
It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom.
As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody.
I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions.
I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality.
I want to know if there was a moral molecule.
After 10 years of experiments, I found it.
(Laughter) It's called oxytocin.
So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals.
In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates.
But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, and is released by both sexes during sex.
So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule.
One of them told me, "Paul, that is the world's stupidist idea.
It is," he said, "only a female molecule.
It can't be that important."
There must be a reason why."
But he was right, it was a stupid idea.
But it was testably stupid.
In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral.
Turns out it wasn't so easy.
First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule.
Baseline levels are near zero, without some stimulus to cause its release.
And when it's produced, it has a three-minute half-life, and degrades rapidly at room temperature.
Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery.
Then I had to measure morality.
So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project.
So I started smaller.
Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous.
So in these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty.
So instead I use the Jerry Maguire approach to research.
If you're so virtuous, show me the money.
So we recruit some people for an experiment.
Then we match them in pairs by computer.
And in that pair, one person gets a message saying, "Do you want to give up some of your $10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab?"
The trick is you can't see them, you can't talk to them.
You only do it one time.
Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person's account.
So think about this experiment for minute.
You're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half.
Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood.
And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger?
So this was the birth of vampire economics.
Make a decision and give me some blood.
So in fact, experimental economists had run this test around the world, and for much higher stakes, and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness.
But in fact, economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money.
They assumed money is good, why not keep it all?
That's not what we found.
We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money, and of those who received money, 95 percent returned some of it.
But why?
Well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin, and the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned.
But wait. What's wrong with this experiment?
Two things.
So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, but they didn't have any effect.
But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness.
So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly.
I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain.
So along with colleagues in Zurich, we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo, had that same trust test with money, and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust, we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger -- all without altering mood or cognition.
So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule?
Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies.
We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent.
We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent.
We've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin.
These include massage, dancing and praying.
Yes, my mom was happy about that last one.
And whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers.
But why do they do this?
What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin?
To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer.
After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin.
The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy.
So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people.
It's empathy that makes us help other people.
It's empathy that makes us moral.
A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments."
In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason, but for a bottom-up reason.
He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others.
So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain.
So I tend to avoid that.
If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy.
So I tend to do those things.
Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called "The Wealth of Nations" -- the founding document of economics.
But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral.
I just found the molecule behind it.
In particular, it tells us why we see immorality.
So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980.
I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California.
You sit in a gas station all day, you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you.
So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box.
Opens it up and there's a pearl necklace inside.
We have to find the owner for this." I said, "Yea."
"Oh, you're saving my life. Here's my phone number.
I'll be there and I'll give him a $200 reward."
He said, "I can't do it.
I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes, and I need this job, I've got to go."
Again he asked me, "What do you think we should do?"
I'm in high school. I have no idea.
He said, "You know, you've been so nice, let's split the reward."
I'll give you the jewelry, you give me a hundred dollars, and when the guy comes ... " You see it. I was conned.
Now we know what happens.
The victim's brain releases oxytocin, and you're opening up your wallet or purse, giving away the money.
So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems?
We found, testing thousands of individuals, that five percent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus.
So if you trust them, their brains don't release oxytocin.
If there's money on the table, they keep it all.
We call them bastards.
(Laughter) These are not people you want to have a beer with.
They have many of the attributes of psychopaths.
So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half those don't release oxytocin on stimulus.
Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin.
So we all know this, when we're really stressed out, we're not acting our best.
There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting -- through the action of testosterone.
So we, in experiments, have administered testosterone to men.
And instead of sharing money, they become selfish.
But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish.
(Laughter) Now think about this. It means, within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality.
We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel.
And we have testosterone.
And men have 10 times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women -- we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally.
We don't need God or government telling us what to do.
It's all inside of us.
So you may be wondering: these are beautiful laboratory experiments, do they really apply to real life?
So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England.
200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion.
And I drove up in my rented Vauxhall.
Weddings cause a release of oxytocin, but they do so in a very particular way.
Who is the center of the wedding solar system?
The bride.
She had the biggest increase in oxytocin.
Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride?
Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends -- arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun.
So I think it tells us that we've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple, connect us emotionally.
I also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers.
So even though I have a fear of heights, I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft.
I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike of oxytocin.
And there are so many ways we can connect to people.
For example, through social media.
So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin.
So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System.
And they had the reporters and their producers participate.
I mean, astounding; no one has this.
When I wrote my report to the Koreans, I said, "Look, I don't know what this guy was doing," but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend.
They checked.
He was interacting on his girlfriend's Facebook page.
So there's tons of ways that we can connect to other people, and it seems to be universal.
Two weeks ago, I just got back from Papua New Guinea where I went up to the highlands -- very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia.
There are 800 different languages in the highlands.
These are the most primitive people in the world.
And they indeed also release oxytocin.
So oxytocin connects us to other people.
Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel.
I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest.
(Applause) So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love.
I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great, but here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day.
We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier.
And they're happier because they have better relationships of all types.
Of course, if you don't like to touch people, I can always shove this up your nose.
(Laughter) Thank you.
(Applause)
90 percent of the living space on the planet is in the open ocean, and it's where life -- the title of our seminar tonight -- it's where life began.
And it's a lively and a lovely place, but we're rapidly changing the oceans with our -- not only with our overfishing, our irresponsible fishing, our adding of pollutants like fertilizer from our cropland, but also, most recently, with climate change, and Steve Schneider, I'm sure, will be going into greater detail on this.
Now, as we continue to tinker with the oceans, more and more reports are predicting that the kinds of seas that we're creating will be conducive to low-energy type of animals, like jellyfish and bacteria.
And this might be the kind of seas we're headed for.
Now jellyfish are strangely hypnotic and beautiful, and you'll see lots of gorgeous ones at the aquarium on Friday, but they sting like hell, and jellyfish sushi and sashimi is just not going to fill you up.
About 100 grams of jellyfish equals four calories.
So it may be good for the waistline, but it probably won't keep you satiated for very long.
And a sea that's just filled and teeming with jellyfish isn't very good for all the other creatures that live in the oceans, that is, unless you eat jellyfish.
And this is this voracious predator launching a sneak attack on this poor little unsuspecting jellyfish there, a by-the-wind sailor.
This animal is in "The Guinness World Book of Records" for being the world's heaviest bony fish.
It reaches up to almost 5,000 pounds -- on a diet of jellyfish, primarily.
So it's kind of nice, the sun and the moon getting together this way, even if one is eating the other.
Now this is typically how you see sunfish, this is where they get their common name.
They like to sunbathe, can't blame them.
They just lay out on the surface of the sea and most people think they're sick or lazy, but that's a typical behavior, they lie out and bask on the surface.
Their other name, Mola mola, is -- it sounds Hawaiian, but it's actually Latin for millstone, and that's attributable to their roundish, very bizarre, cut-off shape.
It's as if, as they were growing, they just forgot the tail part.
(Laughter) And this is just so elegantly mysterious, it's just -- it really kind of holds its cards a lot tighter than say, a tuna.
So I was just intrigued with what -- you know, what is this animal's story?
Well, as with anything in biology, nothing really makes sense except in the light of evolution.
They appeared shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago, at a time when whales still had legs, and they come from a rebellious little puffer fish faction -- oblige me a little Kipling-esque storytelling here.
Of course evolution is somewhat random, and you know, about 55 million years ago there was this rebellious little puffer fish faction that said, oh, the heck with the coral reefs -- we're going to head to the high seas.
They look -- maybe they look kind of prehistoric and unfinished, abridged perhaps, but in fact, in fact they are the -- they vie for the top position of the most evolutionarily-derived fish in the sea, right up there with flat fish.
They're -- every single thing about that fish has been changed.
A single four-foot female had 300 million eggs, can carry 300 million eggs in her ovaries -- imagine -- and they get to be over 10 feet long. Imagine what a 10 foot one has.
And from that little egg, they pass through this spiky little porcupine fish stage, reminiscent of their ancestry, and develop -- this is their little adolescent stage.
They school as adolescents, and become behemoth loners as adults.
That's a little diver up there in the corner.
600 million. Now imagine if you gave birth to a little baby, and you had to feed this thing.
Now I don't know how you'd feed a child like that but -- we don't know how fast the Molas grow in the wild, but captive growth studies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium -- one of the first places to have them in captivity -- they had one that gained 800 lbs in 14 months.
If we're going to save the world from total jellyfish domination, then we've got to figure out what the jellyfish predators -- how they live their lives, like the Mola.
And unfortunately, they make up a large portion of the California by-catch -- up to 26 percent of the drift net.
And in the Mediterranean, in the swordfish net fisheries, they make up up to 90 percent.
And how do you do that?
How do you do that with an animal -- very few places in the world.
This is an open ocean creature. It knows no boundaries -- it doesn't go to land.
How do you get insight?
How do you seduce an open ocean creature like that to spill its secrets?
Well, there's some great new technology that has just recently become available, and it's just a boon for getting insight into open ocean animals.
And it's pictured right here, that little tag up there.
That little tag can record temperature, depth and light intensity, which is correlated with time, and from that we can get locations.
And it can record this data for up to two years, and keep it in that tag, release at a pre-programmed time, float to the surface, upload all that data, that whole travelogue, to satellite, which relays it directly to our computers, and we've got that whole dataset. And we didn't even have -- we just had to tag the animal and then we went home and you know, sat at our desks.
They're just parasite hotels; even their parasites have parasites.
But they have 40 genera of parasites, and so we figured just one more parasite won't be too much of a problem.
So what are we trying to find out? We're focusing on the Pacific.
And we're interested in how these animals are using the currents, using temperature, using the open ocean, to live their lives.
We'd love to tag in Monterey.
And you know, the locals think it's terrible behavior, it's just horrible watching this happen, day after day.
So we've also tagged one part of the Pacific; we've gone over to another part of the Pacific, and we've tagged in Taiwan, and we tagged in Japan.
So the hardest part of tagging, now, is after you put that tag on, you have to wait, months.
And you're just wondering, oh, I hope the fish is safe, I hope, I hope it's going to be able to actually live its life out during the course that the tag is recording.
And so the waiting is really the hardest part.
I'm going to show you our latest dataset.
And in showing you this, you know, when we're looking at this data, we're thinking, oh do these animals, do they cross the equator?
And we found that they kind of are homebodies.
Now that's important, though, because if there's a lot of fishing pressure, that population doesn't get replenished.
So that's a very important piece of data.
As the sun comes up, you see in the blue, they start their dive.
Down -- and as the sun gets brighter they go a little deeper, little deeper.
They've got to come up, warm, get that solar power, and then plunge back into the depths, and go up and down and up and down.
And they're hitting a layer down there; it's called the deep scattering layer -- which a whole variety of food's in that layer.
So rather than just being some sunbathing slacker, they're really very industrious fish that dance this wild dance between the surface and the bottom and through temperature.
We see the same pattern -- now with these tags we're seeing a similar pattern for swordfishes, manta rays, tunas, a real three-dimensional play.
And what's exciting -- you all travel, and you know the best thing about traveling is to be able to find the locals, and to find the great places by getting the local knowledge.
Well now with the Census of Marine Life, we'll be able to sidle up to all the locals and explore 90 percent of our living space, with local knowledge.
And so I just figured I'd have the questions answered, and I'd be able to thank my funders, like National Geographic and Lindbergh.
But people would write into the site with all sorts of, all sorts of stories about these animals and wanting to help me get samples for genetic analysis.
I was getting reports from Catholic nuns, Jewish Rabbis, Muslims, Christians -- everybody writing in, united by their love of life.
And sure, it may be just one big old silly fish, but it's helping.
If it's helping to unite the world, I think it's definitely the fish of the future.
What is it about flying cars?
We've wanted to do this for about a hundred years.
And there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success.
So instead of trying to make a car that can fly, we decided to try to make a plane that could drive.
And the result is the Terrafugia Transition.
It's a two-seat, single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane.
You take off and land at a local airport.
Then once you're on the ground, you fold up the wings, drive it home, park it in your garage.
And it works.
After two years of an innovative design and construction process, the proof of concept made its public debut in 2008.
Now like with anything that's really different from the status quo, it didn't always go so well testing that aircraft.
Still, we very much wanted to see the aircraft that we'd all helped build in the air, off the ground, like it was supposed to be.
And on our third high-speed testing deployment on a bitter cold morning in upstate New York, we got to do that for the first time.
And we were all very flattered to see that image become a symbol of accomplishing something that people had thought was impossible really the world over.
within the light sport aircraft category.
Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's very important, because being able to deliver the Transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it, but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it.
A sport pilot can be certificated in as little as 20 hours of flight time.
And at 110 lbs., that's very important for solving the other side of the equation -- driving.
It turns out that driving, with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles, is actually a harder problem to solve than flying.
For those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground, this may be counter-intuitive, but driving has potholes, cobblestones, pedestrians, other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with.
We have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants for less than 10 percent of the weight of a traditional steel chassis in a car.
The regulations for vehicles on the road weren't written with an airplane in mind.
So we did need a little bit of support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Now you may have seen in the news recently, they came through with us at the end of last month with a few special exemptions that will allow the Transition to be sold in the same category as SUVs and light trucks.
As a multi-purpose passenger vehicle, it is now officially "designed for occasional off-road use."
(Laughter) Now let's see it in action.
You can see there the wings folded up just along the side of the plane.
You're not powering the propeller, you're powering the wheels.
And it is under seven feet tall, so it will fit in a standard construction garage.
And that's the automated wing-folding mechanism.
That's real time.
You just push a few buttons in the cockpit, and the wings come out.
Once they're fully deployed, there's a mechanical lock that goes into place, again, from inside the cockpit.
And you're all thinking what your neighbors would think of seeing that.
(Video) Test Pilot: Until the vehicle flies, 75 percent of your risk is that first flight.
Radio: What did you think of that?
AMD: See, we're all exceedingly excited about that little bunny hop.
And our test pilot gave us the best feedback you can get from a test pilot after a first flight, which was that it was "remarkably unremarkable."
He would go onto tell us that the Transition had been the easiest airplane to land that he'd flown in his entire 30-year career as a test pilot.
So despite making something that is seemingly revolutionary, we really focused on doing as little new as possible.
We leverage a lot of technology from the state-of-the-art in general aviation and from automotive racing.
When we do have to do something truly out-of-the-box, we use an incremental design, build, test, redesign cycle that lets us reduce risk in baby steps.
Now since we started Terrafugia about 6 years ago, we've had a lot of those baby steps.
The Transition will cost in line with other small airplanes.
And I'm certainly not out to replace your Chevy, but I do think that the Transition should be your next airplane.
Here's why.
While nearly all of the commercial air travel in the world goes through a relatively small number of large hub airports, there is a huge underutilized resource out there.
On average, there's one within 20 to 30 miles of wherever you are in the United States.
For those of you who aren't yet pilots, there's four main reasons why those of us who are don't fly as much as we'd like to: the weather, primarily, cost, long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination.
Instead of paying to keep your airplane in a hanger, park it in your garage.
And the unleaded automotive fuel that we use is both cheaper and better for the environment than traditional avgas.
Door-to-door travel time is reduced, because now, instead of lugging bags, finding a parking space, taking off your shoes or pulling your airplane out of the hanger, you're now just spending that time getting to where you want to go.
And mobility to your destination is clearly solved.
Just fold up the wings and keep going.
The Transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller, more accessible place.
It also continues to be a fabulous adventure.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with you.
(Applause)
I'm a neuroscientist.
And in neuroscience, we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain.
And that is, why do we and other animals have brains?
Not all species on our planet have brains, so if we want to know what the brain is for, let's think about why we evolved one.
We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements.
There is no other reason to have a brain.
Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you.
Now that's not quite true. There's one other way, and that's through sweating.
But apart from that, everything else goes through contractions of muscles.
So think about communication -- speech, gestures, writing, sign language -- they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles.
So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements.
Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here -- the humble sea squirt.
Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life.
So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain.
And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject.
(Applause) So I am a movement chauvinist.
Now if movement is so important, how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement?
But we can look at how well we're doing by thinking about how well we're doing building machines which can do what humans can do.
Think about the game of chess.
If you pit Garry Kasparov here, when he's not in jail, against IBM's Deep Blue, well the answer is IBM's Deep Blue will occasionally win.
And I think if IBM's Deep Blue played anyone in this room, it would win every time.
What about the problem of picking up a chess piece, dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board?
If you put a five year-old child's dexterity against the best robots of today, the answer is simple: the child wins easily.
One reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem -- look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win.
So it's a very simple algorithm.
When it comes to being dexterous, it's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous.
But let me show you cutting-edge robotics.
Now a lot of robotics is very impressive, but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages.
And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass.
Now if you want this robot to do a different task, that's another three-year Ph.D. program.
Now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance.
So what I'm going to show you is Emily Fox winning the world record for cup stacking.
It's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order.
And this is her getting the world record in real time.
(Laughter) (Applause) And she's pretty happy.
We have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that, and that's what we'd like to know.
So in my group, what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement.
You send a command down, it causes muscles to contract.
Your arm or body moves, and you get sensory feedback from vision, from skin, from muscles and so on.
The trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be.
So one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is, for example, sensory feedback is extremely noisy.
We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal.
So the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard "crrcckkk" on the station you wanted to hear, that was the noise.
But more generally, this noise is something that corrupts the signal.
So for example, if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand, you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback.
Similarly, when you put motor output on movement output, it's extremely noisy.
Forget about trying to hit the bull's eye in darts, just aim for the same spot over and over again.
And more than that, the outside world, or task, is both ambiguous and variable.
The teapot could be full, it could be empty.
It changes over time.
Now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise.
So if you're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick, our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability.
And to do that, I'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory.
And it's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty.
And the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions.
You want to generate beliefs about the world.
Beliefs could be: where are my arms in space?
Am I looking at a cat or a fox?
But we're going to represent beliefs with probabilities.
And numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty.
And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference.
You have data, and data in neuroscience is sensory input.
So I have sensory input, which I can take in to make beliefs.
But there's another source of information, and that's effectively prior knowledge.
You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories.
And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs.
I'm not going to explain what that formula is, but it's very beautiful.
And it has real beauty and real explanatory power.
And what it really says, and what you want to estimate, is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input.
So let me give you an intuitive example.
Imagine you're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you.
But you know that your senses are not perfect, and therefore there's some variability of where it's going to land shown by that cloud of red, representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1.
That information is available in the current shot, but there's another source of information not available on the current shot, but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis, and that's that the ball doesn't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match.
If you're playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it in that green area, which is the prior distribution, making it hard for you to return.
Now both these sources of information carry important information.
And what Bayes' rule says is that I should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow, which have the ellipses, and that's my belief.
Now I wouldn't tell you all this if it wasn't that a few years ago, we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills.
And what it means is we really are Bayesian inference machines.
As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down, but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is, and then combine those in a real Bayesian way.
Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula.
And what this part really says is I have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs.
And I want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it's going to get.
And moreover, it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do.
But you can imagine looking inside the brain.
You might have a little predictor, a neural simulator, of the physics of your body and your senses.
So as you send a movement command down, you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions.
So as I shake this ketchup bottle, I get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row.
And if I've got a good predictor, it predicts the same thing.
Imagine, as I shake the ketchup bottle, someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me.
Now I get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act.
So I get two sources.
Now there's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events.
So one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction -- which is only based on your movement commands -- with the reality.
So as I go around the world, I'm making predictions of what I should get, subtracting them off.
What evidence is there for this?
And so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling.
But it hasn't really been shown, it's because you have a neural simulator, simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense.
And in effect, what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot, and they're going to move that back and forward.
And then we're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot, which is going to tickle their palm with another stick.
Either no time delay, in which case light would just tickle your palm, or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second.
So the important point here is the right hand always does the same things -- sinusoidal movement.
The left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle.
As you go from 0.1 to 0.2, it becomes more ticklish at the end.
So whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality.
And based on this illustration, we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations.
Now I have to admit, these are the worst studies my lab has ever run.
So we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena.
And one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys, they get into fights -- which started with one of them doing something to the other, the other retaliating.
It quickly escalates.
And children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force.
And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another, they generate the movement command.
So if they retaliate with the same force, the first person will think it's been escalated.
So we decided to test this in the lab.
(Laughter) Now we don't work with children, we don't work with hitting, but the concept is identical.
We bring in two adults. We tell them they're going to play a game.
And so here's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other.
And the game is very simple.
We started with a motor with a little lever, a little force transfuser.
And we use this motor to apply force down to player one's fingers for three seconds and then it stops.
So they don't know the rules the other person's playing by.
And if we look at what we start with, a quarter of a Newton there, a number of turns, perfect would be that red line.
So it really suggests, when you're doing this -- based on this study and others we've done -- that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it's producing.
So it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts.
So we've made inferences, we've done predictions, now we have to generate actions.
And what Bayes' rule says is, given my beliefs, the action should in some sense be optimal.
Tasks are symbolic -- I want to drink, I want to dance -- but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence.
So it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways.
So think about just a point to point movement.
And I can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed.
Now it turns out, we are extremely stereotypical.
We all move the same way pretty much.
And so it turns out we're so stereotypical, our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping.
So if I take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion, your brain's circuitry would understand instantly what's going on.
Now this is a bunch of dots moving.
If these dots were cars going on a racing circuit, you would have absolutely no idea what's going on.
Well let's think about what really happens.
Maybe we don't all quite move the same way.
Maybe there's variation in the population.
And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation.
Imagine I want to intercept this ball.
Here are two possible paths to that ball.
Well if I choose the left-hand path, I can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time.
But there's noise added to this.
So if I pick the same command through many times, I will get a different noisy version each time, because noise changes each time.
So what I can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if I choose that way.
If I choose a different way of moving -- on the right for example -- then I'll have a different command, different noise, playing through a noisy system, very complicated.
All we can be sure of is the variability will be different.
So if I have to choose between those two, I would choose the right one because it's less variable.
And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger.
So I hope I've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement.
There are many diseases which effect movement.
And hopefully if we understand how we control movement, we can apply that to robotic technology.
And finally, I want to remind you, when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks, the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question for you, Dan.
So you're a movement -- (DW: Chauvinist.) -- chauvinist.
The fact that we forget most of our childhood, for example, is probably fine, because it doesn't effect our movements later in life.
CA: So you think that people thinking about the brain, and consciousness generally, could get real insight by saying, where does movement play in this game?
And it uses it very differently once you think about it that way.
(Applause)
So magic is a very introverted field.
While scientists regularly publish their latest research, we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets.
But if you look at creative practice as a form of research, or art as a form of R&D for humanity, then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research?
Now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic.
And about three years ago, I started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic -- tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster.
It's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system, or a digital storytelling tool.
So let's give this a try.
(Applause) (Music) Terribly sorry. I forgot the floor.
(Music) Come on.
Ah, sorry about that.
Forgot this.
(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) Uh oh.
(Music) All right. Let's try this.
(Music) (Laughter) (Music) Hey.
(Laughter) (Applause) Bye-bye.
(Applause)
So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side, and living systems on the other side.
But what we're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum -- so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory, mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures, and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems.
Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life.
So what are these characteristics that I'm talking about? These are them.
Now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment.
Life also has a metabolism. Now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself.
Life also has a kind of inheritable information.
Now we, as humans, we store our information as DNA in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring.
And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab, make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life.
So how do we do this? Well, we use a model system that we term a protocell.
You might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell. It is a simple chemical model of a living cell, and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together, play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive.
And so what we do is, we start simple and we work our way up to living systems.
Consider for a moment this quote by Leduc, a hundred years ago, considering a kind of synthetic biology: "The synthesis of life, should it ever occur, will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea."
That's his first statement. So if we actually create life in the laboratories, it's probably not going to impact our lives at all.
"If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non-living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life" -- so, the ones I just discussed -- "to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment."
What that means is, I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab, and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures.
So say on the order of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn't exist before.
And in this particular example, what I took is some membrane molecules, mixed those together in the right environment, and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here.
Some architectures.
What about the other aspects of living systems?
So we came up with this protocell model here that I'm showing.
We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite.
This is natural from the environment, this clay.
It forms a surface that is, say, chemically active.
Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay. For example, in this case, RNA, shown in red -- this is a relative of DNA, it's an informational molecule -- it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay.
This structure, then, can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself, so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself, and that's shown in green here on this micrograph.
So just through self-assembly, mixing things together in the lab, we can come up with, say, a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body, right?
So we're on a road towards living systems.
It's actually quite lifeless. Once it forms, it doesn't really do anything.
So, something is missing.
So we came up with a different protocell model, and this is actually simpler than the previous one.
You add the droplet to the system.
It's a pool of water, and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system.
So I add some food source to the system.
The protocell moves. It encounters the food.
It reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there.
It can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself.
If we count the number of chemicals in that system, actually, including the water that's in the dish, we have five chemicals that can do this.
So then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do, and depending on the conditions, we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment.
On the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other, and they form a kind of a dance, a complex dance with each other.
So now that you're all experts on protocells, we're going to play a game with these protocells.
Protocell A has a certain kind of chemistry inside that, when activated, the protocell starts to vibrate around, just dancing.
So remember, these are primitive things, so dancing protocells, that's very interesting to us. (Laughter) The second protocell has a different chemistry inside, and when activated, the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one. Right?
And we just put these two together in the same system.
So there's population A, there's population B, and then we activate the system, and protocell Bs, they're the blue ones, they all come together. They fuse together to form one big blob, and the other protocell just dances around. And this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up, and then, game over.
So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB.
Protocell AB likes to dance around for a bit, while protocell B does the fusing, okay?
But then something even more interesting happens.
Watch when these two large protocells, the hybrid ones, fuse together.
Now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event. Right. (Laughter) Just with blobs of chemicals, again.
Certainly, there were molecules present on the early Earth, but they wouldn't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and I showed in these experiments.
Rather, they'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff, because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds.
And it's a pool that's too difficult to fully characterize, even by modern methods, and the product looks brown, like this tar here on the left. A pure compound is shown on the right, for contrast.
So this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen, you put them in a pan, and you apply energy.
You turn up the heat, you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar, forming a brownish caramel, right?
You needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early Earth, four, 4.5 billion years ago.
These are also, these tar-fueled protocells, are also able to locate resources in their environment.
They become very energetic, and able to find the resource in the environment, similar to what we saw before.
These are very dirty little protocells, as a matter of fact. (Laughter) But they have lifelike properties, is the point.
So, doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems.
This is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the National Research Council in the United States, wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe, okay, especially if that life is very different from life on Earth. If we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there, how could we even recognize it as life?
Well, they came up with three very general criteria. First is -- and they're listed here.
Basically what that means is, you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself.
This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth, driving photosynthesis, driving the ecosystem.
Without the Sun, there's likely to be no life on this planet.
Secondly, life needs to be in liquid form, so that means even if we had some interesting structures, interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid, then this is not a good place for life.
And thirdly, we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds. And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself.
Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties.
But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems.
So by making these chemical, artificial life experiments, we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet, but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe. Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi. Today, I'm going to take you through glimpses of about eight of my projects, done in collaboration with Danish artist Soren Pors.
We call ourselves Pors and Rao, and we live and work in India.
And as I grew up, it became worse and worse, And I started to think of it as a form of control.
But of course, I could never say anything, because the uncle is a respected figure in the Indian family.
And the situation that irked me and mystified me the most was his use of a landline telephone.
And so as a response and as a gift to my uncle, I made him "The Uncle Phone."
It's so long that it requires two people to use it.
It's exactly the way my uncle uses a phone that's designed for one person.
And so I made him a golden typewriter through which he could dispense his commands to nephews and nieces around the world as an email.
So what he had to do was take a piece of paper, roll it into the carriage, type his email or command and pull the paper out.
This device would automatically send the intended person the letter as an email.
So my uncle is only dealing with a mechanical interface.
And of course, the object had to be very grand and have a sense of ritualism, the way my uncle likes it.
The next work is a sound-sensitive installation that we affectionately call "The Pygmies."
And we wanted to work with a notion of being surrounded by a tribe of very shy, sensitive and sweet creatures.
And at the slightest sound, they hide back again.
So we had these panels on three walls of a room.
And we had over 500 of these little pygmies hiding behind them.
So this is how it works.
This is a video prototype.
So when it's quiet, it's sort of coming out from behind the panels.
So each pygmy has its own behavior, psyche, mood swings, personalities and so on.
So this is a very early prototype.
Of course, it got much better after that.
And we made them react to people, but we found that people were being quite playful and childlike with them.
This is a video installation called "The Missing Person."
And we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility.
How would it be possible to experience a sense of invisibility?
So I'm just going to show you a very early prototype.
On the right side you can see my colleague Soren, who's actually in the space.
And on the left side, you'll see the processed video where the camera has made him invisible.
Soren enters the room. Pop! He goes invisible.
So how we used it was in a room where we had a camera looking into the space, and we had one monitor, one on each wall.
And as people walked into the room, they would see themselves in the monitor, except with one difference: one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room.
So this is a work called "The Sun Shadow."
And it was almost like a sheet of paper, like a cutout of a childlike drawing of an oil spill or a sun.
And from the front, this object appeared to be very strong and robust, and from the side, it almost seemed very weak.
(Laughter) So this work is a caricature of an upside-down man.
His head is so heavy, full of heavy thoughts, that it's sort of fallen into his hat, and his body's grown out of him almost like a plant.
Well what he does is he moves around in a very drunken fashion on his head in a very unpredictable and extremely slow movement.
And it's kind of constrained by that circle.
And there's no wires.
So I'll just show you an instance -- so when people enter the room, it activates this object.
And this is an important moment, because we wanted to instill in the viewer an instinct to almost go and help, or save the subject.
So this work was a real technical challenge for us, and we worked very hard, like most of our works, over years to get the mechanics right and the equilibrium and the dynamics.
That's my colleague. He's let it go.
And it's at the scale of the night sky.
And the idea was to sort of contrast something very cold and distant and abstract like the universe into the familiar form of a teddy bear, which is very comforting and intimate.
And the idea was that at some point you would stop looking at the form of a teddy bear and you would almost perceive it to be a hole in the space, and as if you were looking out into the twinkling night sky.
So this is the last work, and a work in progress, and it's called "Space Filler."
Well imagine a small cube that's about this big standing in front of you in the middle of the room, and as you approached it, it tried to intimidate you by growing into a cube that's twice its height and [eight] times its volume.
And so this object is constantly expanding and contracting to create a dynamic with people moving around it -- almost like it were trying to conceal a secret within its seams or something.
So we work with a lot of technology, but we don't really love technology, because it gives us a lot of pain in our work over years and years.
But we use it because we're interested in the way that it can help us to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in these creatures that we create.
And once a creature pops into our minds, it's almost like the process of creation is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'd like to start with a short story.
It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp.
They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis, and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls, but at the same time they excited him.
And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work.
Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system.
Female Voice: Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that's a laser beam of light.
The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return.
With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates.
The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program.
All of this happens in seconds.
Ben Kacyra: You can see here, these systems are extremely fast.
A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day.
So, as you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry.
Approximately ten years ago, my wife and I started a foundation to do good, and right about that time, the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas, hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan, were blown up by the Taliban.
They were gone in an instant.
And unfortunately, there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas.
We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive.
To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects.
Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui -- and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points -- Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects.
As you see here, we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal.
We also produce media for dissemination to the public -- free through the CyArk website.
These would be used for education, cultural tourism, etc.
What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions.
This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal.
In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation, and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs.
And so this is not a video.
This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy.
And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed.
And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle.
It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education.
The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them.
This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars.
It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle.
We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically we're losing a piece -- and a significant piece -- of our collective memory.
Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war.
This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet.
Because of this accelerated pace of destruction, it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work.
And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge -- and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years.
However, to me, the 500 is really just the first 500.
In order to sustain our work into the future, we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them, whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites, and at the same time, it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future.
Let me close with another short story.
Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs.
The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website.
Last March, we received very sad news.
The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson.
Our answer, of course, was yes.
Our heritage is much more than our collective memory -- it's our collective treasure.
We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause) This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points.
You can look from different vantage points, but I'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd, just to show the amount of detail that we can create.
We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the Historic Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art.
I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland.
David.
(Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art.
(Applause) Thank you.
Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain.
Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology -- think Google Maps, think GPS -- the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation.
So let's take a look at the brain.
Most people, when they first look at a fresh human brain, they say, "It doesn't look what you're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain."
Typically, what you're looking at is a fixed brain. It's gray.
This is the blood vessels.
20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ.
That's basically, if you hold two fists together, it's just slightly larger than the two fists.
Scientists, sort of at the end of the 20th century, learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain.
It's keeping me standing. It's involved in coordinated movement.
On the side here, this is temporal cortex.
This is the area where primary auditory processing -- so you're hearing my words, you're sending it up into higher language processing centers.
Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought, decision making -- it's the last to mature in late adulthood.
So if you take a deeper look at the brain, one of the things, if you look at it in cross-section, what you can see is that you can't really see a whole lot of structure there.
It's cells and it's wires all wired together.
So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex.
And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through.
So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain.
And how they're distributed really contributes to their underlying function.
And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells.
Let's look at neurons.
So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons.
These are support cells -- astrocytes glia.
Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain.
And each neuron itself is largely unique.
These are proteins.
They're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement.
They're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with.
So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes.
We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes.
They're encoded in the DNA.
And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on.
And so our project is seeking to look at this readout, understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on.
So in order to undertake such a project, we obviously need brains.
We were seeking normal human brains.
What we actually start with is a medical examiner's office.
This a place where the dead are brought in.
We are seeking normal human brains.
There's a lot of criteria by which we're selecting these brains.
We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60, they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain, no history of psychiatric disease, no drugs on board -- we do a toxicology workup.
We're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue, we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death.
One side note on the collection of brains: because of the way that we collect, and because we require consent, we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains.
This is magnetic resonance imaging -- MRI.
It's a standard template by which we're going to hang the rest of this data.
The next thing we do is we collect what's called a diffusion tensor imaging.
The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices.
And those are frozen solid, and they're shipped to Seattle.
And in Seattle, we take these -- this is a whole human hemisphere -- and we put them into what's basically a glorified meat slicer.
There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide.
And then what we get is our first mapping.
From this, we're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces, which then we can put on a smaller cryostat.
And this is just showing this here -- this frozen tissue, and it's being cut.
This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width.
And remember, it's frozen.
We take a microscope slide.
This will then go onto a robot that's going to apply one of those stains to it.
You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places.
And they can make basically what's a reference atlas.
This is a more detailed map.
Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what's called laser scanning microdissection.
And then the laser actually cuts.
You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time.
There's a container underneath that's collecting that tissue.
We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray.
Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you, but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass.
This has roughly 60,000 elements on it, so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome.
And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample.
Now we do this over and over again, this process for any given brain.
This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus.
And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples.
So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements, a thousand samples.
So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain.
It's basically a large data set of information that's all freely available to any scientist around the world.
So here's the modalities that we put together.
You'll start to recognize these things from what we've collected before.
There's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn, it allows you to zoom in, it allows you to highlight individual structures.
But most importantly, we're now mapping into this anatomic framework, which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on.
So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree.
And each gene gives us a fingerprint.
And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available.
So what can scientists learn about this data?
We're just starting to look at this data ourselves.
There's some basic things that you would want to understand.
Two great examples are drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin.
These are commonly prescribed antidepressants.
Now remember, we're assaying genes.
Genes send the instructions to make proteins.
Proteins are targets for drugs.
So if you want to understand the action of drugs, you want to understand how they're acting in the ways you want them to, and also in the ways you don't want them to.
In the side effect profile, etc., you want to see where those genes are turned on.
We can see this unique fingerprint.
We get confirmation that, indeed, the gene is turned on -- for something like Prozac, in serotonergic structures, things that are already known be affected -- but we also get to see the whole thing.
We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before, and we see these genes turned on there.
One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint.
So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize.
Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, "Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X."
And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they're great. They analyze large populations.
They look at their entire genomes, and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes.
And so it's very important for those researchers that we've created this resource.
They can start to look at common pathways -- other things that they simply haven't been able to do before.
So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality.
And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives.
But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar.
We're similar at the genetic level.
And what we're finding is actually, even at the brain biochemical level, we are quite similar.
And so this shows it's not 99 percent, but it's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff, so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated.
And those genes are interesting, but they're very subtle.
So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level.
This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were -- and they're quite subtle.
These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type.
These are two genes that we found as good examples.
One is called RELN -- it's involved in early developmental cues.
DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia.
And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells.
It's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that's telling us a gene is turned on there.
Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know.
Those kinds of studies require much larger populations.
So I'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go.
I think these resources are incredibly valuable.
And so for those who are undaunted, but humbled by the complexity of the brain, the future awaits.
(Applause)
I started Improv Everywhere about 10 years ago when I moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy.
Because I was new to the city, I didn't have access to a stage, so I decided to create my own in public places.
So the first project we're going to take a look at is the very first No Pants Subway Ride.
Now, this took place in January of 2002.
And this woman is the star of the video.
She doesn't know she's being filmed.
She's being filmed with a hidden camera.
These are two Danish guys who come in and sit down next to the hidden camera.
And that's me right there in a brown coat.
I'm wearing a hat. I'm wearing a scarf.
(Laughter) And as you'll see now, I'm not wearing pants.
(Laughter) At this point -- at this point she's noticed me, but in New York there's weirdos on any given train car.
Now, in the meantime, I have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well.
They're going to be entering this car one by one.
And we'll act as if it's just an unfortunate mistake we've made, forgetting our pants on this cold January day.
(Laughter) (Laughter continues) So at this point, she decides to put the rape book away.
(Laughter) And she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings.
They think this is the funniest thing they've ever seen before.
(Laughter) And I love that moment in this video, because before it became a shared experience, it was something that was maybe a little bit scary, or something that was at least confusing to her.
And then, once it became a shared experience, it was funny and something that she could laugh at.
So the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line.
(Laughter) So the video won't show everything.
At the eighth stop, a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar -- like you might sell batteries or candy on the train.
We all very matter-of-factly bought a pair of pants, put them on and said, "Thank you. That's exactly what I needed today," and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions.
(Applause) Thank you.
So that's a still from the video there.
And watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what I do.
And really one of the points of Improv Everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people.
It's a prank, but it's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell.
And her reaction inspired me to do a second annual No Pants Subway Ride.
And we've continued to do it every year.
This January, we did the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in New York -- almost every single train line in the city.
And also in 50 other cities around the world, people participated.
(Laughter) As I started taking improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians, I started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects.
Well, one day I was walking through Union Square, and I saw this building, which had just been built in 2005.
There was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing.
It was very peculiar, because it was dark out, but she was backlit with florescent lighting.
She was very much onstage and I couldn't figure out why she was doing it.
After about 15 seconds, her friend appeared -- she had been hiding behind a display.
They laughed, hugged each other and ran away.
Looking at the entire facade -- there were 70 total windows -- and I knew what I had to do.
(Laughter) So this project is called Look Up More.
We had 70 actors dress in black.
We didn't let the stores know we were coming.
And I stood in the park giving signals.
The first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out "Look Up More," the name of the project.
(Laughter) And then we had dancing. We had everyone dance.
(Laughter) So then I gave a new hand signal, which signaled the next soloist down below in Forever 21, and he danced.
There were several other activities.
And because it was in Union Square Park, right by a subway station, there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing.
So that particular event was inspired by a moment that I happened to stumble upon.
A high school kid in Texas wrote me in 2006 and said, "You should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a Best Buy and stand around."
(Laughter) (Applause) So I wrote this high school kid back immediately and I said, "Yes, you are correct.
I think I'll try to do that this weekend. Thank you."
So here's the video.
We had about 80 people show up to participate, entering one by one.
There was also a 65-year-old man who participated.
So a very diverse group of people.
(Laughter) And I told people, "Don't work. Don't actually do work.
Everybody else is one of our actors.
Several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us.
A lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers.
The managers and the security guards, on the other hand, did not find it particularly funny.
You can see them in this footage.
And we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911.
(Laughter) So they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming, "Watch out, the cops are coming."
And you can see the cops in this footage right here.
That's a cop wearing black right there, being filmed with a hidden camera.
Ultimately, the police had to inform Best Buy management that it was not, in fact, illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) So we had been there for 20 minutes; we were happy to exit the store.
One thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras.
And they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags.
But the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the Best Buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop.
(Laughter) I think our best projects are ones that are site-specific and happen at a particular place for a reason.
And one morning, I was riding the subway.
I had to make a transfer at the 53rd St. stop where there are these two giant escalators.
And it's a very depressing place to be in the morning, it's very crowded.
So I decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning.
So this was in the winter of 2009 -- 8:30 in the morning.
It's morning rush hour.
It's very cold outside.
People are coming in from Queens, transferring from the E train to the 6 train.
And they're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs.
[Rob wants] [to give you] (Laughter) [a high five!] (Laughter) [Get ready!] (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
He gave 2,000 high fives that day, and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick.
And that was done also without permission, although no one seemed to care.
So I'd say over the years, one of the most common criticisms I see of Improv Everywhere left anonymously on YouTube comments is: "These people have too much time on their hands."
The participants in Improv Everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other New Yorkers, they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way.
You know, every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games.
And I've never seen anybody comment, looking at a football game, "All those people in the stands, they have too much time on their hands."
It's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon, watching a football game in a stadium.
But I think it's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the Grand Central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the New York Public Library.
(Laughter) You know, as kids, we're taught to play.
It's just acceptable that play is a good thing.
And I think, as adults, we need to learn that there's no right or wrong way to play.
(Applause)
Thank you very much, Chris. Everybody who came up here said they were scared. I don't know if I'm scared, but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this.
(Laughter) What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa.
Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time: the Africa of HIV/AIDS, the Africa of malaria, the Africa of poverty, the Africa of conflict, and the Africa of disasters.
While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much.
And sometimes I'm puzzled, and I ask myself why.
This is the Africa that is changing, that Chris alluded to.
This is the Africa of opportunity.
This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies.
And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this. That's what I want to talk about today.
On 15th of September 2005, Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a governor of one of the oil-rich states of Nigeria, was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on a visit to London.
Due to some slip-ups, he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where, according to our constitution, those in office as governors, president -- as in many countries -- have immunity and cannot be prosecuted. But what happened: people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office.
This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders.
This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good, and not taken out to places where they'll benefit just a few of the elite.
And therefore, when you hear about the corrupt Africa -- corruption all the time -- I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries, and that some successes are emerging.
Does it mean the problem is over? The answer is no.
There's still a long way to go, but that there's a will there.
So when you hear about corruption, don't just feel that nothing is being done about this -- that you can't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption. That is not the case.
There's a will to fight, and in many countries, that fight is ongoing and is being won. In others, like mine, where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria, the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go.
But the truth of the matter is that this is going on.
The results are showing: independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is improving.
A study by the Economic Commission for Africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 African countries.
And let me say just one more thing before I leave this area of governance.
That is that people talk about corruption, corruption.
All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa.
In this country, if you receive stolen goods, are you not prosecuted?
So when we talk about this kind of corruption, let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe -- where the money's going and what can be done to stop it.
Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back, it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together.
(Applause) The second thing I want to talk about is the will for reform.
Africans, after -- they're tired, we're tired of being the subject of everybody's charity and care.
We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform.
And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us. We have to do it.
We can invite partners who can support us, but we have to start.
We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, become more democratic, be more open to change and to information.
And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent, Nigeria.
In fact, if you're not in Nigeria, you're not in Africa.
I want to tell you that.
(Laughter) One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and it has 140 million dynamic people -- chaotic people -- but very interesting people. You'll never be bored.
And with the support of a leader who was willing, at the time, to do the reforms, we put forward a comprehensive reform program, which we developed ourselves.
Not the International Monetary Fund. Not the World Bank, where I worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president.
No one can do it for you. You have to do it for yourself.
The state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it's inefficient and incompetent.
So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises.
(Applause) We -- as a result, we decided to liberalize many of our markets.
Can you believe that prior to this reform -- which started at the end of 2003, when I left Washington to go and take up the post of Finance Minister -- we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history?
(Laughter) Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury.
Nigeria's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world, after China. We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms. And nobody knows, except a few smart people.
(Laughter) The smartest one, first to come in, was the MTN company of South Africa.
360 million in a market -- in a country that is a poor country, with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita.
So the market is there.
When they kept this under wraps, but soon others got to know.
Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies, and three or four others have come in.
But there's a huge market out there, and people don't know about it, or they don't want to know.
So privatization is one of the things we've done.
The other thing we've also done is to manage our finances better.
Because nobody's going to help you and support you if you're not managing your own finances well.
And Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well.
So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price.
We de-linked that, and once we did it, we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price.
We didn't know we could pull it off; it was very controversial.
But what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development -- where, even if oil prices were high, we would grow very fast.
When they crashed, we crashed.
That smoothened out. We were able to save, just before I left, 27 billion dollars. Whereas -- and this went to our reserves -- when I arrived in 2003, we had seven billion dollars in reserves.
Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy.
We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent.
And we had GDP grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now.
So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy.
And what is more important, because we want to get away from oil and diversify -- and there are so many opportunities in this one big country, as in many countries in Africa -- what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone, but from non-oil.
Agriculture grew at better than eight percent.
We have opportunities in agriculture, like I said.
We have opportunities in solid minerals. We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored. And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible, that wouldn't happen. So we've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world.
We have opportunities in housing and real estate.
This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people.
So, huge things in construction, real estate, mortgage markets. Financial services: we had 89 banks. Too many not doing their real business.
We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital -- share capital.
And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars.
The banks -- these banks are now consolidated, and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside.
Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million.
Standard Chartered has brought in 140 million.
In tourism, in many African countries, a great opportunity.
And that's what many people know East Africa for: the wildlife, the elephants, and so on.
But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important.
So what am I trying to say? I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent.
A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections.
Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
I'm trying to tell you that since the past three years, the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum.
This is better than the performance of many OECD countries.
So it's clear that things are changing.
And, you know, you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected.
But you should know that this continent is not -- is a continent of many countries, not one country.
And if we are down to three or four conflicts, it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable, growing, exciting economies where there's plenty of opportunity.
And I want to just make one point about this investment.
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet.
And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
There's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children's lives. That's not what I'm saying. That is fine.
(Applause) I have a CD here. I'm sorry that I didn't say anything on time.
Otherwise, I would have liked you to have seen this.
It says, "Africa: Open for Business."
And this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year.
Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania, where they're having the session in June.
But it shows you Africans, and particularly African women, who against all odds have developed businesses, some of them world-class.
One of the women in this video, Adenike Ogunlesi, making children's clothes -- which she started as a hobby and grew into a business.
Mixing African materials, such as we have, with materials from elsewhere.
(Laughter) For 10,000 pieces.
And the women are diligent. They are focused; they work hard.
I could go on giving examples: Beatrice Gakuba of Rwanda, who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the Dutch auction in Amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her.
However, many of these are starved for capital to expand, because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary. Nobody thinks in terms of a market.
But I'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now, will miss it forever.
So if you want to be in Africa, think about investing.
Think about the Beatrices, think about the Adenikes of this world, who are doing incredible things, that are bringing them into the global economy, whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed, and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income.
When you go to Tanzania, listen carefully, because I'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent, for the people and for yourselves.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine.
And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight, so they could be kept in robotic pods.
One of the fascinating things about what we were working on is that we were seeing, using new scanning technologies, things that had never been seen before.
I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen.
And your entire body, everything -- your hair, skin, bone, nails -- everything is made of collagen.
And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this.
And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye.
Because we kept on seeing this in different parts of the body.
And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies.
So I wrote the algorithms and code, and he built the hardware -- Paul Lauterbur -- then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI.
I got the data.
And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, "From Conception to Birth."
(Music) [From Conception to Birth] [Oocyte] [Sperm] [Egg Inseminated] [24 Hours: Baby's first division] [The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion...] [And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.] [Early Embryo] [Yolk sack still feeding baby.] [25 Days: Heart chamber developing.] [32 Days: Arms & hands are developing] [36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertebrae] [These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus.] [If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth.] [45 Days] [Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's.] [51 Days] [Developing retina, nose and fingers] [The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.] [12 Weeks: Indifferent penis] [Girl or boy yet to be determined] [8 Months] [Delivery: The expulsion stage] [The moment of birth] (Applause) Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you.
But as you can see, when you actually start working on this data, it's pretty spectacular.
And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you.
And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were the trophoblasts coming off of the blastocyst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, "I'm here to stay."
Having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, "I'm here to stay, plant me," building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being.
The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information?
And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself.
Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart -- and then basically the development of the entire human body.
Then you start to take a look at adult life.
Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries.
It's just a tiny sub-substructure, microscopic.
But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body.
59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away.
The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today.
And then instructions set, from the brain to every other part of the body -- look at the complexity of the folding.
Where does this intelligence of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information, so as you actually watch the baby's brain grow.
And this is one of the things we're doing.
We're launching two new studies of scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born.
And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension -- the magic that is existence, that is us?
Thank you.
(Applause)
[Wind tunnel tests] Narrator: The wing has no steering controls, no flaps, no rudder.
Stefan Von Bergen: Well, he turns by just putting his head on one or the other side.
And that's quite unique.
There is Yves Rossy.
And I think the wing is open.
So our first critical moment, it's open.
He's starting to make his climb.
Commentator One: There's that 90 degree turn.
There is Yves Rossy.
Ladies and gentlemen, a historic flight has begun.
Yves Rossy has landed in England.
Bruno Giussani: And now he's in Edinburgh. Yves Rossy!
(Applause) (Applause ends) And his equipment as well.
Those sequences were shot over the last three years in various moments of your activities.
And there were many, many others.
But I feel like a bird sometimes.
It's really an unreal feeling, because normally you have a big thing, a plane, around you.
And when I strap just this little harness, this little wing, I really have the feeling of being a bird.
BG: How did you start to become Jetman?
YR: It was about 20 years ago, when I discovered free falling.
When you go out of an airplane, you are almost naked.
And especially when you take a tracking position, you have the feeling that you are flying.
And that's the nearest thing to the dream.
(Laughter) So the idea was, okay, keep that feeling of freedom, but change the vector and increase the time.
YR: It's about 300 km per hour before looping.
That means about 190 miles per hour.
YR: When I exit full of kerosene, I'm about 55 kilos.
I have 55 kilos on my back.
BG: And you're not piloting?
It is purely your body, and the wings become part of the body and vice versa?
YR: That's really the goal, because if you put in steering, then you reinvent the airplane.
And I wanted to keep this freedom of movement.
I want to go down like that.
YR: Actually, I try to stay just fit.
I don't do special physical training.
For example, last winter I began with kite surfing.
So you have to adapt.
I'm quite an experienced manager of systems as a pilot, but this is, really -- You need fluidity, you need to be agile and also to adapt really fast.
BG: Somebody in the audience asked me, "How does he breathe up there?"
YR: Okay, up to 3,000 meters, it's not such a big problem with oxygen.
But for example, bikers, they have the same speed.
So Breitling's four engines.
Ultra-stable profile.
Harness, parachute.
My only instruments are an altimeter and time.
Two parachutes.
And this is my life.
That's the real important thing about safety.
I did use that during these last 15 years about 20 times.
BG: We saw the 2009 crossing of the Gibraltar Strait where you lost control and then you dived down into the clouds and in the ocean.
So that was one of those cases where you let the wings go, right?
But most probably, I did something like that.
(Laughter) BG: Something that is not very safe, the image.
YR: You feel great, but -- (Laughter) But you have not the right altitude.
So the next thing I saw was just blue.
It was the sea.
And then I did open my chute.
BG: So the wings have their own parachute, and you have your two parachutes.
BG: I see. Maybe come back here.
People have died trying to do this kind of thing.
And you don't look like a crazy guy; you're a Swiss airline pilot, so you're rather a checklist kind of guy.
YR: Yeah. I have no checklist for that.
(Laughter) BG: Let's not tell your employer.
(Laughter) YR: No, that's really two worlds.
We have a hundred years of experience.
And you can adapt really precisely.
With that, I have to adapt to something new.
So it's really a play between these two approaches.
For example, we have two engines on an Airbus; with only one engine, you can fly it.
So plan B, always a plan B.
That's my ejection seat.
So I have the approach of a professional pilot with the respect of a pioneer in front of Mother Nature.
What happens if one of the engines stops?
It's sometimes possible.
BG: So the beginning of the flight is actually you jump off a plane or a helicopter, and you go on a dive and accelerate the engines, and then you basically take off mid-air somewhere.
So just as a curiosity, where did you land when you flew over the Grand Canyon?
Did you land on the rim, down at the bottom?
(Laughter) BG: That's exactly why I asked the question.
There is big thermal activity, big difference in altitude also.
So it was much safer for me to land at the bottom.
BG: I think that right now, many people are asking, "When are you developing a double-seater so they can fly with you?"
YR: I have a standard answer.
Have you ever seen tandem birds?
(Laughter) BG: Perfect answer.
What's next for you? What's next for Jetman?
BG: So instead of jumping off a plane, yes?
It seems a little bit crazy, but it's not.
(Laughter) Thanks to the increasing technology, better technology, it will be safe.
And I hope it will be for everybody.
(Applause)
I've always had a fascination for computers and technology, and I made a few apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
My first app was a unique fortune teller called "Earth Fortune" that would display different colors of Earth depending on what your fortune was.
My favorite and most successful app is "Bustin Jieber," which is -- (Laughter) which is a Justin Bieber whack-a-mole.
(Laughter) I created it because a lot of people at school disliked Justin Bieber a little bit, so I decided to make the app.
So I went to work programming it, and I released it just before the holidays in 2010.
I mean, for soccer, you could go to a soccer team.
For violin, you could get lessons for a violin.
But what if you want to make an app?
And the kid's parents might have done some of these things when they were young, but not many parents have written apps.
(Laughter) Where do you go to find out how to make an app?
Well, this is how I approached it, this is what I did.
First of all, I've been programming in multiple other programming languages to get the basics down, such as Python, C, Java, etc.
And then Apple released the iPhone, and with it, the iPhone software development kit, and the software development kit is a suite of tools for creating and programming an iPhone app.
This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me, and after playing with the software development kit a little bit, I made a couple of apps, I made some test apps.
One of them happened to be "Earth Fortune," and I was ready to put "Earth Fortune" on the App Store, and so I persuaded my parents to pay the 99 dollar fee to be able to put my apps on the App Store.
I've gotten a lot of interest and encouragement from my family, friends, teachers and even people at the Apple Store, and that's been a huge help to me.
I've gotten a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs, and I've started an app club at school, and a teacher at my school is kindly sponsoring my app club.
Any student at my school can come and learn how to design an app.
This is so I can share my experiences with others.
There's these programs called the iPad Pilot Program, and some districts have them.
So we're getting feedback from teachers at the school to see what kind of apps they'd like.
These days, students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology.
(Laughter) So -- (Laughter) Sorry.
(Laughter) So this is a resource to teachers, and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it.
(Laughter) I'd like to finish up by saying what I'd like to do in the future.
First of all, I'd like to create more apps, more games.
I'd like to get into Android programming and development, and I'd like to continue my app club, and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others.
This is one these magical abilities that we humans have.
We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another.
So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling.
I'm making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air.
Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts.
I hope.
So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time.
I could say, "Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics."
(Laughter) Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before.
(Laughter) But now I've just made you think it, through language.
Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world.
Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures -- very importantly, different structures.
That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think?
People have been speculating about this question forever.
Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" -- strong statement that language crafts reality.
But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, "What's in a name?
Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality.
Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question.
So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples.
I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with.
What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west.
And when I say everything, I really mean everything.
You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg."
Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit."
So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction.
We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: "Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales."
No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it.
And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast.
(Laughter) Keep your eyes closed. Point.
OK, so you can open your eyes.
This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right?
(Laughter) There are also really big differences in how people think about time.
So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages.
And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right.
This has to do with writing direction.
If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left.
They don't use words like "left" and "right."
Let me give you hint.
When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right.
When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left.
East to west, right?
So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way.
I'm facing this way, time goes this way -- very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body.
Here's another really smart human trick.
Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there.
You counted them.
You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins.
This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids.
A little linguistic trick.
They're languages that don't have a word like "seven" or a word like "eight."
So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting.
But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that.
Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum -- the visual world.
Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark."
And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors.
So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn't a single word.
So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors.
When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary.
They're faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue.
Languages have all kinds of structural quirks.
This is one of my favorites.
Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine.
And these genders differ across languages.
So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse.
Could this actually have any consequence for how people think?
Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like?
So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here -- "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish -- German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words.
Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words.
In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase."
In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke itself."
If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it.
In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, "I broke my arm."
Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm -- (Laughter) and you succeeded.
If it was an accident, you would use a different construction.
Now, this has consequences.
So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do.
So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase."
Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident.
They're more likely to remember the intention.
So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event.
This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony.
It also has implications for blame and punishment.
So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "The vase broke," even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, "He broke it," as opposed to, "It broke."
The language guides our reasoning about events.
Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways.
So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other.
Language can also have really deep effects -- that's what we saw with the case of number.
Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics.
Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right?
This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm.
Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color.
These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions.
So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns.
And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us -- ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory.
These are important things in our daily lives.
Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is.
Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 -- there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world.
The tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time.
We're losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years.
And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities.
That excludes almost all humans. Right?
So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better.
I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think.
It's about how you think.
It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think.
And that gives you the opportunity to ask, "Why do I think the way that I do?"
"How could I think differently?"
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Have you ever wanted to stay young a little longer and put off aging?
But scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible.
But if you look in nature, you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans.
Now these animals are different from one another, because they have different genes.
So that suggests that somewhere in these genes, somewhere in the DNA, are genes for aging, genes that allow them to have different lifespans.
So if there are genes like that, then you can imagine that, if you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan.
And if you could do that, then you could find the genes for aging.
And if they exist and you can find them, then maybe one could eventually do something about it.
So we've set out to look for genes that control aging.
And we didn't study any of these animals.
Instead, we studied a little, tiny, round worm called C. elegans, which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence.
And we were really optimistic that we could find something because there had been a report of a long-lived mutant.
And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm.
But at that time, most of the mutant worms are still alive.
And now I want to show what they actually look like in this movie here.
So the first thing you're going to see is the normal worm when it's about college student age -- a young adult.
So this animal is going to live twice as long.
Now get out your handkerchiefs here.
You can see the little head moving down at the bottom there.
But everything else is just lying there.
The animal's clearly in the nursing home.
And if you look at the tissues of the animal, they're starting to deteriorate.
You know, even if you've never seen one of these little C. elegans -- which probably most of you haven't seen one -- you can tell they're old -- isn't that interesting?
So there's something about aging that's kind of universal.
And now here is the daf-2 mutant.
One gene is changed out of 20,000, and look at it.
It takes this worm two days to age as much as the normal worm ages in one day.
And when I tell people about this, they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80.
But it's really more like this: let's say you're a 30 year-old guy -- or in your 30s -- and you're a bachelor and you're dating people.
And you meet someone you really like, you get to know her.
And you're in a restaurant, and you say, "Well how old are you?"
She says, "I'm 60."
You would never know, until she told you.
(Laughter) Okay.
So what is the daf-2 gene?
Well as you know, genes, which are part of the DNA, they're instructions to make a protein that does something.
And the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor.
So what you see in the picture there is a cell with a hormone receptor in red punching through the edge of the cell.
So part of it is like a baseball glove.
And the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell.
Okay, so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell?
So that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging.
That's what that arrow means.
It speeds up aging. It makes it go faster.
So this is altogether really, really interesting.
It says that aging is subject to control by the genes, and specifically by hormones.
So what kind of hormones are these?
You know about a lot of them.
These hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies.
The daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and IGF-1.
Now you've all heard of at least insulin.
Insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal.
And the hormone IGF-1 promotes growth.
So these functions were known for these hormones for a long time, but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about -- maybe they also affect aging.
And that is the case in flies.
If you change this hormone pathway in flies, they live longer.
And also in mice -- and mice are mammals like us.
So it's an ancient pathway, because it must have arisen a long time ago in evolution such that it still works in all these animals.
So for example, there was one study that was done in a population of Ashkenazi Jews in New York City.
And just like any population, most of the people live to be about 70 or 80, but some live to be 90 or 100.
And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations -- that is, changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF-1.
And these changes made the gene not act as well as the normal gene would have acted.
So those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging.
So the next question, of course, is: Is there any effect on age-related disease?
As you age, you're much more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, all sorts of diseases.
It turns out that these long-lived mutants are more resistant to all these diseases.
They hardly get cancer, and when they do it's not as severe.
So it's really interesting, and it makes sense in a way, that they're still young, so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old?
So how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging?
Well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants, a whole lot of genes are switched on in the DNA that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues, and repair damage.
And the way that they're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called FOXO.
The receptor isn't working as well.
Under those conditions, the FOXO protein in blue has gone into the nucleus -- that little compartment there in the middle of the cell -- and it's sitting down on a gene binding to it.
You see one gene. There are lots of genes actually that bind on FOXO.
And it's just sitting on one of them.
So FOXO turns on a lot of genes.
And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes, genes I call carrot-giver genes, whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well -- to fold correctly and function correctly.
DNA repair genes are more active in these animals.
And the immune system is more active.
And many of these different genes, we've shown, actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant.
These animals have within them the latent capacity to live much longer than they normally do.
They have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage, which we think makes them live longer.
Well when the daf-2 receptor is active, then it triggers a series of events that prevent FOXO from getting into the nucleus where the DNA is.
That's how it works. That's why we don't see the long lifespan, until we have the daf-2 mutant.
Well we think that insulin and IGF-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions -- in the good times -- when food is plentiful and there's not a lot of stress in the environment.
You can store the food, use it for energy, grow, etc.
But what we think is that, under conditions of stress, the levels of these hormones drop -- for example, having limited food supply.
So it activates FOXO, FOXO goes to the DNA, and that triggers the expression of these genes that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself.
So maybe he's a little bit lazy, but he's there, he's taking care of the building.
So he doesn't actually do anything himself.
He gets on the telephone -- just like FOXO gets on the DNA -- and he calls up the roofer, the window person, the painter, the floor person.
And then the hurricane comes through, and the house is in much better condition than it would normally have been in.
So that's the concept here for how we think this life extension ability exists.
We all have FOXO genes, but we don't all have exactly the same form of the FOXO gene.
Just like we all have eyes, but some of us have blue eyes and some of us have brown eyes.
And there are certain forms of the FOXO gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100.
And that's the case all over the world, as you can see from these stars.
And each one of these stars represents a population where scientists have asked, "Okay, are there differences in the type of FOXO genes among people who live a really long time?" and there are.
We don't know the details of how this works, but we do know then that FOXO genes can impact the lifespan of people.
So this is really exciting to me.
So we've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this FOXO cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases.
And I'm really optimistic that this is going to work.
There are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging.
There's one called TOR, which is another nutrient sensor, like the insulin pathway.
And mutations that damage the TOR gene -- just like the daf-2 mutations -- extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice.
But in this case, there's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the TOR protein and inhibits its activity.
And you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse -- even when it's pretty old, like age 60 for a human, that old for a mouse -- if you give the mouse rapamycin, it will live longer.
Now I don't want you all to go out taking rapamycin.
It is a drug for people, but the reason is it suppresses the immune system.
So people take it to prevent organ transplants from being rejected.
So this may not be the perfect drug for staying young longer.
But still, here in the year 2011, there's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan, which comes out of this science that's been done in all these different animals.
So I'm really optimistic, and I think it won't be too long, I hope, before this age-old dream begins to come true.
Thank you.
(Applause) Matt Ridley: Thank you, Cynthia.
Although you're looking for a drug that can solve aging in old men like me, what you could do now pretty well in the lab, if you were allowed ethically, is start a human life from scratch with altered genes that would make it live for a lot longer?
CK: Ah, so the kinds of drugs I was talking about would not change the genes, they would just bind to the protein itself and change its activity.
So if you stop taking the drug, the protein would go back to normal.
There isn't the technology to do that.
But I don't think that's a good idea.
And the reason is that these hormones, like the insulin and the IGF hormones and the TOR pathway, they're essential.
If you knock them out completely, then you're very sick.
And I think that's much better, that kind of control would be much better as a drug.
And also, there are other ways of activating FOXO that don't even involve insulin or IGF-1 that might even be safer.
Just move to one side for us, if you would.
CK: There are. There are some animals that don't seem to age.
And they've been tagged, and they've been found to be 70 years old.
And when you look at these 70 year-old turtles, you can't tell the difference, just by looking, between those turtles and 20 year-old turtles.
And the 70 year-old ones, actually they're better at scouting out the good nesting places, and they also have more progeny every year.
And nobody knows if they really can live forever, or what keeps them from aging.
It's not clear.
If you look at birds, which live a long time, cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide, things like that.
And our long-lived mutants are too.
They're more resistant to these kinds of stresses.
MR: But what you're talking about here is not extending human lifespan by preventing death, so much as extending human youthspan.
CK: Yes, that's right.
It's more like, say, if you were a dog.
You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, "Why isn't this human getting old?"
It's more like that.
MR: Thank you very much indeed, Cynthia Kenyon.
(Applause)
So what I'm going to do is, every now and again, I will make this gesture, and in a moment of PowerPoint democracy, you can imagine what you'd like to see.
I do a radio show.
The radio show is called "The Infinite Monkey Cage."
It's about science, it's about rationalism.
So therefore, we get a lot of complaints every single week -- complaints including one we get very often, which is to say the very title, "Infinite Monkey Cage," celebrates the idea of vivisection.
(Laughter) We also had someone else who said, "'The Infinite Monkey Cage' idea is ridiculous.
An infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of Shakespeare.
We know this because they did an experiment."
Yes, they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom.
(Laughter) So the main element though, the main complaint we get -- and one that I find most worrying -- is that people say, "Oh, why do you insist on ruining the magic?
You bring in science, and it ruins the magic."
Now I'm an arts graduate; I love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing.
That's what I do.
All of the magic, I think, that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful.
Astrology, for instance: like many rationalists, I'm a Pisces.
(Laughter) Now astrology -- we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted; that you'll, perhaps today, meet a lucky man who's wearing a hat.
That is gone.
If the Sun could one day -- and indeed the Earth, in fact -- if the Earth could read its own astrological, astronomical chart, one day it would say, "Not a good day for making plans.
And that to me as well, that if you think I'm worried about losing worlds, well Many Worlds theory -- one of the most beautiful, fascinating, sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation -- is a wonderful thing.
That every person here, every decision that you've made today, every decision you've made in your life, you've not really made that decision, but in fact, every single permutation of those decisions is made, each one going off into a new universe.
That is a wonderful idea.
Remember that in the majority of universes, you don't even exist in the first place.
This to me, in its own strange way, is very, very comforting.
Now reincarnation, that's another thing gone -- the afterlife.
Science actually says we will live forever.
We won't actually live forever. You won't live forever.
But every single thing that makes us, every atom in us, has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things.
Who knows, maybe one of your atoms was once Napoleon's knee.
We are all totally recyclable.
For instance, my wife could turn to me and she may say, "Why do you love me?"
And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, "Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors."
(Laughter) Though I'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well.
Pain doesn't go away either.
It is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant -- that's what it is.
(Laughter) And that is all of these different things -- the love for my child.
I have a son. His name is Archie.
I'm very lucky, because he's better than all the other children.
You may well have your own children and think, "Oh no, my child's best."
That's the wonderful thing about evolution -- the predilection to believe that our child is best.
Now in many ways, that's just a survival thing.
The fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes, and therefore we love it.
That is a wonderful thing.
Though I should say that my son is best and is better than your children.
I've done some tests.
And all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder.
You house is in a terrible state.
You think, what should I do?
Do nothing.
All you have to do is, when she walks in, using a quantum interpretation, say, "I'm so sorry.
(Laughter) That's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming.
For me, it's a very, very important thing.
I'm sitting on a train.
Every time I breathe in, I'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen.
I'm sitting on a chair.
Even though I know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space, I find it comfortable.
I look out the window, and I realize that every single time we stop and I look out that window, framed in that window, wherever we are, I am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet Earth.
If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter, you will be disappointed.
And I realize I'm observing this with the brain, the human brain, the most complex thing in the known universe.
Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, once said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless."
Now for some people, that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism.
I'm glad the universe is pointless.
It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can't turn to me and go, "What have you been doing, you idiot?
You can make your own purpose.
We have the individual power to go, "This is what I want to do."
I have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation.
Thank you very much. Goodbye.
(Applause)
[A provocation from Danny Hillis:] [It's time to start talking about engineering our climate] What if there was a way to build a thermostat that allowed you to turn down the temperature of the earth anytime you wanted?
Now, you would think if somebody had a plausible idea about how to do that, everybody would be very excited about it, and there would be lots of research on how to do it.
But in fact, a lot of people do understand how to do that.
But there's not much support for research in this area.
And I think part of it is because there are some real misunderstandings about it.
So I'm not going to try to convince you today that this is a good idea.
So, the basic idea of solar geoengineering is that we can cool things down just by reflecting a little bit more sunlight back into space.
And ideas about how to do this have been around literally for decades.
Clouds are a great way to do that, these low-lying clouds.
And it just shows that even a little bit of a change in the flow of the air can cause a cloud to form.
We make artificial clouds all the time.
These are contrails, which are artificial water clouds that are made by the passing of a jet engine.
And so, we're already changing the clouds on earth.
(Laughter) But we are already doing this quite a lot.
Passing ships actually cause clouds to form, and this is a big enough effect that it actually helps reduce global warming already by about a degree.
There's lots of ideas about how to do this.
People have looked at everything, from building giant parasols out into space to fizzing bubble waters in the ocean.
And some of these are actually very plausible ideas.
One that was published recently by David Keith at Harvard is to take chalk and put dust up into the stratosphere, where it reflects off sunlight.
And that's a really neat idea, because chalk is one of the most common minerals on earth, and it's very safe -- it's so safe, we put it into baby food.
And basically, if you throw chalk up into the stratosphere, it comes down in a couple of years all by itself, dissolved in rainwater.
And that turns out to be very easy to calculate.
This is a hose pumping water at 10 teragrams a year.
And that is how much you would have to pump into the stratosphere to cool the earth back down to pre-industrial levels.
So why don't people like this idea?
Why isn't it taken more seriously?
And there are some very good reasons for that.
And, in fact, I have some very good friends in the audience who I respect a lot, who really don't think I should be talking about this.
And I do worry about that.
I think it's actually a serious problem.
I love this planet, I really do.
And so I think it makes sense for us to look for ways to mitigate that impact.
We need to understand the science behind that.
I've noticed that there's a theme that's kind of developed at TED, which is kind of, "fear versus hope," or "creativity versus caution."
This is certainly not a silver bullet.
So I am an optimist about our future selves, but I'm not an optimist because I think our problems are small.
I'm an optimist because I think our capacity to deal with our problems is much greater than we imagine.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) This talk sparked a lot of controversy at TED2017, and we encourage you to look at discussions online to see other points of view.
Probably by now most of you have seen Al Gore's amazing talk.
Shortly after I saw that, we had some friends over for dinner with the family. The conversation turned to global warming, and everybody agreed, there's a real problem.
We've got a climate crisis.
So, we went around the table to talk about what we should do.
The conversation came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary.
She said, "I agree with everything that's been said.
I'm scared and I'm angry." And then she turned to me and said, "Dad, your generation created this problem; you'd better fix it." Wow.
(Laughter) I didn't know what to say. Kleiner's second law is, "There is a time when panic is the appropriate response."
(Laughter) And we've reached that time. We cannot afford to underestimate this problem. If we face irreversible and catastrophic consequences, we must act, and we must act decisively.
And so, my partners and I, we set off on this mission to learn more, to try to do much more. So, we mobilized. We got on airplanes.
We went to Brazil. We went to China and to India, to Bentonville, Arkansas, to Washington, D.C. and to Sacramento.
You know, my partners at Kleiner and I were compulsive networkers, and so when we see a big problem or an opportunity like avian flu or personalized medicine, we just get together the smartest people we know.
For this climate crisis, we assembled a network, really, of superstars, from policy activists to scientists and entrepreneurs and business leaders. Fifty or so of them.
And so, I want to tell you about what we've learned in doing that and four lessons I've learned in the last year.
The first lesson is that companies are really powerful, and that matters a lot. This is a story about how Wal-Mart went green, and what that means.
Two years ago, the CEO, Lee Scott, believed that green is the next big thing, and so Wal-Mart made going green a top priority.
The three biggest uses of energy in a store are heating and air conditioning, then lighting, and then refrigeration.
So, look what they did.
They painted the roofs of all their stores white.
They put smart skylights through their stores so they could harvest the daylight and reduce the lighting demands.
These are really simple, smart solutions based on existing technology.
Why does Wal-Mart matter? Well, it's massive.
They're the largest private employer in America.
They have the second-largest vehicle fleet on the road.
And they have one of the world's most amazing supply chains, 60,000 suppliers. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be the sixth-largest trading partner with China.
And maybe most important, they have a big effect on other companies.
We need Wal-Mart and every other company to do the same.
The second thing that we learned is that individuals matter, and they matter enormously.
Wal-Mart has over 125 million U.S. customers.
That's a third of the U.S. population.
65 million compact fluorescent light bulbs were sold last year.
And Wal-Mart has committed they're going to sell another 100 million light bulbs in the coming year. But it's not easy.
Consumers don't really like these light bulbs.
But the pay-off is really enormous.
100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs means that we'll save 600 million dollars in energy bills, and 20 million tons of CO2 every year, year in and year out.
It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing.
(Laughter) It's hard to change consumer behavior because consumers don't know how much this stuff costs. Do you know?
I don't know, and I should.
Those of us who care about all this would act better if we knew what the real costs were.
But as long as we pretend that CO2 is free, as long as these uses are nearly invisible, how can we expect change?
The third lesson we learned is that policy matters. It really matters.
I've got a behind-the-scenes story for you about that green tech network I described.
At the end of our first meeting, we got together to talk about what the action items would be, how we'd follow up.
And Bob Epstein raised a hand. He stood up.
You know, Bob's that Berkeley techie type who started Sybase.
Well, Bob said the most important thing we could do right now is to make it clear in Sacramento, California that we need a market-based system of mandates that's going to cap and reduce greenhouse gases in California.
It's necessary and, just as important, it's good for the California economy.
So, eight of us went to Sacramento in August and we met with the seven undecided legislators and we lobbied for AB32.
You know what? Six of those seven voted yes in favor of the bill, so it passed, and it passed by a vote of 47 to 32.
(Applause) Please. Thank you.
Because California was the first state in this country to mandate 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020.
And the result of that is, we're going to generate 83,000 new jobs, four billion dollars a year in annual income, and reduce the CO2 emissions by 174 million tons a year.
California emits only seven percent of U.S. CO2 emissions.
It's only a percent and a half of the country's CO2 emissions. It's a great start, but I've got to tell you -- where I started -- I'm really afraid.
Here's a story about national policy that we could all learn from.
You know Tom Friedman says, "If you don't go, you don't know"?
Well, we went to Brazil to meet Dr. Jose Goldemberg.
He's the father of the ethanol revolution.
He told us that Brazil's government mandated that every gasoline station in the country would carry ethanol.
And they mandated that their new vehicles would be flex-fuel compatible, right?
They'd run ethanol or ordinary gasoline.
They now have 29,000 ethanol pumps -- this versus 700 in the U.S., and a paltry two in California -- and in three years their new car fleet has gone from four percent to 85 percent flex-fuel.
Compare that to the U.S.: five percent are flex-fuel.
And you know what? Most consumers who have them don't even know it.
So, what's happened in Brazil is, they've replaced 40 percent of the gasoline consumed by their automotive fleet with ethanol.
It's created a million jobs inside that country, and it's saved 32 million tons of CO2. It's really substantial.
But Brazil's only 1.3 percent of the world's CO2 emission.
So, Brazil's ethanol miracle, I'm really afraid, is not enough.
In fact, I'm afraid all of the best policies we have are not going to be enough.
The fourth and final lesson we've learned is about the potential of radical innovation.
So, I want to tell you about a tragic problem and a breakthrough technology.
Every year a million and a half people die of a completely preventable disease. That's malaria. 6,000 people a day.
Well, two dollars, two dollars is too much for Africa.
So, a team of Berkeley researchers with 15 million dollars from the Gates Foundation is engineering, designing a radical new way to make the key ingredient, called artemisinin, and they're going to make that drug 10 times cheaper.
And in doing so, they'll save a million lives -- at least a million lives a year. A million lives.
Their breakthrough technology is synthetic biology.
This leverages millions of years of evolution by redesigning bugs to make really useful products.
Now, what you do is, you get inside the microbe, you change its metabolic pathways, and you end up with a living chemical factory.
Now, you may ask, John, what has this got to go with green and with climate crisis?
We've now formed a company called Amyris, and this technology that they're using can be used to make better biofuels.
That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way.
So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels.
Alan Kay is famous for saying the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
And that's why we're investing 200 million dollars in a wide range of really disruptive new technologies for innovation in green technologies.
And we're encouraging others to do it as well.
In 2005, there were 600 million dollars invested in new technologies of the sort you see here. It doubled in 2006 to 1.2 billion dollars.
For reference, fact one: Exxon's revenues in 2005 were a billion dollars a day.
Do you know, they only invested 0.2 percent of revenues in R&D?
Less than one day of Exxon's revenues.
Third fact: I bet you didn't know that there's enough energy in hot rocks under the country to supply America's energy needs for the next thousand years. And the federal budget calls for a measly 20 million dollars of R&D in geothermal energy.
It is almost criminal that we are not investing more in energy research in this country.
And I am really afraid that it's absolutely not enough.
Who would have thought that a mass retailer could make money by going green? Who would have thought that a database entrepreneur could transform California with legislation?
Who would have thought that the ethanol biofuel miracle would come from a developing country in South America?
And who would have thought that scientists trying to cure malaria could come up with breakthroughs in biofuels?
Not enough to stabilize the climate.
Not enough to keep the ice in Greenland from crashing into the ocean.
The scientists tell us -- and they're only guessing -- that we've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one half, and do it as fast as possible.
Now, we may have the political will to do this in the U.S., but I've got to tell you, we've got only one atmosphere, and so somehow we're going to have to find the political will to do this all around the world. The wild card in this deck is China.
To size the problem, China's CO2 emissions today are 3.3 gigatons; the U.S. is 5.8. Business as usual means we'll have 23 gigatons from China by 2050.
That's about as much CO2 as there is in the whole world.
When I was in Davos, China's Mayor of Dalian was pressed about their CO2 strategy, and he said the following, "You know, Americans use seven times the CO2 per capita as Chinese."
Does anybody here have an answer for him? I don't.
Energy's a six-trillion-dollar business worldwide.
It is the mother of all markets. You remember that Internet?
It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
Moreover, if we succeed, it's going to be the most important transformation for life on the planet since, as Bill Joy says, we went from methane to oxygen in the atmosphere.
Now, here's the hard question, if the trajectory of all the world's companies and individuals and policies and innovation is not going to be enough, what are we going to do? I don't know.
Everyone here cares about changing the world and has made a difference in that one way or another.
What can you do? You can personally get carbon neutral.
There's six bills right now in Congress. Let's get one of them passed.
And the most important thing you can do, I think, is to use your personal power and your Rolodex to lead your business, your institution, in going green.
Really think outside the box.
Can you imagine what it would be like if Amazon or eBay or Google or Microsoft or Apple really went green and you caused that to happen?
I can't wait to see what we TEDsters do about this crisis.
And I really, really hope that we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent and all of our influence to solve this problem.
(Applause)
I want to talk to you about something kind of big.
Sixty-five million years ago -- (Laughter) the dinosaurs had a bad day.
(Laughter) A chunk of rock six miles across, moving something like 50 times the speed of a rifle bullet, slammed into the Earth.
If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together, and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment.
The dinosaurs had a really bad day.
Now, a six-mile-wide rock is very large.
We all live here in Boulder.
Take ... Meeker, Mt. Meeker.
And Mt. Everest. And K2.
And the Indian peaks.
We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left.
You can see here, there's the Yucatan Peninsula, if you recognize Cozumel off the east coast there.
Here is how big of a crater was left.
It was huge.
To give you a sense of the scale ... there you go.
It wiped out 75 percent of all species on Earth.
Now, not all asteroids are that big.
Some of them are smaller.
Why is that important?
(Laughter) Now, this is not a 200-mile-wide crater, but then again, you can see the rock, which is sitting right here, about the size of a football, that hit that car and did that damage.
Now, this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in.
But it turns out, you don't need something six miles across to do a lot of damage.
So it's about a mile across, 600 feet deep.
The object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across, so roughly the size of Macky Auditorium here.
It came in at speeds that were tremendous, slammed into the ground, blew up, and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb -- a very hefty bomb.
This was 50,000 years ago, so it may have wiped out a few buffalo or antelope, or something like that out in the desert, but it probably would not have caused global devastation.
Now, in 1908, over Siberia, near the Tunguska region -- for those of you who are Dan Aykroyd fans and saw "Ghostbusters," when he talked about the greatest cross-dimensional rift since the Siberia blast of 1909, where he got the date wrong, but that's OK.
(Laughter) It was 1908. That's fine. I can live with that.
(Laughter) Another rock came into the Earth's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground, several miles up above the surface of the Earth.
The heat from the explosion set fire to the forest below it, and then the shock wave came down and knocked down trees for hundreds of square miles.
This did a huge amount of damage.
And again, this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we're sitting in.
In Meteor Crater, it was made of metal, and metal is much tougher, so it made it to the ground.
Either way, these are tremendous explosions -- 20 megatons.
They're just not big enough.
But they will do global economic damage, because they don't have to hit, necessarily, to do this kind of damage.
They don't have to do global devastation.
If one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere, it would cause a panic.
But if it came over a city, an important city -- not that any city is more important than others, but some of them we depend on more on the global economic basis -- that could do a huge amount of damage to us as a civilization.
This is a potential threat.
The smaller ones happen more often, but probably on the order of a millennium, every few centuries or every few thousand years.
The first thing we have to do is find them.
This is an image of an asteroid that passed us in 2009.
I don't know if you can see that in the back row.
These are just stars.
This is a rock that was about 30 yards across, so roughly the size of the ones that blew up over Tunguska and hit Arizona 50,000 years ago.
These things are faint.
They're hard to see, and the sky is really big.
We have to find these things first.
Well, the good news is, we're looking for them.
NASA has devoted money to this; the National Science Foundation and other countries are interested in doing this.
We're building telescopes that are looking for the threat.
That's a great first step. But what's the second step?
The second step is if we see one heading toward us, we have to stop it.
If you've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, you're going to hear about Apophis, because you're keyed in to all the doomsday networks, anyway.
(Laughter) Apophis is an asteroid that was discovered in 2004.
It's roughly 250 [meters] across, so it's pretty big -- bigger than a football stadium.
And it's going to pass by the Earth in April of 2029.
And it's going to pass us so close that it's actually going to come underneath our weather satellites.
The Earth's gravity is going to bend the orbit of this thing so much that if it's just right, if it passes through this region of space, this kidney-bean-shaped region called the keyhole, the Earth's gravity will bend it just enough that seven years later, on April 13 -- which is a Friday, I'll note -- in the year 2036 -- (Laughter) you can't plan that kind of stuff -- (Laughter) Apophis is going to hit us.
And it's 250 meters across, so it would do unbelievable damage.
The good news is that the odds of it actually passing through this keyhole and hitting us next go-around are one in a million, roughly -- very, very low odds.
In fact, Apophis is a blessing in disguise, because it woke us up to the dangers of these things.
This thing was discovered just a few years ago and could hit us a few years from now.
It won't, but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids.
We didn't really necessarily understand these keyholes, and now we do, and it turns out that's really important, because how do you stop an asteroid like this?
Well, let me ask you: What happens if you're standing in the road and a car's headed for you?
But we can't move the Earth, at least not easily, but we can move a small asteroid.
In the year 2005, NASA launched a probe called Deep Impact, which slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet.
Comets are very much like asteroids.
The purpose wasn't to push it out of the way; the purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet, which we learned quite a bit about.
We did move the comet a little tiny bit -- not very much, but that wasn't the point.
However, think about this: This thing is orbiting the Sun at 10, 20 miles per second.
Imagine how hard that must be, and we did it.
If we see an asteroid that's coming toward us, headed right for us, and we have two years to go?
Well, you can try that, but the problem is timing.
And there are a lot of other problems with that; it's very hard to do.
I think even NASA can do that, and proved that they can.
(Laughter) The problem is, if you hit this asteroid, you've changed the orbit, you measure the orbit, then you find out, oh yeah, we just pushed it into a keyhole, and now it's going to hit us in three years.
And you can hit it again.
That's kind of ham-fisted; you might just push it into a third keyhole or whatever, so you don't do that.
(Laughter) There's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts, and they call themselves The B612 Foundation.
For those of you who've read "The Little Prince," you understand that reference, I hope -- the little prince lived on an asteroid called B612.
These are smart guys -- men and women -- astronauts, like I said, engineers.
Dan Durda, my friend who made this image, works here at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, on Walnut Street.
He created this image for this.
He's actually one of the astronomers who works for them.
If we see an asteroid that's going to hit the Earth and we have enough time, we can hit it to move it into a better orbit.
But then what we do is launch a probe that has to weigh a ton or two.
It doesn't have to be huge -- a couple of tons, not that big -- and you park it near the asteroid.
The gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe, and the probe has a couple of tons of mass.
It has a little tiny bit of gravity, but it's enough that it can pull the asteroid, and you have your rocket set up -- you can barely see it here, but there's rocket plumes -- and these guys are connected by their own gravity, and if you move the probe very slowly -- very, very gently, you can very easily finesse that rock into a safe orbit.
You can even put in orbit around the Earth where we could mine it, although that's a whole other thing; I won't go into that.
There are these giant rocks flying out there, and they're hitting us, and they're doing damage to us.
We have very, very smart people, who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem, and we have the technology to do this.
Chemical rockets provide too much thrust, too much push.
We invented something called an ion drive, which is a very, very, very low-thrust engine.
If anybody here is a fan of the original "Star Trek," they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive, and Spock said, "They're very technically sophisticated.
(Laughter) (Applause) Spock.
(Laughter) So ...
That's the difference -- that's the difference between us and the dinosaurs.
This happened to them.
It doesn't have to happen to us.
The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote, and so we can change our future.
(Laughter) We have the ability to change our future.
Sixty-five million years from now, we don't have to have our bones collecting dust in a museum.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This little fellow was developed by a group of 10 undergraduate students at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at ETH-Zurich.
Our robot belongs to a family of robots called Ballbots.
Instead of wheels, a Ballbot is balancing and moving on one single ball.
The main characteristics of such a system is that there's one sole contact point to the ground.
This means that the robot is inherently unstable.
It's like when I am trying to stand on one foot.
You might ask yourself, what's the usefulness of a robot that's unstable?
This happens 160 times per second, and if anything fails in this process, Rezero would immediately fall to the ground.
The ball is driven by three special wheels that allow Rezero to move into any direction and also move around his own axis at the same time.
It's indeed exactly this instability that allows a robot to move very [dynamically].
Let's play a little.
You may have wondered what happens if I give the robot a little push.
In this mode, he's trying to maintain his position.
For the next demo, I'd like you to introduce to my colleagues Michael, on the computer, and Thomas who's helping me onstage.
In the next mode, Rezero is passive, and we can move him around.
This works with a laser sensor that's mounted on top of Rezero.
All right, thank you, Thomas.
(Applause) Now, what's the use of this technology?
For now, it's an experiment, but let me show you some possible future applications.
Rezero could be used in exhibitions or parks.
In a hospital, this device could be used to carry around medical equipment.
Due to the Ballbot system, it has a very small footprint and it's also easy to move around.
And these are more practical applications.
But there's also a certain beauty within this technology.
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Once upon a time in 19th century Germany, there was the book.
Now during this time, the book was the king of storytelling.
But it was a little bit boring.
Because in its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device.
But then one author arrived, and he changed the game forever.
(Music) His name was Lothar, Lothar Meggendorfer.
He grabbed his pen, he snatched his scissors.
This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold.
History would know Lothar Meggendorfer as -- who else? -- the world's first true inventor of the children's pop-up book.
(Music) For this delight and for this wonder, people rejoiced.
(Cheering) They were happy because the story survived, and that the world would keep on spinning.
Lothar Meggendorfer wasn't the first to evolve the way a story was told, and he certainly wasn't the last.
And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around.
(Laughter) Because, not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world, but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices.
For example, one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine.
One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D.
(Laughter) And one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate.
And this was a cause for celebration.
And for the most part, the stories are recycled.
But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure, consistent novelty.
And they remembered a man, one amazing German, every time a new storytelling device popped up next.
And for that, the audience -- the lovely, beautiful audience -- would live happily ever after.
(Applause)
When I graduated UCLA, I moved to Northern California, and I lived in a little town called Elk, on the Mendocino coast.
And I didn't have a phone or TV, but I had US mail.
And life was good back then -- if you could remember it.
So I started shooting time-lapse photography.
It would take me a month to shoot a four-minute roll of film, because that's all I could afford.
I've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously, nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 30 years.
And to see them move is a dance I'll never get tired of.
It also provides a third of the food we eat.
(Music) Beauty and seduction are nature's tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with.
It opens our hearts and makes us realize we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it.
When we see ourselves in nature, it also connects us to every one of us, because it's clear that it's all connected in one.
When people see my images, a lot of times they'll say, "Oh my God."
Have you ever wondered what that meant?
The "oh" means it caught your attention; it makes you present, makes you mindful.
It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard.
And "God"?
God is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we're connected to a universe that celebrates life.
Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes, and if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see, which is right in the middle?
And aren't we grateful for our brains, that can take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world?
And aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature?
Nature's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude.
So, I have a gift I want to share with you today, a project I'm working on called "Happiness Revealed."
Little girl: When I watch TV, it's just some shows that you just -- that are pretend.
And when you explore, you get more imagination than you already had, and when you get more imagination, it makes you want to go deeper in so you can get more and see beautifuller things, like the path, if it's a path, it could lead you to a beach or something, and it could be beautiful.
(Music) (Narrator) Brother David Steindl-Rast: Do you think this is just another day in your life?
It's the one day that is given to you: today.
(Music) It's given to you.
It's the only gift that you have right now.
And the only appropriate response is gratefulness.
(Music) Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open, that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for our pure enjoyment.
Look at the sky.
We just think of the weather, and even with the weather, we don't think of all the many nuances of weather.
We just think of "good weather" and "bad weather."
The formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same as it is right now.
Open your eyes. Look at that.
(Music) Look at the faces of people whom you meet.
(Music) Open your heart to the incredible gifts that civilization gives to us.
You turn a faucet, and there is warm water and cold water, and drinkable water.
It's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience.
So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart.
And so I wish you that you will open your heart to all these blessings, and let them flow through you, that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you, just by your eyes, by your smile, by your touch, just by your presence.
Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you.
(Applause) Louie Schwartzberg: Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities.
And some days, that can even be a little scary.
But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open-source collaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan, in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment.
Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment.
So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future.
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space.
Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors.
And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there's no dirt involved.
Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing.
And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food.
The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked.
We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window.
And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff.
And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us.
And we have window farms all over the world.
What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development.
But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or "research and develop it yourself."
(Laughter) So, for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps.
It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half.
Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients.
And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project.
So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software.
And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns, and the universal concerns.
So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone.
And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers.
So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free.
And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems.
In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy.
What we get out of this project is support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs.
But I think that Eleen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration.
So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing.
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own.
And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems.
And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us.
(Applause)
If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?
That's the question that changed my life forever.
Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free.
I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.
With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere.
For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life.
That is, until my life took a detour.
I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a two percent chance of living.
It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection.
Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee.
I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time.
The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein.
I didn't know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that.
How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always wanted?
And how was I going to snowboard again?
That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side.
I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken.
But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy.
And that is when it dawned on me that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore.
(Laughter) And if I snowboarded again, my feet aren't going to get cold.
It was this moment that I asked myself that life-defining question: If my life were a book and I were the author, how would I want the story to go?
And I began to daydream.
I daydreamed like I did as a little girl and I imagined myself walking gracefully, helping other people through my journey and snowboarding again.
I could feel the wind against my face and the beat of my racing heart as if it were happening in that very moment.
And that is when a new chapter in my life began.
Four months later I was back up on a snowboard, although things didn't go quite as expected: My knees and my ankles wouldn't bend and at one point I traumatized all the skiers on the chair lift when I fell and my legs, still attached to my snowboard — (Laughter) — went flying down the mountain, and I was on top of the mountain still.
I was so shocked, I was just as shocked as everybody else, and I was so discouraged, but I knew that if I could find the right pair of feet that I would be able to do this again.
And this is when I learned that our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: one, stop us in our tracks or two, force us to get creative.
I did a year of research, still couldn't figure out what kind of legs to use, couldn't find any resources that could help me.
So I decided to make a pair myself.
My leg maker and I put random parts together and we made a pair of feet that I could snowboard in.
As you can see, rusted bolts, rubber, wood and neon pink duct tape.
And yes, I can change my toenail polish.
It was these legs and the best 21st birthday gift I could ever receive — a new kidney from my dad — that allowed me to follow my dreams again.
I started snowboarding, then I went back to work, then I went back to school.
Then in 2005 I cofounded a nonprofit organization for youth and young adults with physical disabilities so they could get involved with action sports.
From there, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa, where I helped to put shoes on thousands of children's feet so they could attend school.
And just this past February, I won two back-to-back World Cup gold medals — (Applause) — which made me the highest ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world.
Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect.
But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no.
They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in the possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as tools for breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything.
It's believing in those dreams and facing our fears head-on that allows us to live our lives beyond our limits.
And although today is about innovation without borders, I have to say that in my life, innovation has only been possible because of my borders.
I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins.
So the thought that I would like to challenge you with today is that maybe instead of looking at our challenges and our limitations as something negative or bad, we can begin to look at them as blessings, magnificent gifts that can be used to ignite our imaginations and help us go further than we ever knew we could go.
Thank you.
Meet Tony. He's my student.
He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison.
When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment, "It was mom's gun.
Just flash it, scare the guy. He's a punk.
Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this. This is wrong.' My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.' I say, 'Let's do this.'" And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop.
And that's felony murder -- 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky.
So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say, "In this class, we will discuss the foundations of ethics," Tony interrupts me.
I know what is wrong. I have done wrong.
I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong.
If I ever get out of here, there will always be a mark by my name.
So I say to Tony, "Sorry, but it's worse than you think.
You think you know right and wrong?
Then can you tell me what wrong is?
No, don't just give me an example.
How do we know that it's wrong? Maybe you and I disagree.
Maybe it's you, maybe it's me -- but we're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion.
We are here for knowledge.
And something changes for Tony.
"Could be I'm wrong. I'm tired of being wrong.
I want to know what is wrong.
I want to know what I know."
What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy, the project that begins in wonder -- what Kant called "admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within."
What can creatures like us know of such things?
It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence -- what Heidegger called "the always already there."
It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it -- what Socrates called "the examined life."
Socrates, a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing.
Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact.
So Tony starts doing his homework.
He learns his whys and wherefores, his causes and correlations, his logic, his fallacies.
His body is in prison, but his mind is free.
Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous, the epistemologically anxious, the ethically dubious, the metaphysically ridiculous.
That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton.
Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there.
It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy.
And I say to Tony, "Let's do this."
Thank you.
(Applause)
So that's Johnny Depp, of course.
And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder.
And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo.
Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder "Winona forever."
And then three years later -- which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards -- they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done.
And now his shoulder says, "Wino forever."
(Laughter) So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo.
I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time.
Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30.
I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly.
And by "regretted it," I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place -- this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side -- and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street.
(Laughter) Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares.
(Laughter) And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute.
And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets.
I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course.
But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand.
I learned a lesson from it.
It somehow got me to where I am in life right now.
In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.
until I tell you who said it.
And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here, as he generally was.
Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.
It's called a lobotomy.
So let's start off by defining some terms.
What is regret?
Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past.
So in other words, regret requires two things.
And second of all, it requires imagination.
We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present.
And in fact, the more we have of either of these things -- the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be.
So let's say for instance that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding and you're trying to get to the airport and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight.
You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20.
Why?
Well because, if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome.
I should have gone through that yellow light."
Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things.
This session today is about behavioral economics.
We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them -- buyer's remorse, basically.
But then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life?
So top six regrets -- the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education.
33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.
We wish we'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have.
The remaining regrets pertain to these things: finance, family issues unrelated to romance or parenting, health, friends, spirituality and community.
So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance.
But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank.
They account for less than three percent of our total regrets.
Odds are, you're not going to care in five years.
But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like?
It feels terrible. Regret feels awful.
But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways.
So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial.
When I went home that night after getting my tattoo, I basically stayed up all night.
And for the first several hours, there was exactly one thought in my head.
This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response.
We're not trying to solve the problem.
We're not trying to understand how the problem came about.
What was I thinking?"
This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret.
We don't understand that part.
So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret.
But I want to suggest that there's also a fifth one.
And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call.
That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts.
This is obviously an incredibly painful experience.
And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture -- Control-Z like the computer command, undo.
We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense.
We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem -- we can undo and unfriend and unfollow.
And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot.
Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control.
And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists -- and I know where of I speak -- this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right.
Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos, and I'm going to return to that point in a few minutes.
But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about.
And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing, we can experience a huge range of regret.
You can accidentally hit "reply all" to an email and torpedo a relationship.
Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work.
Or you can have your last day at work.
And this doesn't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life.
Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences, either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives.
Now obviously, those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring.
So how are we supposed to live with this?
I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret.
And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality.
(Laughter) The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them.
That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends.
And that's just regret about tattoos.
We are all in this together.
The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves.
Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo.
But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets.
All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive.
It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us.
The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds -- except for tattoos, which are permanent.
So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo.
And do you guys just want to see it?
Actually, you know what, I should warn you, you're going to be disappointed.
When other people see my tattoo, for the most part they like how it looks.
It's just that I don't like how it looks.
And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist.
This is my tattoo.
I can guess what some of you are thinking.
So let me reassure you about something.
Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are.
I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling.
And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time.
And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image.
But it turns out, it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would; it reminds me constantly of something else instead.
It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us.
Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong.
The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them.
It reminds us that we know we can do better.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In 1994, I walked into a prison in Cambodia, and I met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured and was denied access to counsel.
And as I looked into his eyes, I realized that for the hundreds of letters I had written for political prisoners, that I would never have written a letter for him, because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody.
He was not a political prisoner.
He was a 12-year-old boy who had stolen a bicycle.
What I also realized at that point was that it was not only Cambodia, but of the 113 developing countries that torture, 93 of these countries have all passed laws that say you have a right to a lawyer and you have a right not to be tortured.
And what I recognized was that there was an incredible window of opportunity for us as a world community to come together and end torture as an investigative tool.
We often think of torture as being political torture or reserved for just the worst, but, in fact, 95 percent of torture today is not for political prisoners.
I believe today that it is possible for us as a world community, if we make a decision, to come together and end torture as an investigative tool in our lifetime, but it will require three things.
First is the training, empowerment, and connection of defenders worldwide.
And the third is commitment.
Could we do something for these 93 countries?
And even 20 years later, there was only 10 lawyers in the country, so consequently you'd walk into a prison and not only would you meet 12-year-old boys, you'd meet women and you'd say, "Why are you here?" Women would say, "Well I've been here for 10 years because my husband committed a crime, but they can't find him."
So it's just a place where there was no rule of law.
She said, "I have defended more than a hundred people, and I've never had to do any investigation, because they all come with confessions."
And it took a lot of courage for these defenders to decide that they would begin to stand up and support each other in implementing these laws.
And I still remember the first cases where they came, all 25 together, she would stand up, and they were in the back, and they would support her, and the judges kept saying, "No, no, no, no, we're going to do things the exact same way we've been doing them."
But one day the perfect case came, and it was a woman who was a vegetable seller, she was sitting outside of a house.
She said she actually saw the person run out who she thinks stole whatever the jewelry was, but the police came, they got her, there was nothing on her.
She was pregnant at the time. She had cigarette burns on her. She'd miscarried.
And when they brought her case to the judge, for the first time he stood up and he said, "Yes, there's no evidence except for your torture confession and you will be released."
But Cambodia is not alone.
But it is in so many countries.
In Burundi I walked into a prison and it wasn't a 12-year-old boy, it was an 8-year-old boy for stealing a mobile phone.
Or a woman, I picked up her baby, really cute baby, I said "Your baby is so cute."
And she said "Yeah, but she's why I'm here," because she was accused of stealing two diapers and an iron for her baby and still had been in prison.
A judge would let her out."
But we realized that it's not only the training of the lawyers, but the connection of the lawyers that makes a difference.
For example, in Cambodia, it was that [inaudible name] did not go alone but she had 24 lawyers with her who stood up together. And in the same way, in China, they always tell me, "It's like a fresh wind in the desert when we can come together."
Or in Zimbabwe, where I remember Innocent, after coming out of a prison where everybody stood up and said, "I've been here for one year, eight years, 12 years without a lawyer," he came and we had a training together and he said, "I have heard it said" -- because he had heard people mumbling and grumbling -- "I have heard it said that we cannot help to create justice because we do not have the resources."
And then he said, "But I want you to know that the lack of resources is never an excuse for injustice."
And with that, he successfully organized 68 lawyers who have been systematically taking the cases.
The key that we see, though, is training and then early access.
And I said, "But there's been tens of millions of dollars that have recently gone in to the development of the legal system here.
And they showed me a manual which actually was an excellent manual.
I said, "I'm gonna copy this."
Prosecutors were perfectly trained.
But I said to them, "I just have one question, which is, by the time that everybody got to the prosecutor's office, what had happened to them?"
And after a pause, they said, "They had been tortured."
And as I tell you this, I'm also aware of the fact that it sounds like, "Oh, okay, it sounds like we could do it, but can we really do it?"
And there are many reasons why I believe it's possible.
We have a program called JusticeMakers, and we realized there are people that are courageous and want to do things, but how can we support them?
And there are 30 JusticeMakers throughout the world, from Sri Lanka to Swaziland to the DRC, who with five thousand dollars do amazing things, through SMS programs, through paralegal programs, through whatever they can do.
And it's not only these JusticeMakers, but people we courageously see figure out who their networks are and how they can move it forward.
And on December 4, he organized three thousand members of the Youth Communist League, from 14 of the top law schools, who organized themselves, developed posters with the new laws, and went to the police stations and began what he says is a non-violent legal revolution to protect citizen rights.
So I talked about the fact that we need to train and support defenders.
We need to systematically implement early access to counsel.
But the third and most important thing is that we make a commitment to this.
And people often say to me, "You know, this is great, but it's wildly idealistic.
And the reason that I think that those words are interesting is because those were the same kinds of words that were used for people who decided they would end slavery, or end apartheid.
It began with a small group of people who decided they would commit.
And I believe that if we can come together as a world community to support not only defenders, but also everyone in the system who is looking towards it, we can end torture as an investigative tool.
Vishna was a 4-year-old boy when I met him who was born in a Cambodian prison in Kandal Province. But because he was born in the prison, everybody loved him, including the guards, so he was the only one who was allowed to come in and out of the bars.
You know, he never quite made it to all of them every day, but he wanted to visit all 156 prisoners. And I would lift him, and he would put his fingers through.
And most of the prisoners said that he was their greatest joy and their sunshine, and they looked forward to him. And I was like, here's Vishna. He's a 4-year-old boy.
He was born in a prison with almost nothing, no material goods, but he had a sense of his own heroic journey, which I believe we are all born into. He said, "Probably I can't do everything.
But I'm one. I can do something.
And I will do the one thing that I can do."
So I thank you for having the prophetic imagination to imagine the shaping of a new world with us together, and invite you into this journey with us.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
My subject today is learning.
And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz.
When does learning begin?
Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher.
Maybe you've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones.
And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth.
Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology.
And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb.
Now I'm a science reporter.
I write books and magazine articles.
And I'm also a mother.
And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called "Origins."
"Origins" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins.
Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb.
Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me.
I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book.
And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it.
Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.
First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices.
Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled.
One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher in the old "Peanuts" cartoon.
But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily.
How can we know this?
Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking.
Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice.
Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one.
This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb.
My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born.
So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.
A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language.
French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages.
Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful?
It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival.
From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it -- its mother.
But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero.
It's also tastes and smells.
By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning.
The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus.
In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water.
Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it.
The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.
A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon, France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life.
What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat.
Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food.
They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.
Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons.
The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus -- like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly.
Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus.
They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself.
The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.
It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside.
So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's "Magic Flute" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival.
The pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind.
To conclude, I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born.
In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food.
The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades -- so cold the water in the canals froze solid.
Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day -- a quarter of what they consumed before the war.
As weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs.
By the beginning of May, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted.
The specter of mass starvation loomed.
And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies.
The "Hunger Winter," as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more.
But there was another population that was affected -- the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege.
Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality.
Decades after the "Hunger Winter," researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions.
They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance -- a precursor of diabetes.
One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation.
When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver.
It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly.
They're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb.
The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it.
And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats.
The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation.
This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems -- an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival.
Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.
The real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty.
This is what happened to the children of the Dutch "Hunger Winter."
And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result.
The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born.
Here's another story.
At 8:46 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York -- commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street.
1,700 of these people were pregnant women.
When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster -- the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives.
About a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack.
In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD -- an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester.
In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.
Now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering.
But there's another way of thinking about PTSD.
In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of PTSD -- a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger -- could save someone's life.
The notion that the prenatal transmission of PTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative, but I find it rather poignant.
Let me be clear.
Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy.
It's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation.
That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb.
Learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined.
Thank you.
(Applause)
What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago.
This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data.
We're looking at many, many gigabytes of digital photos here and kind of seamlessly and continuously zooming in, panning through it, rearranging it in any way we want.
And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are or how big the images are.
Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range.
It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment.
It's also very flexible architecture.
This is an entire book, so this is an example of non-image data.
To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture.
Maybe this is an artificial way to read an e-book.
Every large image is the beginning of a section.
We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution -- much higher than in an ordinary ad -- and we've embedded extra content.
If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here.
Or other models, or even technical specifications.
Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications for a technology like this.
superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image.
This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies.
One of them is Seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W.
and Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research.
The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots -- all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies -- all these shots were taken.
So you see elements here of stabilized slide-show or panoramic imaging, and these things have all been related spatially.
Some are much more spatial.
I would like to jump straight to one of Noah's original data-sets -- this is from an early prototype that we first got working this summer -- to show you what I think is really the punch line behind the Photosynth technology, It's not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments we've put up on the website.
We had to worry about the lawyers and so on.
This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from Flickr.
You just type Notre Dame into Flickr, and you get some pictures of guys in T-shirts, and of the campus and so on.
And each of these orange cones represents an image that was discovered to belong to this model.
And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way.
(Applause) (Applause ends) You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft.
Somewhere in here there is actually a series of photographs -- here we go.
This is actually a poster of Notre Dame that registered correctly.
We can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this environment.
This is now taking data from everybody -- from the entire collective memory, visually, of what the Earth looks like -- and link all of that together.
Those photos become linked, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts.
Think of this as the long tail to Stephen Lawler's Virtual Earth work.
And this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it.
If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of a cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way.
And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) (Applause ends) Chris Anderson: Do I understand this right?
What your software is going to allow, is that at some point, really within the next few years, all the pictures that are shared by anyone across the world are going to link together?
BAA: Yes. What this is really doing is discovering, creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images.
It's doing that based on the content inside the images.
And that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information a lot of images have.
Like when you do a web search for images, you type in phrases, and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of.
The amount of semantic interconnection and richness that comes out of that is really huge.
It's a classic network effect.
As you're all aware, we face difficult economic times.
I come to you with a modest proposal for easing the financial burden.
This idea came to me while talking to a physicist friend of mine at MIT.
He was struggling to explain something to me: a beautiful experiment that uses lasers to cool down matter.
Now he confused me from the very start, because light doesn't cool things down.
It makes it hotter. It's happening right now.
The reason that you can see me standing here is because this room is filled with more than 100 quintillion photons, and they're moving randomly through the space, near the speed of light.
All of them are different colors, they're rippling with different frequencies, and they're bouncing off every surface, including me, and some of those are flying directly into your eyes, and that's why your brain is forming an image of me standing here.
Now a laser is different.
It also uses photons, but they're all synchronized, and if you focus them into a beam, what you have is an incredibly useful tool.
The control of a laser is so precise that you can perform surgery inside of an eye, you can use it to store massive amounts of data, and you can use it for this beautiful experiment that my friend was struggling to explain.
First you trap atoms in a special bottle.
It uses electromagnetic fields to isolate the atoms from the noise of the environment.
And the atoms themselves are quite violent, but if you fire lasers that are precisely tuned to the right frequency, an atom will briefly absorb those photons and tend to slow down.
Little by little it gets colder until eventually it approaches absolute zero.
Now if you use the right kind of atoms and you get them cold enough, something truly bizarre happens.
It's no longer a solid, a liquid or a gas.
It enters a new state of matter called a superfluid.
The atoms lose their individual identity, and the rules from the quantum world take over, and that's what gives superfluids such spooky properties.
For example, if you shine light through a superfluid, it is able to slow photons down to 60 kilometers per hour.
Now of course, the moment that it does hit the outside environment, and its temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree, it immediately turns back into normal matter.
Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we've ever discovered.
But the experiment is not the end of the story, because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people.
I have a Ph.D in molecular biology.
I still barely understand what most scientists are talking about.
So as my friend was trying to explain that experiment, it seemed like the more he said, the less I understood.
Because if you're trying to give someone the big picture of a complex idea, to really capture its essence, the fewer words you use, the better.
Now, the idea is not as crazy as it sounds.
I started a contest four years ago called Dance Your Ph.D.
Instead of explaining their research with words, scientists have to explain it with dance.
Now surprisingly, it seems to work.
Dance really can make science easier to understand.
But don't take my word for it.
Go on the Internet and search for "Dance Your Ph.D."
There are hundreds of dancing scientists waiting for you.
The most surprising thing that I've learned while running this contest is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research.
For example, at the University of Minnesota, there's a biomedical engineer named David Odde, and he works with dancers to study how cells move.
They do it by changing their shape.
When a chemical signal washes up on one side, it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side, because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment.
So that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions.
But what seems so slow and graceful from the outside is really more like chaos inside, because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibers, and those fibers are constantly falling apart.
But just as quickly as they explode, more proteins attach to the ends and grow them longer, so it's constantly changing just to remain exactly the same.
Now, David builds mathematical models of this and then he tests those in the lab, but before he does that, he works with dancers to figure out what kinds of models to build in the first place.
It's basically efficient brainstorming, and when I visited David to learn about his research, he used dancers to explain it to me rather than the usual method: PowerPoint.
I think that bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy.
Now that assumes half-hour presentations for an average audience of four people with salaries of 35,000 dollars, and it conservatively assumes that about a quarter of the presentations are a complete waste of time, and given that there are some apparently 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day, that would indeed add up to an annual waste of 100 billion dollars.
There are other costs, because PowerPoint is a tool, and like any tool, it can and will be abused.
It allows you to create the illusion of competence, the illusion of simplicity, and most destructively, the illusion of understanding.
So now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt.
Our leaders are working tirelessly to try and find ways to save money.
One idea is to drastically reduce public support for the arts.
For example, our National Endowment for the Arts, with its $150 million budget, slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt by about one one-thousandth of a percent.
However, once we eliminate public funding for the arts, there will be some drawbacks.
Many will turn to drug abuse and prostitution, and that will inevitably lower property values in urban neighborhoods.
All of this could wipe out the savings we're hoping to make in the first place.
I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.
Once we eliminate public funding for the artists, let's put them back to work by using them instead of PowerPoint.
As a test case, I propose we start with American dancers.
Imagine our politicians using dance to explain why we must invade a foreign country or bail out an investment bank.
Of course someday, in the deep future, a technology of persuasion even more powerful than PowerPoint may be invented, rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric.
(Music) (Applause)
(Laughter) I was having coffee with a friend of mine the other day, and I said, "You know, I read a new study that says coffee reduces the risk of depression in women."
But really, what I read was a tweet.
(Laughter) That said -- (Laughter) "A new study says drinking coffee may decrease depression risk in women."
(Laughter) And that tweet had a link to the "New York Times" blog, where a guest blogger translated the study findings from a "Live Science" article, which got its original information from the Harvard School of Public Health news site, which cited the actual study abstract, which summarized the actual study published in an academic journal.
(Laughter) It's like the six degrees of separation, but with research.
(Laughter) So, when I said I read a study, I was reading fractions of the study that were put together by four different writers that were not the author, before it got to me.
That doesn't seem right.
But accessing original research is difficult, because academics aren't regularly engaging with popular media.
Right?
(Laughter) In a country with over 4,100 colleges and universities, it feels like this should be the norm.
But it's not.
To understand why scholars aren't engaging with popular media, you first have to understand how universities work.
Now, in the last six years, I've taught at seven different colleges and universities in four different states.
(Laughter) And at the same time, I'm pursuing my PhD.
In all of these different institutions, the research and publication process works the same way.
To fund their research, they apply for public and private grants and after the research is finished, they write a paper about their findings.
Then it goes through a process called peer review, which essentially means that other experts are checking it for accuracy and credibility.
And then, once it's published, for-profit companies resell that information back to universities and public libraries through journal and database subscriptions.
So, that's the system.
Research, write, peer-review, publish, repeat.
My friends and I call it feeding the monster.
The first problem is that most academic research is publicly funded but privately distributed.
Every year, the federal government spends 60 billion dollars on research.
According to the National Science Foundation, 29 percent of that goes to public research universities.
So, if you're quick at math, that's 17.4 billion dollars.
And just five corporations are responsible for distributing most publicly funded research.
In 2014, just one of those companies made 1.5 billion dollars in profit.
It's a big business.
And I bet you can see the irony here.
If the public is funding academics' research, but then we have to pay again to access the results, it's like we're paying for it twice.
And the other major problem is that most academics don't have a whole lot of incentive to publish outside of these prestigious subscription-based journals.
Universities build their tenure and promotion systems around the number of times scholars publish.
So, books and journal articles are kind of like a form of currency for scholars.
Publishing articles helps you get tenure and more research grants down the road.
But academics are not rewarded for publishing with popular media.
The current academic ecosystem.
But I don't think it has to be this way.
We can make some simple changes to flip the script.
So, first, let's start by discussing access.
Universities can begin to challenge the status quo by rewarding scholars for publishing not just in these subscription-based journals but in open-access journals as well as on popular media.
Now, the open-access movement is starting to make some progress in many disciplines, and fortunately, some other big players have started to notice.
Google Scholar has made open-access research searchable and easier to find.
Congress, last year, introduced a bill that suggests that academic research projects with over 100 million or more in funding should develop an open-access policy.
And this year, NASA opened up its entire research library to the public.
So, let's talk about translation.
Instead, what if scholars were able to take the research that they're doing and translate it on popular media and be able to engage with the public?
And there are some other benefits to this approach.
By showing the public how their tax dollars are being used to fund research, they can begin to redefine universities' identities so that universities' identities are not just based on a football team or the degrees they grant but on the research that's being produced there.
And when there's a healthy relationship between the public and scholars, it encourages public participation in research.
What if social scientists helped local police redesign their sensitivity trainings and then collaboratively wrote a manual to model future trainings?
Or what if our education professors consulted with our local public schools to decide how we're going to intervene with our at-risk students and then wrote about it in a local newspaper?
Because a functioning democracy requires that the public be well-educated and well-informed.
Instead of research happening behind paywalls and bureaucracy, wouldn't it be better if it was unfolding right in front of us?
But if the status quo in academic research is to publish in the echo chambers of for-profit journals that never reach the public, you better believe my answer is going to be "nope."
I believe in inclusive, democratic research that works in the community and talks with the public.
I want to work in research and in an academic culture where the public is not only seen as a valuable audience, but a constituent, a participant.
And in some cases even the expert.
It's about shifting academic culture from publishing to practice and from talking to doing.
I'm standing on the shoulders of many scholars, teachers, librarians and community members who also advocate for including more people in the conversation.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Now when we think of our senses, we don't usually think of the reasons why they probably evolved, from a biological perspective.
We don't really think of the evolutionary need to be protected by our senses, but that's probably why our senses really evolved -- to keep us safe, to allow us to live.
We want beauty; we don't just want function.
And when it comes to sensory restoration, we're still very far away from being able to provide beauty.
And that's what I'd like to talk to you a little bit about today.
Likewise for hearing.
When we think about why we hear, we don't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren, although clearly that's an important thing.
Really what we want to hear is music.
Many of you know that he was deaf, or near profoundly deaf, when he wrote that.
Music is just one of the strangest things that there is.
It's acoustic vibrations in the air, little waves of energy in the air that tickle our eardrum.
Somehow in tickling our eardrum that transmits energy down our hearing bones, which get converted to a fluid impulse inside the cochlea and then somehow converted into an electrical signal in our auditory nerves that somehow wind up in our brains as a perception of a song or a beautiful piece of music.
That process is entirely abstract and very, very unusual.
And it's at the hair cell level that they do this.
In fact, nothing even actually comes close to our ability to restore hearing.
As a musician, I can tell you that if I had to have a cochlear implant, I'd be heartbroken. I'd just be plainly heartbroken, because I know that music would never sound the same to me.
Now this is a video that I'm going to show you of a girl who's born deaf.
She's in a very supportive environment.
Her mother's doing everything she can.
Okay, play that video please.
(Video) Mother: That's an owl.
Owl, yeah.
Owl. Owl.
Yeah.
Baby. Baby.
I'm not saying that they can't live a beautiful, wonderful life.
I'm saying that they're going to face obstacles that most people who have normal hearing will not have to face.
Now hearing loss and the treatment for hearing loss has really evolved in the past 200 years.
And that was the best you could do for hearing loss.
And now today we have the modern multi-channel cochlear implant, which is an outpatient procedure.
It's surgically placed inside the inner ear.
It takes about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on where it's done, under general anesthesia.
And in the end, you achieve something like this where an electrode array is inserted inside the cochlea.
Now actually, this is quite crude in comparison to our regular inner ear.
But here is that same girl who is implanted now.
This is her 10 years later.
Girl: I have written two books. (Mother: Was the other one a book or a journal entry?) Girl: No, the other one was a book. (Mother: Oh, okay.) JN: Well this book has seven chapters, and the last chapter is entitled "The Good Things About Being Deaf."
Do you remember writing that chapter?
Girl: Yes I do. I remember writing every chapter.
JN: Yeah.
Girl: Well sometimes my sister can be kind of annoying.
JN: I see. And who is that?
Girl: Holly. (JN: Okay.) Mother: Her sister. (JN: Her sister.) Girl: My sister.
JN: So you don't want to hear everything that's out there?
Girl: No.
CL: And so she's phenomenal.
However, despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language, you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they can't hear music almost at all.
In fact, most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad.
Now there are a lot of reasons for that.
I mentioned earlier the fact that music is a different capacity because it's abstract.
Language is very different. Language is very precise.
In fact, the whole reason we use it is because it has semantic-specificity.
Music is entirely different.
When you hear music, if it doesn't sound good, what's the point?
There's really very little point in listening to music when it doesn't sound good to you.
The acoustics of music are much harder than those of language.
And you can see on this figure, that the frequency range and the decibel range, the dynamic range of music is far more heterogeneous.
So if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant, what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission.
Because I always view music as the pinnacle of hearing.
If you can hear music, you should be able to hear anything.
Now the problems begin first with pitch perception.
I mean, most of us know that pitch is a fundamental building block of music.
Now this is a MIDI arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Prelude.
(Music) Okay, now if we consider that in a cochlear implant patient pitch perception could be off as much as two octaves, let's see what happens here when we randomize this to within one semitone.
We would be thrilled if we had one semitone pitch perception in cochlear implant users.
Go ahead and play this one.
But it certainly wasn't the way the music was intended.
And you're not hearing the same thing that most people who have normal hearing are hearing.
Now the other issue comes with, not just the ability to tell pitches apart, but the ability to tell sounds apart.
Most cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between an instrument.
If we could play these two sound clips in succession.
(Trumpet) The trumpet.
And the second one.
(Violin) That's a violin.
Cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between these instruments.
This implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth.
Now if you look at the brain of an individual who has a cochlear implant and you have them listen to speech, have them listen to rhythm and have them listen to melody, what you find is that the auditory cortex is the most active during speech.
But actually if you look at melody, what you find is that there's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls.
So for whatever reason, this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception.
Now the next question is, well how does it really sound?
Now we've been doing some studies to really get a sense of what sound quality is like for these implant users.
I'm going to play you two clips of Usher, one which is normal and one which has almost no high frequencies, almost no low frequencies and not even that many mid frequencies.
Go ahead and play that.
(Music) (Limited Frequency Music) I had patients tell me that those sound the same.
Now the question comes to mind: Is there any hope?
And yes, there is hope.
Now I don't know if anybody knows who this is.
This is Beethoven.
Now why would we know what Beethoven's skull looks like?
And it turns out that his temporal bones were harvested when he died to try to look at the cause of his deafness, which is why he has molding clay and his skull is bulging out on the side there.
But Beethoven composed music long after he lost his hearing.
What that suggests is that, even in the case of hearing loss, the capacity for music remains.
The brains remain hardwired for music.
I've been very lucky to work with Dr. David Ryugo where I've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants.
This is a cat that's been trained to respond to a trumpet for food.
(Music) Text: Beethoven doesn't excite her.
(Music) The "1812 Overture" isn't worth waking for.
(Trumpet) But she jumps to action when called to duty!
(Trumpet) CL: Now I'm not suggesting that the cat is hearing that trumpet the way we're hearing it.
If we were to direct efforts towards training cochlear implant users to hear music -- because right now there's virtually no effort put towards that, no rehabilitative strategies, very little in the way of technological advances to actually improve music -- we would come a long way.
Now I want to show you one last video.
And this is of a student of mine named Joseph who I had the good fortune to work with for three years in my lab.
He's deaf, and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant.
And here's a video of Joseph.
(Music) (Video) Joseph: I was born in 1986.
Not long after, I was fitted with hearing aids.
But although these hearing aids were the most powerful hearing aids on the market at the time, they weren't very helpful.
When I was 12 years old, I was one of the first few people in Singapore who underwent cochlear implantation.
And not long after I got my cochlear implant, I started learning how to play piano.
CL: Joseph is phenomenal. He's brilliant.
He is now a medical student at Yale University, and he's contemplating a surgical career -- one of the first deaf individuals to consider a career in surgery.
There are almost no deaf surgeons anywhere.
And the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain.
Truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant, because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time.
You don't actually have to hear it.
I know he doesn't hear well, because I've heard him do Karaoke.
(Laughter) And so there is certainly a lot of hope, but there's a lot more that needs to be done.
So I just want to conclude with the following words.
When it comes to restoration of hearing, we have certainly come a long way, a remarkably long way.
And we have a much longer way to go when it comes to the idea of restoring perfect hearing.
And let me tell you right now, it's fine that we would all be very happy with speech.
But I tell you, if we lost our hearing, if anyone here suddenly lost your hearing, you would want perfect hearing back.
You wouldn't want decent hearing, you would want perfect hearing.
Restoration of basic sensory function is critical.
And I don't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function.
But it's really restoration of the ability to perceive beauty where we can get inspiring.
And I don't think that we should give up on beauty.
And I want to thank you for your time.
(Applause)
(Singing) I see the moon. The moon sees me.
The moon sees somebody that I don't see.
God bless the moon, and God bless me.
And I'll write your name on every star, and that way the world won't seem so far.
There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch, raindrops against the window and not even the hint of coffee in the kitchen air.
The engineers on the 15th floor have stopped working on their particle machine.
They are too busy recalculating what this all mean for lost time.
How many galaxies are we losing per second?
How long before next rocket can be launched?
Somewhere an electron flies off its energy cloud.
A black hole has erupted.
A Law & Order marathon is starting.
The astronaut is asleep.
He has forgotten to turn off his watch, which ticks, like a metal pulse against his wrist.
He dreams of coral reefs and plankton.
His fingers find the pillowcase's sailing masts.
He thinks that scuba divers must have the most wonderful job in the world.
(Applause) Thank you.
I don't mean this metaphorically.
It was only a matter of time.
And there was no limitation based on age or gender or race or even appropriate time period.
I was sure that I was going to actually experience what it felt like to be a leader of the civil rights movement or a ten-year old boy living on a farm during the dust bowl or an emperor of the Tang dynasty in China.
My mom says that when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my typical response was: princess-ballerina-astronaut.
I was listing things I thought I was gonna get to be: a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut.
And I was sure that if I was going to do everything, that it probably meant I had to move pretty quickly, because there was a lot of stuff I needed to do.
I was always scared that I was falling behind.
And since I grew up in New York City, as far as I could tell, rushing was pretty normal.
And I wanted them to know, I wanted to tell them.
And this became the focus of my obsession.
And it's not until recently that I realized that I can't always rush poetry.
In April for National Poetry Month, there's this challenge that many poets in the poetry community participate in, and its called the 30/30 Challenge.
The idea is you write a new poem every single day for the entire month of April.
And last year, I tried it for the first time and was thrilled by the efficiency at which I was able to produce poetry.
But at the end of the month, I looked back at these 30 poems I had written and discovered that they were all trying to tell the same story, it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out the way that it wanted to be told.
And I realized that this is probably true of other stories on an even larger scale.
I have stories that I have tried to tell for years, rewriting and rewriting and constantly searching for the right words.
There's a French poet and essayist by the name of Paul Valéry who said a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned.
And this terrifies me because it implies that I could keep re-editing and rewriting forever and its up to me to decide when a poem is finished and when I can walk away from it.
And this goes directly against my very obsessive nature to try to find the right answer and the perfect words and the right form.
And I use poetry in my life, as a way to help me navigate and work through things.
I like to revisit old poetry because it shows me exactly where I was at that moment and what it was I was trying to navigate and the words that I chose to help me.
But I do know that later, when I look back I will be able to know that this is where I was at this moment and this is what I was trying to navigate, with these words, here, in this room, with you.
It didn't always work this way.
There's a time you had to get your hands dirty.
If you needed more contrast, more saturation, darker darks and brighter brights, they called it extended development.
It wasn't always easy.
Grandpa Stewart was a Navy photographer.
Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair, he showed up to World War II, with a smirk and a hobby.
When they asked him if he knew much about photography, he lied, learned to read Europe like a map, upside down, from the height of a fighter plane, camera snapping, eyelids flapping the darkest darks and brightest brights.
My father was born into this world of black and white.
His basketball hands learned the tiny clicks and slides of lens into frame, film into camera, chemical into plastic bin.
His father knew the equipment but not the art.
Once he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire, hunted it with his camera for a week.
"Follow the light," he said.
"Follow the light."
The loft on Wooster Street with the creaky hallways, the twelve-foot ceilings, white walls and cold floors.
This was my mother's home, before she was mother.
Before she was wife, she was artist.
And the only two rooms in the house, with walls that reached all the way up to the ceiling, and doors that opened and closed, were the bathroom and the darkroom.
The darkroom she built herself, with custom-made stainless steel sinks, an 8x10 bed enlarger that moved up and down by a giant hand crank, a bank of color-balanced lights, a white glass wall for viewing prints, a drying rack that moved in and out from the wall.
My mother built herself a darkroom.
Made it her home.
Fell in love with a man with basketball hands, with the way he looked at light.
Moved to a house near a park.
The baby tipped the grayscale, filled her parents' photo albums with red balloons and yellow icing.
The baby grew into a girl without freckles, with a crooked smile, who didn’t understand why her friends did not have darkrooms in their houses, who never saw her parents kiss, who never saw them hold hands.
But one day, another baby showed up.
This one with perfect straight hair and bubble gum cheeks.
They named him sweet potato.
When he laughed, he laughed so loudly he scared the pigeons on the fire escape And the four of them lived in that house near the park.
The girl with no freckles, the sweet potato boy, the basketball father and darkroom mother and they lit their candles and said their prayers, and the corners of the photographs curled.
One day, some towers fell.
The sweet potato boy mashed his fists into his mouth until he had nothing more to say.
So, the girl without freckles went treasure hunting on her own.
And the note said: "A guy sure loves the girl who works in the darkroom."
It was a year before my father picked up a camera again.
His first time out, he followed the Christmas lights, dotting their way through New York City's trees, tiny dots of light, blinking out at him from out of the darkest darks.
On the other side of the country, I went to class and wrote a poem in the margins of my notebook.
We have both learned the art of capture.
Maybe we are learning the art of letting go.
(Applause)
Good afternoon, I'm proud to be here at TEDxKrakow.
I'll try to speak a little bit today about a phenomenon which can, and actually is changing the world, and whose name is people power.
Here it is.
Somebody gives you a bet: you will look at a crystal ball, and you will see the future; the future will be accurate.
OK, curiosity killed the cat, you take the bet, you look at the crystal ball.
One hour later, you're sitting in a building of the national TV, in a top show, and you tell the story.
Saleh of Yemen and Assad of Syria would be either challenged, or already on their knees.
Now, the anchor watches you with a strange gaze on his face.
And then, on top of it you add: "And thousands of young people from Athens, Madrid and New York will demonstrate for social justice, claiming they are inspired by Arabs."
Next thing you know, two guys in white appear, they give you the strange t-shirt, take you to the nearest mental institution.
So I would like to speak a little bit about the phenomenon which is behind what already seems to be a very bad year for bad guys.
It helped Gandhi kick the Brits from India, it helped Martin Luther King win his historic racial struggle.
It helped a local, Lech Walesa, to kick out one million Soviet troops from Poland, and in beginning the end of the Soviet Union as we know it.
So what's new in it?
What seems to be very new, which is the idea I would like to share with you today, is that there is a set of rules and skills which can be learned and taught in order to perform successful nonviolent struggle.
I'll try where it all started in the Middle East.
And for so many years, we were living with a completely wrong perception of the Middle East.
It was looking like the frozen region.
And there were only two types of meal there.
And everybody was amazed when the refrigerator opened, and millions of young, mainly secular people stepped out to do the change.
What is the average age of an Egyptian? 24.
How long was Mubarak in power? 31.
And guess what? The same Generation Y, with their rules, with their tools, with their games, and with their language, which sounds a little bit strange to me.
And can you look at the age of the people on the streets of Europe?
It seems that Generation Y is coming.
They will say: "People power will work only if the regime is not too oppressive."
They will say: "People power will work, if the annual income of the country is between X and Z."
They will say: "People power will work only if there is a foreign pressure."
They will say: "People power will work only if there is no oil."
And, I mean, there is a set of conditions.
Well, the news here is that your skills during the conflict seem to be more important than the conditions.
I come from a country called Serbia.
It took us 10 years to unite 18 opposition party leaders, with their big egos, behind one single candidate against the Balkan dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Guess what? That was the day of his defeat.
You look at the Egyptians, they fight on Tahrir Square, they get rid of their individual symbols, they appear on the street only with the flag of Egypt.
I will give you a counter-example.
You see nine presidential candidates running against Lukashenko, you all know the outcome.
So unity is a big thing.
Same with planning.
Somebody has lied to you about the successful and spontaneous nonviolent revolution.
One single act of violence can literally destroy your movement.
There are certain rules in nonviolent struggle you may follow.
First, you start small.
It's only 200 of us in this room.
We are actually witnessing the picture of one of the best tactics ever used.
It was on Tahrir square, where the international community was constantly frightened that, you know, the Islamists will overtake the revolution.
What they organized -- Christians protecting Muslims where they are praying, a Coptic wedding cheered by thousands of Muslims, the world has just changed the picture, but somebody was thinking about this previously.
So there are so many things you can do instead of getting into one place, shouting, and you know, showing off in front of the security forces.
Now, there is also another very important dynamic.
This is the dynamic between fear and apathy on the one side, and enthusiasm and humor on another side.
So, it works like in a video game.
You can tell that something is happening there.
And then, it's about the humor.
Humor is such a powerful game-changer, and of course, it was very big in Poland.
You know, we were just a small group of crazy students in Serbia when we made this big skit.
We put the big petrol barrel with a portrait of Mr. President on it, in the middle of the Main Street.
So you could literally come, put a coin in, get a baseball bat, and hit his face.
And within minutes, we were sitting in a nearby café having coffee, and there was a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing.
Well, that's just the beginning of the show.
The real show starts when the police appears.
(Laughter) "What will they do?"
We were like three blocks away, observing it from our espresso bar.
Arrest the shoppers, with kids?
They arrested the barrel.
And now, the picture of the smashed face on the barrel, with the policemen dragging it to the police car, that was the best day for newspaper photographers that they will ever have.
So, I mean, these are the things you can do.
And you can always use humor.
There is also one big thing about humor, it really hurts.
When you start to mock them, it hurts.
Now, everybody is talking about His Majesty, the Internet, and it is also a very useful skill.
But don't rush to label things like "a Facebook Revolution," "Twitter Revolution."
It is true that the Internet and the new media are very useful in making things faster and cheaper.
They also make it a bit safer for the participants, because they give partial anonymity.
This is the famous group "We are all Khaled Said," made by Wael Ghonim in Egypt, and his friend.
This is the mutilated face of the guy who was beaten by the police.
This is how he became known to the public, and this is what probably became the straw that broke the camel's back.
But here is also the bad news.
The nonviolent struggle is won in the real world, in the streets.
There are risks to be taken, and there are living people who are winning the struggle.
Well, the million-dollar question.
And though young people from the Arab world were pretty successful in bringing down three dictators, shaking the region, kind of persuading the clever kings from Jordan and Morocco to do substantial reforms, it is yet to be seen what will be the outcome.
Whether the Egyptians and Tunisians will make it through the transition, or this will end in bloody ethnic and religious conflicts, whether the Syrians will maintain nonviolent discipline, faced with a brutal daily violence which kills thousands already, or they will slip into violent struggle and make ugly civil war.
Will these revolutions be pushed through the transitions and democracy or be overtaken by the military or extremists of all kinds?
Are they going to find their skills, their enthusiasm, and their strategy to find what they really want and push for the reform, or will they just stay complaining about the endless list of the things they hate?
This is the difference between the two paths.
This is one more reason to look at this phenomenon, this is one more reason to look at Generation Y.
Enough for me to give them credit, and hope that they will find their skills and their courage to use nonviolent struggle and thus fix at least a part of the mess our generation is making in this world.
Thank you.
How many of you found it really annoying?
(Laughter) OK, outstanding. So I invented that.
That thing is called a CAPTCHA.
And it is there to make sure you, the entity filling out the form, are a human and not a computer program that was written to submit the form millions of times.
The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted characters, whereas programs can't do it as well yet.
In the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets, two at a time.
CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet.
And since they're used so often, a lot of times the sequence of random characters shown to the user is not so fortunate.
The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W, A, I, T, which, of course, spell a word.
But the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later.
[Help! I've been waiting for over 20 minutes and nothing happens.] (Laughter) This person thought they needed to wait.
This, of course, is not as bad as this poor person.
Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later, which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHA.
This is a project that we call reCAPTCHA, which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon, then we turned it into a start-up company.
And then about a year and a half ago, Google actually acquired this company.
Let me tell you what this project started.
This project started from the following realization: It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world.
When I first heard this, I was quite proud of myself.
Here's the thing: each time you type a CAPTCHA, essentially, you waste 10 seconds of your time.
And if you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs.
(Laughter) And then I started thinking, of course, we can't just get rid of CAPTCHAs, because the security of the web depends on them.
But then I started thinking, can we use this effort for something that is good for humanity?
While you're typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing.
Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do.
Is there some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve, yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA, they solve a little bit of this problem?
And the answer to that is "yes," and this is what we're doing now.
Nowadays, while you're typing a CAPTCHA, not only are you authenticating yourself as a human, but in addition you're helping us to digitize books.
Let me explain how this works.
There's a lot of projects trying to digitize books.
Google has one. The Internet Archive has one.
Amazon, with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books.
Basically, the way this works is you start with an old book.
Like a book?
(Laughter) So you start with a book and then you scan it.
Now, scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page.
This is an image with text for every page of the book.
The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher the words in this image.
That's using a technology called OCR, for optical character recognition, which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there.
Now, the problem is that OCR is not perfect.
Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow, OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words.
For things that were written more than 50 years ago, the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words.
So now we're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we're getting people to read them for us while they're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet.
So the next time you type a CAPTCHA, these words that you're typing are actually words from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize.
The reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book, it didn't know what it was and it's going to present it to you.
So we give you another word, for which the system does know the answer.
And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system knows the answer, it assumes you are human and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly.
And if we repeat this process to 10 different people and they agree on what the new word is, then we get one more word digitized accurately.
So this is how the system works.
And since we released it about three or four years ago, a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA, where people wasted their time, to the new CAPTCHA where people are helping to digitize books.
So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book.
Facebook: Every time you add a friend or poke somebody, you help to digitize a book.
And the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words we're digitizing per day is really large.
It's about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year.
And this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet.
(Applause) Now, of course, since we're doing so many words per day, funny things can happen.
This is especially true because now we're giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other.
But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word, bad things can happen.
[bad Christians] But it's even worse, because the website where we showed this actually happened to be called The Embassy of the Kingdom of God.
(Laughter) Here's another really bad one.
JohnEdwards.com [Damn liberal] (Laughter) So we keep on insulting people left and right everyday.
Of course, we're not just insulting people.
Here's the thing. Since we're presenting two randomly chosen words, interesting things can happen.
So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in, which is called CAPTCHA art.
I'm sure some of you have heard about it.
Here's how it works.
Imagine you're using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar, like this CAPTCHA.
[invisible toaster] What you're supposed to do is you take a screenshot of it.
But first you take a screenshot and then you draw something that is related to it.
(Laughter) That's how it works.
(Laughter) There are tens of thousands of these.
Some of them are very cute.
(Laughter) OK, so this is my favorite number of reCAPTCHA.
So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project.
This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through reCAPTCHA: 750 million, a little over 10 percent of the world's population, has helped us digitize human knowledge.
And it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda.
So the question that motivates my research is the following: If you look at humanity's large-scale achievements, these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically -- like, for example, building the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal or putting a man on the Moon -- there is a curious fact about them, and it is that they were all done with about the same number of people.
It's weird; they were all done with about 100,000 people.
And the reason for that is because, before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible.
But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge.
So the question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000, what can we do with 100 million?
It hasn't yet been launched. It's called Duolingo.
So this is the project. Here's how it started.
It started with me posing a question to my graduate student, Severin Hacker.
OK, that's Severin Hacker.
So I posed the question to my graduate student.
By the way, you did hear me correctly; his last name is Hacker.
(Laughter) So I posed this question to him: How can we get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free?
Right now, the web is partitioned into multiple languages.
If you don't know English, you can't access it.
So I would like to translate all of the web, or at least most of it, into every major language.
That's what I would like to do.
Now, some of you may say, why can't we use computers to translate?
Machine translation is starting to translate some sentences here and there.
The problem with that is it's not yet good enough and it probably won't be for the next 15 to 20 years.
It makes a lot of mistakes. Even when it doesn't, since it makes so many mistakes, you don't know whether to trust it or not.
So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine.
It was somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript.
It was translated from Japanese into English.
This person starts apologizing for the fact that it's translated with a computer.
So he's just explaining something.
[This insult to father's stones?] (Laughter) And then comes the ending, which is my favorite part of the whole thing.
[Please apologize for your stupidity. There are a many thank you.] (Laughter) OK, so computer translation, not yet good enough.
So back to the question.
So now the next question you may have is, well, why can't we just pay people to do this?
For example, translating a tiny fraction of the whole web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish.
OK? Wikipedia exists in Spanish, but it's very small compared to the size of English.
It's about 20 percent of the size of English.
If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish, it would cost at least 50 million dollars -- and this is even at the most exploited, outsourcing country out there.
So it would be very expensive.
So what we want to do is, we want to get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free.
If this is what you want to do, you quickly realize you're going to run into two big hurdles, two big obstacles.
The first one is a lack of bilinguals.
So I don't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the web who are bilingual enough to help us translate.
That's a big problem.
The other problem you're going to run into is a lack of motivation.
How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the web for free?
Normally, you have to pay people to do this.
So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free?
But then we realized, there's a way to solve both these problems with the same solution.
To kill two birds with one stone.
And that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals, and that is language education.
So it turns out that today, there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language.
People really want to learn a foreign language.
In the US alone, there are over five million people who have paid over $500 for software to learn a new language.
So people really want to learn a new language.
So what we've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website -- it's called Duolingo -- where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the web.
And so basically, they're learning by doing.
So the way this works is whenever you're a just a beginner, we give you very simple sentences.
There's a lot of very simple sentences on the web.
And as you translate them and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language.
And as you get more advanced, we give you more complex sentences to translate.
People are really learning a language.
People really can learn a language with it.
So people really do learn a language.
And not only do they learn it as well, but actually it's more interesting.
Because with Duolingo, people are learning with real content.
As opposed to learning with made-up sentences, people are learning with real content, which is inherently interesting.
So people really do learn a language.
But perhaps more surprisingly, the translations that we get from people using the site, even though they're just beginners, the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators, which is very surprising.
This is a sentence that was translated from German into English.
The top is the German. The middle is an English translation that was done by a professional translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation.
And the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo, none of whom knew any German before they started using the site.
If you can see, it's pretty much perfect.
Of course, we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators.
We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator.
Now, even though we're combining the translations, the site actually can translate pretty fast.
So let me show you, this is our estimates of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish.
So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish, we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users.
And we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users.
Since all the projects my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users, we're hopeful that we'll be able to translate extremely fast.
Now, the thing that I'm most excited about with Duolingo is I think this provides a fair business model for language education.
So here's the thing: The current business model for language education is the student pays, and in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone 500 dollars.
(Laughter) That's the current business model.
The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world's population doesn't have 500 dollars.
So it's extremely unfair towards the poor.
Now, see, in Duolingo, because while you learn, you're actually creating value, you're translating stuff -- which, for example, we could charge somebody for translations, so this is how we could monetize this.
Since people are creating value while they're learning, they don't have to pay with their money, they pay with their time.
So the nice thing about Duolingo is, I think, it provides a fair business model -- one that doesn't discriminate against poor people.
So here's the site. Thank you.
(Applause) We haven't yet launched, but if you go there, you can sign up to be part of our private beta, which is probably going to start in three or four weeks.
By the way, I'm the one talking here, but Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team, some of whom are here. So thank you.
(Applause)
I'm here to spread the word about the magnificence of spiders and how much we can learn from them.
Spiders are truly global citizens.
You can find spiders in nearly every terrestrial habitat.
This red dot marks the Great Basin of North America, and I'm involved with an alpine biodiversity project there with some collaborators.
Turning rocks over revealed this crab spider grappling with a beetle.
Spiders are not just everywhere, but they're extremely diverse.
There are over 40,000 described species of spiders.
To put that number into perspective, here's a graph comparing the 40,000 species of spiders to the 400 species of primates.
There are two orders of magnitude more spiders than primates.
Spiders are also extremely old.
On the bottom here, this is the geologic timescale, and the numbers on it indicate millions of years from the present, so the zero here, that would be today.
So what this figure shows is that spiders date back to almost 380 million years.
To put that into perspective, this red vertical bar here marks the divergence time of humans from chimpanzees, a mere seven million years ago.
All spiders make silk at some point in their life.
Most spiders use copious amounts of silk, and silk is essential to their survival and reproduction.
Even fossil spiders can make silk, as we can see from this impression of a spinneret on this fossil spider.
So this means that both spiders and spider silk have been around for 380 million years.
It doesn't take long from working with spiders to start noticing how essential silk is to just about every aspect of their life.
Spiders use silk for many purposes, including the trailing safety dragline, wrapping eggs for reproduction, protective retreats and catching prey.
There are many kinds of spider silk.
For example, this garden spider can make seven different kinds of silks.
When you look at this orb web, you're actually seeing many types of silk fibers.
The frame and radii of this web is made up of one type of silk, while the capture spiral is a composite of two different silks: the filament and the sticky droplet.
How does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk?
To answer that, you have to look a lot closer at the spinneret region of a spider.
So silk comes out of the spinnerets, and for those of us spider silk biologists, this is what we call the "business end" of the spider. (Laughter) We spend long days ...
(Laughter) We spend long days and nights staring at this part of the spider.
You can see multiple fibers coming out of the spinnerets, because each spinneret has many spigots on it.
Each of these silk fibers exits from the spigot, and if you were to trace the fiber back into the spider, what you would find is that each spigot connects to its own individual silk gland. A silk gland kind of looks like a sac with a lot of silk proteins stuck inside.
So if you ever have the opportunity to dissect an orb-web-weaving spider, and I hope you do, what you would find is a bounty of beautiful, translucent silk glands.
Inside each spider, there are hundreds of silk glands, sometimes thousands.
These can be grouped into seven categories.
They differ by size, shape, and sometimes even color.
There's also aciniform silk, which is used to wrap prey.
But what, exactly, is spider silk?
Spider silk is almost entirely protein.
Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family, so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today.
There are several features that all these silks have in common. They all have a common design, such as they're all very long -- they're sort of outlandishly long compared to other proteins.
They're very repetitive, and they're very rich in the amino acids glycine and alanine.
To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk protein, it's just a portion of it, from the black widow spider.
This is the kind of sequence that I love looking at day and night. (Laughter) So what you're seeing here is the one letter abbreviation for amino acids, and I've colored in the glycines with green, and the alanines in red, and so you can see it's just a lot of G's and A's.
You can also see that there's a lot of short sequence motifs that repeat over and over and over again, so for example there's a lot of what we call polyalanines, or iterated A's, AAAAA. There's GGQ. There's GGY.
You can think of these short motifs that repeat over and over again as words, and these words occur in sentences.
So for example this would be one sentence, and you would get this sort of green region and the red polyalanine, that repeats over and over and over again, and you can have that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times within an individual silk molecule.
Silks made by the same spider can have dramatically different repeat sequences.
At the top of the screen, you're seeing the repeat unit from the dragline silk of a garden argiope spider.
It's short. And on the bottom, this is the repeat sequence for the egg case, or tubuliform silk protein, for the exact same spider. And you can see how dramatically different these silk proteins are -- so this is sort of the beauty of the diversification of the spider silk gene family.
You can see that the repeat units differ in length. They also differ in sequence.
So I've colored in the glycines again in green, alanine in red, and the serines, the letter S, in purple. And you can see that the top repeat unit can be explained almost entirely by green and red, and the bottom repeat unit has a substantial amount of purple.
What silk biologists do is we try to relate these sequences, these amino acid sequences, to the mechanical properties of the silk fibers.
Now, it's really convenient that spiders use their silk completely outside their body.
This makes testing spider silk really, really easy to do in the laboratory, because we're actually, you know, testing it in air that's exactly the environment that spiders are using their silk proteins.
So this makes quantifying silk properties by methods such as tensile testing, which is basically, you know, tugging on one end of the fiber, very amenable.
Here are stress-strain curves generated by tensile testing five fibers made by the same spider.
So what you can see here is that the five fibers have different behaviors.
Specifically, if you look on the vertical axis, that's stress. If you look at the maximum stress value for each of these fibers, you can see that there's a lot of variation, and in fact dragline, or major ampullate silk, is the strongest of these fibers.
We think that's because the dragline silk, which is used to make the frame and radii for a web, needs to be very strong.
So silk fibers vary in their strength and also their extensibility.
So if the web was made entirely out of dragline silk, an insect is very likely to just bounce right off. But by having really, really stretchy capture spiral silk, the web is actually able to absorb the impact of that intercepted prey.
There's quite a bit of variation within the fibers that an individual spider can make.
We call that the tool kit of a spider.
That's what the spider has to interact with their environment.
But how about variation among spider species, so looking at one type of silk and looking at different species of spiders?
This is an area that's largely unexplored but here's a little bit of data I can show you.
Some of them are orb-weaving spiders and some of them are non-orb-weaving spiders.
What you see here on this toughness graph is the higher the black dot is on the graph, the higher the toughness.
These are the two species of spiders for which the vast majority of time and money on synthetic spider silk research has been to replicate their dragline silk proteins.
It frees us from the constraints of our imagination.
Now I'm going to mark on the toughness values for nylon fiber, bombyx -- or domesticated silkworm silk -- wool, Kevlar, and carbon fibers.
It's the combination of strength, extensibility and toughness that makes spider silk so special, and that has attracted the attention of biomimeticists, so people that turn to nature to try to find new solutions.
And the strength, extensibility and toughness of spider silks combined with the fact that silks do not elicit an immune response, have attracted a lot of interest in the use of spider silks in biomedical applications, for example, as a component of artificial tendons, for serving as guides to regrow nerves, and for scaffolds for tissue growth.
Spider silks also have a lot of potential for their anti-ballistic capabilities.
Silks could be incorporated into body and equipment armor that would be more lightweight and flexible than any armor available today.
In addition to these biomimetic applications of spider silks, personally, I find studying spider silks just fascinating in and of itself.
I love when I'm in the laboratory, a new spider silk sequence comes in.
That's just the best. (Laughter) It's like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me, and that's why I'm going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk.
The next time you see a spider web, please, pause and look a little closer.
You'll be seeing one of the most high-performance materials known to man.
To borrow from the writings of a spider named Charlotte, silk is terrific.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Over the last 13 years -- one, three, 13 years -- I've been part of an exceptional team at InSightec in Israel and partners around the world for taking this idea, this concept, noninvasive surgery, from the research lab to routine clinical use.
13 years -- for some of you, you can empathize with that number.
For me, today, on this date, it's like a second bar mitzvah experience.
(Laughter) So this dream is really enabled by the convergence of two known technologies.
One is the focused ultrasound, and the other one is the vision-enabled magnetic resonance imaging.
So let's first talk about focused ultrasound.
And I hold in my hand a tissue-mimicking phantom.
It is transparent, made just for you.
So you see, it's all intact, completely transparent.
This is a setup I put in a physics lab.
On the right-hand side, you see an ultrasonic transducer.
Okay, when you hear the click, this is when the energy starts to emit and you see a little lesion form inside the phantom.
Okay, so everything around it is whole and intact.
So think about, this is in your brain.
So this is, I think, the first kosher Hippocratic surgical system.
(Laughter) Okay, so let's talk a little bit about ultrasound, the force of ultrasound.
You know all about imaging, right, ultrasound imaging.
And you know also about lithotripsy -- breaking kidney stones.
But ultrasound can be shaped to be anything in between, because it's a mechanical force.
So this idea of harnessing focused ultrasound to treat lesions in the brain is not new at all.
But you may not know that he tried to perform lobotomies in the brain, noninvasively, with focused ultrasound in the '50s.
And it makes you ponder why those pioneers failed.
It wasn't until the invention of the MR and really the integration of MR with focused ultrasound that we could get the feedback -- both the anatomical and the physiological in order to have a completely noninvasive, closed-loop surgical procedure.
So this is how it looks, you know, the operating room of the future today.
This is an MR suite with a focused ultrasound system.
And I will give you several examples.
So the first one is in the brain.
One of the neurological conditions that can be treated with focused ultrasound are movement disorders, like Parkinson's or essential tremor.
What is typical to those conditions, to essential tremor for example, is inability to drink or eat cereal or soup without spilling everything all over you, or write legibly so people can understand it, and be really independent in your life without the help of others.
So I'd like you to meet John.
John is a retired professor of history from Virginia.
So he suffered from essential tremor for many years.
And medication didn't help him anymore.
And many of those patients refused to undergo surgery to have people cut into their brain.
And about four or five months ago, he underwent an experimental procedure.
And this is his handwriting.
This is his handwriting on the morning of the treatment before going into the MR So now I'll take you through [what] a typical procedure like that looks like, [what] noninvasive surgery looks like.
So we put the patient on the MR table.
We attach a transducer, in this case, to the brain, but if it will be a different organ, it will be a different transducer attached to the patient.
I don't have a pointer here, but you see the green, sort of rectangle or trapezoid?
It's a safety boundary around the target.
It's a target in the thalamus.
The only handwork the physician does here is moving a mouse.
So he presses "sonicate," and this is what happens.
You see the transducer, the light blue.
There's water in between the skull and the transducer.
And it does this burst of energy.
So the first sonication is at lower energy.
And one of the unique capabilities that we leverage with the MR is the ability to measure temperature noninvasively.
It is not being used in regular diagnostic imaging.
But here we can get both the anatomical imaging and the temperature maps in real time.
The temperature was raised to 43 degrees C temporarily.
So once the physician verifies that the focus spot is on the target he has chosen, then we move to perform a full-energy ablation like you see here.
And you see the temperature rises to like 55 to 60 degrees C.
If you do it for more than a second, it's enough to basically destroy the proteins of the cells.
This is an immediate relief.
(Applause) Thank you.
John is one of [about] a dozen very heroic, courageous people who volunteered for the study.
And his wife said, "This is the happiest moment of my life."
I mean, one of the messages I like to carry over is, what about defending quality of life?
They are dependent on others.
And John today is fully independent.
He returned to a normal life routine.
And he also plays golf, like you do in Virginia when you are retired.
Okay, so you can see here the spot.
It's like three millimeters in the middle of the brain.
Let's move now to a more painful subject.
Pain is something that can make your life miserable.
And people are suffering from all kinds of pain like neuropathic pain, lower-back pain and cancer pain from bone metastases, when the metastases get to your bones, sometimes they are very painful.
All those I've indicated have already been shown to be successfully treated by focused ultrasound relieving the pain, again, very fast.
And I would like to tell you about PJ.
He's a 78 year-old farmer who suffered from -- how should I say it? -- it's called pain in the butt.
He had metastases in his right buttock, and he couldn't sit even with medication.
And again, he volunteered to a pivotal study that we ran worldwide, also in the U.S.
And his wife actually took him.
They drove like three hours from their farm to the hospital.
So again, this is an immediate relief.
And you have to understand what those people feel and what their family experiences when it happens.
He returned again to his daily routine on the farm.
He rides his tractor.
But now, you ask me, but what about war, the war on cancer?
Show us some primary cancer.
So I have good news and bad news.
I don't see, without this nation taking it as some collective will or something that is a national goal to make that happen, it will not happen.
And it's not just because of regulation; it's because of the amount of money needed under the current evidence-based medicine and the size of trials and so on to make it happen.
So the first two applications are breast cancer and prostate cancer.
They were the first to be treated by focused ultrasound.
And we have better-than-surgery results in breasts.
But I have a message for the men here.
There is a unique opportunity now with focused ultrasound guided by MR, because we can actually think about prostate lumpectomy -- treating just the focal lesion and not removing the whole gland, and by that, avoiding all the issues with potency and incontinence.
Well, there are other cancer tumors in the abdomen -- quite lethal, very lethal actually -- pancreas, liver, kidney.
And this will take time.
This will take two years.
And this is, in 2004, the FDA has approved MR-guided focused ultrasounds for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids.
All those tumors have heavy bleeding during periods, abdominal pressure, back pain, frequent urination.
She was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized fibroid.
This is a big fibroid.
So she elected to undergo a focused ultrasound procedure in 2008.
And in 2010, she became a first-time mother to a healthy baby.
So new life was born.
(Applause) So in conclusion, I'd like to leave you with actually four messages.
And the other thing I would like you to think about is the new type of relationship between physician and patients when you have a patient on the table [who] is awake and can even monitor the treatment.
In all our treatments, the patient holds a stop sonication button.
(Applause)
I won't be able to tell you what it is until it happens.
(Music) (Applause) Okay, so first of all, let's welcome Mr. Jamire Williams on the drums, (Applause) Burniss Travis on the bass, (Applause) and Mr. Christian Sands on the piano.
(Applause) So the bandstand, as we call it, this is an incredible space.
It is really a sacred space.
You really are alive right here in this moment.
In the middle, we sort of made our way into a song called "Titi Boom."
So the idea of a mistake: From the perspective of a jazz musician, it's easier to talk about someone else's mistake.
Every "mistake" is an opportunity in jazz.
So it's hard to even describe what a funny note would be.
(Music) So if Christian played a note -- like play an F.
If you played an F# though, (Dissonance) to most people's ears, they would perceive that as a mistake.
And at some point, Christian will introduce this note.
We'll see what happens when we play with this palette.
(Music) So someone could conceptually perceive that as a mistake.
He'll play it. I don't know how we'll react to it, but something will change.
(Music) So you see, he played this note.
I ended up creating a melody out of it.
The texture changed in the drums this time.
It got a little bit more rhythmic, a little bit more intense in response to how I responded to it.
The only mistake is if I'm not aware, if each individual musician is not aware and accepting enough of his fellow band member to incorporate the idea and we don't allow for creativity.
So jazz, this bandstand is absolutely amazing.
And I know that I speak for all of us when I tell you that we don't take it for granted.
We know that to be able to come on the bandstand and play music is a blessing.
So how does this all relate to behavioral finance?
(Laughter) Anyway, I just wanted to sort of point out the way that we handle it.
But what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities.
(Music) It's kind of chaotic because I'm bullying my ideas.
If I really want the music to go there, the best way for me to do it is to listen.
This is a science of listening.
It has far more to do with what I can perceive than what it is that I can do.
So if I want the music to get to a certain level of intensity, the first step for me is to be patient, to listen to what's going on and pull from something that's going on around me.
When you do that, you engage and inspire the other musicians and they give you more, and gradually it builds.
It's much more organic. It's much more nuanced.
It's about being here in the moment, accepting one another and allowing creativity to flow.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) (Applause) Maybe a tank?
So today, I want to talk about the microprinter, about my work, how everything started, what was my motivation to build the smallest 3-D printer in the world.
You need a complex laser system, a so-called femtosecond laser system, which you focus onto a very tiny spot -- very, very, very tiny -- and this is a very expensive, not very durable laser system. (Laughs) And on the other hand, you need a very complex positioning system.
We call it "Agathe," because it's very heavy, and we thought Agathe was a nice name.
(Laughter) And, well, you need this system to move the laser through, for example, at the very accurate level, about 200 nanometers, so very accurate.
So you can print out whatever you want, you can print out a tower bridge, you can print out Agathe's husband ...
You maybe notice this scale bar, and it's 100 microns for the tower bridge and 20 microns for the fat man.
For comparison, the diameter of a human hair is around 50 microns.
So these objects are like a dust particle or even smaller, so you can hardly see them.
What you can also do and what we are also working on is improving the system, improving the resins, the material we use for catching a worm or something else.
What we're trying to do, or what the next step would be, is to make biocompatible polymers and maybe to write some things inside your body or inside the body of a worm, or to attach cells to our structures, and so on.
Today I want to tell the story behind the microprinter.
What was my motivation?
Well, everything started on Monday morning, 6:30.
OK, that's a lie. Maybe it was 10 o'clock.
(Laughter) I went to my laser lab, which is located near Karlsplatz, in Freihaus, at the Vienna University of Technology.
I went in, and I saw that this laser system was broken, and I tried to fix it.
Then I noticed, OK, there is a major issue with the pump source.
I cannot fix that myself; we have to call the service technician.
And from that point on, I noticed I had time to think.
So I thought, "What to do now? Maybe start to write my PhD thesis."
(Laughter) No, no, not a good idea at all.
So I started thinking, maybe write a scientific paper.
Not a good idea at all.
And then, on Saturday, after a week of thinking, I came up with the idea to build the smallest 3-D microprinter in the world.
(Laughter) Or, the smallest 3-D printer in the world.
(Applause) So I called my professor and told him about it.
"Go ahead, build it."
And after a few months, we had the first test run with the system.
It worked brilliantly from the first test on, and it had the same resolution as systems which cost 60,000 euros, and we only spent 1,500 euros for the system, not including my salary, but that wouldn't add so much on its own.
(Laughter) OK, how does this work?
This video was produced by a friend of mine, Junior Veloso.
Maybe you have 100 slices, 1,000 or 10,000 slices.
Of course, this is a much bigger machine than the microprinter, but it uses more or less the same principles, so that's what I want to show you.
At the end, this head, this alien head, is attached to the building platform, and when the process is done, you just simply have to break the head from the support structure you need, and then everything is ready.
So.
OK, but what does the microprinter look like?
Well, maybe some of you have already seen this picture.
So it's very small, it's really a desktop version.
And we are really proud of it, actually, and -- (Laughter) And you have this tiny little system; there are bigger ones.
What can you do with a cheap, affordable system?
They have to be produced individually for each person, so this is a perfect example for using this technology to create the shell for a hearing aid.
(Applause) Then they print it out with a big machine, and then, when it's ready to send back to Vienna or wherever you are -- via post -- then they put in the electronics.
When you have a microprinter in your store, you can go to the store, they scan your ear, they just press "Print," the 3-D model gets sliced, and you can go for a coffee, you can go to the university, whatever you want, and instead of five days, you can have your ear shell or your hearing aid in just one day.
And that is an example of how these tiny little machines or other cheap 3-D printers could change our everyday lives.
(Applause)
Frank Gehry: I listened to this scientist this morning.
When I was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and I decided to make water.
(Laughter) So, I made a hydrogen generator and I made an oxygen generator, and I had the two pipes leading into a beaker and I threw a match in.
(Laughter) And the glass -- luckily I turned around -- I had it all in my back and I was about 15 feet away.
The wall was covered with ...
Richard Saul Wurman: Really?
FG: People on the street came and knocked on the door to see if I was okay.
RSW: ... huh. (Laughter) I'd like to start this session again.
The gentleman to my left is the very famous, perhaps overly famous, Frank Gehry.
(Laughter) (Applause) And Frank, you've come to a place in your life, which is astonishing.
I mean it is astonishing for an artist, for an architect, to become actually an icon and a legend in their own time.
I mean you have become, whether you can giggle at it because it's a funny ... you know, it's a strange thought, but your building is an icon -- you can draw a little picture of that building, it can be used in ads -- and you've had not rock star status, but celebrity status in doing what you wanted to do for most of your life.
You kept moving ahead in a life where you're dependent on working for somebody.
But that's an interesting thing for a creative person.
A lot of us work for people; we're in the hands of other people.
And that's one of the great dilemmas -- we're in a creativity session -- it's one of the great dilemmas in creativity: how to do work that's big enough and not sell out.
FG: Well, I've always just ...
I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.
And when I started out, I thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff.
And I realized when I'd come into the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars.
And actually, it was responding to clients that I had who didn't have very much money, so they couldn't afford very much.
Until I got to my house, where the client was my wife.
And a few people got excited about it.
I was visiting with an artist, Michael Heizer, out in the desert near Las Vegas somewhere.
He's building this huge concrete place.
And it was late in the evening. We'd had a lot to drink.
We were standing out in the desert all alone and, thinking about my house, he said, "Did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent, somewhere in 2000 years somebody's going to like it?"
(Laughter) So, I thought, "Yeah, that's probably a good idea."
Luckily I started to get some clients that had a little more money, so the stuff was a little more permanent.
But I just found out the world ain't going to last that long, this guy was telling us the other day.
For me, every day is a new thing.
So I approach it with the same trepidation.
When Bilbao was finished and I looked at it, I saw all the mistakes, I saw ...
RSW: What's the status of the New York project?
So, I think he's Icarus and Phoenix all in one guy.
(Laughter) He gets up there and then he ... comes back up.
They're still talking about it.
September 11 generated some interest in moving it over to Ground Zero, and I'm totally against that.
RSW: The picture on the screen, is that Disney?
FG: Yeah.
RSW: How much further along is it than that, and when will that be finished?
FG: That will be finished in 2003 -- September, October -- and I'm hoping Kyu, and Herbie, and Yo-Yo and all those guys come play with us at that place.
Luckily, today most of the people I'm working with are people I really like.
Richard Koshalek is probably one of the main reasons that Disney Hall came to me.
He's been a cheerleader for quite a long time.
There aren't many people around that are really involved with architecture as clients.
He's become the head of Art Center, and there's a building by Craig Ellwood there.
I knew Craig and respected him.
They want to add to it and it's hard to add to a building like that -- it's a beautiful, minimalist, black steel building -- and Richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it's a lot of acreage.
I convinced him to let me bring in another architect from Portugal: Alvaro Siza.
RSW: Why did you want that?
FG: I knew you'd ask that question.
It was intuitive.
(Laughter) Alvaro Siza grew up and lived in Portugal and is probably considered the Portuguese main guy in architecture.
I visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work, and his early work had a resemblance to my early work.
When I came out of college, I started to try to do things contextually in Southern California, and you got into the logic of Spanish colonial tile roofs and things like that.
I just stopped.
I mean, Charlie Moore did a bunch of it, but it didn't feel good to me.
And I always felt that he should come to Southern California and do a building.
Did you see that thing?
RSW: No. What did he say?
FG: He calls architecture "plumbing."
(Laughter) FG: Anyway, the Siza thing.
It's a richer experience.
FG: Liquid architecture.
(Laughter) Where you ... It's like jazz: you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something.
And I think for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city.
RSW: Is it going to be near the current campus?
(Laughter) RSW: What's his schedule on that?
FG: I don't know.
FG: 2004.
You can come to the opening. I'll invite you.
Everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment, and if you can figure out how to work off each other -- if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other's work and play off each other, you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the one architect.
Like the Rockefeller Center model, which is kind of from another era.
RSW: I found the most remarkable thing.
My preconception of Bilbao was this wonderful building, you go inside and there'd be extraordinary spaces.
The surprise of Bilbao was in its context to the city.
That was the surprise of going across the river, of going on the highway around it, of walking down the street and finding it.
That was the real surprise of Bilbao.
FG: But you know, Richard, most architects when they present their work -- most of the people we know, you get up and you talk about your work, and it's almost like you tell everybody you're a good guy by saying, "Look, I'm worried about the context, I'm worried about the city, I'm worried about my client, I worry about budget, that I'm on time."
Blah, blah, blah and all that stuff.
And it's like cleansing yourself so that you can ...
You've got to work with the building department.
If you don't meet the budgets, you're not going to get much work.
If it leaks -- Bilbao did not leak.
I was so proud.
(Laughter) The MIT project -- they were interviewing me for MIT and they sent their facilities people to Bilbao.
I met them in Bilbao.
They came for three days.
RSW: This is the computer building?
FG: Yeah, the computer building.
They were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around -- I noticed they were looking under things and looking for things, and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden, you know?
But you've got to -- yeah, well up until then every building leaked, so this ...
(Laughter) RSW: Frank had a sort of ...
FG: Ask Miriam!
RW: ... sort of had a fame. His fame was built on that in L.A. for a while.
(Laughter) FG: You've all heard the Frank Lloyd Wright story, when the woman called and said, "Mr. Wright, I'm sitting on the couch and the water's pouring in on my head."
And he said, "Madam, move your chair."
(Laughter) So, some years later I was doing a building, a little house on the beach for Norton Simon, and his secretary, who was kind of a hell on wheels type lady, called me and said, "Mr. Simon's sitting at his desk and the water's coming in on his head."
And I told her the Frank Lloyd Wright story.
FG: No. Not now either.
OK, you solved all the problems, you did all the stuff, you made nice, you loved your clients, you loved the city, you're a good guy, you're a good person ...
and then what?
And I think that's what I've always been interested in, is that -- which is a personal kind of expression.
Bilbao, I think, shows that you can have that kind of personal expression and still touch all the bases that are necessary of fitting into the city.
They're hiring them to get it done, get it on budget, be polite, and they're missing out on the real value of an architect.
RSW: At a certain point a number of years ago, people -- when Michael Graves was a fashion, before teapots ...
FG: I did a teapot and nobody bought it.
FG: No.
(Laughter) RSW: ... people wanted a Michael Graves building.
Is that a curse, that people want a Bilbao building?
FG: Yeah.
And I've met with some of these people.
In one case, I flew all the way to Malaga with a team because the thing was signed with seals and various very official seals from the city, and that they wanted me to come and do a building in their port.
I asked them what kind of building it was.
"When you get here we'll explain it." Blah, blah, blah.
So four of us went.
And they took us -- they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay, and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor.
Each one was more beautiful than the other.
And then we were going to have lunch with the mayor and we were going to have dinner with the most important people in Malaga.
Just before going to lunch with the mayor, we went to the harbor commissioner.
We sat down, and we had a drink of water and everybody was quiet.
(Laughter) RSW: Oh, my God.
FG: So, I got up.
I said to my team, "Let's get out of here."
They followed -- the guy that dragged us there followed us and he said, "You mean you're not going to have lunch with the mayor?"
I said, "Nope."
They just brought us there to hustle this group, you know, to create a project.
And we get a lot of that.
Luckily, I'm old enough that I can complain I can't travel.
(Laughter) I don't have my own plane yet.
FG: Can I say something?
Are you going to talk about me or you?
(Laughter) (Applause) RSW: Once a shit, always a shit!
FG: Because I want to get a standing ovation like everybody, so ...
RSW: You're going to get one! You're going to get one!
(Laughter) I'm going to make it for you!
FG: No, no. Wait a minute!
(Applause)
Thank you.
I feel it's sort of like the Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient work from ancient India in which the Buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area, Vaishali, and they bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make an offering to him.
So he was hanging out with the movie star, and of course they were grumbling: "He's supposed to be religious and all this.
What's he doing over there at Amrapali's house with all his 500 monks," and so on. They were all grumbling, and so they boycotted him.
But the young people all came.
And they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol, and they put it on the ground.
And as soon as they had laid all these, all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient India, he performed a kind of special effect which made it into a giant planetarium, the wonder of the universe. Everyone looked in that, and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes.
And of course, in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets.
So they don't -- when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky -- they don't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding.
They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that.
He made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected.
And we're all still trying to, I guess we're all trying to become TEDsters, if that's a modern form of enlightenment.
I guess so. Because in a way, if a TEDster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything, it's the forging of a mass awareness, of where everybody can really know everything that's going on everywhere in the planet.
With all of us knowing everything, we're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened.
And of course, we all will be deeply disappointed when we do.
Because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do, a little bit tired, we do suffer.
We distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere, but basically we all have this common misery that we are sort of stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there.
Because our egocentric perception -- from the Buddha's point of view, misperception -- is that all we are is what is inside our skin.
And it's inside and outside, self and other, and other is all very different.
And everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception, a little bit, right?
What do they want from me? Like, who's that?
Because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone, each of us, and everyone else is different, then that puts us in an impossible situation, doesn't it?
Who is it who's going to get enough attention from the world?
Who's going to get enough out of the world?
Who's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings -- if you're different from all the other beings?
So where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way: through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge actually, knowing that you have no such boundary, knowing your interconnectedness with other beings.
You can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them.
When you do that, you're forced to feel what they feel.
Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people's suffering.
But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life.
When you're no longer locked in yourself, and as the wisdom or the intelligence or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world, that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life. And you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing.
Too bad nobody ever woke up to it, and they've been trying to suppress it since then.
I, me, me, mine. It's like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching.
But when we're relieved from that, we somehow then become interested in all the other beings.
And we feel ourselves differently. It's totally strange.
It's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know -- and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets.
You know, the big communist revolutions, Russia and China and so forth.
They didn't help at all.
But of course, what you said, I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion is that it is more fun.
It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That's the key.
Everybody has the wrong idea. They think Buddha was so boring, and they're so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he's fairly jolly.
Even though his people are being genocided -- and believe me, he feels every blow on every old nun's head, in every Chinese prison. He feels it.
He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays.
You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is, how it can be changed.
Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us. She scared us with the lava man.
It's really lovely.
So, compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion.
The human being is compassion because what is our brain for?
So the first person who gets happy, when you stop focusing on the self-centered situation of, how happy am I, where you're always dissatisfied -- as Mick Jagger told us. You never get any satisfaction that way.
So then you decide, "Well, I'm sick of myself.
And the first person who gets happy when you do that, you don't do anything for anybody else, but you get happier, you yourself, because your whole perception broadens and you suddenly see the whole world and all of the people in it.
And you realize that this -- being with these people -- is the flower garden that Chiho showed us.
It is Nirvana.
And my time is up. And I know the TED commandments.
Thank you.
Let's talk about thrift.
Thrift is a concept where you reduce, reuse and recycle, but yet with an economic aspect I think has a real potential for change.
My grandmother, she knew about thrift.
This is her string jar.
She would put it in the jar and then use it when it was needed.
When you want to throw out a cardboard box, the average kid will say, "Don't! I want to use it for a robot head or for a canoe to paddle down a river."
They understand the value of the second life of products.
When we get that bright, new, shiny toy, it's because, basically, we got rid of the old one.
That problem is that there is really no way.
When you throw something away, it typically goes into a landfill.
At the moment, we have about 1.3 billion tons of material every year going into landfills.
By 2100, it's going to be about four billion tons.
What that means is, we consider materials when they go into products and also when they get used, and, at the end of their life: When can they be used again?
It's the idea of completely changing the way we think about waste, so waste is no longer a dirty word -- we almost remove the word "waste" completely.
Resource goes into a product and then can basically go into another product.
My grandmother, again, used to use old seed packets to paper the bathroom walls.
I think, though, there are companies out there who understand this value and are promoting it.
And a lot of the technologies that have been developed for the smart age can also be adapted to reduce, reuse and also thrift more proficiently.
The first one, a good one; the second one, not so good.
The first is the automotive industry.
Not always known as the most innovative or creative of industries, but it turns out, they're really, really good at recycling their products.
And of that car, about 75 percent of the entire car actually gets used again.
That includes, of course, the old steel and aluminum but then also the plastics from the fender and the interiors, glass from the windows and the windshield and also the tires.
There's a mature and successful industry that deals with these old cars and basically recycles them and puts them back into use as new cars or other new products.
Even as we move towards battery-powered cars, there are companies that claim they can recycle up to 90 percent of the 11 million tons of batteries that are going to be with us in 2020.
That, I think, is not perfect, but it's certainly good, and it's getting better.
We don't dismantle, we don't disassemble, we demolish.
There are programs that can actually reduce some of this material.
A good example is this.
These are actually bricks that are made from old demolition waste, which includes the glass, the rubble, the concrete.
You put up a grinder, put it all together, heat it up and make these bricks we can basically build more buildings from.
But it's only a fraction of what we need.
My hope is that with big data and geotagging, we can actually change that, and be more thrifty when it comes to buildings.
If there's a building down the block which is being demolished, are there materials there that the new building being built here can use?
Can we use that, the ability to understand that all the materials available in that building are still usable?
Can we then basically put them into a new building, without actually losing any value in the process?
So now let's think about other industries.
What are other industries doing to create thrift?
Well, it turns out that there are plenty of industries that are also thinking about their own waste and what we can do with it.
Most metal smelters give off an awful lot of carbon dioxide.
Turns out, there's a company called Land Detector that's actually working in China and also soon in South Africa, that's able to take that waste gas -- about 700,000 tons per smelter -- and then turn it into about 400,000 tons of ethanol, which is equivalent to basically powering 250,000, or quarter of a million, cars for a year.
That's a very effective use of waste.
This is a simple solution.
The advantage with this is not just a simplification of the process, it's also, "I've got one material. I have zero waste," and then also, "I'm able to potentially recycle that at the end of its life."
Digital manufacturing is also allowing us to do this more effectively.
In this case, it's actually creating the theoretical limit of strength for a material: you cannot get any stronger for the amount of material than this shape.
So it's a basic simple block, but the idea is, I can extrapolate this, I can make it into large formats, I can make it into buildings, bridges, but also airplane wings and shoes.
Here's a good example from architecture.
Typically, these sorts of metal nodes are used to hold up large tent structures.
In this case, it in was in the Hague, along a shopping center.
They used 1600 of the materials on the left.
The difference is, by using the solution on the right, they cut down the number of steps from seven to one, because the one on the left is currently welded, the one on the right is simply just printed.
And it was able to reduce waste to zero, cost less money and also, because it's made out of steel, can be eventually recycled at the end of its life.
Nature also is very effective at thrift.
So, in this case, nanocellulose, which is basically one of the very fine building blocks of cellulose, which is one of the materials that makes trees strong, you can isolate it, and it works very much like carbon fiber.
So, take that from a tree, form it into fibers, and then those fibers can strengthen things, such as airplanes, buildings, cars.
The advantage of this, though, is it's not just bioderived, comes from a renewable resource, but also that it is transparent, so it can be used in consumer electronics, as well as food packaging.
Not bad for something that basically comes from the backyard.
Another one from the biosource is synthetic spider silk.
Now, it's very hard to actually create spider silk naturally.
You can basically get it from spiders, but in large numbers, they tend to kill each other, eat each other, so you've got a problem with creating it, in the same way you do with regular silk.
So what you can do is instead take the DNA from the spider, and put it into various different things.
You can put it into bacteria, you can put it into yeast, you can put it into milk.
But again, it's bioderived, and at the end of its life, it potentially can go back into the soil and get composted to again be potentially used as a new material.
It's the water bottle.
We have too many of them, they're basically going everywhere, they're a problem in the ocean.
Because when we think about reusing and recycling, metals, glass, things like that, can be recycled as many times as you like.
There's metal in your car that may well have come from a 1950s Oldsmobile, because you can recycle it infinitely with no loss of performance.
Plastics offer about once or twice of recycling, whether it's a bottle, whether it's a chair -- whatever it is, if it's carpet -- after two times of recycling, whether it goes back into another chair, etc, it tends to lose strength, it's no longer of any use.
This, though, just using a few enzymes, is able to recycle it infinitely.
And then from those molecules, you can build another chair or carpet or bottle.
So, the cycle is infinite.
The advantage with that, of course, is that you have potentially zero loss of material resources.
Again, the perfect idea of thrift.
(Applause)
Jamie Oliver: My wish ...
is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food.
(Music) To inspire families to cook again and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity.
I came here to start a food revolution that I profoundly believe in.
(Applause) [Great Big Story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world.
But they couldn't do it alone.
(Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ...
[Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] (Knife chop) (Music) JO: Food is simple. It's just raw ingredients.
But it's the most powerful killer on the planet.
Every child has the human right to be taught about food: where it comes from, how it affects their body.
[Timothy Baker Head teacher] Timothy Baker: In the past, the children weren't eating the right things.
I've been inspired by Jamie to educate this school about the fact that we're feeding the children the wrong food.
And I thought, well, the timetable is an already crowded place -- there are so many lessons in the primary curriculum.
How can you introduce another subject for teachers to teach?
So we looked at English, we looked at maths, science, history, geography and we saw how we could put that around food.
Male teacher: Today we're doing a little bit of science in the kitchen.
Female teacher: We are going to combine our lessons on Diwali, but also our lessons on shape and symmetry.
Male teacher: Is this a physical change or a chemical change?
Children: Physical!
Male teacher: You're right.
TB: For history topics, we talk about the history of chocolate, and so we can do a whole topic around that.
Male teacher: And the Aztecs have been cooking with chocolate -- TB: And it's interesting because it's not made as they think, with all the milk in that they would have had -- and the taste is very, very different.
Some children like it; some children don't.
(Laughter) For maths, simple weighing and measuring.
(Children yell excitedly) TB: Charlton Manor is a state school.
About 80 percent of children come from areas that are identified as in poverty.
The children had very little experience of being outside in the countryside, knowing about food-growing.
(Children shout) Students: Welcome to the Secret Garden!
Kehinde: This is our greenhouse.
This is our compost bin.
(Music) This is our vegetable patch.
And these are our chickens.
Sean: The chickens come out, and they try and chase you.
I had to run for my life.
TB: Up at the community garden, we've got two polytunnels so we can grow year-round.
Sean: I will pick onions, broccoli and carrots because they're all healthy, they make you stronger -- obviously -- and they just make me happy.
(Birds chirp) TB: 12 or 13 years ago, there was a reluctance to engage in this sort of curriculum.
There were many people that couldn't see what we were aiming for and what we were trying to do.
Obesity hadn't reached the epidemic proportions it has reached now.
Behavior issues are incredibly lower than they have been in the past.
Elizabeth: One the of the great things they've done is introduce us to worlds of healthy food.
Sean: I feel better when I eat healthier food.
JO: You don't die young because you didn't do your geography homework.
These kids die young if they don't know how to feed themselves.
His story, we want to replicate, but the truth is we've got so much more to do.
TB: Jamie really revolutionized our school dinners, and it really has hugely impacted all the children, but so many in a deep way which is going to stick with them for the rest of their lives.
When you change a life like that, it makes it all worthwhile.
From all of us at the Charlton Manor, thank you, Jamie.
Student: Thank you, Jamie.
Student: Thank you, Jamie.
[Join the food revolution JamiesFoodRevolution.org]
My travels to Afghanistan began many, many years ago on the eastern border of my country, my homeland, Poland.
I was walking through the forests of my grandmother's tales.
Behind the destruction, I found a soul of places.
I met humble people.
I heard their prayer and ate their bread.
Then I have been walking East for 20 years -- from Eastern Europe to Central Asia -- through the Caucasus Mountains, Middle East, North Africa, Russia.
And I shared their bread and their prayer.
This is why I went to Afghanistan.
One day, I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River.
And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport.
But he gave me a cup of tea.
So I have been walking and traveling, by horses, by yak, by truck, by hitchhiking, from Iran's border to the bottom, to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor.
And in this way I could find noor, the hidden light of Afghanistan.
I heard prayers of the Sufi -- humble Muslims, hated by the Taliban.
Hidden river, interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India.
The mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears, and welcomed as a gift.
What do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect, about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium?
These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war.
These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen.
What do we know about the women 10 years after the war?
I saw one day, the largest school in Afghanistan, a girls' school.
13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground, full of scorpions.
And their love [for studying] was so big that I cried.
What do we know about the death threats by the Taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in Balkh?
The region is not secure, but full of the Taliban, and they did it.
My aim is to give a voice to the silent people, to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game, the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict.
(Applause)
JR: Art is not supposed to change the world.
But art can change the way we see the world.
(Music) So now my wish is ...
And together, we'll turn the world inside out.
[Great big story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world.
But they couldn't do it alone.
(Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ...
And now, here's my wish.
[Torchbearers] [Ideas in action] (Camera clicking) JR: My name is JR, I like to call myself an artist.
But I believe my work is about connecting people.
For me, it's the power of bringing people together.
I went there to do art projects with the community.
And I started thinking: Why I don't take myself out of the equation and let them do it?
Every day, I see rolls leaving around the world.
(Music) Luana: We're a team of four traveling in the Photobooths truck: Josh, Basel, Jamie and I.
(Laughter) We are using two of these trucks to cover 30 cities around America.
Luana: We're just a tool for people that want to send a positive message.
Jamie: Step inside and take a seat over here.
Wait for the flash.
(Music) (Camera clicking) Touch the screen, take your picture, type in information.
No one is used to seeing their face so big.
And we sent them to more than 130 countries.
(Music) Luana: It's the people's art project.
We don't decide the message.
It can be political, to bring attention to issues.
Jamie: I love the idea of using photography to promote change.
This specific project is to raise awareness about the DREAMers situation.
Karina Ruiz: INSIDE OUT is bringing the opportunity for DREAMers like myself, a person that came here at young age to have a better future, to come out and give a face to the issue.
Vianey Perez: When people drive by and they see a lot of faces, they're going to get curious and they're going to wonder who they are.
To humanize it.
Jamie: It all starts with believing. Right?
And so, if you don't believe that you can make change, change will never happen.
Even if it's a very small change in one person, that's a positive change.
JR: I think that definitely art can change the perception we have about the world.
And if we start seeing the world differently, maybe it's a good path to start changing the world.
I want to talk to you about one of the biggest myths in medicine, and that is the idea that all we need are more medical breakthroughs and then all of our problems will be solved.
Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single, solo inventor who, working late in the lab one night, makes an earthshaking discovery, and voila, overnight everything's changed.
In fact, medicine today is a team sport.
And in many ways, it always has been.
I'm a surgeon, and we surgeons have always had this special relationship with light.
And this is why, traditionally, surgeries have always started so early in the morning -- to take advantage of daylight hours.
And if you look at historical pictures of the early operating rooms, they have been on top of buildings.
For example, this is the oldest operating room in the Western world, in London, where the operating room is actually on top of a church with a skylight coming in.
And then this is a picture of one of the most famous hospitals in America.
This is Mass General in Boston.
And do you know where the operating room is?
So nowadays in the operating room, we no longer need to use sunlight.
And because we no longer need to use sunlight, we have very specialized lights that are made for the operating room.
And this is what I think is the magic of fluorescence.
When we are in medical school, we learn our anatomy from illustrations such as this where everything's color-coded.
Nerves are yellow, arteries are red, veins are blue.
That's so easy anybody could become a surgeon, right?
We heard over the last couple days what an urgent problem cancer still is in our society, what a pressing need it is for us to not have one person die every minute.
It's done, it's out, you're cured of cancer.
We do our best, based upon our training and the way the cancer looks and the way it feels and its relationship to other structures and all of our experience, we say, you know what, the cancer's gone.
That's what the surgeon is saying in the operating room when the patient's on the table.
We actually have to take samples from the surgical bed, what's left behind in the patient, and then send those bits to the pathology lab.
In the meanwhile, the patient's on the operating room table.
The pathologist takes that sample, freezes it, cuts it, looks in the microscope one by one and then calls back into the room.
And very often they say, "You know what, points A and B are okay, but point C, you still have some residual cancer there.
So we go back and we do that again, and again.
There's still cancer in your patient."
So now you're faced with telling your patient, first of all, that they may need another surgery, or that they need additional therapy such as radiation or chemotherapy.
So wouldn't it be better if we could really tell, if the surgeon could really tell, whether or not there's still cancer on the surgical field?
I mean, in many ways, the way that we're doing it, we're still operating in the dark.
So in 2004, during my surgical residency, I had the great fortune to meet Dr. Roger Tsien, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2008.
Roger and his team were working on a way to detect cancer, and they had a very clever molecule that they had come up with.
The molecule they had developed had three parts.
The main part of it is the blue part, polycation, and it's basically very sticky to every tissue in your body.
There's no specificity there.
So they added two additional components.
The first one is a polyanionic segment, which basically acts as a non-stick backing like the back of a sticker.
So when those two are together, the molecule is neutral and nothing gets stuck down.
And the two pieces are then linked by something that can only be cut if you have the right molecular scissors -- for example, the kind of protease enzymes that tumors make.
So here in this situation, if you make a solution full of this three-part molecule along with the dye, which is shown in green, and you inject it into the vein of someone who has cancer, normal tissue can't cut it.
The molecule passes through and gets excreted.
However, in the presence of the tumor, now there are molecular scissors that can break this molecule apart right there at the cleavable site.
So here's an example of a nerve that has tumor surrounding it.
Can you tell where the tumor is?
I couldn't when I was working on this.
But here it is. It's fluorescent.
See, so every single one in the audience now can tell where the cancer is.
And the cool thing about fluorescence is that it's not only bright, it actually can shine through tissue.
So even if the tumor is not right on the surface, you'll still be able to see it.
In this movie, you can see that the tumor is green.
But even before I peel that muscle away, you saw that there was a tumor underneath.
And this works for metastatic lymph nodes also.
But when sentinel lymph node came into our treatment protocol, the surgeon basically looks for the single node that is the first draining lymph node of the cancer.
And then if that node has cancer, the woman would go on to get the axillary lymph node dissection.
But sentinel lymph node, the way that we do it today, is kind of like having a road map just to know where to go.
So if you're driving on the freeway and you want to know where's the next gas station, you have a map to tell you that that gas station is down the road.
You have to cut it out, bring it back home, cut it up, look inside and say, "Oh yes, it does have gas."
So that takes more time.
Patients are still on the operating room table.
That takes time.
So with our technology, we can tell right away.
Some of these are swollen lymph nodes that look a little larger than others.
Who amongst us hasn't had swollen lymph nodes with a cold?
That doesn't mean that there's cancer inside.
The patient has cancer, you want to know if the lymph nodes have cancer even before you go in.
Well you can see this on an MRI.
So it's very important to avoid inadvertent injury.
And what I'm talking about are nerves.
In the setting of prostate cancer, up to 60 percent of men after prostate cancer surgery may have urinary incontinence and erectile disfunction.
That's a lot of people to have a lot of problems -- and this is even in so-called nerve-sparing surgery, which means that the surgeon is aware of the problem, and they are trying to avoid the nerves.
But you know what, these little nerves are so small, in the context of prostate cancer, that they are actually never seen.
They are traced just by their known anatomical path along vasculature.
And they're known because somebody has decided to study them, which means that we're still learning about where they are.
Crazy to think that we're having surgery, we're trying to excise cancer, we don't know where the cancer is.
So I said, wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to see nerves with fluorescence?
People said, "We've been doing it this way for all these years.
And Roger helped me.
And he brought his whole team with him.
So there's that teamwork thing again.
And we eventually discovered molecules that were specifically labeling nerves.
You see what looks like little Medusa heads coming out.
We have been able to see nerves for facial expression, for facial movement, for breathing -- every single nerve -- nerves for urinary function around the prostate.
So here's a tumor.
Do you guys know where the margins of this tumor is?
What about the nerve that's going into this tumor?
But what about the part that goes into the tumor?
Basically, we've come up with a way to stain tissue and color-code the surgical field.
This was a bit of a breakthrough.
We published our results in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Nature Biotechnology.
We received commentary in Discover magazine, in The Economist.
And we showed it to a lot of my surgical colleagues.
I have patients who would benefit from this.
I think that this will result in my surgeries with a better outcome and fewer complications."
What needs to happen now is further development of our technology along with development of the instrumentation that allows us to see this sort of fluorescence in the operating room.
Understandably, the majority of the medical industry is focused on multiple-use drugs, such as long-term daily medications.
We are focused on making this technology better.
We're focused on adding drugs, adding growth factors, killing nerves that are causing problems and not the surrounding tissue.
We know that this can be done and we're committed to doing it.
I'd like to leave you with this final thought.
Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough.
Successful innovation is a team sport, it's a relay race.
And this takes the long-term steady courage of the day-in day-out struggle to educate, to persuade and to win acceptance.
And that is the light that I want to shine on health and medicine today.
(Applause)
I'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature.
But we need to do something about this problem.
I began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest, but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature, and which doesn't get priced by the markets.
A project called TEEB was started in 2007, and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8+5.
They asked themselves a question: If economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change, well why can't the same be done for conservation?
Why can't an equivalent case be made for nature?
But it's not that straightforward.
Biodiversity, the living fabric of this planet, is not a gas.
It exists in many layers, ecosystems, species and genes across many scales -- international, national, local, community -- and doing for nature what Lord Stern and his team did for nature is not that easy.
And yet, we began.
We began the project with an interim report, which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many, many researchers.
And amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that, in fact, we were losing natural capital -- the benefits that flow from nature to us.
We were losing it at an extraordinary rate -- in fact, of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital.
We then have gone on since to present for [the] international community, for governments, for local governments and for business and for people, for you and me, a whole slew of reports, which were presented at the U.N. last year, which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it.
What is this about?
A picture that you're familiar with -- the Amazon rainforests.
It's a massive store of carbon, it's an amazing store of biodiversity, but what people don't really know is this also is a rain factory.
Because the northeastern trade winds, as they go over the Amazonas, effectively gather the water vapor.
Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds, and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin.
This rainfall cycle, this rainfall factory, effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in Latin America.
But the question arises: Okay, so how much do Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of Amazonas, which produces that rainfall?
That can't keep going on, because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful.
Economics has become the currency of policy.
And unless we address this invisibility, we are going to get the results that we are seeing, which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset.
It's not just about the Amazonas, or indeed about rainforests.
No matter what level you look at, whether it's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level, we see the same problem again and again.
So rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level.
At the species level, it's been estimated that insect-based pollination, bees pollinating fruit and so on, is something like 190 billion dollars-worth.
That's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally.
Once again, most of that doesn't get paid.
That genetic material probably belonged, if it could belong to anyone, to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule, which then became the medicine.
They were the ones that didn't get paid.
Today, the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor, the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods, to feed their families.
Something like a billion people depend on fish, the quantity of fish in the oceans.
A billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein.
And at this rate at which we are losing fish, it is a human problem of enormous dimensions, a health problem of a kind we haven't seen before.
And finally, at the ecosystem level, whether it's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests, or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats, or whether it's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest, it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services.
We did estimates in our study that for countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, even though ecosystem services -- these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free -- they're not very big in percentage terms of GDP -- two, four, eight, 10, 15 percent -- but in these countries, if we measure how much they're worth to the poor, the answers are more like 45 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent.
That's the difference.
Because these are important benefits for the poor.
And you can't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset, the most important asset, which is your development asset, that is ecological infrastructure.
How bad can things get?
It's basically a measure of how many tigers, toads, ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around.
The green represents the percentage.
If it's yellow, it's 40 to 60 percent.
And these are percentages versus the original state, so to speak, the pre-industrial era, 1750.
And just watch the change in colors in India, China, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us.
The only places that remain green -- and that's not good news -- is, in fact, places like the Gobi Desert, like the tundra and like the Sahara.
This is the challenge.
We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth, it's common goods.
And here's an example from Thailand where we found that, because the value of a mangrove is not that much -- it's about $600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured -- compared to its value as a shrimp farm, which is more like $9,600, there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms.
That's not that hard.
But on the other hand, if you start measuring, how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use?
Once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects, that answer is more like $12,000 of cost.
And if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries, the fish nurseries, that provide fish for the poor, that answer is more like $11,000.
So is this just a story from South Thailand?
Sorry, this is a global story.
And here's what the same calculation looks like, which was done recently -- well I say recently, over the last 10 years -- by a group called TRUCOST.
And they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations, what are the externalities?
This is not illegal stuff, this is basically business as usual, which causes climate-changing emissions, which have an economic cost.
Use of freshwater.
I think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital.
Basically the stuff of life is natural capital, and we need to recognize and build that into our systems.
When we measure corporate performances, we don't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society.
That has to stop.
In fact, this was what really inspired my interest in this phase.
I began a project way back called the Green Accounting Project.
That was in the early 2000s when India was going gung-ho about GDP growth as the means forward -- looking at China with its stellar growths of eight, nine, 10 percent and wondering, why can we do the same?
This is going to create more cost to society and more losses.
Calculating this at the national level is one thing, and it has begun.
And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they've started a project called WAVES -- Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services.
And actually we've done this with the TEEB project.
We've done this for a very difficult case, which was for deforestation in China.
This is important, because in China in 1997, the Yellow River actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society.
Just a year later the Yangtze flooded, causing something like 5,500 deaths.
So clearly there was a problem with deforestation.
It was associated largely with the construction industry.
So in fact, the price of timber in the Beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within China.
Someone once asked me, "Who is better or worse, is it Unilever or is it P&G when it comes to their impact on rainforests in Indonesia?"
But if we look at companies like PUMA -- Jochen Zeitz, their CEO and chairman, once challenged me at a function, saying that he's going to implement my project before I finish it.
Well I think we kind of did it at the same time, but he's done it.
PUMA has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover, 300 million dollars of profits, 200 million dollars after tax, 94 million dollars of externalities, cost to business.
Now that's not a happy situation for them, but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say, "Here's what we are measuring.
We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure."
That's an example, I think, for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from.
If more companies did this, and if more sectors engaged this as sectors, you could have analysts, business analysts, and you could have people like us and consumers and NGOs actually look and compare the social performance of companies.
The other favorite, if you like, solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets.
And by the way, these are my favorites -- externalities calculation and green carbon markets.
TEEB has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it, but these are the favorites.
What's green carbon?
Today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace.
It's about energy emissions.
The European Union ETS is the main marketplace.
But that's all about energy and industry.
But what we're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon, that is soot.
What we're also missing is blue carbon, which, by the way, is the largest store of carbon -- more than 55 percent.
Thankfully, the flux, in other words, the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa, is more or less balanced.
In fact, what's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions, which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans.
And finally, there's deforestation, and there's emission of methane from agriculture.
Green carbon, which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions, and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions.
But the thing is to do a lot more of that.
Will this solve the problem? Will economics solve everything?
There is an area that is the oceans, coral reefs.
As you can see, they cut across the entire globe all the way from Micronesia across Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Madagascar and to the West of the Caribbean.
These red dots, these red areas, basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people.
So that's almost an eighth of society.
And the sad thing is that, as these coral reefs are lost -- and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs -- we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species, the warm water corals, we're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans, but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries.
So in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations, what we have done is we've made an ethical choice.
We've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ben Roche: So I'm Ben, by the way.
BR: And we're chefs. So when Moto opened in 2004, people didn't really know what to expect. A lot of people thought that it was a Japanese restaurant, and maybe it was the name, maybe it was the logo, which was like a Japanese character, but anyway, we had all these requests for Japanese food, which is really not what we did. And after about the ten thousandth request for a maki roll, we decided to give the people what they wanted. So this picture is an example of printed food, and this was the first foray into what we like to call flavor transformation. So this is all the ingredients, all the flavor of, you know, a standard maki roll, printed onto a little piece of paper.
HC: So our diners started to get bored with this idea, and we decided to give them the same course twice, so here we actually took an element from the maki roll and and took a picture of a dish and then basically served that picture with the dish.
So this dish in particular is basically champagne with seafood.
The champagne grapes that you see are actually carbonated grapes. A little bit of seafood and some crème fraiche and the picture actually tastes exactly like the dish. (Laughter) BR: But it's not all just edible pictures.
We decided to do something a little bit different and transform flavors that were very familiar -- so in this case, we have carrot cake.
So we take a carrot cake, put it in a blender, and we have kind of like a carrot cake juice, and then that went into a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create this hollow shell of carrot cake ice cream, I guess, and it comes off looking like, you know, Jupiter's floating around your plate.
HC: And here's something we have no reference to eat. This is a cigar, and basically it's a Cuban cigar made out of a Cuban pork sandwich, so we take these spices that go into the pork shoulder, we fashion that into ash. We take the sandwich and wrap it up in a collard green, put an edible label that bears no similarity to a Cohiba cigar label, and we put it in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge you about twenty bucks for it. (Laughter) HC: Delicious.
So this is a plate of nachos.
The difference between our nachos and the other guy's nachos, is that this is actually a dessert.
So the chips are candied, the ground beef is made from chocolate, and the cheese is made from a shredded mango sorbet that gets shredded into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese.
And after doing all of this dematerialization and reconfiguring of this, of these ingredients, we realized that it was pretty cool, because as we served it, we learned that the dish actually behaves like the real thing, where the cheese begins to melt.
So when you're looking at this thing in the dining room, you have this sensation that this is actually a plate of nachos, and it's not really until you begin tasting it that you realize this is a dessert, and it's just kind of like a mind-ripper.
(Laughter) HC: So we had been creating all of these dishes out of a kitchen that was more like a mechanic's shop than a kitchen, and the next logical step for us was to install a state-of-the-art laboratory, and that's what we have here.
So we put this in the basement, and we got really serious about food, like serious experimentation.
BR: One of the really cool things about the lab, besides that we have a new science lab in the kitchen, is that, you know, with this new equipment, and this new approach, all these different doors to creativity that we never knew were there began to open, and so the experiments and the food and the dishes that we created, they just kept going further and further out there.
HC: Let's talk about flavor transformation, and let's actually make some cool stuff.
You see a cow with its tongue hanging out.
What I see is a cow about to eat something delicious. What is that cow eating?
And why is it delicious?
So the cow, basically, eats three basic things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley, and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy, wild ideas. Can we take what the cow eats, remove the cow, and then make some hamburgers out of that?
And basically the reaction tends to be kind of like this. (Laughter) BR: Yeah, that's our chef de cuisine, Chris Jones. This is not the only guy that just flips out when we assign a ridiculous task, but a lot of these ideas, they're hard to understand.
HC: So, after about a day of Chris and I staring at each other, we came up with something that was pretty close to the hamburger patty, and as you can see it basically forms like hamburger meat.
This is made from three ingredients: beets, barley, corn, and so it actually cooks up like hamburger meat, looks and tastes like hamburger meat, and not only that, but it's basically removing the cow from the equation.
(Applause) BR: And it's definitely the world's first bleeding veggie burger, which is a cool side effect.
HC: You're about to eat a lemon, and now it tastes like lemonade.
Let's just stop and think about the economic benefits of something like that.
We could eliminate sugar across the board for all confectionary products and sodas, and we can replace it with all-natural fresh fruit.
BR: So you see us here cutting up some watermelon. The idea with this is that we're going to eliminate tons of food miles, wasted energy, and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna, or any exotic produce or item from a very far-away place, with local, organic produce; so we have a watermelon from Wisconsin.
HC: So if miracle berries take sour things and turn them into sweet things, we have this other pixie dust that we put on the watermelon, and it makes it go from sweet to savory.
So after we do that, we put it into a vacuum bag, add a little bit of seaweed, some spices, and we roll it, and this starts taking on the appearance of tuna.
So the key now is to make it behave like tuna.
HC: So the key thing to remember here is, we don't really care what this tuna really is.
As long as it's good for you and good for the environment, it doesn't matter.
How can we take this idea of tricking your tastebuds and leapfrog it into something that we can do today that could be a disruptive food technology?
So here's the next challenge.
Let's charge them a boatload of cash for this and see what they think. (Laughter) BR: Yeah, so you can imagine, a task like this -- this is another one of those assignments that the kitchen staff hated us for. But we really had to almost relearn how to cook in general, because these are ingredients, you know, plant life that we're, one, unfamiliar with, and two, we have no reference for how to cook these things because people don't eat them.
So we really had to think about new, creative ways to flavor, new ways to cook and to change texture -- and that was the main issue with this challenge.
HC: So this is where we step into the future and we leapfrog ahead.
So developing nations and first-world nations, imagine if you could take these wild plants and consume them, food miles would basically turn into food feet.
And to give you a simple example here as to what we actually fed these customers, there's a bale of hay there and some crab apples.
And basically we took hay and crab apples and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients.
People swore they were eating barbecue sauce, and this is free food.
BR: Thanks, guys.
(Applause)
I was running across the street, and the only thing that I actually remember is feeling like a grenade went off in my head.
And I remember putting my hands on the ground and feeling my life's blood emptying out of my neck and my mouth.
What had happened is, he ran a red light and hit me and my dog.
She ended up underneath the car.
I flew out in front of the car, and then he ran over my legs.
My left leg got caught up in the wheel well -- spun it around.
I ended up with blunt chest trauma.
I had no idea what was going on, but strangers intervened, kept my heart moving, beating.
Somebody was smart and put a Bic pen in my neck to open up my airway, so I could get some air in there.
And my lung collapsed, so somebody cut me open and put a pen in there as well, to stop that catastrophic event from happening.
Somehow I ended up at the hospital.
Eighteen months later, I woke up.
I was blind, I couldn't speak and I couldn't walk.
I was 64 pounds.
The hospital really has no idea what to do with people like that.
And in fact, they started to call me a "gomer."
That's another story we won't even get into.
I had so many surgeries to put my neck back together, to repair my heart a few times.
Some things worked, some things didn't.
But eventually, I started to look human again.
It's hard sometimes to talk about these things, so bear with me.
I had more than 50 surgeries.
But who's counting?
(Laughter) So eventually, the hospital decided it was time for me to go.
What in the world are you going to do there?"
So there were all these skills and talents that these seniors had.
The one advantage they had over most of you is wisdom, because they had a long life.
And I needed that wisdom at that moment in my life.
But imagine what it was like for them when I showed up at their doorstep.
At that point, I had gained four pounds, so I was 68 pounds.
I was bald.
I was wearing hospital scrubs.
So the senior citizens realized that they needed to have an emergency meeting.
(Laughter) So they pulled back and they were looking at each other, and they were going, "OK, what skills do we have in this room?
This kid needs a lot of work."
So they eventually started matching their talents and skills to all of my needs.
But one of the first things they needed to do was assess what I needed right away.
I needed to figure out how to eat like a normal human being, since I'd been eating through a tube in my chest and through my veins.
So I had to go through trying to eat again.
And they went through that process.
And then they had to figure out: "Well, she needs furniture.
She is sleeping in the corner of this apartment."
So they went to their storage lockers and all gathered their extra furniture -- gave me pots and pans, blankets -- everything.
And then the next thing that I needed was a makeover.
(Laughter) We're not going to talk about the hairstyles they tried to force on me once my hair grew back.
But I did say no to the blue hair.
(Laughter) So eventually, what went on is, they decided that, well, I need to learn to speak.
You can't be an independent person if you're not able to speak and you can't see.
So while Sally, the office manager, was teaching me to speak in the day -- it's hard, because when you're a kid, you take things for granted.
You learn things unconsciously.
But for me, I was an adult and it was embarrassing, and I had to learn how to coordinate my new throat with my tongue and my new teeth and my lips, and capture the air and get the word out.
So, I acted like a two-year-old, and refused to work.
But the men had a better idea.
They were going to make it fun for me.
(Laughter) And then, secretly, how to swear like a sailor.
(Laughter) I'm going to just leave it to your imagination as to what my first words were -- (Laughter) when Sally finally got my confidence built.
(Laughter) So I moved on from there.
And a former teacher who happened to have Alzheimer's took on the task of teaching me to write.
The redundancy was actually good for me.
(Laughter) One of the pivotal times for me was actually learning to cross the street again as a blind person.
So close your eyes.
Now imagine you have to cross a street.
One was post-traumatic stress disorder.
Every time I approached the corner or the curb, I would panic.
And the second one was actually trying to figure out how to cross that street.
So one of the seniors just came up to me, and she pushed me up to the corner and said, "When you think it's time to go, just stick the cane out there.
If it's hit, don't cross the street."
(Laughter) Made perfect sense.
And I was able to return to college because of the senior citizens who invested in me, and also the guide dog and skill set I had gained.
Ten years later, I gained my sight back.
Not magically -- I opted in for three surgeries, and one of them was experimental.
It was actually robotic surgery that removed a hematoma from behind my eye.
The biggest change for me was that the world moved forward, that there were innovations and all kinds of new things -- cellphones, laptops, all these things that I had never seen before.
And as a blind person, your visual memory fades, and is replaced with how you feel about things and how things sound and how things smell.
I thought it was a monster, so I was walking around it.
And I touched it and I went, "Oh my God, it's a laundry basket."
(Laughter) Everything is different when you're a sighted person, because you take that for granted.
The biggest change for me was looking down at my hands and seeing that I'd lost 10 years of my life.
But when I looked down, I realized that time marched on for me, too, and that I needed to get caught up.
We didn't have words like "crowdsourcing" and "radical collaboration" when I had my accident.
But the concept held true -- people working with people to rebuild me; people working with people to reeducate me.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
When I was in the fifth grade, I bought an issue of "DC Comics Presents #57" off of a spinner rack at my local bookstore, and that comic book changed my life.
The combination of words and pictures did something inside my head that had never been done before, and I immediately fell in love with the medium of comics.
I became a voracious comic book reader, but I never brought them to school.
Instinctively, I knew that comic books didn't belong in the classroom.
My parents definitely were not fans, and I was certain that my teachers wouldn't be either.
After all, they never used them to teach, comic books and graphic novels were never allowed during silent sustained reading, and they were never sold at our annual book fair.
Eventually I became a published cartoonist, writing and drawing comic books for a living.
I also became a high school teacher.
This is where I taught: Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California.
I taught a little bit of math and a little bit of art, but mostly computer science, and I was there for 17 years.
When I was a brand new teacher, I tried bringing comic books into my classroom.
(Laughter) I was wrong.
My students didn't think I was cool. They thought I was kind of a dork.
They would raise their hands and ask me questions like, "Mr. Yang, who do you think would win in a fight, Superman or the Hulk?"
(Laughter) I very quickly realized I had to keep my teaching and my cartooning separate.
But again, I was wrong.
A few years into my teaching career, I learned firsthand the educational potential of comics.
One semester, I was asked to sub for this Algebra 2 class.
At the time, I was also the school's educational technologist, which meant every couple of weeks I had to miss one or two periods of this Algebra 2 class because I was in another classroom helping another teacher with a computer-related activity.
For these Algebra 2 students, that was terrible.
In an effort to provide some sort of consistency for my students, I began videotaping myself giving lectures.
I tried to make these videos as engaging as possible.
(Laughter) I thought it was pretty awesome.
I was pretty certain that my students would love it, but I was wrong.
(Laughter) These video lectures were a disaster.
I had students coming up to me and saying things like, "Mr. Yang, we thought you were boring in person, but on video, you are just unbearable."
It was like they liked cartoon me more than actual me.
(Laughter) This surprised me, because my students are part of a generation that was raised on screens, so I thought for sure they would like learning from a screen better than learning from a page.
First, unlike their math textbooks, these comics lectures taught visually.
Our students grow up in a visual culture, so they're used to taking in information that way.
This means that the rate of information flow is firmly in the hands of the reader.
When my students didn't understand something in my comics lecture, they could just reread that passage as quickly or as slowly as they needed.
It was like I was giving them a remote control over the information.
The same was not true of my video lectures, and it wasn't even true of my in-person lectures.
When I speak, I deliver the information as quickly or slowly as I want.
So for certain students and certain kinds of information, these two aspects of the comics medium, its visual nature and its permanence, make it an incredibly powerful educational tool.
When I was teaching this Algebra 2 class, I was also working on my master's in education at Cal State East Bay.
And I was so intrigued by this experience that I had with these comics lectures that I decided to focus my final master's project on comics.
I wanted to figure out why American educators have historically been so reluctant to use comic books in their classrooms.
Here's what I discovered.
Comic books first became a mass medium in the 1940s, with millions of copies selling every month, and educators back then took notice.
A lot of innovative teachers began bringing comics into their classrooms to experiment.
In 1944, the "Journal of Educational Sociology" even devoted an entire issue to this topic.
Things seemed to be progressing.
Teachers were starting to figure things out.
But then along comes this guy.
(Laughter) He was wrong.
Now, Dr. Wertham was actually a pretty decent guy.
He spent most of his career working with juvenile delinquents, and in his work he noticed that most of his clients read comic books.
What Dr. Wertham failed to realize was in the 1940s and '50s, almost every kid in America read comic books.
Dr. Wertham does a pretty dubious job of proving his case, but his book does inspire the Senate of the United States to hold a series of hearings to see if in fact comic books caused juvenile delinquency.
These hearings lasted for almost two months.
They ended inconclusively, but not before doing tremendous damage to the reputation of comic books in the eyes of the American public.
It wasn't until the 1970s that a few brave souls started making their way back in.
And it really wasn't until pretty recently, maybe the last decade or so, that comics have seen more widespread acceptance among American educators.
Comic books and graphic novels are now finally making their way back into American classrooms and this is even happening at Bishop O'Dowd, where I used to teach.
And Ms. Murrock uses my own "American Born Chinese" with her English 1 students.
The Standard states that students ought to be able to analyze how visual elements contribute to the meaning, tone and beauty of a text.
Over in the library, Ms. Counts has built a pretty impressive graphic novel collection for Bishop O'Dowd.
Inspired by this renewed interest from American educators, American cartoonists are now producing more explicitly educational content for the K-12 market than ever before.
A lot of this is directed at language arts, but more and more comics and graphic novels are starting to tackle math and science topics.
STEM comics graphics novels really are like this uncharted territory, ready to be explored.
America is finally waking up to the fact that comic books do not cause juvenile delinquency.
(Laughter) That they really do belong in every educator's toolkit.
There's no good reason to keep comic books and graphic novels out of K-12 education.
They teach visually, they give our students that remote control.
The educational potential is there just waiting to be tapped by creative people like you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But trust me -- we have very, very little in common.
His plots are all about destruction and secrecy, whereas my plots are about creation and openness.
In fact, my plot can only work if I share it with as many people as possible.
So here it is.
There's nothing particularly radical or revolutionary about a patch of grass.
What starts to get interesting is when we turn it into this.
(Laughter) Think about this: food is a form of energy.
And when we encourage people to grow some of their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their hands, power over their diet, power over their health and some power over their pocketbooks.
You can think about who those actors might be.
I also look at gardening as a sort of healthy gateway drug, you might say, to other forms of food freedom.
(Laughter) "You know, I might want to look into food preservation or I might want to look up where my local farmer's market is located in my town."
Now the other thing, of course, with planting a garden, especially a garden in front of a white house and on a sunny south lawn, is you never know who you might influence.
(Laughter) Now, I'm not exactly sure what my white house garden's influence was on the First Lady's, but I can tell you this: she's had an enormous influence on me since planting hers.
I understand that she's just in a completely different league there, and I'm not even trying to compete.
But she's really inspired me to think much more boldly about the role that I want to have in the garden movement.
(Laughter) Now, pretty modest, right?
I like this picture.
And I want to share some of those with you right now, starting off in the form of a very short video I've produced for you, which is my best effort to sum up the history of gastronomy in about 15 seconds.
(Applause) Now, that's a funny little clip, but it'd be even funnier if it weren't so tragic and if it weren't so true.
The reality is that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic, and it's not simply limited to our country.
It's spreading around the world right now.
And in a sort of parallel universe, we're also seeing that hunger is on the rise.
Over 900 million people right now are affected by it.
That's three times the population of the United States.
But at the same time, world food prices are rising and world population is rising and is set to reach 10 billion people by the end of the century.
Now, another thing about the population is we know that it's increasing, but a lot of us don't realize that it's also changing.
There's a fundamental shift taking place.
As of 2007, we went from being a primarily rural planet to being a primarily urban one, and that has implications for how we're going to feed these people, how we're going to get the food to the people in the cities.
Now, I imagine that there are some Stephen King fans in the audience here, and I'm one of them.
But I can tell you, I haven't read anything scarier than this here, and that's this statistic: in order to keep up with the growing population, we're going to need to grow more food over the course of the next 50 years than we have grown over the course of the past 10,000 years combined.
Less oil, for example.
Most reputable geologists believe that we've already reached peak oil production in the world.
Now, you might not think in terms of oil and food as being linked, but there's a very strong link, in fact.
It takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy in our highly industrialized food system in order to produce one calorie of food energy.
We'll also need to grow more food with less water.
These three images come from three very different parts of the planet, but they all tell the same story of catastrophic drought.
We'll also need to grow more food with less farmland.
In the Global South, we're seeing desertification, whereas in the north, we're seeing suburban sprawl.
We'll also have to grow more food with less climate stability and less genetic diversity.
Now, this is really important.
We need our genetic varieties because they're a sort of insurance policy against climate change.
We heard earlier today "not putting all of our eggs in one basket."
We're also going to need to grow more food with less time.
Now here, I'm not simply talking about the ticking time bomb that is the global population.
I'm talking about the amount of time we all have in order to put a decent meal on the table.
That's the average amount of time the American family spends preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals per day.
(Laughter) You know?
It's time to leave town or even perhaps leave planets.
But where do we go?
Well, if we were to listen to a lot of our political leaders over the years, we would simply go shopping.
Right?
But the reality is something different.
And although the large food companies would like us to believe that we can give our children all of the vitamins, minerals and immunity-building substances that they need without even leaving the chocolatey cereal aisle -- (Laughter) the truth is something quite different.
Now, what's become even more troublesome of late is that even the foods that ought to be healthy aren't always so, and we're starting to lose confidence in our food system, I think.
The bigger it becomes and the more complex it becomes.
And we've seen this time and time again.
This is an image from the latest E. coli outbreak.
In this case, it was in Europe, and we think it was started with bean sprouts, of all things.
So we have this sort of shopper's dilemma right now.
We have all of these different foods -- 30,000 foods in the average big-box grocery store -- but we have less confidence in those foods, and we have less confidence in the actors that are putting those foods on the shelves.
I think we need to redefine what good food is.
This is an interesting image from Berlin, Germany, where somebody started planting shopping carts and leaving them around.
Those are potatoes, by the way.
But in addition to redefining what good food is, I think we need to redefine our living spaces.
Instead of seeing this as a yard, we need to think of it more as like a full-service greengrocer.
That's what we transformed our yard into, and I think a really key message is this one: gardens grow good food.
And when I say good food, I mean a number of different things.
Another important message is this one: gardens grow healthy kids and families.
Those happen to be my two youngest sons, and they look healthy and they are healthy, and I think it has to do with the fact that they grew up in gardens and they know where good food comes from.
And in fact, they know how to grow some of it themselves.
But in the current economy, I think it's key to get this message out, that gardens also grow important economic savings for families.
And you can pretty much take my word on this one, because in addition to crunching the vegetables a couple of years ago, my wife and I also crunched the numbers, and we found out that at the end, we had saved well over 2,000 dollars by growing our own food.
So you could be asking this question now: If gardens grow all of these great things, how do we grow more gardens?
That's, in fact, the question that my organization, Kitchen Gardens International, is both asking and answering.
And our answer is essentially this one: we're going to need to leverage the resources and power that we have, the gardens and gardeners that we have, in order to grow and inspire even more.
And as I said before, you never know who you might inspire.
(Laughter) Now if this campaign was successful, I think it wasn't simply because we had a visionary First Lady taking up residence at the White House -- that certainly was a major part of it -- and it wasn't simply because we had some celebrity chefs and authors saying this would be a good idea to do.
And my organization tried to sort of channel some of that energy of the movement and direct it towards the White House.
And we had a lot of luck in terms of getting our message out there to the media.
We had a petition on Facebook, 110,000 signatures.
We had viral images and videos, and we did crazy things like symbolically putting the White House lawn up for sale on eBay.
But we need to do even more, and what we're trying to do in my organization is to connect people online, but also to connect people in person.
This is an image from a little holiday we invented called "World Kitchen Garden Day."
It's at the end of August each year, and it's just about bringing people together in gardens to learn from one another, to experience a garden as a community experience.
We also need to grow the next generation of gardeners, and we're doing that in the United States and abroad.
But there's still so much more that needs to be done, and I think this slide sort of captures where we need to go.
We need a road map, and I picked this slide for a reason.
We've got a bike garden on the left and a map of the Netherlands on the right.
I was in the Netherlands early this year and was absolutely amazed by the amount of bikes on the road; 26 percent of all trips taken in the Netherlands are by bicycle, and it's gotten me thinking: How do we get that happening in terms of food and gardens?
How would we get 26 percent of all produce coming from backyard gardens?
But if you take into consideration that at the peak of the victory garden movement last century, 40 percent of all produce was coming from gardens.
We can get there again.
And I think this is a really good start.
The White House garden is certainly very inspirational.
That's actually sort of a snapshot of what the garden looked like when it was planted earlier this spring -- lots of diversity, lots of healthy crops.
However, this is not a good representation of our federal agriculture policy.
(Laughter) If we were to take the model here, the diagram of that particular garden, and sort of transpose it onto our federal agriculture policy, we'd get this: billions of billions of dollars going to support just a handful of commodity crops with just that tiny little bit at the top for fruits and vegetables.
We're already using the tax code to encourage green transport and green shelter.
Why not green food?
We're in the midst now of talking about another stimulus package.
Why not?
(Applause) In terms of other things that we need to be doing, we need to move down to the local level and we need to make sure that gardens are legal.
This is an illegal garden. At least it was.
We still have laws from the 20th century.
We need to bring our codes up to the realities that we are facing now.
Earlier this year, a number of Maine towns passed local food sovereignty laws that allow town residents to not only grow food where they want to grow it but to also sell it the way they want to sell it and to the people they want to sell it to.
I think that's an incentive.
There are a lot of gardeners out there that would be interested in scaling up their production if they could, if they had a financial incentive.
It's not right and it's not fair that the burden of this responsibility -- feeding our country and the world -- should be with the women.
(Applause) And I'm going to challenge the women to come up with really clever, creative ways of getting guys into the gardens, too.
(Laughter) But beyond that, I think we need to reexamine the infrastructure that we have in place for gardens.
I think we need to create new infrastructure.
And this is one of the things my organization is working on right now, sort of a local communications infrastructure, very place-based, that allows people in the same area to connect with one another and to help each other out.
The technology is certainly there.
In addition to that, I think we need another type of infrastructure.
It would be good if we could all get together.
I think if we've learned anything through the TED experience, it's that there is power when we bring people together, and I think we need to bring people together at the local level as well.
I think one of the last things that we need is to not lose the fun of food.
Food is at its best when it's delicious but shared as part of a community, and I think that gardens can get some of that community vibe back as well.
So I'm going to leave with one last video, and I'm going to revisit the short video that I showed you before, but I'm going to suggest an alternative ending.
And I think this ending is well within our reach, but it's really going to require that we all pull together.
So here's the new history of gastronomy.
("Also sprach Zarathustra" plays) (Applause) (Applause and cheers) Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the eastern American chestnut population, counting nearly four billion trees, was completely decimated by a fungal infection.
Fungi are the most destructive pathogens of plants, including crops of major economic importance.
Can you imagine that today, crop losses associated with fungal infection are estimated at billions of dollars per year, worldwide?
And this leads to severe repercussions, including episodes of famine in developing countries, large reduction of income for farmers and distributors, high prices for consumers and risk of exposure to mycotoxin, poison produced by fungi.
The problems that we face is that the current method used to prevent and treat those dreadful diseases, such as genetic control, exploiting natural sources of resistance, crop rotation or seed treatment, among others, are still limited or ephemeral.
Therefore, we urgently need to develop more efficient strategies and for this, research is required to identify biological mechanisms that can be targeted by novel antifungal treatments.
One feature of fungi is that they cannot move and only grow by extension to form a sophisticated network, the mycelium.
In 1884, Anton de Bary, the father of plant pathology, was the first to presume that fungi are guided by signals sent out from the host plant, meaning a plant upon which it can lodge and subsist, so signals act as a lighthouse for fungi to locate, grow toward, reach and finally invade and colonize a plant.
He knew that the identification of such signals would unlock a great knowledge that then serves to elaborate strategy to block the interaction between the fungus and the plant.
Using purification and mutational genomic approaches, as well as a technique allowing the measurement of directed hyphal growth, today I'm glad to tell you that after 130 years, my former team and I could finally identify such plant signals by studying the interaction between a pathogenic fungus called Fusarium oxysporum and one of its host plants, the tomato plant.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) The understanding of such molecular processes offers a panel of potential molecules that can be used to create novel antifungal treatments.
And those treatments would disrupt the interaction between the fungus and the plant either by blocking the plant signal or the fungal reception system which receives those signals.
Fungal infections have devastated agriculture crops.
Moreover, we are now in an era where the demand of crop production is increasing significantly.
And this is due to population growth, economic development, climate change and demand for bio fuels.
Our understanding of the molecular mechanism of interaction between a fungus and its host plant, such as the tomato plant, potentially represents a major step towards developing more efficient strategy to combat plant fungal diseases and therefore solving of problems that affect people's lives, food security and economic growth.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.
We should, in fact, because without having this possibility of conscious minds, we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world.
And of course, Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for."
But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence.
All the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience, this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation, has got major controversies.
I don't believe that, and I think the situation is changing.
It would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make consciousness in our brains, but we certainly can begin to approach the question, and we can begin to see the shape of a solution.
And one more wonder to celebrate is the fact that we have imaging technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do, for example, what you're seeing right now.
These are images that come from Hanna Damasio's lab, and which show you, in a living brain, the reconstruction of that brain.
And this is a person who is alive.
And even more -- and this is something that one can be really amazed about -- is what I'm going to show you next, which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections, real pathways.
So all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons, the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses.
But at any rate, they are there.
The colors are codes for the direction, from whether it is back to front or vice versa.
At any rate, what is consciousness?
What is a conscious mind?
And we could take a very simple view and say, well, it is that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams, or when we go under anesthesia, and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia.
But what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia, or when we are in deep, dreamless sleep?
Well first of all, it is a mind, which is a flow of mental images.
And of course consider images that can be sensory patterns, visual, such as you're having right now in relation to the stage and me, or auditory images, as you are having now in relation to my words.
That flow of mental images is mind.
But there is something else that we are all experiencing in this room.
We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images.
And we have a sense that it's everyone of us that is experiencing this -- not the person who is sitting next to you.
So in order to have a conscious mind, you have a self within the conscious mind.
So a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
The self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind, and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind.
Now the first part, the first problem, is relatively easy -- it's not easy at all -- but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience.
And it's quite clear that, in order to make minds, we need to construct neural maps.
So imagine a grid, like the one I'm showing you right now, and now imagine, within that grid, that two-dimensional sheet, imagine neurons.
And picture, if you will, a billboard, a digital billboard, where you have elements that can be either lit or not.
This, of course, is a visual map that I'm showing you, but this applies to any kind of map -- auditory, for example, in relation to sound frequencies, or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate.
Now to bring home the point of how close it is -- the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the activity of the neurons and our mental experience -- I'm going to tell you a personal story.
So if I cover my left eye -- I'm talking about me personally, not all of you -- if I cover my left eye, I look at the grid -- pretty much like the one I'm showing you.
But sometime ago, I discovered that if I cover my left eye, instead what I get is this.
Very odd -- I've analyzed this for a while.
If I scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there in the little corner, what I get is the following.
On the right side, my retina is perfectly symmetrical.
You see the going down towards the fovea where the optic nerve begins.
But on my left retina there is a bump, which is marked there by the red arrow.
And it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below.
So this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina, which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball, or, for that matter, a sheet of visual cortex.
So from the retina you go onto visual cortex.
And of course, the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina.
You have the green for example, that corresponds to tactile information, or the blue that corresponds to auditory information.
So think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is.
So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making.
And those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information.
So far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images.
And I thought about a solution to this problem.
We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps.
I came to this because, if you're going to have a reference that we know as self -- the Me, the I in our own processing -- we need to have something that is stable, something that does not deviate much from day to day.
We have one body, not two, not three.
There is just one reference point, which is the body.
But then, of course, the body has many parts, and things grow at different rates, and they have different sizes and different people; however, not so with the interior.
If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range, you go into disease or death.
So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity.
I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day.
And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself, unlike any other coupling.
So for example, I'm making images of you, but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain.
However, there is a close, permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body.
There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord.
This is so specific that, for example, if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem, if you damage that as a result of a stroke, for example, what you get is coma or vegetative state, which is a state, of course, in which your mind disappears, your consciousness disappears.
What happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self, you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence, and, in fact, there can be images going on, being formed in the cerebral cortex, except you don't know they're there.
But if you consider the green part of the brain stem, nothing like that happens.
So in that green component of the brain stem, if you damage it, and often it happens, what you get is complete paralysis, but your conscious mind is maintained.
There was a very interesting film, one of the rare good films done about a situation like this, by Julian Schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition.
It's just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem, there are, to make it simple, all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior, different aspects of our body.
They are exquisitely topographic and they are exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern.
But look at the arrows.
They're not there for looks.
Another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species.
So throughout vertebrates, the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours, which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious minds like we do.
Except that they're not as rich as ours, because they don't have a cerebral cortex like we do.
That's where the difference is.
And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex.
Now there are three levels of self to consider -- the proto, the core and the autobiographical.
The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species.
It's the autobiographical self which some species have, I think.
Cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree.
The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.
And the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language.
And out of that came the instruments of culture -- religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
And this is, of course, the culture where we have developed something that I like to call socio-cultural regulation.
Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made?
Three reasons. First, curiosity.
Primates are extremely curious -- and humans most of all.
And if we are interested, for example, in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth, why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings?
Second, understanding society and culture.
We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress.
And finally, medicine.
Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction.
Think of strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious.
So that's a very good reason beyond curiosity to justify what we're doing, and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
I study how the brain processes information. That is, how it takes information in from the outside world, and converts it into patterns of electrical activity, and then how it uses those patterns to allow you to do things -- to see, hear, to reach for an object.
So I'm really a basic scientist, not a clinician, but in the last year and a half I've started to switch over, to use what we've been learning about these patterns of activity to develop prosthetic devices, and what I wanted to do today is show you an example of this.
It's the development of a prosthetic device for treating blindness.
There are 10 million people in the U.S.
and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them.
There are some drug treatments, but they're only effective on a small fraction of the population. And so, for the vast majority of patients, their best hope for regaining sight is through prosthetic devices.
The problem is that current prosthetics don't work very well. They're still very limited in the vision that they can provide.
And so, you know, for example, with these devices, patients can see simple things like bright lights and high contrast edges, not very much more, so nothing close to normal vision has been possible.
So what I'm going to tell you about today is a device that we've been working on that I think has the potential to make a difference, to be much more effective, and what I wanted to do is show you how it works. Okay, so let me back up a little bit and show you how a normal retina works first so you can see the problem that we were trying to solve.
So you have an image, a retina, and a brain.
So when you look at something, like this image of this baby's face, it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina, on the front-end cells here, the photoreceptors.
Then what happens is the retinal circuitry, the middle part, goes to work on it, and what it does is it performs operations on it, it extracts information from it, and it converts that information into a code.
And the code is in the form of these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent up to the brain, and so the key thing is that the image ultimately gets converted into a code. And when I say code, I do literally mean code.
Anyway, you get the idea.
So, you know, it's sort of a complicated thing. You have these patterns of pulses coming out of your eye every millisecond telling your brain what it is that you're seeing.
Until the only things that you have left are these cells here, the output cells, the ones that send the signals to the brain, but because of all that degeneration they aren't sending any signals anymore.
They aren't getting any input, so the person's brain no longer gets any visual information -- that is, he or she is blind.
So, a solution to the problem, then, would be to build a device that could mimic the actions of that front-end circuitry and send signals to the retina's output cells, and they can go back to doing their normal job of sending signals to the brain.
So this is what we've been working on, and this is what our prosthetic does.
So it consists of two parts, what we call an encoder and a transducer.
And so the encoder does just what I was saying: it mimics the actions of the front-end circuitry -- so it takes images in and converts them into the retina's code.
And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain, and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output.
So a completely blind retina, even one with no front-end circuitry at all, no photoreceptors, can now send out normal signals, signals that the brain can understand.
I'm not sure "cool" is really the right word, but you know what I mean.
So what it's doing is, it's replacing the retinal circuitry, really the guts of the retinal circuitry, with a set of equations, a set of equations that we can implement on a chip. So it's just math.
In other words, we're not literally replacing the components of the retina.
And so, in a way, the equations are serving as sort of a codebook. An image comes in, goes through the set of equations, and out comes streams of electrical pulses, just like a normal retina would produce.
Here are three sets of firing patterns. The top one is from a normal animal, the middle one is from a blind animal that's been treated with this encoder-transducer device, and the bottom one is from a blind animal treated with a standard prosthetic.
So the bottom one is the state-of-the-art device that's out there right now, which is basically made up of light detectors, but no encoder. So what we did was we presented movies of everyday things -- people, babies, park benches, you know, regular things happening -- and we recorded the responses from the retinas of these three groups of animals.
So as you can see, the firing patterns from the blind animal treated with the encoder-transducer really do very closely match the normal firing patterns -- and it's not perfect, but it's pretty good -- and the blind animal treated with the standard prosthetic, the responses really don't.
How important is this?
What's the potential impact on a patient's ability to see?
So what we did is we took a moment in time from these recordings and asked, what was the retina seeing at that moment?
Can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns?
So, when we did this for responses from the standard method and from our encoder and transducer.
So you can see that it's pretty limited, and because the firing patterns aren't in the right code, they're very limited in what they can tell you about what's out there. So you can see that there's something there, but it's not so clear what that something is, and this just sort of circles back to what I was saying in the beginning, that with the standard method, patients can see high-contrast edges, they can see light, but it doesn't easily go further than that. So what was the image? It was a baby's face.
So on the left is the encoder alone, and on the right is from an actual blind retina, so the encoder and the transducer.
But the key one really is the encoder alone, because we can team up the encoder with the different transducer.
This is just actually the first one that we tried.
When this first came out, it was just a really exciting thing, the idea that you even make a blind retina respond at all.
But there was this limiting factor, the issue of the code, and how to make the cells respond better, produce normal responses, and so this was our contribution.
So the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas, for example, the auditory system and the motor system, so for treating deafness and for motor disorders.
So just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina's output cells, we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve, or jump over damaged areas in the cortex, in the motor cortex, to bridge the gap produced by a stroke.
I just want to end with a simple message that understanding the code is really, really important, and if we can understand the code, the language of the brain, things become possible that didn't seem obviously possible before. Thank you.
(Applause)
So, I kind of believe that we're in like the "cave-painting" era of computer interfaces.
Hit me.
OK. So I mean, this is the kind of status quo interface, right?
And OK, so you could sex it up and like go to a much more lickable Mac, you know, but really it's the kind of same old crap we've had for the last, you know, 30 years.
(Laughter) (Applause) Like I think we really put up with a lot of crap with our computers.
I mean it's point and click, it's like the menus, icons, it's all the kind of same thing.
And so one kind of information space that I take inspiration from is my real desk.
And I'd like to bring that experience to the desktop.
It's kind of like a new approach to desktop computing.
And then, it's all smoothly animated, instead of these jarring changes you see in today's interfaces.
Also some of the stuff we can do is, for these individual icons we thought -- I mean, how can we play with the idea of an icon, and push that further?
And one of the things I can do is make it bigger if I want to emphasize it and make it more important.
(Laughter) So it's cute, but it's also like a subtle channel of conveying information, right?
This is heavy so it feels more important. So it's kind of cool.
Despite computers everywhere paper really hasn't disappeared, because it has a lot of, I think, valuable properties.
Or if you want to be destructive, you can just crumple it up and, you know, toss it to the corner.
Also just like paper, around our workspace we'll pin things up to the wall to remember them later, and I can do the same thing here, and you know, you'll see post-it notes and things like that around people's offices.
So, one of the criticisms of this kind of approach to organization is that, you know, "Okay, well my real desk is really messy. I don't want that mess on my computer."
So one thing we have for that is like a grid align, kind of -- so you get that more traditional desktop. Things are kind of grid aligned.
And you can still do fun things like make shelves on your desktop.
Let's just break this shelf. Okay, that shelf broke.
Do you remember the story of Odysseus and the Sirens from high school or junior high school?
And these women sing an enchanting song, a song so alluring that all sailors who hear it crash into the rocks and die."
Now you would expect, given that, that they would choose an alternate route around the Sirens, but instead Odysseus says, "I want to hear that song.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pour wax in the ears of you and all the men -- stay with me -- so that you can't hear the song, and then I'm going to have you tie me to the mast so that I can listen and we can all sail by unaffected."
So this is a captain putting the life of every single person on the ship at risk so that he can hear a song.
And I'd like to think if this was the case, they probably would have rehearsed it a few times.
Odysseus would have said, "Okay, let's do a dry run.
You tie me to the mast, and I'm going to beg and plead.
And no matter what I say, you cannot untie me from the mast.
All right, so tie me to the mast."
And the first mate takes a rope and ties Odysseus to the mast in a nice knot.
And Odysseus does his best job playacting and says, "Untie me. Untie me.
And then Odysseus says, "I see that you can get it.
All right, untie me now and we'll get some dinner."
And the first mate hesitates.
He's like, "Is this still the rehearsal, or should I untie him?"
Now just don't untie me no matter what."
He throws the first mate to the ground.
This repeats itself through the night -- rehearsal, tying to the mast, conning his way out of it, beating the poor first mate up mercilessly.
Tying yourself to a mast is perhaps the oldest written example of what psychologists call a commitment device.
A commitment device is a decision that you make with a cool head to bind yourself so that you don't do something regrettable when you have a hot head.
Because there's two heads inside one person when you think about it.
This is like Odysseus when he's hearing the song.
He just wants to get to the front row.
He just thinks about the here and now and the immediate gratification.
But then there's this other self, the future self.
This is Odysseus as an old man who wants nothing more than to retire in a sunny villa with his wife Penelope outside of Ithaca -- the other one.
So why do we need commitment devices?
Well resisting temptation is hard, as the 19th century English economist Nassau William Senior said, "To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will."
If you set goals for yourself and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible that's keeping you from achieving them, it's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them.
It's physically possible to lose weight.
It's physically possible to exercise more.
But resisting temptation is hard.
The other reason that it's difficult to resist temptation is because it's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self.
It has these strong, heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth.
So there's this battle between the two selves that's being fought, and we need commitment devices to level the playing field between the two.
Now I'm a big fan of commitment devices actually.
So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career.
And when you try to execute these commitment devices, you realize the devil is really in the details.
I mean, you can't burn it; that's illegal.
And I thought, well I could give it to a charity or give it to my wife or something like that.
But then I thought, oh, I'm sending myself mixed messages.
Because not writing is bad, but giving to charity is good.
So then I would kind of justify not writing by giving a gift.
And then I kind of flipped that around and thought, well I could give it to the neo-Nazis.
So ultimately, I just decided I would leave it in an envelope on the subway.
(Laughter) Such it is with commitment devices.
But despite my like for them, there's two nagging concerns that I've always had about commitment devices, and you might feel this if you use them yourself.
So the first is, when you've got one of these devices going, such as this contract to write everyday or pay, it's just a constant reminder that you have no self-control.
So I don't like the way that they take the power away from you.
I think self-discipline is something, it's like a muscle.
The other problem with commitment devices is that you can always weasel your way out of them.
You say, "Well, of course I can't write today, because I'm giving a TEDTalk and I have five media interviews, and then I'm going to a cocktail party and then I'll be drunk after that.
So in effect, you are like Odysseus and the first mate in one person.
So I've been working for about a decade now on finding other ways to change people's relationship to the future self without using commitment devices.
In particular, I'm interested in the relationship to the future financial self.
And this is a timely issue.
Now saving is a classic two selves problem.
So this is a timely problem.
We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s.
At the same time, the Retirement Risk Index, the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement, has been increasing.
And we're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their pre-retirement needs while they're in retirement.
So what can we do about this?
He said that, "We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination."
That is to say, we somehow might not believe that we're going to get old, or we might not be able to imagine that we're going to get old some day.
On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous.
Of course, we know that we're going to get old.
But aren't there things that we believe and don't believe at the same time?
So my coauthors and I have used computers, the greatest tool of our time, to assist people's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future.
The first is called the distribution builder.
Each outcome is shown by one of these markers, and each sits on a row that represents a level of wealth and retirement.
Being down at the bottom means that you're struggling to make ends meet.
When you make an investment, what you're really saying is, "I accept that any one of these 100 things could happen to me and determine my wealth."
You can try to manipulate your fate, like this person is doing, but it costs you something to do it.
It means that you have to save more today.
Once you find an investment that you're happy with, what people do is they click "done" and the markers begin to disappear, slowly, one by one.
It simulates what it is like to invest in something and to watch that investment pan out.
At the end, there will only be one marker left standing and it will determine our wealth in retirement.
Yes, this person retired at 150 percent of their working income in retirement.
By using this tool over and over and simulating outcome after outcome, people can understand that the investments and savings that they undertake today determine their well-being in the future.
Now people are motivated through emotions, but different people find different things motivating.
This is a simulation that uses graphics, but other people find motivating what money can buy, not just numbers.
So here I made a distribution builder where instead of showing numerical outcomes, I show people what those outcomes will get you, in particular apartments that you can afford if you're retiring on 3,000, 2,500, 2,000 dollars per month and so on.
Some of them look like places I lived in as a graduate student.
And as you get to the very bottom, you're faced with the unfortunate reality that if you don't save anything for retirement, you won't be able to afford any housing at all.
Those are actual pictures of actual apartments renting for that amount as advertised on the Internet.
The last thing I'll show you, the last behavioral time machine, is something that I created with Hal Hershfield, who was introduced to me by my coauthor on a previous project, Bill Sharpe.
So what we do is we take pictures of people -- in this case, college-age people -- and we use software to age them and show these people what they'll look like when they're 60, 70, 80 years old.
And we try to test whether actually assisting your imagination by looking at the face of your future self can change you investment behavior.
So this is one of our experiments.
He's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate.
You can see his current annual income -- this is the percentage of his paycheck that he can take home today -- is quite high, 91 percent, but his retirement income is quite low.
If he saves the maximum legal amount, his retirement income goes up, but he's unhappy because now he has less money on the left-hand side to spend today.
Other conditions show people the future self.
If you save very little, the future self is unhappy living on 44 percent of the income.
Whereas if the present self saves a lot, the future self is delighted, where the income is close up near 100 percent.
To bring this to a wider audience, I've been working with Hal and Allianz to create something we call the behavioral time machine, in which you not only get to see yourself in the future, but you get to see anticipated emotional reactions to different levels of retirement wealth.
And just watch the facial expressions as they move the slider.
The older face is miserable.
And slowly, slowly we're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate.
And then it's a high savings rate.
The younger face is getting unhappy.
The older face is quite pleased with the decision.
We're going to see if this has an effect on what people do.
And what's nice about it is it's not something that biasing people actually, because as one face smiles, the other face frowns.
It's not telling you which way to put the slider, it's just reminding you that you are connected to and legally tied to this future self.
Your decisions today are going to determine its well-being.
And that's something that's easy to forget.
This use of virtual reality is not just good for making people look older.
There are programs you can get to see how people might look if they smoke, if they get too much exposure to the sun, if they gain weight and so on.
And what's good is, unlike in the experiments that Hal and myself ran with Russ Smith, you don't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality.
There are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing.
This is actually a picture of Hal, my coauthor.
You might recognize him from the previous demos.
And just for kicks we ran his picture through the balding, aging and weight gain software to see how he would look.
Hal is here, so I think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image.
And I'll close it there.
On behalf of Hal and myself, I wish all the best to your present and future selves.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I've been in Afghanistan for 21 years.
I work for the Red Cross and I'm a physical therapist.
My job is to make arms and legs -- well it's not completely true.
We do more than that.
We provide the patients, the Afghan disabled, first with the physical rehabilitation then with the social reintegration.
It's a very logical plan, but it was not always like this.
It took quite many years for the program to become what it is now.
Today, I would like to tell you a story, the story of a big change, and the story of the people who made this change possible.
I arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 to work in a hospital for war victims.
I was also working in the orthopedic center, we call it.
This is the place where we make the legs.
At that time I found myself in a strange situation.
There were so many things new to me.
So the orthopedic center was closed because physical rehabilitation was not considered a priority.
It was a strange sensation.
It's something that comes out from the past.
It's 21 years, but they are still all there.
Anyway, in 1992, the Mujahideen took all Afghanistan.
And the orthopedic center was closed.
I was assigned to work for the homeless, for the internally displaced people.
But one day, something happened.
I was coming back from a big food distribution in a mosque where tens and tens of people were squatting in terrible conditions.
I wanted to go home. I was driving.
A bomb fell not far from my car -- well, far enough, but big noise.
And everybody disappeared from the street.
And only one figure remained in the middle of the road.
It was a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to move away.
Well I'm not a particularly brave person, I have to confess it, but I could not just ignore him.
So I stopped the car and I went to help.
The man was without legs and only with one arm.
Behind him there was a child, his son, red in the face in an effort to push the father.
So I took him into a safe place.
And I ask, "What are you doing out in the street in this situation?"
"I work," he said.
And he said, "The Red Cross has closed."
Well without thinking, I told him "Come tomorrow.
We will provide you with a pair of legs."
The man, his name was Mahmoud, and the child, whose name was Rafi, left.
Who is going to make the legs for him?"
So I hoped that he would not come.
So I said, "Well I will give him some money."
And so the following day, I went to the orthopedic center.
And I spoke with a gatekeeper.
I was ready to tell him, "Listen, if someone such-and-such comes tomorrow, please tell him that it was a mistake.
Give him some money."
But Mahmoud and his son were already there.
And they were not alone.
There were 15, maybe 20, people like him waiting.
And there was some staff too.
And the gatekeeper told me, "They come everyday to see if the center will open."
I said, "No.
We have to go away. We cannot stay here."
They were bombing -- not very close -- but you could hear the noise of the bombs.
So, "We cannot stay here, it's dangerous.
It's not a priority."
But Najmuddin told me, "Listen now, we're here."
At least we can start repairing the prostheses, the broken prostheses of the people and maybe try to do something for people like Mahmoud."
I said, "No, please. We cannot do that.
It's really dangerous.
We have other things to do."
But they insisted.
When you have 20 people in front of you, looking at you and you are the one who has to decide ...
So we started doing some repairs.
The legs were swollen and the knees were stiff, so he needed a long preparation.
Believe me, I was worried because I was breaking the rules.
In the evening, I went to speak with the bosses at the headquarters, and I told them -- I lied -- I told them, "Listen, we are going to start a couple of hours per day, just a few repairs."
Maybe some of them are here now.
I was working, I was going everyday to work for the homeless.
He was telling me, "Patients are coming."
We knew that many more patients could not come, prevented by the fighting.
But people were coming.
And Mahmoud was coming every day.
And slowly, slowly week after week his legs were improving.
The stump or cast prosthesis was made, and he was starting the real physical rehabilitation.
A couple of times I crossed the front line in the very place where Mahmoud and his son were crossing.
It was April, I remember, a very beautiful day.
April in Kabul is beautiful, full of roses, full of flowers.
Very sad, dark.
So we chose a small spot in the garden.
And Mahmoud put on his prostheses, the other patients did the same, and they started practicing for the last time before being discharged.
Suddenly, they started fighting.
Two groups of Mujahideen started fighting.
We could hear in the air the bullets passing.
So we dashed, all of us, towards the shelter.
And we ran.
You know, 50 meters can be a long distance if you are totally exposed, but we managed to reach the shelter.
Inside, all of us panting, I sat a moment and I heard Rafi telling his father, "Father, you can run faster than me."
(Laughter) And Mahmoud, "Of course I can.
I can run, and now you can go to school.
Later on, we took them home.
And I will never forget Mahmoud and his son walking together pushing the empty wheelchair.
And then I understood, physical rehabilitation is a priority.
Dignity cannot wait for better times.
I met Mahmoud one year later.
He needed to change his prostheses -- a new pair of prostheses.
I asked about his son.
He told me, "He's at school. He'd doing quite well."
But I understood he wanted to tell me something.
He was sweating.
He said, "You have taught me to walk.
Thank you very much.
Now help me not to be a beggar anymore."
That was the job.
"My children are growing.
I said, "Okay."
Just to give him some money.
It was the easiest way.
And then he sat down.
I sat down too with goosebumps everywhere.
"What?" I said, "Stop."
We need to increase the production."
"Excuse me?"
I could not believe.
And then he said, "No, we can modify the workbench maybe to put a special stool, a special anvil, special vice, and maybe an electric screwdriver."
I said, "Listen, it's insane.
And it's even cruel to think of anything like this.
That's a production line and a very fast one.
It's cruel to offer him a job knowing that he's going to fail."
So the only things I could manage to obtain was a kind of a compromise.
One week later, Mahmoud was the fastest in the production line.
The production was up 20 percent.
"It's a trick, it's a trick," I said.
It was true.
Mahmoud had looked taller.
I remember him sitting behind the workbench smiling.
He was a new man, taller again.
Of course, I understood that what made him stand tall -- yeah they were the legs, thank you very much -- but as a first step, it was the dignity.
So of course, I understood.
And then we started a new policy -- a new policy completely different.
We decided to employ as many disabled as possible to train them in any possible job.
It became a policy of "positive discrimination," we call it now.
It's good for everybody.
Everybody benefits from that -- those employed, of course, because they get a job and dignity.
And then the surprise turns into hope.
And it's easy for me as well to train someone who has already passed through the experience of disability.
Poof, they learn much faster -- the motivation, the empathy they can establish with the patient is completely different, completely.
People like Mahmoud are agents of change.
And when you start, you cannot stop.
So you do vocational training, home education for those who cannot go to school.
There is always a better way to do things.
I have learned a lot from people like Najmuddin, Mahmoud, Rafi.
They are my teachers.
There are plenty of countries at war like Afghanistan.
It is possible and it is not difficult.
All we have to do is to listen to the people that we are supposed assist, to make them part of the decision-making process and then, of course, to adapt.
This is my big wish.
Well don't think that the changes in Afghanistan are over; not at all. We are going on.
Recently we have just started a program, a sport program -- basketball for wheelchair users.
We have several teams in the main part of Afghanistan.
And then I asked the usual question: "Is it a priority?
I never miss a single training session.
The night before a match I'm very nervous.
I shout like a true Italian.
(Laughter) What's next? What is going to be the next change?
That was my story. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement.
And I've done this in three parts.
So first I started with the mind.
And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z -- or, more precisely, from "a-ak" to "Zywiec."
And here's a little image of that.
It was really a fascinating journey.
It was painful at times, especially for those around me.
My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation.
As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no religion at all.
I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian.
But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it.
So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible.
(Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski.
So there was the topiary there.
And there's the sheep.
Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive.
So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years.
Because living so healthily was killing me.
I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers.
I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure.
I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book.
I had to put on sunscreen.
And you have to reapply it every two to four hours.
I had to do that properly.
So that took a lot of time.
I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health.
I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council.
They started a public campaign that says, "A walking helmet is a good helmet."
So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around.
And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets.
(Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that.
All of the markers went in the right direction.
My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant.
And it was successful overall.
I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family.
And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health.
And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over.
I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself.
It was like something out of Caligula.
Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening.
So now I'm back to adopting many -- not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore -- but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year.
It was really a life-changing project.
Because we live in such a noisy world.
There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy.
And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage.
The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year.
And it was done in Europe.
And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution.
So they think it's actually very deadly.
It really impairs cognition.
And our Founding Fathers knew about this.
When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate.
So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist.
So as a patriot, I felt it was important to -- I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way.
And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that -- and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED -- that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them.
The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable.
To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel.
So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes -- throw in some sunflower seeds.
And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos.
(Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person.
So that is it.
The book about it comes out in April.
It's called "Drop Dead Healthy."
And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour.
That's my greatest hope.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
There have been many revolutions over the last century, but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution.
We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did -- think about that.
That's an entire second adult lifetime that's been added to our lifespan.
We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch.
That's the metaphor, the old metaphor.
(Laughter) Age as pathology.
But many people today -- philosophers, artists, doctors, scientists -- are taking a new look at what I call "the third act" -- the last three decades of life.
They realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance, as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood.
And they are asking -- we should all be asking: How do we use this time?
What is the appropriate new metaphor for aging?
I've spent the last year researching and writing about this subject.
And I have come to find that a more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase -- the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness, and authenticity.
Age as potential.
It turns out, most people over 50 feel better, are less stressed, less hostile, less anxious.
Some of the studies even say we're happier.
(Laughter) This is not what I expected, trust me.
As I was approaching my late 40s, when I would wake up in the morning, my first six thoughts would all be negative.
And I got scared.
I thought, "Oh my gosh. I'm going to become a crotchety old lady."
But now that I am actually smack-dab in the middle of my own third act, I realize I've never been happier.
You realize you're still yourself -- maybe even more so.
Picasso once said, "It takes a long time to become young."
(Laughter) I don't want to romanticize aging.
Obviously, there's no guarantee that it can be a time of fruition and growth.
Some of it is a matter of luck.
One third of it, in fact, is genetic.
And there isn't much we can do about that.
We're going to discuss what we can do to make these added years really successful, and use them to make a difference.
Now, let me say something about the staircase, which may seem like an odd metaphor for seniors, given the fact that many seniors are challenged by stairs.
(Laughter) Myself included.
As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.
Entropy means that everything in the world -- everything -- is in a state of decline and decay -- the arch.
There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards, the staircase, bringing us into wholeness, authenticity, and wisdom.
And here's an example of what I mean.
This upward ascension can happen even in the face of extreme physical challenges.
About three years ago, I read an article in the New York Times.
Two years later, he was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
It's a terrible disease. It's fatal.
And I quote: "As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger.
As I diminished, I grew.
Now we're all born with spirit, all of us, but sometimes it gets tamped down beneath the challenges of life, violence, abuse, neglect.
Perhaps our parents suffered from depression.
Perhaps the task of the third act is to finish up the task of finishing ourselves.
And I realized that, in order to know where I was going, I had to know where I'd been.
And so I went back and I studied my first two acts, trying to see who I was then, who I really was, not who my parents or other people told me I was, or treated me like I was.
Who were my grandparents?
How did they treat my parents?
I discovered, a couple of years later, that this process that I had gone through is called by psychologists "doing a life review."
And they say it can give new significance and clarity and meaning to a person's life.
You may discover, as I did, that a lot of things that you used to think were your fault, a lot of things you used to think about yourself, really had nothing to do with you.
It wasn't your fault; you're just fine.
And you're able to go back and forgive them.
And forgive yourself.
You're able to free yourself from your past.
Now while I was writing about this, I came upon a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who'd spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp.
And he wrote this: "Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived -- not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering.
What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger."
Perhaps the central purpose of the third act is to go back and to try, if appropriate, to change our relationship to the past.
It turns out that cognitive research shows when we are able to do this, it manifests neurologically -- neural pathways are created in the brain.
You see, if you have, over time, reacted negatively to past events and people, neural pathways are laid down by chemical and electrical signals that are sent through the brain.
They become the norm -- even if it's bad for us, because it causes us stress and anxiety.
If, however, we can go back and alter our relationship, re-vision our relationship to past people and events, neural pathways can change.
And if we can maintain the more positive feelings about the past, that becomes the new norm.
It's like resetting a thermostat.
It's not having experiences that makes us wise.
It's reflecting on the experiences that we've had that makes us wise and that helps us become whole, brings wisdom and authenticity.
It helps us become what we might have been.
(Laughter) We have agency.
We are the subjects of our own lives.
But very often, many, if not most of us, when we hit puberty, we start worrying about fitting in and being popular.
And we become the subjects and objects of other people's lives.
And if we can do that, it will not just be for ourselves.
Older women are the largest demographic in the world.
If we can go back and redefine ourselves and become whole, this will create a cultural shift in the world, and it will give an example to younger generations so that they can reconceive their own lifespan.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
There's a poem written by a very famous English poet at the end of the 19th century.
And the poem goes: "On the idle hill of summer, lazy with the flow of streams, hark I hear a distant drummer, drumming like a sound in dreams, far and near and low and louder on the roads of earth go by, dear to friend and food to powder, soldiers marching, soon to die."
And these are -- and we see it very clearly today -- nearly always highly turbulent times, highly difficult times, and all too often very bloody times.
By the way, it happens about once every century.
And of course, into the vacuum where the too-old European powers used to be were played the two bloody catastrophes of the last century -- the one in the first part and the one in the second part: the two great World Wars.
Mao Zedong used to refer to them as the European civil wars, and it's probably a more accurate way of describing them.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we live at one of those times.
But for us, I want to talk about three factors today.
And the first of these, the first two of these, is about a shift in power.
But let's talk about the shifts of power that are occurring to the world.
And what is happening today is, in one sense, frightening because it's never happened before.
We have seen lateral shifts of power -- the power of Greece passed to Rome and the power shifts that occurred during the European civilizations -- but we are seeing something slightly different.
It's also moving vertically.
The globalization of power -- we talk about the globalization of markets, but actually it's the globalization of real power.
And where, at the nation state level that power is held to accountability subject to the rule of law, on the international stage it is not.
The international stage and the global stage where power now resides: the power of the Internet, the power of the satellite broadcasters, the power of the money changers -- this vast money-go-round that circulates now 32 times the amount of money necessary for the trade it's supposed to be there to finance -- the money changers, if you like, the financial speculators that have brought us all to our knees quite recently, the power of the multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries.
These live in a global space which is largely unregulated, not subject to the rule of law, and in which people may act free of constraint.
It's always suitable for those who have the most power to operate in spaces without constraint, but the lesson of history is that, sooner or later, unregulated space -- space not subject to the rule of law -- becomes populated, not just by the things you wanted -- international trade, the Internet, etc. -- but also by the things you don't want -- international criminality, international terrorism.
It's said that something like 60 percent of the four million dollars that was taken to fund 9/11 actually passed through the institutions of the Twin Towers which 9/11 destroyed.
You see, our enemies also use this space -- the space of mass travel, the Internet, satellite broadcasters -- to be able to get around their poison, which is about destroying our systems and our ways.
Sooner or later, sooner or later, the rule of history is that where power goes governance must follow.
And if it is therefore the case, as I believe it is, that one of the phenomenon of our time is the globalization of power, then it follows that one of the challenges of our time is to bring governance to the global space.
And I believe that the decades ahead of us now will be to a greater or lesser extent turbulent the more or less we are able to achieve that aim: to bring governance to the global space.
Now notice, I'm not talking about government.
I'm not talking about setting up some global democratic institution.
My own view, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is that this is unlikely to be done by spawning more U.N. institutions.
If we didn't have the U.N., we'd have to invent it.
The world needs an international forum.
It will actually happen by the powerful coming together and making treaty-based systems, treaty-based agreements, to govern that global space.
And if you look, you can see them happening, already beginning to emerge.
The World Trade Organization: treaty-based organization, entirely treaty-based, and yet, powerful enough to hold even the most powerful, the United States, to account if necessary.
Kyoto: the beginnings of struggling to create a treaty-based organization.
The G20: we know now that we have to put together an institution which is capable of bringing governance to that financial space for financial speculation.
And that's what the G20 is, a treaty-based institution.
So there's my first message, that if you are to pass through these turbulent times more or less turbulently, then our success in doing that will in large measure depend on our capacity to bring sensible governance to the global space.
And watch that beginning to happen.
My second point is, and I know I don't have to talk to an audience like this about such a thing, but power is not just shifting vertically, it's also shifting horizontally.
You might argue that the story, the history of civilizations, has been civilizations gathered around seas -- with the first ones around the Mediterranean, the more recent ones in the ascendents of Western power around the Atlantic.
Well it seems to me that we're now seeing a fundamental shift of power, broadly speaking, away from nations gathered around the Atlantic [seaboard] to the nations gathered around the Pacific rim.
Now that begins with economic power, but that's the way it always begins.
You already begin to see the development of foreign policies, the augmentation of military budgets occurring in the other growing powers in the world.
I think actually this is not so much a shift from the West to the East; something different is happening.
My guess is, for what it's worth, is that the United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth for the next 10 years, 15, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered; it has radically changed.
Up until now, the United States has been the dominant feature of our world.
They will remain the most powerful nation, but they will be the most powerful nation in an increasingly multi-polar world.
And you begin to see the alternative centers of power building up -- in China, of course, though my own guess is that China's ascent to greatness is not smooth.
But that's a subject of a different discussion.
You see India, you see Brazil.
You see increasingly that the world now looks actually, for us Europeans, much more like Europe in the 19th century.
Europe in the 19th century: a great British foreign secretary, Lord Canning, used to describe it as the "European concert of powers."
A fixed polarity of power means fixed alliances.
But a multiple polarity of power means shifting and changing alliances.
And that's the world we're coming into, in which we will increasingly see that our alliances are not fixed.
Canning, the great British foreign secretary once said, "Britain has a common interest, but no common allies."
And we will see increasingly that even we in the West will reach out, have to reach out, beyond the cozy circle of the Atlantic powers to make alliances with others if we want to get things done in the world.
Note, that when we went into Libya, it was not good enough for the West to do it alone; we had to bring others in.
We had to bring, in this case, the Arab League in.
My guess is Iraq and Afghanistan are the last times when the West has tried to do it themselves, and we haven't succeeded.
My guess is that we're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years -- I say 400 years because it's the end of the Ottoman Empire -- of the hegemony of Western power, Western institutions and Western values.
But that's no longer true.
Take the last financial crisis after the Second World War.
The West got together -- the Bretton Woods Institution, World Bank, International Monetary Fund -- the problem solved.
Now we have to call in others.
Now we have to create the G20.
Now we have to reach beyond the cozy circle of our Western friends.
I suspect we are now reaching the end of 400 years when Western power was enough.
People say to me, "The Chinese, of course, they'll never get themselves involved in peace-making, multilateral peace-making around the world."
How many Chinese troops are serving under the blue beret, serving under the blue flag, serving under the U.N. command in the world today?
How many Americans? 11.
What is the largest naval contingent tackling the issue of Somali pirates?
The Chinese naval contingent.
They want to keep the sea lanes open.
Increasingly, we are going to have to do business with people with whom we do not share values, but with whom, for the moment, we share common interests.
It's a whole new different way of looking at the world that is now emerging.
Today in our modern world, because of the Internet, because of the kinds of things people have been talking about here, everything is connected to everything.
We are now interdependent.
The interrelationship of nations, well it's always existed.
Lehman Brothers goes down, the whole lot collapses.
There are fires in the steppes of Russia, food riots in Africa.
We are all now deeply, deeply, deeply interconnected.
And what that means is the idea of a nation state acting alone, not connected with others, not working with others, is no longer a viable proposition.
Because the actions of a nation state are neither confined to itself, nor is it sufficient for the nation state itself to control its own territory, because the effects outside the nation state are now beginning to affect what happens inside them.
I was a young soldier in the last of the small empire wars of Britain.
That was when the enemy was outside the walls.
Now the enemy is inside the walls.
Now if I want to talk about the defense of my country, I have to speak to the Minister of Health because pandemic disease is a threat to my security, I have to speak to the Minister of Agriculture because food security is a threat to my security, I have to speak to the Minister of Industry because the fragility of our hi-tech infrastructure is now a point of attack for our enemies -- as we see from cyber warfare -- I have to speak to the Minister of Home Affairs because who has entered my country, who lives in that terraced house in that inner city has a direct effect on what happens in my country -- as we in London saw in the 7/7 bombings.
It's no longer the case that the security of a country is simply a matter for its soldiers and its ministry of defense.
It tells you that, in fact, our governments, vertically constructed, constructed on the economic model of the Industrial Revolution -- vertical hierarchy, specialization of tasks, command structures -- have got the wrong structures completely.
So here is Ashdown's third law.
By the way, don't ask me about Ashdown's first law and second law because I haven't invented those yet; it always sounds better if there's a third law, doesn't it?
Ashdown's third law is that in the modern age, where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others.
The most important bit about your structure -- whether you're a government, whether you're an army regiment, whether you're a business -- is your docking points, your interconnectors, your capacity to network with others.
But now one final thing.
If it is the case, ladies and gentlemen -- and it is -- that we are now locked together in a way that has never been quite the same before, then it's also the case that we share a destiny with each other.
Suddenly and for the very first time, collective defense, the thing that has dominated us as the concept of securing our nations, is no longer enough.
It used to be the case that if my tribe was more powerful than their tribe, I was safe; if my country was more powerful than their country, I was safe; my alliance, like NATO, was more powerful than their alliance, I was safe.
The advent of the interconnectedness and of the weapons of mass destruction means that, increasingly, I share a destiny with my enemy.
When I was a diplomat negotiating the disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union in Geneva in the 1970s, we succeeded because we understood we shared a destiny with them.
Collective security is not enough.
Peace has come to Northern Ireland because both sides realized that the zero-sum game couldn't work.
They shared a destiny with their enemies.
One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides, both Israel and, I think, the Palestinians, do not understand that they share a collective destiny.
And so suddenly, ladies and gentlemen, what has been the proposition of visionaries and poets down the ages becomes something we have to take seriously as a matter of public policy.
The great poem of John Donne's.
"Send not for whom the bell tolls."
The poem is called "No Man is an Island."
For us, I think, part of the equation for our survival.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
There's currently over a thousand TED Talks on the TED website.
Because if you think about it, 1,000 TED Talks, that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading.
How on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas?
Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand TED videos, it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so.
And I did a little calculation of this.
The damage to the economy for each one who does this is around $15,000.
So having seen this danger to the economy, I thought, we need to find a solution to this problem.
Each of those TED Talks has an average length of about 2,300 words.
(Laughter) The obvious question here is, does a TED Talk really need 2,300 words?
What's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a TED Talk?
While I was pondering this question, I came across this urban legend about Ernest Hemingway, who allegedly said that these six words here: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," were the best novel he had ever written.
And I also encountered a project called Six-Word Memoirs where people were asked, take your whole life and please sum this up into six words, such as these here: "Found true love, married someone else."
I actually like that one.
So if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words, you don't need more than six words for a TED Talk.
(Laughter) And if you did this for all thousand TED Talks, you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000.
So I thought this was quite worthwhile.
So I started asking all my friends, please take your favorite TED Talk and put that into six words.
So here are some of the results that I received.
For example, Dan Pink's talk on motivation, which was pretty good, if you haven't seen it: "Drop carrot. Drop stick. Bring meaning."
Or some even included references to the speakers, such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style, or the one of Tim Ferriss, which might be considered a bit strenuous at times.
The challenge here is, if I try to systematically do this, I would probably end up with a lot of summaries, but not with many friends in the end.
And luckily, there's a website for that, called Mechanical Turk, which is a website where you can post tasks that you don't want to do yourself, such as "Please summarize this text for me in six words."
And I didn't allow any low-cost countries to work on this, but I found out I could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents, which I think is a pretty good price.
Even then, unfortunately, it's not possible to summarize each TED Talk individually.
So what if I don't let people summarize individual TED Talks to six words, but give them 10 TED Talks at the same time and say, "Please do a six-word summary for that one."
Some of you might actually right now be thinking, it's downright crazy to have 10 TED Talks summarized into just six words.
But it's actually not, because there's an example by statistics professor Hans Rosling.
He's got eight talks online, and those can basically be summed up into just four words, because that's all he's basically showing us, our intuition is really bad.
He always proves us wrong.
And when I asked them to summarize the 10 TED Talks at the same time, some took the easy route out.
There were others -- and I found this quite cheeky -- They used their six words to talk back to me and ask me if I'd been too much on Google lately.
(Laughter) And finally also, I never understood this, some people really came up with their own version of the truth.
I don't know any TED Talk that contains this.
But, oh well.
In the end, however, and this is really amazing, for each of those 10 TED Talk clusters that I submitted, I actually received meaningful summaries.
Here are some of my favorites.
For example, for the TED Talks about food, someone summed this up into: "Food shaping body, brains and environment," which I think is pretty good.
Or happiness: "Striving toward happiness = moving toward unhappiness."
I had started out with a thousand TED Talks and I had 600 six-word summaries for those.
Actually, it sounded nice in the beginning, but when you look at 600 summaries, it's quite a lot, it's a huge list.
(Laughter) So I thought, I probably have to take this one step further here and create summaries of the summaries, and this is exactly what I did.
So I took the 600 summaries that I had, put them into nine groups according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on TED.com and asked people to do summaries of those.
But in the end, amazingly, again, people were able to do it.
For example, all the courageous TED Talks: "People dying" or "People suffering" was also one, "with easy solutions around."
Or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping TED Talk: "Flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer."
I mean that's the essence of it all.
But of course, once you are that far, you're not really satisfied.
I wanted to have a thousand TED Talks summarized into just six words -- which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content.
And I would only pay $99.50 -- so stay even below $100 for it.
This time I paid 25 cents because I thought the task was a bit harder.
And unfortunately, when I first received the answers -- and here, you'll see six of the answers -- I was a bit disappointed.
Because I think you'll agree, they all summarize some aspect of TED, but to me, they felt a bit bland, or they just had a certain aspect of TED in them.
So I was almost ready to give up when one night, I played around with these sentences and found out that there's actually a beautiful solution in here.
So here it is, a crowd-sourced, six-word summary of a thousand TED Talks at the value of $99.50: "Why the worry? I'd rather wonder."
(Applause)
(Laughter) So the best stories are often the trickiest ones.
They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in.
But the thing about this filter is that it always leaves the same things in.
You're always left with the same few simple stories.
There is the old saying that just about every story can be summed up as "a stranger came to town."
There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he claims there are really just seven types of stories.
You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again.
There was a study done, we asked some people-- people were asked to describe their lives.
(Laughter) It's probably the best answer, I don't mean that in a bad way.
But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey."
51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story.
11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that is a kind of story.
8% said, "My life is a novel." 5% said, "My life is a play."
I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show."
(Laughter) But again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and the thing is when something is in the form of a story, often, we remember it when we shouldn't.
So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree?
The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that is exactly the way it happened.
We're biologically programmed to respond to them.
They contain a lot of information. They have social power.
They connect us to other people.
So they are like a candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels.
When we read non-fiction books, we're really being fed stories.
Non-fiction is, in a sense, the new fiction.
The book may happen to say true things, but again, everything's taking the same form of these stories.
So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories?
You view your life like this instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be.
But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative.
When you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good versus evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics.
But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good versus evil story.
As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more.
If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly.
Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good versus evil story, and by pressing that button, you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more.
Another set of stories that are popular-- if you know Oliver Stone's movies, or Michael Moore's movies, you can't make a movie and say: "It was all a big accident."
No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because in a story, a story is about intention.
A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action, but not of human design.
No, a story is about evil people plotting together.
As a good rule of thumb, if you're asking: "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?"
You'll hear this in so many contexts.
We have to get tough with the banks. We had to get tough with the labor unions.
But this is again a story we fall back upon all too readily, all too quickly.
When we don't really know why something happened, we blame someone, and we say: "We need to get tough with them!"
I view it usually as a kind of mental laziness.
It's a simple story you tell: "We need to get tough, we needed to get tough, we will have to get tough."
Usually, that is a kind of warning signal.
Another kind of problem with stories is you can only fit so many stories into your mind at once, or in the course of a day, or even over the course of a lifetime.
So your stories are serving too many purposes.
It's a kind of self-deception, but the problem comes when I need to change that story.
So stories will serve dual and conflicting purposes, and very often they will lead us astray.
I used to think I was within the camp of economists, I was one of the good guys, and I was allied with other good guys, and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys.
And probably, I was wrong.
Maybe sometimes, I'm one of the good guys, but on some issues, I finally realized: "Hey, I wasn't one of the good guys."
I'm not sure I was the bad guy in the sense of having evil intent, but it was very hard for me to get away with that story.
One interesting thing about cognitive biases is they are the subject of so many books these days.
Why don't these books tell us that?
So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias.
Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like: "I bought this book. I won't be 'Predictably Irrational'."
(Laughter) It's like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it.
They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes.
A third problem with stories is that outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but, of course, that's not how it is, advertising works on all of us.
So if you're too attached to stories, what will happen is people selling products come along, and they will bundle their product with a story.
And you end up buying the product, because the product and the story go together.
Let's consider two kinds of stories about cars.
Story A is: "Buy this car, and you will have beautiful, romantic partners and a fascinating life."
(Laughter) There are a lot of people who have a financial incentive to promote that story.
But, say, the alternative story is: "You don't actually need a car as nice as your income would indicate.
That is a good heuristic for lots of problems, but when it comes to cars, just buy a Toyota."
(Laughter) Maybe Toyota has an incentive there, but even Toyota is making more money off the luxury cars, and less money off the cheaper cars.
There are people using your love of stories to manipulate you.
You can never get out of the pattern of thinking in terms of stories, but you can improve the extent to which you think in stories, and make some better decisions.
(Laughter) It would fit a pretty well-known pattern.
"This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'" (Laughter) And you tell your story.
That too is a narrative you will remember, you can tell to other people, and again, it may stick.
"This guy Tyler Cowen came (Laughter) and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories (Laughter) about how other people think too much in terms of stories."
Or maybe some combination of the three?
I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and throw out your Tolstoy.
To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human.
There is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez memoir "Living to Tell the Tale" that we use memory in stories to make sense of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to establish connections with other people.
None of this will go away, should go away, or can go away.
But again, as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin, the extra decision.
When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious?
The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended consequences of human action, because that very often does not make for a good story.
And those are your categories, but don't let them make you too happy.
If I actually had to live those journeys, and quests, and battles, that would be so oppressive to me!
It's so easy to pick out a few areas to be agnostic in, and then feel good about it, like, "I am agnostic about religion, or politics."
It's a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right?
But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then, on other things, they can be pretty open-minded.
So don't fall into the trap of thinking because you're agnostic on some things, that you're being fundamentally reasonable about your self-deception, your stories, and your open-mindedness.
(Laughter) (Applause)
This is an equipment graveyard.
Now, why is this?
Most of the medical devices used in Africa are imported, and quite often, they're not suitable for local conditions.
An example of a medical device that may have ended up in an equipment graveyard at some point is an ultrasound monitor to track the heart rate of unborn babies.
In low-resource settings, the standard of care is often a midwife listening to the baby's heart rate through a horn.
Now, this approach has been around for more than a century.
It's very much dependent on the skill and the experience of the midwife.
Two young inventors from Uganda visited an antenatal clinic at a local hospital a few years ago, when they were students in information technology.
They noticed that quite often, the midwife was not able to hear any heart rate when trying to listen to it through this horn.
So they invented their own fetal heart rate monitor.
They adapted the horn and connected it to a smartphone.
An app on the smartphone records the heart rate, analyzes it and provides the midwife with a range of information on the status of the baby.
These inventors -- (Applause) are called Aaron Tushabe and Joshua Okello.
Another inventor, Tendekayi Katsiga, was working for an NGO in Botswana that manufactured hearing aids.
Now, he noticed that these hearing aids needed batteries that needed replacement, very often at a cost that was not affordable for most of the users that he knew.
In response, and being an engineer, Tendekayi invented a solar-powered battery charger with rechargeable batteries, that could be used in these hearing aids.
He cofounded a company called Deaftronics, which now manufactures the Solar Ear, which is a hearing aid powered by his invention.
My colleague, Sudesh Sivarasu, invented a smart glove for people who have suffered from leprosy.
Even though their disease may have been cured, the resulting nerve damage will have left many of them without a sense of touch in their hands.
This puts them at risk of injury.
The glove has sensors to detect temperature and pressure and warn the user.
Sudesh invented this glove after observing former leprosy patients as they carried out their day-to-day activities, and he learned about the risks and the hazards in their environment.
Now, the inventors that I've mentioned integrated engineering with healthcare.
This is what biomedical engineers do.
At the University of Cape Town, we run a course called Health Innovation and Design.
The aim of the course is to introduce these students to the philosophy of the design world.
The students are encouraged to engage with communities as they search for solutions to health-related problems.
One of the communities that we work with is a group of elderly people in Cape Town.
A recent class project had the task of addressing hearing loss in these elderly people.
The students, many of them being engineers, set out believing that they would design a better hearing aid.
They spent time with the elderly, chatted to their healthcare providers and their caregivers.
They soon realized that, actually, adequate hearing aids already existed, but many of the elderly who needed them and had access to them didn't have them.
And many of those who had hearing aids wouldn't wear them.
The students realized that many of these elderly people were in denial of their hearing loss.
They also discovered that the environment in which these elderly people lived did not accommodate their hearing loss.
So instead of developing and designing a new and better hearing aid, the students did an audit of the environment, with a view to improving the acoustics.
They also devised a campaign to raise awareness of hearing loss and to counter the stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid.
Now, this often happens when one pays attention to the user -- in this case, the elderly -- and their needs and their context.
One often has to move away from the focus of technology and reformulate the problem.
This approach to understanding a problem through listening and engaging is not new, but it often isn't followed by engineers, who are intent on developing technology.
One of our students has a background in software engineering.
He had often created products for clients that the client ultimately did not like.
When a client would reject a product, it was common at his company to proclaim that the client just didn't know what they wanted.
Having completed the course, the student fed back to us that he now realized that it was he who hadn't understood what the client wanted.
Another student gave us feedback that she had learned to design with empathy, as opposed to designing for functionality, which is what her engineering education had taught her.
So what all of this illustrates is that we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology.
But we need technology.
We need hearing aids. We need fetal heart rate monitors.
So how do we create more medical device success stories from Africa?
How do we create more inventors, rather than relying on a few exceptional individuals who are able to perceive real needs and respond in ways that work?
Well, we focus on needs and people and context.
"But this is obvious," you might say, "Of course context is important."
But Africa is a diverse continent, with vast disparities in health and wealth and income and education.
If we assume that our engineers and inventors already know enough about the different African contexts to be able to solve the problems of our different communities and our most marginalized communities, then we might get it wrong.
But then, if we on the African continent don't necessarily know enough about it, then perhaps anybody with the right level of skill and commitment could fly in, spend some time listening and engaging and fly out knowing enough to invent for Africa.
But understanding context is not about a superficial interaction.
We already have a strong and rich base of knowledge from which to start finding solutions to our own problems.
So let's not rely too much on others when we live on a continent that is filled with untapped talent.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Lauren Hodge: If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option, which would you choose, grilled or fried chicken?
Now most people would answer grilled, and it's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories.
However, grilled chicken poses a hidden danger.
The hidden danger is heterocyclic amines -- specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine, or PhIP -- (laughter) which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound.
They are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group.
Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines.
However, no studies exist yet that show how or why.
These here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens.
And as you can see, none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe, which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet.
Now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea.
And I was led to it through a series of events.
I first learned about it through a lawsuit I read about in my doctor's office -- (Laughter) which was between the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine and seven different fast food restaurants.
They weren't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken, but they were sued because of California's Proposition 65, which stated that if there's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning.
So I was very surprised about this.
And I was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken, which doesn't seem very harmful.
But then one night, my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner, and I noticed that the edges of the chicken, which had been marinated in lemon juice, turned white.
So I combined these two ideas and I formulated a hypothesis, saying that, could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in PH?
I thought this would be easy, but I emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where I lived, and I got one positive response that said that they could work with me.
Most of the others either never responded back, said they didn't have the time or didn't have the equipment and couldn't help me.
However, it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab -- so I could finally start my project.
The first stage was completed at home, which consisted of marinating the chicken, grilling the chicken, amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab.
The second stage was completed at the Penn State University main campus lab, which is where I extracted the chemicals, changed the PH so I could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds I needed from the rest of the chicken.
The final stages, when I ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer, which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens I had in my chicken.
When compared with the unmarinated chicken, which is what I used as my control, I found that lemon juice worked by far the best, which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent.
The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well, decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent.
Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation, but it was nearly negligible.
And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range, but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens.
Another important factor that I didn't take into account initially was the time cooked.
And I found that if you increase the time cooked, the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases.
So the best way to marinate chicken, based on this, is to, not under-cook, but definitely don't over-cook and char the chicken, and marinate in either lemon juice, brown sugar or saltwater.
(Applause) Based on these findings, I have a question for you.
Would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life?
However, anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle.
Is it worth it to you?
(Applause) Shree Bose: Hi everyone. I'm Shree Bose.
And she's standing in front of you and she's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they're different colors.
But that was me years ago.
And that was my first science fair project.
It got a bit more complicated from there.
My older brother Panaki Bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when I barely understood basic algebra.
(Laughter) And then came the summer after my freshman year, when my grandfather passed away due to cancer.
And I remember watching my family go through that and thinking that I never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss.
So, armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology, I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15.
Good plan.
So I started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab.
So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don't know about, or at least don't pay that much attention to.
But yet, it's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States.
In fact, one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
One in 100 will die from it.
Chemotherapy, one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today, involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells.
Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug -- a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves.
But here's the problem: sometimes patients become resistant to the drug, and then years after they've been declared to be cancer free, they come back.
And this time, they no longer respond to the drug.
It's a huge problem.
In fact, it's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today.
So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin.
And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase, an energy protein.
So we ran all of these tests blocking the protein, and we saw this huge shift.
I mean, on the slide, you can see that on our sensitive side, these cells that are responding to the drug, when we start blocking the protein, the number of dying cells -- those colored dots -- they're going down.
But those are dots on a screen for you; what exactly does that mean?
Well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell.
And in fact, it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant.
In fact, it means that if a patient comes in and they're resistant to this drug, then if we give them a chemical to block this protein, then we can treat them again with the same drug.
But my work wasn't just about the research.
It was about finding my passion.
That's why being the grand prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair -- cute picture, right -- it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor.
And ever since then, I've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff -- from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys.
But like I said, my journey wasn't just about the research, it was about finding my passion, and it was about making my own opportunities when I didn't even know what I was doing.
It was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing.
After all, my story begins with a dried, withered spinach plant and it's only getting better from there.
Thank you.
(Applause) Naomi Shah: Hi everyone. I'm Naomi Shah, and today I'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients.
1.6 million deaths worldwide.
One death every 20 seconds.
People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors.
And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined.
Now these statistics had a huge impact on me, but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round.
It confused me; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season?
With this question in mind, I started researching, and I soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit.
As soon as I realized this, I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients.
At first, I just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients.
But soon after, I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients.
And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health, because that relationship seems so important.
So with that in mind, I started researching more, I started investigating more, and I became very passionate.
For example, volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools, homes and workplaces.
They're everywhere.
These chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant, as defined by the U.S. Clean Air Act.
Which is surprising to me, because these chemical pollutants, through my research, I show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated.
So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created.
I'm going to show it to you on my laptop.
And I have a volunteer subject in the audience today, Julie.
And all of Julie's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model.
And this can be used by anyone.
So I want you to imagine that you're in Julie's shoes, or someone who's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder.
So Julie's going to her doctor's office to get treated for her asthma.
And the doctor has her sit down, and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate -- which is essentially her exhalation rate, or the amount of air that she can breathe out in one breath.
So that peak expiratory flow rate, I've entered it up into the interactive software model.
I've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels.
So what it shows -- if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner -- it shows Julie's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar.
This is the measurement that she took in her doctor's office.
In the blue bar at the bottom of the graph, it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate, what her exhalation rate or lung health, should be based on her age, gender and height.
So the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar, and he says, "Wow, we need to give her steroids, medication and inhalers."
But I want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids, inhalers and medication, the doctor turns to Julie and says, "Why don't you go home and clean out your air filters.
And if you're remodeling your house, take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring."
Because these solutions are natural, these solutions are sustainable, and these solutions are long-term investments -- long-term investments that we're making for our generation and for future generations.
Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home, her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her.
So I'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma, more respiratory disorders, as well as more pollutants.
And that saying is that genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.
And that made a huge impact on me when I was doing this research.
Because what I feel, is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level, that we can't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything.
But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home, in our own school and in our own workplace, we can make a huge difference in air quality.
Because remember, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors.
And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients, anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general.
So I want you to reimagine a world with better air quality, better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Amongst all the troubling deficits we struggle with today -- we think of financial and economic primarily -- the ones that concern me most is the deficit of political dialogue -- our ability to address modern conflicts as they are, to go to the source of what they're all about and to understand the key players and to deal with them.
There is trade, there is disarmament, there is cross-border relations.
We loosely call them "groups."
They may represent social, religious, political, economic, military realities.
The rules of engagement: how to talk, when to talk, and how to deal with them.
Let me show you a slide here which illustrates the character of conflicts since 1946 until today.
You see the green is a traditional interstate conflict, the ones we used to read about.
The red is modern conflict, conflicts within states.
These are quite different, and they are outside the grasp of modern diplomacy.
And the core of these key actors are groups who represent different interests inside countries.
And the way they deal with their conflicts rapidly spreads to other countries.
Another acknowledgment we've seen during these years, recent years, is that very few of these domestic interstate, intrastate conflicts can be solved militarily.
They may have to be dealt with with military means, but they cannot be solved by military means.
They need political solutions.
And we, therefore, have a problem, because they escape traditional diplomacy.
Plus, during the last decade, we've been in the mode where dealing with groups was conceptually and politically dangerous.
After 9/11, either you were with us or against us.
It was black or white.
So we've spent more time on focusing on why we should not talk to others than finding out how we talk to others.
Now I'm not naive.
You cannot talk to everybody all the time.
And sometimes military intervention is necessary.
I happen to believe that Libya was necessary and that military intervention in Afghanistan was also necessary.
And my country relies on its security through military alliance, that's clear.
But still we have a large deficit in dealing with and understanding modern conflict.
10 years after that military intervention, that country is far from secure.
The situation, to be honest, is very serious.
When I first came to Afghanistan in 2005 as a foreign minister, I met the commander of ISAF, the international troops.
And he told me that, "This can be won militarily, minister.
Now four COM ISAF's later, we hear a different message: "This cannot be won militarily.
We need military presence, but we need to move to politics.
We can only solve this through a political solution.
And it is not us who will solve it; Afghans have to solve it."
But then they need a different political process than the one they were given in 2001, 2002.
Everybody seems to agree with that.
It was very controversial to say three, four, five years ago.
Now everybody agrees.
We didn't grasp what was going on.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, is talking to everyone, and it is doing so because it is neutral.
And that's one reason why that organization probably is the best informed key player to understand modern conflict -- because they talk.
And the other side which you're going to engage is the one with whom you profoundly disagree.
Prime Minister Rabin said when he engaged the Oslo process, "You don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies."
It's hard, but it is necessary.
Let me go one step further.
This is Tahrir Square.
There's a revolution going on.
It will last for a long, long time.
And who knows what it will be called in the end.
The point is that we are probably seeing, for the first time in the history of the Arab world, a revolution bottom-up -- people's revolution.
Social groups are taking to the streets.
And we find out in the West that we know very little about what's happening.
Most governments followed the dictate of the authoritarian leaders to stay away from these different groups, because they were terrorists.
So now that they are emerging in the street and we salute the democratic revolution, we find out how little we know.
Right now, the discussion goes, "Should we talk to the Muslim Brotherhood?
Should we talk to Hamas?
I think that is wrong.
And how can we tell the Muslim Brotherhood, as we should, that they must respect minority rights, if we don't accept majority rights?
Because they may turn out to be a majority.
How can we escape [having] a double-standard, if we at the same time preach democracy and at the same time don't want to deal with the groups that are representative?
Now my diplomats are instructed to talk to all these groups.
We make a distinction between talking from a diplomatic level and talking at the political level.
So if we refuse to talk to these new groups that are going to be dominating the news in years to come, we will further radicalization, I believe.
And if we cannot demonstrate to these groups that if you move towards democracy, if you move towards taking part in civilized and normal standards among states, there are some rewards on the other side.
The paradox here is that the last decade probably was a lost decade for making progress on this.
And the paradox is that the decade before the last decade was so promising -- and for one reason primarily.
And the reason is what happened in South Africa: Nelson Mandela.
When Mandela came out of prison after 27 years of captivity, if he had told his people, "It's time to take up the arms, it's time to fight," he would have been followed.
And I think the international community would have said, "Fair enough.
It's their right to fight."
Now as you know, Mandela didn't do that.
In his memoirs, "Long Road to Freedom," he wrote that he survived during those years of captivity because he always decided to look upon his oppressor as also being a human being, also being a human being.
So he engaged a political process of dialogue, not as a strategy of the weak, but as a strategy of the strong.
Now South African friends will know that was very painful.
So what can we learn from all of this?
Dialogue is not easy -- not between individuals, not between groups, not between governments -- but it is very necessary.
We have to connect with these profound changes.
And what is dialogue really about?
We need a lot more training on how to do that and a lot more practice on how that can take problem-solving forward.
We know from our personal experiences that it's easy sometimes just to walk, and sometimes you may need to fight.
Sometimes you have to.
The alternative is a strategy of engagement and principled dialogue.
And I believe we need to strengthen this approach in modern diplomacy, not only between states, but also within states.
We are seeing some new signs.
All of a sudden, NGOs were not only standing in the streets, crying their slogans, but they were taking [them] into the negotiations, partly because they represented the victims of these weapons.
And they brought their knowledge.
And there was an interaction between diplomacy and the power coming bottom-up.
This is perhaps a first element of a change.
And we have to go also beyond traditional diplomacy to the survival issue of our times, climate change.
How are we going to solve climate change through negotiations, unless we are able to make civil society and people, not part of the problem, but part of the solution?
It is going to demand an inclusive process of diplomacy very different from the one we are practicing today as we are heading to new rounds of difficult climate negotiations, but when we move toward something which has to be much more along a broad mobilization.
It's crucial to understand, I believe, because of technology and because of globalization, societies from bottom-up.
We as diplomats need to know the social capital of communities.
What is the legitimacy of diplomacy, of the the solution we devise as diplomats if they cannot be reflected and understood by also these broader forces of societies that we now very loosely call groups?
The good thing is that we are not powerless.
The diplomatic toolbox is actually full of different tools we can use to strengthen our communication.
But the problem is that we are coming out of a decade where we had a fear of touching it.
And as we try to understand this broad movement across the Arab world, we are not powerless.
In my country, I have seen how the council of Islamist groups and Christian groups came together, not as a government initiative, but they came together on their own initiative to establish contact and dialogue in times where things were pretty low-key tension.
And when tension increased, they already had that dialogue, and that was a strength to deal with different issues.
Our modern Western societies are more complex than before, in this time of migration.
How are we going to settle and build a bigger "We" to deal with our issues if we don't improve our skills of communication?
So there are many reasons, and for all of these reasons, this is time and this is why we must talk.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
It was June 2014.
I was 30 years old, and I received a call from my doctor's office to say my test results were in.
So I walked up to see her in my lunch break, and my doctor said she was very sorry to tell me that I had breast cancer.
I didn't want to believe her and at first, I didn't.
You see, I'm a lawyer and I needed some evidence.
So I'm very embarrassed to tell you all that I stood up and I walked around to where she was sitting so that I could look over her shoulder and verify what was written on the page in front of her.
(Laughter) She told me she was sure.
But at that moment, work wasn't my priority.
I was thinking about how I was going to tell my family and friends that I had cancer.
How I was going to answer their questions about how bad it was and whether I was going to be OK, when I didn't know that myself.
I was wondering if my partner and I would ever have an opportunity to start a family.
And I was figuring out how I was going to tell my mother, who had herself had breast cancer when she was pregnant with me.
But I also didn't want her to have to relive her cancer experience.
What I didn't appreciate at the time was that work was about to play a huge role in my treatment and recovery.
And at a time like that, you would think that I would turn to my family and friends for support.
You see, we were a pretty close team, and we shared a couple of really good in-jokes, like this time they overheard someone ask me how I got my hair so shiny and perfect -- without knowing that it was, of course, a wig, and you know, it was a very good wig and it did make getting ready in the mornings very easy.
(Laughter) But in little moments like this, I appreciated what their support meant, and I wondered what I would have done without that network.
I've spoken with so many people, women in particular, who haven't had the chance to have that network because they haven't been given the opportunity to work through treatment.
And there are several reasons for this.
But I think it mostly comes down to overly paternalistic employers.
These employers want you to go away and focus on yourself.
And they use those kinds of phrases.
So I started to look into what an employer is required to do when someone presents with a cancer diagnosis.
I discovered that under Australian law, cancer is considered a disability.
So if you are unable to perform your usual work duties, your employer is obligated by the Disability Discrimination Act to make reasonable adjustments to your working arrangements, so that you can continue to work.
I knew the obvious impacts my diagnosis was going to have on work.
Medical appointments would be scheduled during business hours, and I knew that I would need time off to recover from surgical procedures.
Admittedly, a lot of that was through Doctor Google, perhaps not my best move and I wouldn't recommend that.
And if this happened to me, I wondered how I was going to do my job as a lawyer.
I was fortunate to have a supportive manager who was happy to see how things went as we went along, rather than requiring a concrete plan up front.
And they'll learn to adjust for that.
So for me, there were the tips and tricks that I learned about the treatment itself, like, before you go to chemo, you need to make sure you're really well hydrated and that you're warm, because it helps the nurses to find your veins.
And make sure that you don't eat any of your favorite food, either before or after chemo, because you're going to be throwing that up and you won't ever want to look at it again.
(Laughter) I learned that one the hard way.
And then there were the tricks for managing my workflow.
I scheduled chemo for first thing on a Monday morning.
I knew that from the time I left the cancer care unit, I had about four hours before this fog screen would come down and I would start to be sick.
And then I would log back into work from home.
I was able to set reasonable expectations with my business partners about what I could do and the time frames that I could do it in.
But I still remember the hesitation in their voices when it came to asking for things.
And asking me to do things by a certain time.
And trust me, these were people that were not afraid of setting a good deadline.
(Laughter) I got the impression they didn't want to put any extra pressure on me while I was going through treatment.
And while I appreciated the sentiment, I actually needed the deadlines.
To me, that was something within my control and something that could stay in my control when there were so many things that couldn't.
And as I was working from home, I was thinking about how employers should be applying this concept of reasonable adjustments in our current age, where one in two Australian men and women will be diagnosed with cancer by the age of 85.
And with technology enabling us to work anywhere, any time, reasonable adjustments are no longer contingent upon whether or not you can continue to physically make it into the physical office.
Reasonable adjustments are also not about just offering a longer break or a comfier chair to sit in, although those things might be good, too.
At the very least, we need to be applying the flexibility policies and strategies we've developed for other scenarios, like for people with family responsibilities.
But how can we ensure that people are even having a conversation about what reasonable adjustments might look like for them if a manager's first response is to say, "Oh no, don't come back to work until you're better."
It must be compulsory for managers to have to have these conversations with their employees.
And lessons from people like me, that have really benefited from working through treatment, need to be more widely shared.
And I thought about what could be done to guide these conversations, and then an amazing colleague of mine, Camilla Gunn, developed a "Working with Cancer" toolkit.
The toolkit provides a framework for those diagnosed, their managers, their carers and their coworkers to have conversations about cancer and the work support available.
So what should be a manager's first response when somebody says that they're sick and they don't know how it's going to impact their work?
It must be this: "To the extent that you are able, and want to, we would love to work out an arrangement for you to continue to work through treatment."
We need to start positively engaging people with serious illness to keep them in the workforce, rather than paternalistically pushing them away.
And yes, these things were true some of the time, if not a lot of the time, but I was also determined to push myself at work as much as I had always done.
And I was able to do that because my employer gave me the choice.
Thank you.
(Applause)
What I'm going to show you are the astonishing molecular machines that create the living fabric of your body.
Now molecules are really, really tiny.
They're smaller than a wavelength of light, so we have no way to directly observe them.
But through science, we do have a fairly good idea of what's going on down at the molecular scale.
So what we can do is actually tell you about the molecules, but we don't really have a direct way of showing you the molecules.
And this idea is actually nothing new.
Scientists have always created pictures as part of their thinking and discovery process.
They draw pictures of what they're observing with their eyes, through technology like telescopes and microscopes, and also what they're thinking about in their minds.
I picked two well-known examples, because they're very well-known for expressing science through art.
And I start with Galileo, who used the world's first telescope to look at the Moon.
And he transformed our understanding of the Moon.
The perception in the 17th century was the Moon was a perfect heavenly sphere.
But what Galileo saw was a rocky, barren world, which he expressed through his watercolor painting.
Another scientist with very big ideas, the superstar of biology is Charles Darwin.
And with this famous entry in his notebook, he begins in the top left-hand corner with, "I think," and then sketches out the first tree of life, which is his perception of how all the species, all living things on Earth are connected through evolutionary history -- the origin of species through natural selection and divergence from an ancestral population.
And his pictures -- everything's accurate and it's all to scale.
And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like.
In the top left-hand corner, you've got this yellow-green area.
The yellow-green area is the fluid of blood, which is mostly water, but it's also antibodies, sugars, hormones, that kind of thing.
And the red region is a slice into a red blood cell.
And those red molecules are hemoglobin.
They are actually red; that's what gives blood its color.
And hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs and then carry it to other parts of the body.
I was very much inspired by this image many years ago, and I wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world.
What would it look like?
And that's how I really began.
This is DNA in its classic double helix form.
And it's from X-ray crystallography, so it's an accurate model of DNA.
If we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands, you see these things that look like teeth.
Those are the letters of genetic code, the 25,000 genes you've got written in your DNA.
This is what they typically talk about -- the genetic code -- this is what they're talking about.
But I want to talk about a different aspect of DNA science, and that is the physical nature of DNA.
But they physically run in opposite directions, which creates a number of complications for your living cells, as you're about to see, most particularly when DNA is being copied.
And so what I'm about to show you is an accurate representation of the actual DNA replication machine that's occurring right now inside your body, at least 2002 biology.
So DNA's entering the production line from the left-hand side, and it hits this collection, these miniature biochemical machines, that are pulling apart the DNA strand and making an exact copy.
So DNA comes in and hits this blue, doughnut-shaped structure and it's ripped apart into its two strands.
But things aren't so simple for the other strand because it must be copied backwards.
So it's thrown out repeatedly in these loops and copied one section at a time, creating two new DNA molecules.
Now you have billions of this machine right now working away inside you, copying your DNA with exquisite fidelity.
It's an accurate representation, and it's pretty much at the correct speed for what is occurring inside you.
(Applause) This is work from a number of years ago, but what I'll show you next is updated science, it's updated technology.
So again, we begin with DNA.
And it's jiggling and wiggling there because of the surrounding soup of molecules, which I've stripped away so you can see something.
DNA is about two nanometers across, which is really quite tiny.
But in each one of your cells, each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long.
So to keep the DNA organized and regulate access to the genetic code, it's wrapped around these purple proteins -- or I've labeled them purple here.
All this field of view is a single strand of DNA.
This huge package of DNA is called a chromosome.
And we'll come back to chromosomes in a minute.
We're pulling out, we're zooming out, out through a nuclear pore, which is the gateway to this compartment that holds all the DNA, called the nucleus.
This is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope.
And it's been filmed under time-lapse, which is why you can see it moving.
They go through this very striking motion that is focused on these little red spots.
When the cell feels it's ready to go, it rips apart the chromosome.
One set of DNA goes to one side, the other side gets the other set of DNA -- identical copies of DNA.
And then the cell splits down the middle.
And again, you have billions of cells undergoing this process right now inside of you.
Now we're going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes, and look at its structure and describe it.
The chromosomes line up.
So this is one of the biggest molecular structures that you have, at least as far as we've discovered so far inside of us.
So this is a single chromosome.
And you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome.
One is bundled up into one sausage.
The other strand is bundled up into the other sausage.
These things that look like whiskers that are sticking out from either side are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell.
They're called microtubules, that name's not important.
But we're going to focus on the region labeled red here -- and it's the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes.
We've been studying this thing they call the kinetochore for over a hundred years with intense study, and we're still just beginning to discover what it's about.
It is made up of about 200 different types of proteins, thousands of proteins in total.
It is a signal broadcasting system.
It broadcasts through chemical signals, telling the rest of the cell when it's ready, when it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go for the separation of the chromosomes.
It is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules.
It's also an attention-sensing system.
And you'll see, there's this one little last bit that's still remaining red.
That is the signal broadcasting system sending out the stop signal.
It's molecular clockwork.
This is how you work at the molecular scale.
So with a little bit of molecular eye candy, (Laughter) we've got kinesins, the orange ones.
Exploring at the frontier of science, at the frontier of human understanding, is mind-blowing.
Discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) ♫ They stood together ♫ ♫ under a tree in tall grass ♫ ♫ on TV ♫ ♫ telling the world ♫ ♫ their story ♫ ♫ We will be left to wander ♫ ♫ and fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and took our husbands ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ We will live on ♫ ♫ then fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and killed our children ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I believe ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ You've got something this little life ♫ ♫ can never take away ♫ ♫ Running through the darkness of night ♫ ♫ with a child by her side ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Daybreak brings a sign of new life ♫ ♫ with the power to stand ♫ ♫ Crossing the border ♫ ♫ she said, "You will grow free on this land" ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I can feel your power ♫ ♫ in these words she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on living ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on giving ♫ ♫ and forgiving ♫ ♫ Aung San Suu Kyi ♫ ♫ living under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ When her people asked her for a message ♫ ♫ she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ Now we know the words, let's sing.
♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ People of hope ♫ ♫ People of change ♫ ♫ People of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty ♫ ♫ knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ Thank you.
(Applause)
Nearly everyone in the world is part of some community, whether large or small.
And all of these communities have similar needs.
They need light, they need heat they need air-conditioning.
They need food to be grown or provided, distributed and stored safely.
They need waste products to be collected, removed and processed.
People in the community need to be able to get from one place to another as quickly as possible.
And a supply of energy is the basis for all of these activities.
Energy in the form of electricity provides light and air-conditioning.
Energy in the form of heat keeps us warm.
And energy in chemical form provides fertilizer; it drives farm machinery and transportation energy.
Now, I spent 10 years working at NASA.
In the beginning of my time there in 2000, I was very interested in communities.
There’s no coal on the Moon.
There's no atmosphere.
And solar power had a real problem: the Moon orbits the Earth once a month.
For two weeks, the sun goes down, and your solar panels don't make any energy.
If you want to try to store enough energy in batteries for two weeks, it just simply isn't practical.
So nuclear energy was really the only choice.
Now, back in 2000, I didn't really know too much about nuclear power, so I started trying to learn.
Almost all of the nuclear power we use on Earth today uses water as a basic coolant.
This has some advantages, but it has a lot of disadvantages.
If you want to generate electricity, you have to get the water a lot hotter than you normally can.
At normal pressures, water will boil at 100 degrees Celsius.
This isn't nearly hot enough to generate electricity effectively.
So water-cooled reactors have to run at much higher pressures than atmospheric pressure.
Some water-cooled reactors run at over 70 atmospheres of pressure, and others have to run at as much as 150 atmospheres of pressure.
There's no getting around this; it's simply what you have to do if you want to generate electricity using a water-cooled reactor.
This means you have to build a water-cooled reactor as a pressure vessel, with steel walls over 20 centimeters thick.
If that sounds heavy, that's because it is.
Things get a lot worse if you have an accident where you lose pressure inside the reactor.
If you have liquid water at 300 degrees Celsius and suddenly you depressurize it, it doesn't stay liquid for very long; it flashes into steam.
So water-cooled reactors are built inside of big, thick concrete buildings called containment buildings, which are meant to hold all of the steam that would come out of the reactor if you had an accident where you lost pressure.
Steam takes up about 1,000 times more volume than liquid water, so the containment building ends up being very large, relative to the size of the reactor.
Another bad thing happens if you lose pressure and your water flashes to steam.
If you don't get emergency coolant to the fuel in the reactor, it can overheat and melt.
The reactors we have today use uranium oxide as a fuel.
It's a ceramic material similar in performance to the ceramics we use to make coffee cups or cookware or the bricks we use to line fireplaces.
If you lose pressure, you lose your water, and soon your fuel will melt down and release the radioactive fission products within it.
Making solid nuclear fuel is a complicated and expensive process.
And we extract less than one percent of the energy for the nuclear fuel before it can no longer remain in the reactor.
Water-cooled reactors have another additional challenge: they need to be near large bodies of water, where the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed.
Now, there's no lakes or rivers on the Moon, so if all of this makes it sound like water-cooled reactors aren't such a good fit for a lunar community, I would tend to agree with you.
(Laughter) I had the good fortune to learn about a different form of nuclear power that doesn't have all these problems, for a very simple reason: it's not based on water-cooling, and it doesn't use solid fuel.
Surprisingly, it's based on salt.
Inside that book, I learned about research in the United States back in the 1950s, into a kind of reactor that wasn't based on solid fuel or on water-cooling.
It used a mixture of fluoride salts as a nuclear fuel, specifically, the fluorides of lithium, beryllium, uranium and thorium.
Fluoride salts are remarkably chemically stable.
They do not react with air and water.
You have to heat them up to about 400 degrees Celsius to get them to melt.
But that's actually perfect for trying to generate power in a nuclear reactor.
And that makes the biggest difference of all.
This means they don't have to be in heavy, thick steel pressure vessels, they don't have to use water for coolant and there's nothing in the reactor that's going to make a big change in density, like water.
So the containment building around the reactor can be much smaller and close-fitting.
Unlike the solid fuels that can melt down if you stop cooling them, these liquid fluoride fuels are already melted, at a much, much lower temperature.
In normal operation, you have a little plug here at the bottom of the reactor vessel.
This plug is made out of a piece of frozen salt that you've kept frozen by blowing cool gas over the outside of the pipe.
If there's an emergency and you lose all the power to your nuclear power plant, the little blower stops blowing, the frozen plug of salt melts, and the liquid fluoride fuel inside the reactor drains out of the vessel, through the line and into another vessel called a drain tank.
Inside the drain tank, it's all configured to maximize the transfer of heat, so as to keep the salt passively cooled as its heat load drops over time.
In water-cooled reactors, you generally have to provide power to the plant to keep the water circulating and to prevent a meltdown, as we saw in Japan.
But in this reactor, if you lose the power to the reactor, it shuts itself down all by itself, without human intervention, and puts itself in a safe and controlled configuration.
Now, this was sounding pretty good to me, and I was excited about the potential of using a liquid fluoride reactor to power a lunar community.
But then I learned about thorium, and the story got even better.
Thorium is a naturally occurring nuclear fuel that is four times more common in the Earth's crust than uranium.
It can be used in liquid fluoride thorium reactors to produce electrical energy, heat and other valuable products.
It's so energy-dense that you could hold a lifetime supply of thorium energy in the palm of your hand.
Thorium is also common on the Moon and easy to find.
Here's an actual map of where the lunar thorium is located.
Thorium has an electromagnetic signature that makes it easy to find, even from a spacecraft.
With the energy generated from a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, we could recycle all of the air, water and waste products within the lunar community.
It seemed like the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR, could be the power source that could make a self-sustainable lunar colony a reality.
But I had a simple question: If it was such a great thing for a community on the Moon, why not a community on the Earth, a community of the future, self-sustaining and energy-independent?
The same energy generation and recycling techniques that could have a powerful impact on surviving on the Moon could also have a powerful impact on surviving on the Earth.
Right now, we're burning fossil fuels because they're easy to find and because we can.
Unfortunately, they're making some parts of our planet look like the Moon.
Using fossil fuels entangles us in conflict in unstable regions of the world and costs money and lives.
Things could be very different if we were using thorium.
You see, in a LFTR, we could use thorium about 200 times more efficiently than we're using uranium now.
And because the LFTR is capable of almost completely releasing the energy in thorium, this reduces the waste generated over uranium by factors of hundreds, and by factors of millions over fossil fuels.
We're still going to need liquid fuels for vehicles and machinery, but we could generate these liquid fuels from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and from water, much like nature does.
We could generate hydrogen by splitting water and combining it with carbon harvested from CO2 in the atmosphere, making fuels like methanol, ammonia, and dimethyl ether, which could be a direct replacement for diesel fuels.
Imagine carbon-neutral gasoline and diesel, sustainable and self-produced.
In fact, in the United States, we have over 3,200 metric tons of thorium that was stockpiled 50 years ago and is currently buried in a shallow trench in Nevada.
This thorium, if used in LFTRs, could produce almost as much energy as the United States uses in three years.
And thorium is not a rare substance, either.
There are many sites like this one in Idaho, where an area the size of a football field would produce enough thorium each year to power the entire world.
Using liquid fluoride thorium technology, we could move away from expensive and difficult aspects of current water-cooled, solid-fueled uranium nuclear power.
We wouldn't need to have as many long-distance power transmission infrastructure, because thorium is a very portable energy source that can be located near to where it is needed.
A liquid fluoride thorium reactor would be a compact facility, very energy-efficient and safe, that would produce the energy we need day and night, and without respect to weather conditions.
In 2007, we used five billion tons of coal, 31 billion barrels of oil and five trillion cubic meters of natural gas, along with 65,000 tons of uranium to produce the world's energy.
With thorium, we could do the same thing with 7,000 tons of thorium that could be mined at a single site.
If all this sounds interesting to you, I invite you to visit our website, where a growing and enthusiastic online community of thorium advocates is working to tell the world about how we can realize a clean, safe and sustainable energy future, based on the energies of thorium.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
I remember the first time that I saw people injecting drugs.
I had just arrived in Vancouver to lead a research project in HIV prevention in the infamous Downtown East Side.
It was in the lobby of the Portland Hotel, a supportive housing project that gave rooms to the most marginalized people in the city, the so-called "difficult to house."
I'll never forget the young woman standing on the stairs repeatedly jabbing herself with a needle, and screaming, "I can't find a vein," as blood splattered on the wall.
In response to the desperate state of affairs, the drug use, the poverty, the violence, the soaring rates of HIV, Vancouver declared a public health emergency in 1997.
This opened the door to expanding harm reduction services, distributing more needles, increasing access to methadone, and, finally, opening a supervised injection site.
But today, 20 years later, harm reduction is still viewed as some sort of radical concept.
In some places, it's still illegal to carry a clean needle.
Drug users are far more likely to be arrested than to be offered methadone therapy.
Recent proposals for supervised injection sites in cities like Seattle, Baltimore and New York have been met with stiff opposition: opposition that goes against everything we know about addiction.
Why is that?
Why are we still stuck on the idea that the only option is to stop using -- that any drug use will not be tolerated?
Why do we ignore countless personal stories and overwhelming scientific evidence that harm reduction works?
Critics say that harm reduction doesn't stop people from using illegal drugs.
After every criminal and societal sanction that we can come up with, people still use drugs, and far too many die.
Critics also say that we are giving up on people by not focusing our attention on treatment and recovery.
We are not giving up on people.
We know that if recovery is ever going to happen we must keep people alive.
Offering someone a clean needle or a safe place to inject is the first step to treatment and recovery.
Critics also claim that harm reduction gives the wrong message to our children about drug users.
The last time I looked, these drug users are our children.
The message of harm reduction is that while drugs can hurt you, we still must reach out to people who are addicted.
A needle exchange is not an advertisement for drug use.
Neither is a methadone clinic or a supervised injection site.
Let's take supervised injection sites, for example.
Probably the most misunderstood health intervention ever.
All we are saying is that allowing people to inject in a clean, dry space with fresh needles, surrounded by people who care is a lot better than injecting in a dingy alley, sharing contaminated needles and hiding out from police.
It's better for everybody.
The first supervised injection site in Vancouver was at 327 Carol Street, a narrow room with a concrete floor, a few chairs and a box of clean needles.
The police would often lock it down, but somehow it always mysteriously reopened, often with the aid of a crowbar.
No judgment, no hassles, no fear, lots of profound conversation.
I learned that despite unimaginable trauma, physical pain and mental illness, that everyone there thought that things would get better.
Most were convinced that, someday, they'd stop using drugs altogether.
That room was the forerunner to North America's first government-sanctioned supervised injection site, called INSITE.
It opened in September of 2003 as a three-year research project.
After eight years, the battle to close INSITE went all the way up to Canada's Supreme Court.
It pitted the government of Canada against two people with a long history of drug use who knew the benefits of INSITE firsthand: Dean Wilson and Shelley Tomic.
The court ruled in favor of keeping INSITE open by nine to zero.
And I quote: "The effect of denying the services of INSITE to the population that it serves and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users is grossly disproportionate to any benefit that Canada might derive from presenting a uniform stance on the possession of narcotics."
This was a hopeful moment for harm reduction.
Yet, despite this strong message from the Supreme Court, it was, until very recently, impossible to open up any new sites in Canada.
There was one interesting thing that happened in December of 2016, when due to the overdose crisis, the government of British Columbia allowed the opening of overdose prevention sites.
Hundreds of overdoses were reversed by Naloxone, and nobody died.
In fact, this is what's happened at INSITE over the last 14 years: 75,000 different individuals have injected illegal drugs more than three and a half million times, and not one person has died.
We have scientific evidence and successes from needle exchanges methadone and supervised injection sites.
These are common-sense, compassionate approaches to drug use that improve health, bring connection and greatly reduce suffering and death.
Why do we still think that drug use is law enforcement issue?
Our disdain for drugs and drug users goes very deep.
We are bombarded with images and media stories about the horrible impacts of drugs.
We have stigmatized entire communities.
We applaud military-inspired operations that bring down drug dealers.
And we appear unfazed by building more jails to incarcerate people whose only crime is using drugs.
Virtually millions of people are caught up in a hopeless cycle of incarceration, violence and poverty that has been created by our drug laws and not the drugs themselves.
How do I explain to people that drug users deserve care and support and the freedom to live their lives when all we see are images of guns and handcuffs and jail cells?
Let's be clear: criminalization is just a way to institutionalize stigma.
Our paralysis to see things differently is also based on an entirely false narrative about drug use.
We have been led to believe that drug users are irresponsible people who just want to get high, and then through their own personal failings spiral down into a life of crime and poverty, losing their jobs, their families and, ultimately, their lives.
In reality, most drug users have a story, whether it's childhood trauma, sexual abuse, mental illness or a personal tragedy.
The drugs are used to numb the pain.
We must understand that as we approach people with so much trauma.
While the media may focus on overdose deaths like Prince and Michael Jackson, the majority of the suffering happens to people who are living on the margins, the poor and the dispossessed.
They don't vote; they are often alone.
They are society's disposable people.
People using drugs avoid the health care system.
They know that once engaged in clinical care or admitted to hospital, they will be treated poorly.
And their supply line, be it heroin, cocaine or crystal meth will be interrupted.
"How long have you been living on the street?"
"Where are your children?"
"When were you last in jail?"
Essentially: "Why the hell don't you stop using drugs?"
In fact, our entire medical approach to drug use is upside down.
For some reason, we have decided that abstinence is the best way to treat this.
If you're lucky enough, you may get into a detox program.
Starting with abstinence is like asking a new diabetic to quit sugar or a severe asthmatic to start running marathons or a depressed person to just be happy.
What makes us think that strategy would work for something as complex as addiction?
While unintentional overdoses are not new, the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented.
The Center for Disease Control estimated that 64,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2016, far exceeding car crashes or homicides.
Drug-related mortality is now the leading cause of death among men and women between 20 and 50 years old in North America Think about that.
How did we get to this point, and why now?
There is a kind of perfect storm around opioids.
Drugs like Oxycontin, Percocet and Dilaudid have been liberally distributed for decades for all kinds of pain.
It is estimated that two million Americans are daily opioid users, and over 60 million people received at least one prescription for opioids last year.
This massive dump of prescription drugs into communities has provided a steady source for people wanting to self-medicate.
In response to this prescription epidemic, people have been cut off, and this has greatly reduced the street supply The unintended but predictable consequence is an overdose epidemic.
Many people who were reliant on a steady supply of prescription drugs turned to heroin.
And now the illegal drug market has tragically switched to synthetic drugs, mainly fentanyl.
People are literally being poisoned.
What if thousands of people started dying from poisoned meat or baby formula or coffee?
We would be treating this as a true emergency.
We continue to demonize the drugs and the people who use them and blindly pour even more resources into law enforcement.
So where should we go from here?
First, we should fully embrace, fund and scale up harm reduction programs across North America.
I know that in places like Vancouver, harm reduction has been a lifeline to care and treatment.
I know that the number of overdose deaths would be far higher without harm reduction.
And I personally know hundreds of people who are alive today because of harm reduction.
But harm reduction is just the start.
If we truly want to make an impact on this drug crisis, we need to have a serious conversation about prohibition and criminal punishment.
We need to recognize that drug use is first and foremost a public health issue and turn to comprehensive social and health solutions.
We already have a model for how this can work.
In 2001, Portugal was having its own drug crisis.
Lots of people using drugs, high crime rates and an overdose epidemic.
They defied global conventions and decriminalized all drug possession.
Money that was spent on drug enforcement was redirected to health and rehabilitation programs.
Overall drug use is down dramatically.
Many more people are in treatment.
We have come so far down the road of prohibition, punishment and prejudice that we have become indifferent to the suffering that we have inflicted on the most vulnerable people in our society.
This year even more people will get caught up in the illegal drug trade.
Thousands of children will learn that their mother or father has been sent to jail for using drugs.
And far too many parents will be notified that their son or daughter has died of a drug overdose.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Music is the most universal language that we have, way more so than any dialect or tongue.
You can play a melody to a child in China and the same melody to a child in South Africa.
And despite the huge differences between those two children, they will still draw some of the same truths from that melody.
Now, I think the reason why music has this universality, this way of speaking to each and every one of us, is that somehow it's capable of holding up a mirror to us that reveals, in some small or large way, a little bit of who or what we are.
By logical extension of this, if music is this universal force, then surely groups of musicians -- let's call them orchestras -- should reflect every aspect of the community.
Logical, but not necessarily true.
At TEDxBrussels today, we've been looking forward to the future -- 50 years from now.
And if you took a look at all the great orchestras of the world at that time, a snapshot, how many women do you think you would find playing in those orchestras?
Well, here we are 50 years on, in 2011, and pretty much every orchestra on the planet has a fantastic and healthy balance between the sexes.
The disabled community.
Do we find them well-represented in the great orchestras of our world?
Well, I can tell you as a conductor, I work with orchestras around the world all the time, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of disabled musicians I've encountered in any orchestra, anywhere.
Why is this?
Where is their platform?
Where is the infrastructure that creates a space for them so that they can collaborate with other great musicians?
So, ladies and gentlemen, as you can probably tell, I'm on a bit of a mission.
And this mission has a personal root to it.
I have four children, the youngest of whom was born with cerebral palsy.
She's now five, and through her glorious existence, I suppose I have now become a fully paid-up member of the amazing, dizzyingly wonderful disabled community.
And I find myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking what an incredible model that is.
It's taken a good five decades, actually, but I can say with hand on heart that when the Paralympics comes to London next year, there will not be an intelligent person anywhere on the planet who does not absolutely believe in the validity of disabled sportspeople.
Apologies to any of you who are sports fans, but music is far more universal than sport.
Where is the platform? Where is their voice?
So, we in the UK are at the very early stages in forming what will be Britain's first-ever national disabled orchestra.
Where's yours?"
Every country should have a multiplicity of paraorchestras of all shapes and sizes, no question.
We present to you today a little sonic adventure, a little piece of improvisational whimsy, if you like, a piece on which, of course, the ink is still wet, the clay is still wet.
After all, improvisation is never a fixed thing.
It's one of the only folk melodies that we still recognize in our culture.
And here's an interesting thing: folk music can tell you an awful lot about the cultural DNA of the country from which it originates.
You know, the rain ... it does rain.
The food's not so good.
(Laughter) Quietly melancholic.
And as Shakespeare put it so brilliantly in "Twelfth Night," he loves music that has "a dying fall."
So this melody, "Greensleeves," is chock-full of "dying fall."
You may know this tune.
(Singing) Da, da, da da da da, dying fall.
Brief burst of sunshine, ladies and gentlemen, the chorus -- (Singing) Ya da da da, dying fall ...
(Laughter) (Singing) Da da dee, da da da da, dying fall ...
It's like we need some melodic Viagra in our culture, ladies and gentlemen.
(Laughter) (Applause) It goes without saying that we are very much at the starting gates with this project.
We need your help, we need the global community to help us deliver this dream, so that this orchestra can be full steam ahead by summer 2012.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me enormous pride, pleasure and joy to introduce to you, with a short improvisation upon that most melancholic tune, "Greensleeves," the first four members of the British Paraorchestra.
(Applause) (Cheers) (Music) (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause)
Cholera was reported in Haiti for the first time in over 50 years last October.
There was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get.
We've gotten good at predicting and preparing for storms before they take innocent lives and cause irreversible damage, but we still can't do that with water, and here's why.
Right now, if you want to test water in the field, you need a trained technician, expensive equipment like this, and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results.
And it ignores the fact that, in the meanwhile, people still need to drink water.
Countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines -- a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they're safe.
I've been inspired by that simplicity as I've been working on this problem with some of the most hardworking and brilliant people I've ever known.
We call it the Water Canary.
It's a fast, cheap device that answers an important question: Is this water contaminated?
And instead of waiting for chemical reactions to take place, it uses light.
That means there's no waiting for chemical reactions to take place, no need to use reagents that can run out and no need to be an expert to get actionable information.
To test water, you simply insert a sample and, within seconds, it either displays a red light, indicating contaminated water, or a green light, indicating the sample is safe.
This will make it possible for anyone to collect life-saving information and to monitor water quality conditions as they unfold.
With enough users, maps like this will make it possible to take preventive action, containing hazards before they turn into emergencies that take years to recover from.
We've seen how distributed networks, big data and information can transform society.
I think it's time for us to apply them to water.
Our goal over the next year is to get Water Canary ready for the field and to open-source the hardware so that anyone can contribute to the development and the evaluation, so we can tackle this problem together.
Thank you.
(Applause)
One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't -- into the religious and the atheists.
And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means.
There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous.
Now I think it's too easy.
I think it's too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way.
And it's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Now what is Atheism 2.0?
Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels, etc.
I can't believe in the doctrines.
I don't think these doctrines are right.
I really like the art of Mantegna.
I really like looking at old churches.
I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament."
Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine.
Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice.
So that's a sort of tough choice.
I don't think we have to make that choice.
I think there is an alternative.
And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, "What here could we use?"
The secular world is full of holes.
And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well.
Now education is a field the secular world really believes in.
When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place, we think education; that's where we put a lot of money.
Education is going to give us, not only commercial skills, industrial skills, it's also going to make us better people.
Interesting where it came from.
In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked.
They said culture.
Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen.
In there, we'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John.
Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea.
They wanted to replace scripture with culture.
And that's a very plausible idea.
Why? They don't think we need it.
They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance.
They see us as adults, rational adults.
We need data, we don't need help.
Now religions start from a very different place indeed.
All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children.
And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance.
Perhaps this is just me, maybe you.
And we need help. Of course, we need help.
And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning.
You know, in the 18th century in the U.K., the greatest preacher, greatest religious preacher, was a man called John Wesley, who went up and down this country delivering sermons, advising people how they could live.
He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents, the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich.
He was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons, the classic medium of delivery of religions.
If you said to a modern liberal individualist, "Hey, how about a sermon?"
I'm an independent, individual person."
What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture?
Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information.
Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it.
Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them.
You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day.
So get on your knees and repeat it."
That's what all religions tell us: "Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day."
So religions are cultures of repetition.
We associate repetition with boredom.
"The new is better than the old."
If I said to you, "Okay, we're not going to have new TED.
We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever," you'd feel cheated.
All the major religions give us calendars.
What is a calendar?
A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas.
In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor.
Now we don't think that way.
In the secular world we think, "If an idea is important, I'll bump into it.
Nonsense, says the religious world view.
Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters.
This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings.
You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, "I'm really small. What are my problems?"
We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't.
But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September, you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of.
You'll be handed rice cakes.
And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart.
That's very good.
In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career.
But the religious world doesn't think that way.
What you're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it.
After every convincing point, people will go, "Amen, amen, amen."
At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up, and they'll go, "Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior."
And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, "Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen."
(Applause) The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains, we are also bodies.
And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body.
So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness.
Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh.
They don't just deliver us sermons on this.
They don't just give us books or words about this.
They tell us to have a bath.
So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh.
You immerse yourself in the water, and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea.
We don't tend to do that.
Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two.
Let's look at art now.
Now art is something that in the secular world, we think very highly of. We think art is really, really important.
A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc.
We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches.
You've heard that saying.
And the reason we've let ourselves down is that we're not properly studying how religions handle art.
The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art's sake -- a ridiculous idea -- an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world.
The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself, that artists shouldn't say what they're up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy.
That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum -- let's admit it -- is, "I don't know what this is about."
But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that.
But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art.
Art is about two things in all the major faiths.
And secondly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate.
And that's what art is.
Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith.
Rembrandt is a propagandist in the Christian view.
Now the word "propaganda" sets off alarm bells.
We think of Hitler, we think of Stalin. Don't, necessarily.
Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something.
And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum -- if I was a museum curator, I would make a room for love, a room for generosity.
And if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told, use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind, we would get a lot more out of art.
Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society.
Art should be didactic.
The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul-like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals.
They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers.
They're our cottage industries. They are vulnerable, single people.
And they get depressed and they get sad on their own.
And they don't really change much.
Now think about religions, think about organized religions.
What do organized religions do?
The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal.
These are massive machines.
They're collaborative, they're branded, they're multinational, and they're highly disciplined.
These are all very good qualities.
They're selling us shoes and cars.
Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
We need to group together.
And that's what religions do.
They are multinational, as I say, they are branded, they have a clear identity, so they don't get lost in a busy world.
I want to conclude.
If you're involved in anything that's communal, that involves lots of people getting together, there are things for you in religion.
If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way, look at pilgrimage.
If you're in the art world, look at the example of what religions are doing with art.
And if you're an educator in any way, again, look at how religions are spreading ideas.
You may not agree with the ideas, but my goodness, they're highly effective mechanisms for doing so.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk, because you're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters.
AB: You can get shot by both sides.
You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists, and you can get shot by those who fully believe.
AB: Indeed.
Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0?
AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people who say things like, "But isn't there something bigger than us, something else?"
And I say, "Of course." And they say, "So aren't you sort of religious?"
The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure.
So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
How many people here would say that religion is important to them?
Is there an equivalent process by which there's a sort of bridge between what you're talking about and what you would say to them?
AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged.
It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things.
It's so sad that we constantly say, "I don't believe so I can't have community, so I'm cut off from morality, so I can't go on a pilgrimage."
One wants to say, "Nonsense. Why not?"
There's so much we can absorb.
Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion.
CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists.
But probably most people in the community certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common.
Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war, that there could be bridging?
AB: No, we need to be polite about differences.
Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue.
It's seen as hypocrisy.
But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist and someone says, "Well you know, I did pray the other day," you politely ignore it.
You move on.
Because you've agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ.
And I think that's what the religious wars of late have ignored.
They've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement.
CA: And finally, does this new thing that you're proposing that's not a religion but something else, does it need a leader, and are you volunteering to be the pope?
(Laughter) AB: Well, one thing that we're all very suspicious of is individual leaders.
What I've tried to lay out is a framework and I'm hoping that people can just fill it in.
But wherever you are, as I say, if you're in the travel industry, do that travel bit.
So it's a wiki project.
(Applause)
In the 1980s, in communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government.
You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter.
And we in the West couldn't understand how anybody would do this, how much this would restrict freedom of speech.
This is happening to us today.
And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it.
And this is an example of the ways our own governments are using technology against us, the citizens.
And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today.
If we look at what's really happening in the online world, we can group the attacks based on the attackers.
We have three main groups.
We have online criminals.
And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand.
These guys make money.
They use online attacks to make lots of money -- and lots and lots of it.
We actually have several cases of millionaires online, multimillionaires, who made money with their attacks.
This is [Albert] Gonzalez.
This is Stephen Watt.
These guys make their fortunes online, but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking Trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking, or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer.
The US Secret Service, two months ago, froze the Swiss bank account of Mr. Sam Jain right here, and that bank account had 14.9 million US dollars in it when it was frozen.
Mr. Jain himself is on the loose; nobody knows where he is.
And I claim it's already today that it's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world.
And it's very obvious that this is only going to get worse.
In the future, the majority of crime will be happening online.
The second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money.
They're motivated by something else -- motivated by protests, motivated by an opinion, motivated by the laughs.
Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks.
So those are the three main attackers: criminals who do it for the money, hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest, but then the last group are nation states -- governments doing the attacks.
And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar.
This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens.
DigiNotar is a certificate authority from the Netherlands -- or actually, it was.
It was running into bankruptcy last fall, because they were hacked into.
And I asked last week, in a meeting with Dutch government representatives, I asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the DigiNotar hack.
And his answer was: yes.
So how do people die as the result of a hack like this?
Well, DigiNotar is a CA.
They sell certificates.
What do you do with certificates?
Well, you need a certificate if you have a website that has https, SSL encrypted services, services like Gmail.
Now we all, or a big part of us, use Gmail or one of their competitors, but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran, where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over SSL connections, so the local government can't snoop on their discussions.
And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar.
What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening, for example, in Egypt?
Among those papers was this binder entitled, "FinFisher."
And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany, which had sold to the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting, at a very large scale, all the communication of the citizens of the country.
So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens.
But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well.
If you are a suspect in a criminal case, well, it's pretty obvious, your phone will be tapped.
But today, it goes beyond that.
They will even use tools like State Trojan to infect your computer with a Trojan, which enables them to watch all your communication, to listen to your online discussions, to collect your passwords.
Why should I worry? Because I have nothing to hide."
Privacy is implied.
It's a question of freedom against control.
And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government, a government we might have 50 years from now?
And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years.
This is a hand-lettered sign that appeared in a mom and pop bakery in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn a few years ago.
The store owned one of those machines that can print on plates of sugar.
But unfortunately, one of the things kids liked to draw was cartoon characters.
They liked to draw the Little Mermaid, they'd like to draw a smurf, they'd like to draw Micky Mouse.
But it turns out to be illegal to print a child's drawing of Micky Mouse onto a plate of sugar.
And it's a copyright violation.
One is called SOPA, the other is called PIPA.
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act.
It's from the Senate.
PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property -- because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands.
And what SOPA and PIPA want to do is they want to do this.
Now the way they propose to do this is to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright -- although how those sites are identified is never fully specified in the bills -- and then they want to remove them from the domain name system.
They want to take them out of the domain name system.
Now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines expect -- 74.125.226.212.
Now the problem with this model of censorship, of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work.
Now to understand how Congress came to write a bill that won't accomplish its stated goals, but will produce a lot of pernicious side effects, you have to understand a little bit about the back story.
And the back story is this: SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century.
If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time -- which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty.
This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink.
Cassette tapes, video cassette recorders, even the humble Xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business.
Because it turned out we're not really couch potatoes.
We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share.
And this freaked the media businesses out -- it freaked them out every time.
Jack Valenti, who was the head lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and poor, helpless Hollywood to a woman at home alone.
That was the level of rhetoric.
And so the media industries begged, insisted, demanded that Congress do something.
And Congress did something.
By the early 90s, Congress passed the law that changed everything.
And that law was called the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
What the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 said was, look, if people are taping stuff off the radio and then making mixtapes for their friends, that is not a crime. That's okay.
And they thought that they clarified the issue, because they'd set out a clear distinction between legal and illegal copying.
But that wasn't what the media businesses wanted.
They had wanted Congress to outlaw copying full-stop.
So when the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 was passed, the media businesses gave up on the idea of legal versus illegal distinctions for copying because it was clear that if Congress was acting in their framework, they might actually increase the rights of citizens to participate in our own media environment.
So they went for plan B.
Plan B appeared in its first full-blown form in 1998 -- something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
It would be, as Ed Felton once famously said, "Like handing out water that wasn't wet."
Bits are copyable. That's what computers do.
So in order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you to use systems that broke the copying function of your devices.
The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means.
And the main reason it hasn't worked is the Internet has turned out to be far more popular and far more powerful than anyone imagined.
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
We share written things, we share images, we share audio, we share video.
Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've found.
So PIPA and SOPA are round two.
But where the DMCA was surgical -- we want to go down into your computer, we want to go down into your television set, down into your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store -- PIPA and SOPA are nuclear and they're saying, we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content.
Because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another.
So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversing it -- guilty until proven innocent.
You can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like.
Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities.
So this is the Internet they have in mind.
Imagine this sign everywhere -- except imagine it doesn't say College Bakery, imagine it says YouTube and Facebook and Twitter.
Imagine it says TED, because the comments can't be policed at any acceptable cost.
The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects.
The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.
There's two things you can do to help stop this -- a simple thing and a complicated thing, an easy thing and a hard thing.
The simple thing, the easy thing, is this: if you're an American citizen, call your representative, call your senator.
When you look at the people who co-signed on the SOPA bill, people who've co-signed on PIPA, what you see is that they have cumulatively received millions and millions of dollars from the traditional media industries.
You don't have millions and millions of dollars, but you can call your representatives, and you can remind them that you vote, and you can ask not to be treated like a thief, and you can suggest that you would prefer that the Internet not be broken.
And if you're not an American citizen, you can contact American citizens that you know and encourage them to do the same.
Because this seems like a national issue, but it is not.
If they break it, they will break it for everybody.
And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA to disallow sharing as a technical means.
Because the whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law and then gathering evidence and proving that, that turns out to be really inconvenient.
They don't want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing.
They just want the sharing to go away.
And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming.
Because that's the real message of PIPA and SOPA.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day?
Do you know how many choices you make in typical week?
And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks.
And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week.
Each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course.
50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less.
Think about your own choices.
How well do you think you're doing at managing those choices?
I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions.
So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories.
(Laughter) Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, I'd like you to clap your hands.
So for my first question for you today: Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem?
(Applause) Thank you.
So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale.
It was a store called Draeger's.
They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees.
So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and I asked the manager, "Is this model of offering people all this choice really working?"
We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment.
They had 348 different kinds of jam.
We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store.
We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: First, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam?
More people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent.
The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam.
Now we see the opposite effect.
Of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam.
Of the people who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam.
Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24.
Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us -- at least it's good for our waistlines -- but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions.
We choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests.
Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S.
And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401(k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow.
And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation.
So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings.
So if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s -- still not as high as we want it to be.
In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile.
Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences.
So for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds.
Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being.
Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices.
They're more likely to delay choosing -- procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest.
They're more likely to make worse choices -- worse financial choices, medical choices.
They're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better.
The main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display.
So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques -- techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues -- that you can easily apply in your businesses.
The first: Cut.
You've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more.
People are always upset when I say, "Cut."
They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space.
But in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience.
You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products.
The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products.
But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products -- one kind of canned tomato sauce.
Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund.
For those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds.
You know, often, people say, "I don't know how to cut.
They're all important choices."
And the first thing I do is I ask the employees, "Tell me how these choices are different from one another.
And if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers."
Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary.
And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world.
And I'd like you to read it.
And now I'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take Gary up on his offer.
(Light clapping) Okay. Anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer.
All right, let me show you some more about this.
(Honk) Now who's ready to go on this trip.
(Applause) (Laughter) I think I might have actually heard more hands.
Now in fact, you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around, but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around.
That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way.
Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash?
Because it doesn't feel like real money.
And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more.
And during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing.
The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more.
It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664.
If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories, versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600.
Here are two different jewelry displays.
One is called "Jazz" and the other one is called "Swing."
If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands.
(Laughter) The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker.
My fourth technique: Condition for complexity.
It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier.
We have to gradually increase the complexity.
Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car.
Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car.
Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision.
Car colors, exterior car colors -- I've got 56 choices.
Engines, gearshift -- four choices.
So half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts.
The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice.
If you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means I'm losing you.
What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again.
We're losing them.
It's the same information. It's the same number of choices.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So what makes a piece of music beautiful?
Well, most musicologists would argue that repetition is a key aspect of beauty, the idea that we take a melody, a motif, a musical idea, we repeat it, we set up the expectation for repetition, and then we either realize it or we break the repetition.
And that's a key component of beauty.
So if repetition and patterns are key to beauty, then what would the absence of patterns sound like, if we wrote a piece of music that had no repetition whatsoever in it?
That's actually an interesting mathematical question.
Is it possible to write a piece of music that has no repetition whatsoever?
It's not random -- random is easy.
It turns out, a guy who was trying to develop the world's perfect sonar ping solved the problem of writing pattern-free music.
And that's what the topic of the talk is today.
So, recall that in sonar, you have a ship that sends out some sound in the water, and it listens for it -- an echo.
Well, in the 1960s, a guy by the name of John Costas was working on the Navy's extremely expensive sonar system.
It wasn't working, because the ping they were using was inappropriate.
(Piano notes play high to low) So that was the sonar ping they were using, a down chirp.
It turns out that's a really bad ping.
The relationship between the first two notes is the same as the second two, and so forth.
So he designed a different kind of sonar ping, one that looks random.
These look like a random pattern of dots, but they're not.
The first two notes and every other pair of notes have a different relationship.
So the fact that we know about these patterns is unusual.
John Costas is the inventor of these patterns.
This is a picture from 2006, shortly before his death.
He was the sonar engineer working for the Navy.
So he wrote a letter to the mathematician in the middle, a young mathematician in California at the time, Solomon Golomb.
It turns out that Solomon Golomb was one of the most gifted discrete mathematicians of our time.
John asked Solomon if he could tell him the right reference to where these patterns were.
So, Solomon Golomb spent the summer thinking about the problem.
And he relied on the mathematics of this gentleman here, Évariste Galois.
Now, Galois is a very famous mathematician.
He's famous because he invented a whole branch of mathematics which bears his name, called Galois field theory.
It's the mathematics of prime numbers.
He's also famous because of the way that he died.
The story is that he stood up for the honor of a young woman.
He was challenged to a duel, and he accepted.
And shortly before the duel occurred, he wrote down all of his mathematical ideas, sent letters to all of his friends, saying "Please, please" -- this was 200 years ago -- "Please, please, see that these things get published eventually."
He then fought the duel, was shot and died at age 20.
The mathematics that runs your cell phones, the internet, that allows us to communicate, DVDs, all comes from the mind of Évariste Galois, a mathematician who died 20 years young.
When you talk about the legacy that you leave ...
Of course, he couldn't have even anticipated the way that his mathematics would be used.
Thankfully, his mathematics was eventually published.
Solomon Golomb realized that that was exactly the mathematics needed to solve the problem of creating a pattern-free structure.
So he sent a letter back to John saying, "It turns out you can generate these patterns using prime number theory."
And John went about and solved the sonar problem for the Navy.
Here's a pattern here.
This is an 88-by-88-sized Costas array.
Elementary school mathematics is sufficient to solve this problem.
It's generated by repeatedly multiplying by the number three: 1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243 ...
There happen to be 88 notes on the piano.
So today, we are going to have the world premiere of the world's first pattern-free piano sonata.
So, back to the question of music: What makes music beautiful?
Let's think about one of the most beautiful pieces ever written, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the famous "da na na na!" motif.
That motif occurs hundreds of times in the symphony -- hundreds of times in the first movement alone and also in all the other movements as well.
So the setting up of this repetition is so important for beauty.
This music that we saw before, those stars on the grid, is far, far, far from random.
It turns out that musicologists -- a famous composer by the name of Arnold Schoenberg -- thought of this in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
His goal as a composer was to write music that would free music from tonal structure.
Unfortunately, he died 10 years before Costas solved the problem of how you can mathematically create these structures.
Today, we're going to hear the world premiere of the perfect ping.
This is an 88-by-88-sized Costas array, mapped to notes on the piano, played using a structure called a Golomb ruler for the rhythm, which means the starting time of each pair of notes is distinct as well.
This is mathematically almost impossible.
The point when you hear this music is not that it's supposed to be beautiful.
This is supposed to be the world's ugliest piece of music.
In fact, it's music that only a mathematician could write.
(Laughter) When you're listening to this piece of music, I implore you: try and find some repetition.
(Music) (Music ends) (Scott Rickard, off-screen) Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) But have you ever gone to a bar and come out with a $200 million business?
That's what happened to us about 10 years ago.
We're a software consulting firm, and we couldn't find a very specific programming skill to help this client deploy a cutting-edge cloud system.
We have a bunch of engineers, but none of them could please this client.
And we were about to be fired.
Don't worry about it."
(Laughter) and I half-jokingly throw it out there.
I say, "Hey, I mean, we're about to be fired."
So I say, "Why don't we send in Jeff, the bartender?"
(Laughter) And there's some silence, some quizzical looks.
(Laughter) "Jeff is wicked smart. He's brilliant.
Now, Jeff was not a programmer.
In fact, he had dropped out of Penn as a philosophy major.
So we sent him in.
After a couple days of suspense, Jeff was still there.
They hadn't sent him home.
I couldn't believe it.
Here's what I learned.
And he had changed the conversation, even changing what we were building.
And yes, Jeff figured out how to program the solution, and the client became one of our best references.
Back then, we were 200 people, and half of our company was made up of computer science majors or engineers, but our experience with Jeff left us wondering: Could we repeat this through our business?
So we changed the way we recruited and trained.
And while we still sought after computer engineers and computer science majors, we sprinkled in artists, musicians, writers ...
and Jeff's story started to multiply itself throughout our company.
Our chief technology officer is an English major, and he was a bike messenger in Manhattan.
And yes, we're still a computer consulting firm.
We're the number one player in our market.
We work with the fastest-growing software package to ever reach 10 billion dollars in annual sales.
Meanwhile, the push for STEM-based education in this country -- science, technology, engineering, mathematics -- is fierce.
And this is a colossal mistake.
Since 2009, STEM majors in the United States have increased by 43 percent, while the humanities have stayed flat.
Our past president dedicated over a billion dollars towards STEM education at the expense of other subjects, and our current president recently redirected 200 million dollars of Department of Education funding into computer science.
And CEOs are continually complaining about an engineering-starved workforce.
These campaigns, coupled with the undeniable success of the tech economy -- I mean, let's face it, seven out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world by market cap are technology firms -- these things create an assumption that the path of our future workforce will be dominated by STEM.
On paper, it makes sense.
It's like, the entire soccer team chases the ball into the corner, because that's where the ball is.
We shouldn't value the sciences any more than we value the humanities.
Number one, today's technologies are incredibly intuitive.
They're like LEGO: easy to put together, easy to learn, even easy to program, given the vast amounts of information that are available for learning.
Yes, our workforce needs specialized skill, but that skill requires a far less rigorous and formalized education than it did in the past.
Number two, the skills that are imperative and differentiated in a world with intuitive technology are the skills that help us to work together as humans, where the hard work is envisioning the end product and its usefulness, which requires real-world experience and judgment and historical context.
What Jeff's story taught us is that the customer was focused on the wrong thing.
I see it every day.
We are scratching the surface in our ability as humans to communicate and invent together, and while the sciences teach us how to build things, it's the humanities that teach us what to build and why to build them.
And they're equally as important, and they're just as hard.
when I hear people treat the humanities as a lesser path, as the easier path.
They teach us how to think critically.
They teach us to persuade, they give us our language, which we use to convert our emotions to thought and action.
And yes, you can hire a bunch of artists and build a tech company and have an incredible outcome.
Now, I'm not here today to tell you that STEM's bad.
I'm not here today to tell you that girls shouldn't code.
(Laughter) Please.
And that next bridge I drive over or that next elevator we all jump into -- let's make sure there's an engineer behind it.
(Laughter) But to fall into this paranoia that our future jobs will be dominated by STEM, that's just folly.
If you have friends or kids or relatives or grandchildren or nieces or nephews ...
Those tech CEOs that are clamoring for STEM grads, you know what they're hiring for?
Google, Apple, Facebook.
Sixty-five percent of their open job opportunities are non-technical: marketers, designers, project managers, program managers, product managers, lawyers, HR specialists, trainers, coaches, sellers, buyers, on and on.
These are the jobs they're hiring for.
And if there's one thing that our future workforce needs -- and I think we can all agree on this -- it's diversity.
But that diversity shouldn't end with gender or race.
We need a diversity of backgrounds and skills, with introverts and extroverts and leaders and followers.
That is our future workforce.
And the fact that the technology is getting easier and more accessible frees that workforce up to study whatever they damn well please.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But before I do that, we have to go over the definition of what green is, 'cause a lot of us have a different definition of it.
Green. The product is created through environmentally and socially conscious means.
There's plenty of things that are being called green now.
What does it actually mean?
We use three metrics to determine green.
Which means, are you preserving what you are doing for future use or for future generations?
Does it come from Earth's natural replenishing resources, such as sun, wind and water?
Now, my task at NASA is to develop the next generation of aviation fuels.
Extreme green. Why aviation?
Also it's a national aeronautics directive.
One of the national aeronautics goals is to develop the next generation of fuels, biofuels, using domestic and safe, friendly resources.
Do not use arable land.
Number two: Don't compete with food crops.
And lastly the most precious resource we have on this Earth is fresh water. Don't use fresh water.
If 97.5 percent of the world's water is saltwater, 2.5 percent is fresh water. Less than a half percent of that is accessible for human use.
But 60 percent of the population lives within that one percent.
So, combating my problem was, now I have to be extreme green and meet the big three. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the GreenLab Research Facility.
This is a facility dedicated to the next generation of aviation fuels using halophytes.
A halophyte is a salt-tolerating plant.
Most plants don't like salt, but halophytes tolerate salt.
We also are using weeds and we are also using algae.
The good thing about our lab is, we've had 3,600 visitors in the last two years.
If you are into the business of the next generation of aviation fuels, algae is a viable option, there's a lot of funding right now, and we have an algae to fuels program.
There's two types of algae growing.
One is a closed photobioreactor that you see here, and what you see on the other side is our species — we are currently using a species called Scenedesmus dimorphus.
Our job at NASA is to take the experimental and computational and make a better mixing for the closed photobioreactors.
Now the problems with closed photobioreactors are: They are quite expensive, they are automated, and it's very difficult to get them in large scale.
In the GreenLab in our open pond system we use something that happens in nature: waves.
We actually use wave technology on our open pond systems.
We have 95 percent mixing and our lipid content is higher than a closed photobioreactor system, which we think is significant.
There is a drawback to algae, however: It's very expensive.
Is there a way to produce algae inexpensively?
And the answer is: yes.
We do the same thing we do with halophytes, and that is: climatic adaptation.
In our GreenLab we have six primary ecosystems that range from freshwater all the way to saltwater.
What we are trying to do is to come up with a single species that can survive anywhere in the world, where there's barren desert.
We are being very successful so far.
Now, here's one of the problems.
If you are a farmer, you need five things to be successful: You need seeds, you need soil, you need water and you need sun, and the last thing that you need is fertilizer.
Most people use chemical fertilizers. But guess what?
We have a natural solution: fish.
No we don't cut up the fish and put them in there.
Fish waste is what we use. As a matter of fact we use freshwater mollies, that we've used our climatic adaptation technique from freshwater all the way to seawater.
And the more they go to the bathroom, the more fertilizer we get, the better off we are, believe it or not.
So a lot of people ask me, "How did you get started?"
Well, we got started in what we call the indoor biofuels lab.
And lastly, it's me actually working in the lab to prove to you I do work, I don't just talk about what I do.
It's a wonderful plant. I love that plant.
Everywhere we go we see it. It's all over the place, from Maine all the way to California. We love that plant.
It is the highest lipid content that we have, but it has a shortcoming: It's short.
And what we are trying to do with natural selection or adaptive biology — combine all three to make a high-growth, high-lipid plant.
It's called seashore mallow. Kosteletzkya virginica — say that five times fast if you can.
This is a 100 percent usable plant. The seeds: biofuels. The rest: cattle feed.
It's there for 10 years; it's working very well.
This is a macro-algae that loves excess nutrients. If you are in the aquarium industry you know we use it to clean up dirty tanks.
This species is so significant to us.
The properties are very close to plastic.
If we are successful, we will revolutionize the plastics industry.
So, we have a seed to fuel program.
We have to do something with this biomass that we have.
And so we do G.C. extraction, lipid optimization, so on and so forth, because our goal really is to come up with the next generation of aviation fuels, aviation specifics, so on and so forth.
So far we talked about water and fuel, but along the way we found out something interesting about Salicornia: It's a food product.
You can see there's a greenhouse in Germany that sells it as a health food product.
This is harvested, and in the middle here is a shrimp dish, and it's being pickled.
So I have to tell you a joke. Salicornia is known as sea beans, saltwater asparagus and pickle weed.
Oh, I thought it was funny. (Laughter) And at the bottom is seaman's mustard. It does make sense, this is a logical snack. You have mustard, you are a seaman, you see the halophyte, you mix it together, it's a great snack with some crackers.
So, water, fuel and food.
None of this is possible without the GreenLab team.
Just like the Miami Heat has the big three, we have the big three at NASA GRC.
That's myself, professor Bob Hendricks, our fearless leader, and Dr. Arnon Chait.
The backbone of the GreenLab is students.
Over the last two years we've had 35 different students from around the world working at GreenLab.
As a matter fact my division chief says a lot, "You have a green university."
I say, "I'm okay with that, 'cause we are nurturing the next generation of extreme green thinkers, which is significant."
Clearly we use electricity. We have a solution for you — We're using clean energy sources here.
So, we have two wind turbines connected to the GreenLab, we have four or five more hopefully coming soon.
In about 30 days or so they'll be connected to the GreenLab.
And the reason why you see red, red and yellow, is a lot of people think NASA employees don't work on Saturday — This is a picture taken on Saturday.
There are no cars around, but you see my truck in yellow. I work on Saturday. (Laughter) This is a proof to you that I'm working.
'Cause we do what it takes to get the job done, most people know that.
Here's a concept with this: We are using the GreenLab for a micro-grid test bed for the smart grid concept in Ohio.
We have the ability to do that, and I think it's going to work.
So, GreenLab Research Facility.
We really, really hope this concept catches on worldwide.
We think we have a solution for food, water, fuel and now energy. Complete.
It's extreme green, it's sustainable, alternative and renewable and it meets the big three at GRC: Don't use arable land, don't compete with food crops, and most of all, don't use fresh water.
So I get a lot of questions about, "What are you doing in that lab?"
And I usually say, "None of your business, that's what I'm doing in the lab." (Laughter) And believe it or not, my number one goal for working on this project is I want to help save the world.
This might seem to you like a very odd question.
Because, you might ask, how do we find the real you, how do you know what the real you is?
If there's anything real in the world, it's you.
Well, I'm not quite sure.
At least we have to understand a bit better what that means.
Now certainly, I think there are lots of things in our culture around us which sort of reinforce the idea that for each one of us, we have a kind of a core, an essence.
There is something about what it means to be you which defines you, and it's kind of permanent and unchanging.
People put them on their Facebook profile as though they are meaningul, you even know your Chinese horoscope as well.
There are also more scientific versions of this, all sorts of ways of profiling personality type, such as the Myers-Briggs tests, for example.
A lot of companies use these for recruitment.
You answer a lot of questions, and this is supposed to reveal something about your core personality.
And if you pick up one of those magazines, it's hard to resist, isn't it?
So I think that we have a common-sense idea that there is a kind of core or essence of ourselves to be discovered.
And I have to say now, I'll say it a bit later, but I'm not challenging this just because I'm weird, the challenge actually has a very, very long and distinguished history.
There is you.
So you have memories, and these memories help to create what you are.
I don't know whether this number plate, which says "messiah 1," indicates that the driver believes in the messiah, or that they are the messiah.
Either way, they have beliefs about messiahs.
We have knowledge.
It's not just intellectual things.
There is a person who has all the things that make up our life experiences.
But the suggestion I want to put to you today is that there's something fundamentally wrong with this model.
And I can show you what's wrong with one click.
What is there, then?
Well, clearly there are memories, desires, intentions, sensations, and so forth.
But what happens is these things exist, and they're kind of all integrated, they're overlapped, they're connected in various different ways.
They're connecting partly, and perhaps even mainly, because they all belong to one body and one brain.
But there's also a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves, the experiences we have when we remember past things.
So what we desire is partly a result of what we believe, and what we remember is also informing us what we know.
And so really, there are all these things, like beliefs, desires, sensations, experiences, they're all related to each other, and that just is you.
In some ways, it's a small difference from the common-sense understanding.
In some ways, it's a massive one.
It's the shift between thinking of yourself as a thing which has all the experiences of life, and thinking of yourself as simply that collection of all experiences in life.
You are the sum of your parts.
Now those parts are also physical parts, of course, brains, bodies and legs and things, but they aren't so important, actually.
If you have a heart transplant, you're still the same person.
If you have a memory transplant, are you the same person?
Now this idea, that what we are, the way to understand ourselves, is as not of some permanent being, which has experiences, but is kind of a collection of experiences, might strike you as kind of weird.
In a way, it's common sense.
Because I just invite you to think about, by comparison, think about pretty much anything else in the universe, maybe apart from the very most fundamental forces or powers.
Now my science isn't very good.
We might say something like water has two parts hydrogen and one parts oxygen, right?
We all know that.
We understand, very easily, very straightforwardly, that water is nothing more than the hydrogen and oxygen molecules suitably arranged.
Everything else in the universe is the same.
We understand very clearly that you get the parts of the watch, you put them together, and you create a watch.
Now if everything else in the universe is like this, why are we different?
Why think of ourselves as somehow not just being a collection of all our parts, but somehow being a separate, permanent entity which has those parts?
Now this view is not particularly new, actually.
It has quite a long lineage.
You find it in Buddhism, you find it in 17th, 18th-century philosophy going through to the current day, people like Locke and Hume.
But interestingly, it's also a view increasingly being heard reinforced by neuroscience.
But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together."
There is no kind of center where everything happens.
There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently.
It's like a mechanical trick.
It's not that we don't exist, it's just that the trick is to make us feel that inside of us is something more unified than is really there.
You might think that if it's true, that for each one of us there is no abiding core of self, no permanent essence, does that mean that really, the self is an illusion?
Does it mean that we really don't exist?
There is no real you.
These are three psychologists, Thomas Metzinger, Bruce Hood, Susan Blackmore, a lot of these people do talk the language of illusion, the self is an illusion, it's a fiction.
The watch isn't an illusion, because there is nothing to the watch other than a collection of its parts.
In the same way, we're not illusions either.
The fact that we are, in some ways, just this very, very complex collection, ordered collection of things, does not mean we're not real.
Let's take something like a waterfall.
These are the Iguazu Falls, in Argentina.
For one thing, it's always changing.
The waters are always carving new channels.
Of course the water that flows through the waterfall is different every single instance.
But it doesn't mean that the Iguazu Falls are an illusion.
It doesn't mean it's not real.
What it means is we have to understand what it is as something which has a history, has certain things that keep it together, but it's a process, it's fluid, it's forever changing.
Now that, I think, is a model for understanding ourselves, and I think it's a liberating model.
Because if you think that you have this fixed, permanent essence, which is always the same, throughout your life, no matter what, in a sense you're kind of trapped.
But if you think of yourself as being, in a way, not a thing as such, but a kind of a process, something that is changing, then I think that's quite liberating.
If you watch the X-Factor too much, you might buy into this idea that we can all be whatever we want to be.
That's not true.
I could practice hard and maybe be good, but I don't have that really natural ability.
There are limits to what we can achieve.
But nevertheless, we do have this capacity to, in a sense, shape ourselves.
You'll be aware of the fact how much of you changed over recent years.
If you have any videos of yourself, three or four years ago, you probably feel embarrassed because you don't recognize yourself.
This is the Buddha, again: "Well-makers lead the water, fletchers bend the arrow, carpenters bend a log of wood, wise people fashion themselves."
And that's the idea I want to leave you with, that your true self is not something that you will have to go searching for, as a mystery, and maybe never ever find.
To the extent you have a true self, it's something that you in part discover, but in part create.
and that, I think, is a liberating and exciting prospect.
Thank you very much.
So what I'm doing is a thought experiment.
Now you may know of or have read this book by this guy.
It's probably the first and maybe the only bestseller ever written about economics.
It talks about how nations all over the world will prosper through the individual pursuit of individual profit.
But the funny thing about Adam Smith is that he was a stay-at-home kind of guy.
He actually never went further from Edinburgh than France and Switzerland.
So my thought experiment is to imagine what would have happened if Adam Smith had visited Africa.
And fortunately, there's actually an easy answer, because the Arab lawyer and traveler Ibn Battuta traveled down the east coast of Africa in the 14th century, and what he found when he got to Mogadishu was a market, and he wrote about it.
And basically, merchant ships came to the harbor, and they weren't even allowed to land.
They had to drop anchor in the harbor, and boats came out to them, and locals picked them and said, "You are my guest, I am now your broker."
And through this mechanism, everyone prospered.
And so if that was Adam Smith, he might look like this guy and say, "Ah! That's a mutual aid society.
That's a share-the-wealth free market."
And when I put this question to Christian [Benimana], who had the stage at the beginning of this session, he responded that if Adam Smith had come to Africa, there would have been a sharing economy long before Airbnb and Uber.
And that's true.
These are just figures of 10 percent of exports in these countries.
So the interesting thing is that this mutual aid economy still exists, and we can find examples of it in the strangest places.
It's the largest electronics market in West Africa.
It's 10,000 merchants, they do about four billion dollars of turnover every year.
There's a behind-the-scenes principle that enables this market to grow.
And they do claim -- you know, this is an interesting juxtaposition of the King James Bible and "How To Sell Yourself."
That's what they say is their message.
But in reality, this market is governed by a sharing principle.
That means paying your rent for two or three years and giving you a cash infusion so you can go out in the world and start trading.
That's locally generated venture capital. Right?
And there are other sharing economies that we look for -- merry-go-rounds, which are found in almost every shantytown.
They have different names in other cultures; this is the Kenyan name.
It's a way of generating cash.
It's a kitty -- people throw money into a pot once a week, and once a week, one member of the group gets the money, and they can spend it on whatever they need to.
And what the acequia is is a sharing system for scarce water.
It's migrated from North Africa to Spain, and from Spain to the west of the United States, where it still is used.
So taking this thought experiment, I wanted to go a little bit further and suggest that these things are managed communally, and they are taking care of scarce capital, scarce cash and scarce resources.
And it seems to me that we have actually two kinds of capitalism.
We have the capitalism of the top up.
And these are really interesting statistics, because three one-thousandths of one percent of the Nigerian population controls wealth equal to one-fourth of the GDP of the country.
One one-hundredth of one percent of the Kenyan population controls wealth equal to 75 percent of the GDP of the country.
That's the capitalism of top up.
And everyone else is with this guy, selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow on the highway in Lagos.
And they're tripped up by the thesis of cassava and capitalism, that cassava has to be processed in order not to be poisonous, and I would argue that, similarly, the market economy needs to be processed in order to be fair to everyone.
So we have to look at what I call the "bottom down economy."
These are these sharing models that exist out there that need to be propagated and used and scaled.
And if we propagate these things, we can begin to bring infrastructure to everyone, and that will ensure that communities are leading their own development, which is, I believe, what we need in the world, and, I would suggest, what we need in Africa.
I wanted to quote Steve Biko, and I thought it was really important to quote Steve Biko, because next month, September 12 to be exact, is the 40th anniversary of his murder by the South African state.
And you can read the quote.
He basically said that we're not here to compete.
And he also said that "the great powers of the world have done wonders in giving us an industrial and military look, ..."
and we don't have to copy that military-industrialist complex, because Africa can do things differently and restore the humanity of the world.
And so what I want to suggest here is that we have an opportunity, that we are all here in the mutual landscape to be able to do things, and that the journey starts now.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
It is actually a reality today that you can download products from the Web -- product data, I should say, from the Web -- perhaps tweak it and personalize it to your own preference or your own taste, and have that information sent to a desktop machine that will fabricate it for you on the spot.
And the reason we can do this is through an emerging technology called additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.
This is a 3D printer.
They have been around for almost 30 years now, which is quite amazing to think of, but they're only just starting to filter into the public arena.
And typically, you would take data, like the data of a pen here, which would be a geometric representation of that product in 3D, and we would pass that data with material into a machine.
And a process that would happen in the machine would mean layer by layer that product would be built.
But if these machines have been around for almost 30 years, why don't we know about them?
Because typically they've been too inefficient, inaccessible, they've not been fast enough, they've been quite expensive.
But today, it is becoming a reality that they are now becoming successful.
Many barriers are breaking down.
That means that you guys will soon be able to access one of these machines, if not this minute.
And it will change and disrupt the landscape of manufacturing, and most certainly our lives, our businesses and the lives of our children.
So how does it work?
It typically reads CAD data, which is a product design data created on professional product design programs.
And this data gets sent to a machine that slices the data into two-dimensional representations of that product all the way through -- almost like slicing it like salami.
And that data, layer by layer, gets passed through the machine, starting at the base of the product and depositing material, layer upon layer, infusing the new layer of materials to the old layer in an additive process.
And this material that's deposited either starts as a liquid form or a material powder form.
And the bonding process can happen by either melting and depositing or depositing then melting.
In this case, we can see a laser sintering machine developed by EOS.
It's actually using a laser to fuse the new layer of material to the old layer.
So all these products that you can see on the screen were made in the same way.
They were all 3D printed.
And you can see, they're ranging from shoes, rings that were made out of stainless steal, phone covers out of plastic, all the way through to spinal implants, for example, that were created out of medical-grade titanium, and engine parts.
And you can create parts with moving components, hinges, parts within parts.
We can have 3D printers today that build structures like these.
This is almost three meters high.
And this was built by depositing artificial sandstone layer upon layer in layers of about five millimeters to 10 mm in thickness -- slowly growing this structure.
This was created by an architectural firm called Shiro.
And on the other end of the spectrum, this is a microstructure.
So really the resolution is quite incredible.
So who's using it?
Typically, because we can create products very rapidly, it's been used by product designers, or anyone who wanted to prototype a product and very quickly create or reiterate a design.
And actually what's quite amazing about this technology as well is that you can create bespoke products en masse.
Architects, for example, they want to create prototypes of buildings.
Again you can see, this is a building of the Free University in Berlin and it was designed by Foster and Partners.
And very hard to even create this by hand.
Now this is an engine component.
It was developed by a company called Within Technologies and 3T RPD.
Now 3D printing can break away barriers in design which challenge the constraints of mass production.
If we slice into this product which is actually sitting here, you can see that it has a number of cooling channels pass through it, which means it's a more efficient product.
You can't create this with standard manufacturing techniques even if you tried to do it manually.
It's more efficient because we can now create all these cavities within the object that cool fluid.
And it's used by aerospace and automotive.
And then taking this idea of creating a very detailed structure, we can apply it to honeycomb structures and use them within implants.
Typically an implant is more effective within the body if it's more porous, because our body tissue will grow into it.
With 3D printing, we're seeing today that we can create much better implants.
And in fact, because we can create bespoke products en masse, one-offs, we can create implants that are specific to individuals.
So as you can see, this technology and the quality of what comes out of the machines is fantastic.
And we're starting to see it being used for final end products.
You can buy a machine today for about $300 that you can create yourself, which is quite incredible.
But then it begs the question, why don't we all have one in our home?
Because, simply, most of us here today don't know how to create the data that a 3D printer reads.
If I gave you a 3D printer, you wouldn't know how to direct it to make what you want it to.
But there are more and more technologies, software and processes today that are breaking down those barriers.
This technology is really going to disrupt the landscape of manufacturing and, I believe, cause a revolution in manufacturing.
So today, you can download products from the Web -- anything you would have on your desktop, like pens, whistles, lemon squeezers.
You can use software like Google SketchUp to create products from scratch very easily.
3D printing can be also used to download spare parts from the Web.
So imagine you have, say, a Hoover in your home and it has broken down. You need a spare part, but you realize that Hoover's been discontinued.
These are parts of a RepRap machine, which is a kind of desktop printer.
We're all familiar with the idea of customization or personalization.
Brands like Nike are doing it.
It's all over the Web.
In fact, every major household name is allowing you to interact with their products on a daily basis -- all the way from Smart Cars to Prada to Ray Ban, for example.
What you could do is really influence your product now and shape-manipulate your product.
Imagine that you can now engage with a brand and interact, so that you can pass your personal attributes to the products that you're about to buy.
You can today download a product with software like this, view the product in 3D.
This is a lamp.
You can direct what color that product will be, perhaps what material.
And also, you can engage in shape manipulation of that product, but within boundaries that are safe.
And when somebody is ready to purchase the product in their personalized design, they click "Enter" and this data gets converted into the data that a 3D printer reads and gets passed to a 3D printer, perhaps on someone's desktop.
I don't think that will happen soon.
This means lower carbon footprint.
We're now, instead of shipping a product across the world, we're sending data across the Internet.
You can see, this came out of the machine in one piece and the electronics were inserted later.
It's this lamp, as you can see here.
So as long as you have the data, you can create the part on demand.
And you don't necessarily need to use this for just aesthetic customization, you can use it for functional customization, scanning parts of the body and creating things that are made to fit.
Or we can create very specific prosthetics for that individual.
While you wait at the dentist, a machine will quietly be creating this for you ready to insert in the teeth.
And the idea of now creating implants, scanning data, an MRI scan of somebody can now be converted into 3D data and we can create very specific implants for them.
And applying this to the idea of building up what's in our bodies.
You know, this is pair of lungs and the bronchial tree.
You couldn't really create this or simulate it in any other way.
So one of the pioneers, for example, is Dr. Anthony Atala, and he has been working on layering cells to create body parts -- bladders, valves, kidneys.
We all have different preferences, different needs.
We like different things.
We're all different sizes and our companies the same.
Businesses want different things.
Without a doubt in my mind, I believe that this technology is going to cause a manufacturing revolution and will change the landscape of manufacturing as we know it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Yeah, so a couple of years ago I was turning 60, and I don't like being 60.
And I couldn't forgive myself for the countless, countless hours I had lost in negative thought -- all the time I had spent beating myself up for losing my marriage and not stopping the sexual abuse when I was a kid and career moves and this and this and this.
And then my mother died at 82.
And I decided, it was an old dream that was lingering, that was from so many years ago, three decades ago -- the only sort of world class swim I had tried and failed at back in my 20s -- was going from Cuba to Florida.
No one's ever done it without a shark cage.
It's daunting.
And I had kept in good shape, but swimming's a whole different animal.
As a matter of fact, this picture is supposed to be me during training.
It's a smiling face.
And when you're training for this sport, you are not smiling.
(Laughter) It's an arduous, difficult sport, and I don't remember smiling at any time during this sport.
As I said, I respect other sports, and I compare this sport sometimes to cycling and to mountain climbing and other of the expedition type events, but this is a sensory deprivation, a physical duress.
It's 14 hours 58 minutes. Who cares the last two minutes?"
I say, "No, it's got to be 15 hours," and I swim another minute out and another minute back to make the 15 hours.
It's not that I didn't have help, but honestly, I sort of led, I was the team leader.
And to get the government permissions, you read in the paper, you think it's easy to get into Cuba everyday?
The navigation is difficult.
There's a big river called the Gulf Stream that runs across and it's not going in the direction you are.
It's going to the east and you'd like to go north.
And there are sharks.
And there are all kinds of problems.
And a month ago, the 23rd of September, I stood on that shore and I looked across to that long, long faraway horizon and I asked myself, do you have it?
Are your shoulders ready?
You know, you're swimming with the fogged goggles, you're swimming at 60 strokes a minute, so you're never really focused on anything, you don't see well.
You're really left alone with your own thoughts.
You save the French for last.
And I had songs, I had a playlist in my head -- not through headphones, in my own head -- of 65 songs.
And I couldn't wait to get into the dark in the middle of the night, because that's when Neil Young comes out.
(Laughter) And it's odd, isn't it?
You'd think you'd be singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" out in the majesty of the ocean, not songs about heroin addiction in New York City.
But no, for some reason I couldn't wait to get into the dark of the night and be singing, ♫ "A heard you knocking at my cellar door ♫ ♫ I love you baby and I want some more ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, the damage done" ♫ (Applause) The night before I started, I finished Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design."
Is this an envelope we're living inside of, or no, does it go onto infinity in both time and space?
I couldn't wait to prove the athlete I am, that nobody else in the world can do this swim.
And I knew I could do it.
And when I jumped into that water, I yelled in my mother's French, "Courage!"
And I started swimming, and, oh my God, it was glassy.
And we knew it, all 50 people on the boat, we all knew this was it, this was our time.
And I reminded myself a couple hours in, you know, the sport is sort of a microcosm of life itself.
First of all, you're going to hit obstacles.
And even though you're feeling great at any one moment, don't take it for granted, be ready, because there's going to be pain, there's going to be suffering.
And I was thinking of the hypothermia and maybe some shoulder pain and all the other things -- the vomiting that comes from being in the saltwater.
You're immersed in the liquid.
After a couple of days, three days, you tend to rebel in a lot of physical ways.
But no, two hours in, wham! Never in my life ...
And I was on fire -- excruciating, excruciating pain.
I don't know if you can still see the red line here and up the arm.
The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish.
And I'm yelling out, "Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!
Help me! Somebody help me!"
And the next thing is paralysis.
A young man on our boat is an EMT. He dives in to try to help me.
They drag him out on the boat, and he's -- evidently, I didn't see any of this -- but lying on the boat and giving himself epinephrine shots and crying out.
And he's saying, "Bonnie, I think I'm going to die.
My breath is down to three breaths a minute.
I need help, and I can't help Diana."
So that was at eight o'clock at night.
The doctor, medical team from University of Miami arrived at five in the morning.
So I swam through the night, and at dawn they got there and they started with prednisone shots.
It was like an ICU unit in the water.
(Laughter) And I guess the story is that even Navy SEALS who are stung by the box jelly, they're done.
They either die or they quickly get to a hospital.
The box jelly again -- all across the neck, all across here.
And this time, I don't like it, I didn't want to give into it, but there's a difference between a non-stop swim and a staged swim.
And they got me out and they started again with the epinephrine and the prednisone and with the oxygen and with everything they had on board.
And at 41 hours, this body couldn't make it.
And the dream was crushed.
And how odd is this intelligent person who put this together and got all these world experts together.
A lot of athletes have this, you know, sort of invincibility.
They should worry about me. I don't worry about them.
As a matter of fact, the best advice I got was from an elementary school class in the Caribbean.
And I was telling these kids, 120 of them -- they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor -- and I was telling them about the jellyfish and how they're gelatinous and you can't see them at night especially.
And they have these long 30 to 40 to 50-ft. tentacles.
And I said, "What's your name?" "Henry."
"Henry, what's your question?"
He said, "You know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs?"
And I said, "Well it's odd that you've learned of this as a noble kind of pursuit, but yeah, I know those guys."
He said, "That's what you need.
He said, "That's what I'm talking about. That's what you need."
I finished the swim like this.
I was swimming with this thing on.
That's how scared of the jellyfish I was.
So now what do I do?
We've all had a heartache.
And so my journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat.
I can feel proud. I can stand here in front of you tonight and say I was courageous.
Yeah.
(Applause) Thank you.
And with all sincerity, I can say, I am glad I lived those two years of my life that way, because my goal to not suffer regrets anymore, I got there with that goal.
When you live that way, when you live with that kind of passion, there's no time, there's no time for regrets, you're just moving forward.
But the difference in accepting this particular defeat is that sometimes, if cancer has won, if there's death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary.
But that ocean's still there.
This hope is still alive.
And I don't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years, and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida, and I will swim from Cuba to Florida.
Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) And so, what after that?
Are you going to swim the Atlantic?
No, that's the last swim.
And by the way, a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on Wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was August 22nd 1949, and for some odd reason in Wikipedia, they had my death date too.
(Laughter) He said, "Did you know you're going to die the same place you were born, New York City, and it's going to be in January of '35?"
I said, "Nope. I didn't know."
And now I'm going to live to 85.
I have three more years than I thought.
And so I ask myself, I'm starting to ask myself now, even before this extreme dream gets achieved for me, I'm asking myself, and maybe I can ask you tonight too, to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, she says, "So what is it, what is it you're doing, with this one wild and precious life of yours?"
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Live it large. Live it large.
I think we have to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change.
And I think it starts with one physician, and that's me.
And maybe I've been around long enough that I can afford to give away some of my false prestige to be able to do that.
We're near the end, we're getting close to the World Series.
We all love baseball, don't we?
(Laughter) Baseball is filled with some amazing statistics.
And there's hundreds of them.
"Moneyball" is about to come out, and it's all about statistics and using statistics to build a great baseball team.
It's called batting average.
That means that ballplayer batted safely, hit safely three times out of 10 at bats.
Do you know what they call a 300 hitter in Major League Baseball?
Good, really good, maybe an all-star.
Do you know what they call a 400 baseball hitter?
Legendary -- as in Ted Williams legendary -- the last Major League Baseball player to hit over 400 during a regular season.
Suppose you have appendicitis and you're referred to a surgeon who's batting 400 on appendectomies.
Now suppose you live in a certain part of a certain remote place and you have a loved one who has blockages in two coronary arteries and your family doctor refers that loved one to a cardiologist who's batting 200 on angioplasties.
She's doing a lot better this year. She's on the comeback trail.
And she's hitting a 257.
Somehow this isn't working.
But I'm going to ask you a question.
1,000, very good.
What we do though is we send each one of them, including myself, out into the world with the admonition, be perfect.
And that was the message that I absorbed when I was in med school.
In high school, a classmate once said that Brian Goldman would study for a blood test.
(Laughter) And so I did.
And I studied in my little garret at the nurses' residence at Toronto General Hospital, not far from here.
And I memorized everything.
I memorized in my anatomy class the origins and exertions of every muscle, every branch of every artery that came off the aorta, differential diagnoses obscure and common.
I even knew the differential diagnosis in how to classify renal tubular acidosis.
And all the while, I was amassing more and more knowledge.
And I did well, I graduated with honors, cum laude.
And it worked for a while, until I met Mrs. Drucker.
I was a resident at a teaching hospital here in Toronto when Mrs. Drucker was brought to the emergency department of the hospital where I was working.
At the time I was assigned to the cardiology service on a cardiology rotation.
And when I listened to her, she was making a wheezy sound.
And when I listened to her chest with a stethoscope, I could hear crackly sounds on both sides that told me that she was in congestive heart failure.
This is a condition in which the heart fails, and instead of being able to pump all the blood forward, some of the blood backs up into the lung, the lungs fill up with blood, and that's why you have shortness of breath.
And that wasn't a difficult diagnosis to make.
I gave her aspirin. I gave her medications to relieve the strain on her heart.
I gave her medications that we call diuretics, water pills, to get her to pee out the access fluid.
And over the course of the next hour and a half or two, she started to feel better.
And I felt really good.
Actually, I made two more mistakes.
And he knew her, he would have been able to furnish additional information about her.
Maybe I didn't want to be a high-maintenance resident.
The second mistake that I made was worse.
In sending her home, I disregarded a little voice deep down inside that was trying to tell me, "Goldman, not a good idea. Don't do this."
In fact, so lacking in confidence was I that I actually asked the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker, "Do you think it's okay if she goes home?"
I can remember that like it was yesterday.
So I signed the discharge papers, and an ambulance came, paramedics came to take her home.
And I went back to my work on the wards.
All the rest of that day, that afternoon, I had this kind of gnawing feeling inside my stomach.
But I carried on with my work.
And at the end of the day, I packed up to leave the hospital and walked to the parking lot to take my car and drive home when I did something that I don't usually do.
I walked through the emergency department on my way home.
And it was there that another nurse, not the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker before, but another nurse, said three words to me that are the three words that most emergency physicians I know dread.
The three words are: Do you remember?
"Do you remember that patient you sent home?"
"Well she's back," in just that tone of voice.
About an hour after she had arrived home, after I'd sent her home, she collapsed and her family called 911 and the paramedics brought her back to the emergency department where she had a blood pressure of 50, which is in severe shock.
They gave her medications to raise her blood pressure.
And I went through this roller coaster, because after they stabilized her, she went to the intensive care unit, and I hoped against hope that she would recover.
And over the next two or three days, it was clear that she was never going to wake up.
She had irreversible brain damage.
And over the course of the next eight or nine days, they resigned themselves to what was happening.
Over the next few weeks, I beat myself up and I experienced for the first time the unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine -- where I felt alone, isolated, not feeling the healthy kind of shame that you feel, because you can't talk about it with your colleagues.
And you make amends and you never make that mistake again.
The unhealthy shame I'm talking about is the one that makes you so sick inside.
And it was what I was feeling.
And it wasn't because of my attending; he was a doll.
He talked to the family, and I'm quite sure that he smoothed things over and made sure that I didn't get sued.
And I kept asking myself these questions.
And then at my worst moments: Why did I make such a stupid mistake?
Why did I go into medicine?
Slowly but surely, it lifted.
I began to feel a bit better.
And on a cloudy day, there was a crack in the clouds and the sun started to come out and I wondered, maybe I could feel better again.
And I made myself a bargain that if only I redouble my efforts to be perfect and never make another mistake again, please make the voices stop.
And they did.
And I went back to work.
And then it happened again.
Two years later I was an attending in the emergency department at a community hospital just north of Toronto, and I saw a 25 year-old man with a sore throat.
It was busy, I was in a bit of a hurry.
He kept pointing here.
And I gave him a prescription for penicillin and sent him on his way.
And even as he was walking out the door, he was still sort of pointing to his throat.
And she said the three words: Do you remember?
"Do you remember that patient you saw with the sore throat?"
Well it turns out, he didn't have a strep throat.
He had a potentially life-threatening condition called epiglottitis.
You can Google it, but it's an infection, not of the throat, but of the upper airway, and it can actually cause the airway to close.
And fortunately he didn't die.
And I went through the same period of shame and recriminations and felt cleansed and went back to work, until it happened again and again and again.
Twice in one emergency shift, I missed appendicitis.
Now in both cases, I didn't send them home and I don't think there was any gap in their care.
I ordered a kidney X-ray. When it turned out to be normal, my colleague who was doing a reassessment of the patient noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant and called the surgeons.
I ordered some fluids to rehydrate him and asked my colleague to reassess him.
And he did and when he noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant, called the surgeons.
But each time, they were gnawing at me, eating at me.
Here's the problem: If I can't come clean and talk about my mistakes, if I can't find the still-small voice that tells me what really happened, how can I share it with my colleagues?
When was the last time you heard somebody talk about failure after failure after failure?
Oh yeah, you go to a cocktail party and you might hear about some other doctor, but you're not going to hear somebody talking about their own mistakes.
And in fact, if I knew and my colleagues knew that one of my orthopedic colleagues took off the wrong leg in my hospital, believe me, I'd have trouble making eye contact with that person.
That's the system that we have.
It's a system in which there are two kinds of physicians -- those who make mistakes and those who don't, those who can't handle sleep deprivation and those who can, those who have lousy outcomes and those who have great outcomes.
And it's almost like an ideological reaction, like the antibodies begin to attack that person.
But there are two problems with that.
In this country, as many as 24,000 Canadians die of preventable medical errors.
In the United States, the Institute of Medicine pegged it at 100,000.
In a hospital system where medical knowledge is doubling every two or three years, we can't keep up with it.
I don't take the same history.
I'm not a robot; I don't do things the same way each time.
And my patients aren't cars; they don't tell me their symptoms in the same way each time.
Given all of that, mistakes are inevitable.
On my show, on "White Coat, Black Art," I made it a habit of saying, "Here's my worst mistake," I would say to everybody from paramedics to the chief of cardiac surgery, "Here's my worst mistake," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "What about yours?" and I would point the microphone towards them.
They want to tell their stories. They want to share their stories.
They want to be able to say, "Look, don't make the same mistake I did."
What they need is an environment to be able to do that.
What they need is a redefined medical culture.
And it starts with one physician at a time.
She shares her experience with others.
She's supportive when other people talk about their mistakes.
And she points out other people's mistakes, not in a gotcha way, but in a loving, supportive way so that everybody can benefit.
And she works in a culture of medicine that acknowledges that human beings run the system, and when human beings run the system, they will make mistakes from time to time.
So the system is evolving to create backups that make it easier to detect those mistakes that humans inevitably make and also fosters in a loving, supportive way places where everybody who is observing in the health care system can actually point out things that could be potential mistakes and is rewarded for doing so, and especially people like me, when we do make mistakes, we're rewarded for coming clean.
My name is Brian Goldman.
I am a redefined physician.
(Applause)
The maxim, "Know thyself" has been around since the ancient Greeks.
Some attribute this golden world knowledge to Plato, others to Pythagoras.
But the truth is it doesn't really matter which sage said it first, because it's still sage advice, even today.
"Know thyself."
"Know thyself."
I understand this timeless dictum as a statement about the problems, or more exactly, the confusions, of consciousness.
This fascination led me to submerge myself in art, study neuroscience, and later, to become a psychotherapist.
Today I combine all my passions as the CEO of InteraXon, a thought-controlled computing company.
My goal, quite simply, is to help people become more in tune with themselves.
I take it from this little dictum, "Know thyself."
I mean, it's self-awareness that separates Homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind.
Today we're often too busy tending to our iPhones and iPods to really stop and get to know ourselves.
Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, e-mails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and Tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: Ourselves.
And we feel like we have to get far, far away to a secluded retreat, leaving it all behind.
This is the term that armies use when they've lost a battle.
It means we've got to get out of here.
Is this how we feel about the pressures of our world, that in order to get inside ourselves, you have to run for the hills?
So when you think about it, we're almost like a tourist visiting ourselves over there.
And eventually, that vacation's got to come to an end.
So my question to you is, can we find ways to know ourselves without the escape?
Can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek?
I say the answer is yes.
And I'm here today to share a new way that we're working with technology to this end, to get familiar with our inner self like never before -- humanizing technology and furthering that age-old quest of ours to more fully know the self.
It's called thought-controlled computing.
You may or may not have noticed that I'm wearing a tiny electrode on my forehead.
This is actually a brainwave sensor that's reading the electrical activity of my brain as I give this talk.
These brainwaves are being analyzed and we can see them as a graph.
Let me show you what it looks like.
It's the direct signal being recorded from my head, rendered in real time.
The green and red bars show that same signal displayed by frequency, with lower frequencies here and higher frequencies up here.
These graphs are compelling, they're undulating, but from a human's perspective, they're actually not very useful.
That's why we've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this data meaningful to the people who use it.
For instance, what if I could use this data to find out how relaxed I am at any moment?
Or what if I can take that information and put it into an organic shape up on the screen?
The shape on the right over here has become an indicator of what's going on in my head.
And the more focused my brain is, the more the circuit board is going to surge with energy.
Ordinarily, I would have no way of knowing how focused or relaxed I was in any tangible way.
As we know, our feelings about how we're feeling are notoriously unreliable.
We've all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who didn't deserve it, and then we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier.
This new awareness opens up vast possibilities for applications that help improve our lives and ourselves.
We're trying to create technology that uses the insights to make our work more efficient, our breaks more relaxing and our connections deeper and more fulfilling than ever.
I'm going to share some of these visions with you in a bit, but first I want to take a look at how we got here.
By the way, feel free to check in on my head at any time.
(Laughter) My team at InteraXon and I have been developing thought-controlled application for almost a decade now.
In the first phase of development, we were really enthused by all the things we could control with our mind.
We were making things activate, light up and work just by thinking.
We were transcending the space between the mind and the device.
We brought to life a vast array of prototypes and products that you could control with your mind, like thought-controlled home appliances or slot-car games or video games or a levitating chair.
We created technology and applications that engaged people's imaginations, and it was really exciting.
Over 17 days at the Olympics, 7,000 visitors from all over the world actually got to individually control the light from the CN Tower, parliament and Niagara in real time with their minds from across the country, 3,000 km away.
But we're always interested in multitiered levels of human interaction.
And so we began looking into inventing thought-controlled applications in a more complex frame than just control.
We realized that we had a system that allowed technology to know something about you.
And it could join into the relationship with you.
We created the responsive room where the lights, music and blinds adjusted to your state.
We then realized that if technology could know something about you and use it to help you, there's an even more valuable application than that.
We could know sides of ourselves that were all but invisible and come to see things that were previously hidden.
Let me show you an example of what I'm talking about here.
Here's an application that I created for the iPad.
So the goal of the original game Zen Bound is to wrap a rope around a wooden form.
So you use it with your headset.
In that headset, you have fabric sensors on your forehead and above the ear.
In the original Zen Bound game, you play it by scrolling your fingers over the pad.
This is not a fake.
What's really interesting to me though is at the end of the game, you get stats and feedback about how you did.
You have graphs and charts that tell you how your brain was doing -- not just how much rope you used or what your high score is, but what was going on inside of your mind.
And this is valuable feedback that we can use to understand what's going on inside of ourselves.
I like to call this "intra-active."
Normally, we think about technology as interactive.
It understands what's inside of you and builds a sort of responsive relationship between you and your technology so that you can use this information to move you forward.
At InteraXon -- intra-active technology is one of our really defining mandates.
It's how we understand the world inside and reflect it outside into this tight loop.
For example, thought-controlled computing can teach children with ADD how to improve their focus.
With ADD, children have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a high proportion of theta states.
So you can create applications that reward focused brain states.
So you can imagine kids playing video games with their brain waves and improving their ADD symptoms as they do it.
This can be as effective as Ritalin.
Perhaps even more importantly, thought-controlled computing can give children with ADD insights into their own fluctuating mental states, so they can better understand themselves and their learning needs.
We can peer inside our heads and interact with what was once locked away from us, what once mystified and separated us.
Brainwave technology can understand us, anticipate our emotions and find the best solutions for our needs.
Imagine the insights that you can gain from this kind of second sight.
It would be like plugging into your own personal Google.
On the subject of Google, today you can search and tag images based on the thoughts and feelings you had while you watched them.
You can tag pictures of baby animals as happy, or whatever baby animals are to you, and then you can search that database, navigating with your feelings, rather than the keywords that just hint at them.
Or you could tag Facebook photos with the emotions that you had associated with those memories and then instantly prioritize the streams that catch your attention, just like this.
Humanizing technology is about taking what's already natural about the human-tech experience and building technology seamlessly in tandem with it.
As it aligns with our human behaviors, it can allow us to make better sense of what we do and, more importantly, why.
Creating a big picture out of all the important little details that make up who we are.
With humanized technology we can monitor the quality of your sleep cycles.
When our productivity starts to slacken, we can go back to that data and see how we can make more effective balance between work and play.
Do you know what causes fatigue in you or what brings out your energetic self, what triggers cause you to be depressed or what fun things are going to bring you out of that funk?
Imagine if you had access to data that allowed you to rank on a scale of overall happiness which people in your life made you the happiest, or what activities brought you joy.
(Laughter) What thought-controlled computing can allow you to do is build colorful layered pictures of our lives.
And with this, we can get the skinny on our psychological happenings and build a story of our behaviors over time.
We can begin to see the underlying narratives that propel us forward and tell us about what's going on.
And from this, we can learn how to change the plot, the outcome and the character of our personal stories.
They understood the power of human narrative and the value that we place on humans as changing, evolving and growing.
But they understood something more fundamental -- the sheer joy in discovery, the delight and fascination that we get from the world and being ourselves in it; the richness that we get from seeing, feeling and knowing the lives that we are.
My mom's an artist, and as a child, I'd often see her bring things to life with the stroke of a brush.
The next, it was alive with her colorful ideas and expressions.
As I sat easel-side, watching her transform canvas after canvas, I learned that you could create your own world.
I learned that our own inner worlds -- our ideas, emotions and imaginations -- were, in fact, not bound by our brains and bodies.
To me, thought-controlled computing is as simple and powerful as a paintbrush -- one more tool to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds within us.
I look forward to the day that I can sit beside you, easel-side, watching the world that we can create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we can make about ourselves.
Thank you.
We do not invest in victims, we invest in survivors.
And in ways both big and small, the narrative of the victim shapes the way we see women.
You can't count what you don't see.
But this is the face of resilience.
Six years ago, I started writing about women entrepreneurs during and after conflict.
I set out to write a compelling economic story, one that had great characters, that no one else was telling, and one that I thought mattered.
I had left ABC news and a career I loved at the age of 30 for business school, a path I knew almost nothing about.
None of the women I had grown up with in Maryland had graduated from college, let alone considered business school.
But they had hustled to feed their kids and pay their rent.
And I saw from a young age that having a decent job and earning a good living made the biggest difference for families who were struggling.
So if you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs.
And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women, because they are the population you have left.
Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide was 77 percent female.
I want to introduce you to some of those entrepreneurs I've met and share with you some of what they've taught me over the years.
And she had turned it down, she said, because she was going to start her next business, an entrepreneurship consultancy that would teach business skills to men and women all around Afghanistan.
Business, she said, was critical to her country's future.
And she said business was even more important for women because earning an income earned respect and money was power for women.
I mean here was a girl who had never lived in peace time who somehow had come to sound like a candidate from "The Apprentice."
(Laughter) So I asked her, "How in the world do you know this much about business?
Why are you so passionate?"
My first business was a dressmaking business I started under the Taliban.
And that was actually an excellent business, because we provided jobs for women all around our neighborhood.
And that's really how I became an entrepreneur."
Think about this: Here were girls who braved danger to become breadwinners during years in which they couldn't even be on their streets.
And at a time of economic collapse when people sold baby dolls and shoe laces and windows and doors just to survive, these girls made the difference between survival and starvation for so many.
I couldn't leave the story, and I couldn't leave the topic either, because everywhere I went I met more of these women who no one seemed to know about, or even wish to.
I went on to Bosnia, and early on in my interviews I met with an IMF official who said, "You know, Gayle, I don't think we actually have women in business in Bosnia, but there is a lady selling cheese nearby on the side of the road.
So maybe you could interview her."
She had started her business squatting in an abandoned garage, sewing sheets and pillow cases she would take to markets all around the city so that she could support the 12 or 13 family members who were counting on her for survival.
By the time we met, she had 20 employees, most of them women, who were sending their boys and their girls to school.
And she was just the start.
I met women running essential oils businesses, wineries and even the country's largest advertising agency.
And when this story posted, I ran to my computer to send it to the IMF official.
And I said, "Just in case you're looking for entrepreneurs to feature at your next investment conference, here are a couple of women."
(Applause) But think about this.
If you see the word "microfinance," what comes to mind?
Most people say women.
And if you see the word "entrepreneur," most people think men.
Why is that?
Because we aim low and we think small when it comes to women.
Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool that leads to self-sufficiency and self-respect, but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women, because they have so much greater hopes for themselves.
They want to move from micro to medium and beyond.
And in many places, they're there.
In the U.S., women-owned businesses will create five and a half million new jobs by 2018.
China, women run 20 percent of all small businesses.
And in the developing world overall, That figure is 40 to 50 percent.
Nearly everywhere I go, I meet incredibly interesting entrepreneurs who are seeking access to finance, access to markets and established business networks.
They are often ignored because they're harder to help.
It is much riskier to give a 50,000 dollar loan than it is to give a 500 dollar loan.
And as the World Bank recently noted, women are stuck in a productivity trap.
Those in small businesses can't get the capital they need to expand and those in microbusiness can't grow out of them.
Recently I was at the State Department in Washington and I met an incredibly passionate entrepreneur from Ghana.
She sells chocolates.
The great news is we already know what works.
Theory and empirical evidence Have already taught us.
And Kiva.org, the microlender, is actually now experimenting with crowdsourcing small and medium sized loans.
Recently it has become very much in fashion to call women "the emerging market of the emerging market."
You know why?
Because -- and I say this as somebody who worked in finance -- 500 billion dollars at least has gone into the emerging markets in the past decade.
Because investors saw the potential for return at a time of slowing economic growth, and so they created financial products and financial innovation tailored to the emerging markets.
How wonderful would it be if we were prepared to replace all of our lofty words with our wallets and invest 500 billion dollars unleashing women's economic potential?
Just think of the benefits when it comes to jobs, productivity, employment, child nutrition, maternal mortality, literacy and much, much more.
Because, as the World Economic Forum noted, smaller gender gaps are directly correlated with increased economic competitiveness.
And not one country in all the world has eliminated its economic participation gap -- not one.
So the great news is this is an incredible opportunity.
We have so much room to grow.
So you see, this is not about doing good, this is about global growth and global employment.
It is about how we invest and it's about how we see women.
And women can no longer be both half the population and a special interest group.
First of all, for exceptions, there are a lot of them and they're important.
Secondly, when we talk about men who are succeeding, we rightly consider them icons or pioneers or innovators to be emulated.
And when we talk about women, they are either exceptions to be dismissed or aberrations to be ignored.
And finally, there is no society anywhere in all the world that is not changed except by its most exceptional.
So why wouldn't we celebrate and elevate these change makers and job creators rather than overlook them?
This topic of resilience is very personal to me and in many ways has shaped my life.
My mom was a single mom who worked at the phone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night so that I could have every opportunity possible.
We shopped double coupons and layaway and consignment stores, and when she got sick with stage four breast cancer and could no longer work, we even applied for food stamps.
And when I would feel sorry for myself as nine or 10 year-old girls do, she would say to me, "My dear, on a scale of major world tragedies, yours is not a three."
(Laughter) And when I was applying to business school and felt certain I couldn't do it and nobody I knew had done it, I went to my aunt who survived years of beatings at the hand of her husband and escaped a marriage of abuse with only her dignity intact.
And she told me, "Never import other people's limitations."
And when I complained to my grandmother, a World War II veteran who worked in film for 50 years and who supported me from the age of 13, that I was terrified that if I turned down a plum assignment at ABC for a fellowship overseas, I would never ever, ever find another job, she said, "Kiddo, I'm going to tell you two things.
First of all, no one turns down a Fulbright, and secondly, McDonald's is always hiring."
The women in this room and watching in L.A.
We are not a special interest group.
We are the majority.
And for far too long, we have underestimated ourselves and been undervalued by others.
It is time for us to aim higher when it comes to women, to invest more and to deploy our dollars to benefit women all around the world.
We can make a difference, and make a difference, not just for women, but for a global economy that desperately needs their contributions.
Together we can make certain that the so-called exceptions begin to rule.
When we change the way we see ourselves, others will follow.
And it is time for all of us to think bigger.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I want to talk to you about, or share with you, a breakthrough new approach for managing items of inventory inside of a warehouse.
So as a hint, this solution involves hundreds of mobile robots, sometimes thousands of mobile robots, moving around a warehouse. And I'll get to the solution.
But for a moment, just think about the last time that you ordered something online.
You were sitting on your couch and you decided that you absolutely had to have this red t-shirt.
And then you decided that green pair of pants looks pretty good too — click!
And maybe a blue pair of shoes — click!
You didn't stop to think for a moment that that might not be a great outfit.
But you hit "submit order."
And two days later, this package shows up on your doorstep.
And you open the box and you're like, wow, there's my goo.
Classically these pick workers will spend 60 or 70 percent of their day wandering around the warehouse.
I was out in the Bay area in '99, 2000, the dot com boom.
I worked for a fabulously spectacular flame-out called Webvan.
(Laughter) This company raised hundreds of millions of dollars with the notion that we will deliver grocery orders online.
And it really came down to the fact that we couldn't do it cost effectively.
In this particular instance we were trying to assemble 30 items of inventory into a few totes, onto a van to deliver to the home.
And that's before we actually tried to deliver it to the home.
So long story short, during my one year at Webvan, what I realized by talking to all the material-handling providers was that there was no solution designed specifically to solve each base picking.
Red item, green, blue, getting those three things in a box.
So we said, there's just got to be a better way to do this.
Existing material handling was set up to pump pallets and cases of goo to retail stores.
Of course Webvan went out of business, and about a year and a half later, I was still noodling on this problem. It was still nagging at me.
And I started thinking about it again.
And I said, let me just focus briefly on what I wanted as a pick worker, or my vision for how it should work.
(Laughter) I said, let's focus on the problem.
What I need is a system where I put out my hand and — poof! — the product shows up and I pack it into the order, and now we're thinking, this would be a very operator-centric approach to solving the problem.
This is what I need. What technology is available to solve this problem?
But as you can see, orders can come and go, products can come and go.
It allows us to focus on making the pick worker the center of the problem, and providing them the tools to make them as productive as possible.
Well, actually it came from a brainstorming exercise, probably a technique that many of you use, It's this notion of testing your ideas.
In this particular case, we challenged ourselves with the idea: What if we had to build a distribution center in China, where it's a very, very low-cost market?
And say, labor is cheap, land is cheap.
And we said specifically, "What if it was zero dollars an hour for direct labor and we could build a million- square-foot distribution center?"
So naturally that led to ideas that said, "Let's put lots of people in the warehouse."
Diet Coke walks up to the front — pick it, put it in the tote, away it goes."
Wow, what if the products could walk and talk on their own?
That's a very interesting, very powerful way that we could potentially organize this warehouse.
So of course, labor isn't free, on that practical versus awesome spectrum.
(Laughter) So we said mobile shelving — We'll put them on mobile shelving.
Did any of you see the Beijing Olympics, the opening ceremonies?
I about fell out of my couch when I saw this.
But interestingly enough, this actually relates to the idea in that these guys were creating some incredibly powerful, impressive digital art, all without computers, I'm told, it was all peer-to-peer coordination and communication.
And they made some fabulous art.
Here is a warehouse.
It's a pick, pack and ship center that has about 10,000 different SKUs.
We'll call them red pens, green pens, yellow Post-It Notes.
This pick worker's life is completely different.
So the process is very productive.
Reach in, pick an item, scan the bar code, pack it out.
By the time you turn around, there's another product there ready to be picked and packed.
So more productive, more accurate and, it turns out, it's a more interesting office environment for these pick workers.
They actually complete the whole order.
And they feel a little bit more in control of their environment.
So the side effects of this approach are what really surprised us.
But we didn't realize just how pervasive this way of thinking extended to other functions in the warehouse.
But what effectively this approach is doing inside of the DC is turning it into a massively parallel processing engine.
So this is again a cross-fertilization of ideas.
Here's a warehouse and we're thinking about parallel processing supercomputer architectures.
The notion here is that you have 10 workers on the right side of the screen that are now all independent autonomous pick workers.
If the worker in station three decides to leave and go to the bathroom, it has no impact on the productivity of the other nine workers.
Contrast that, for a moment, with the traditional method of using a conveyor.
When one person passes the order to you, you put something in and pass it downstream.
So what you see here potentially the week leading up to Valentine's Day.
All that pink chalky candy has moved to the front of the building and is now being picked into a lot of orders in those pick stations.
Come in two days after Valentine's Day, and that candy, the leftover candy, has all drifted to the back of the warehouse and is occupying the cooler zone on the thermal map there.
(Laughter) So whether you're doing two pick stations, 20 pick stations, or 200 pick stations, the path planning algorithms and all of the inventory algorithms just work.
So I'll conclude with just one final video that shows how this comes to bear on the pick worker's actual day in the life of.
So as we mentioned, the process is to move inventory along the highway and then find your way into these pick stations.
The faster pickers get more pods and the slower pickers get few.
But this pick worker now is literally having that experience that we described before.
Or she has to reach in and get it.
She scans it and she puts it in the bucket.
And all of the rest of the technology is kind of behind the scenes.
So she gets to now focus on the picking and packing portion of her job.
The reason we can say that, though, is that workers in a lot of these buildings now compete for the privilege of working in the Kiva zone that day.
(Laughter) That was at a pharmaceutical distributor, so they told us not to use that video.
And now I think next time you go to your front step and pick up that box that you just ordered online, you break it open and the goo is in there, you'll have some wonderment as to whether a robot assisted in the picking and packing of that order.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As the highest military commander of the Netherlands, with troops stationed around the world, I'm really honored to be here today.
You are the reason why I said yes to the invitation to come here today.
When I look around, I see people who want to make a contribution.
And you all have chosen your own instruments to fulfill this mission of creating a better world.
Some chose the microscope as their instrument.
Ladies and gentlemen ...
(Laughter) (Applause) I share your goals.
I share the goals of the speakers you heard before.
I chose this instrument.
I chose the gun.
It may even feel scary.
A real gun at a few feet's distance.
Let us cherish the fact that probably most of you have never been close to a gun.
It means the Netherlands is a peaceful country.
The Netherlands is not at war.
Guns are not a part of our lives.
In many countries, it is a different story.
In many countries, people are confronted with guns.
Why then am I standing before you with this weapon?
Why did I choose the gun as my instrument?
Today I want to tell you why.
Today I want to tell you why I chose the gun to create a better world.
And I want to tell you how this gun can help.
My story starts in the city of Nijmegen in the east of the Netherlands, the city where I was born.
My father was a hardworking baker, but when he had finished work in the bakery, he often told me and my brother stories.
And most of the time, he told me this story I'm going to share with you now.
The story of what happened when he was a conscripted soldier in the Dutch armed forces at the beginning of the Second World War.
The Nazis invaded the Netherlands.
Only brute force remained.
It was our last resort.
My father was there to provide it.
As the son of a farmer who knew how to hunt, my father was an excellent marksman.
When he aimed, he never missed.
He fired. Nothing happened.
He fired again.
My father had been given an old gun that could not even reach the opposite riverbank.
Until the day my father died, he was frustrated about missing these shots.
But with an old gun, not even the best marksman in the armed forces could have hit the mark.
So this story stayed with me.
Then in high school, I was gripped by the stories of the Allied soldiers -- soldiers who left the safety of their own homes and risked their lives to liberate a country and a people that they didn't know.
They liberated my birth town.
From the awareness that sometimes only the gun can stand between good and evil.
And that is why I took up the gun -- not to shoot, not to kill, not to destroy, but to stop those who would do evil, to protect the vulnerable, to defend democratic values, to stand up for the freedom we have to talk here today in Amsterdam about how we can make the world a better place.
Ladies and gentlemen, I do not stand here today to tell you about the glory of weapons.
I do not like guns.
And once you have been under fire yourself, it brings home even more clearly that a gun is not some macho instrument to brag about.
I stand here today to tell you about the use of the gun as an instrument of peace and stability.
The gun may be one of the most important instruments of peace and stability that we have in this world.
Now this may sound contradictory to you.
Violence has declined dramatically over the last 500 years.
Despite the pictures we are shown daily in the news, wars between developed countries are no longer commonplace.
The murder rate in Europe has dropped by a factor of 30 since the Middle Ages.
And occurrences of civil war and repression have declined since the end of the Cold War.
Statistics show that we are living in a relatively peaceful era.
Why?
Well, we were talking about the human mind this morning.
Or is there something else?
In his latest book, Harvard professor Steven Pinker -- and many other thinkers before him -- concludes that one of the main drivers behind less violent societies is the spread of the constitutional state and the introduction, on a large scale, of the state monopoly on the legitimized use of violence -- legitimized by a democratically elected government, legitimized by checks and balances and an independent judicial system.
In other words, a state monopoly that has the use of violence well under control.
Such a state monopoly on violence, first of all, serves as a reassurance.
It removes the incentive for an arms race between potentially hostile groups in our societies.
Secondly, the presence of penalties that outweigh the benefits of using violence tips the balance even further.
Abstaining from violence becomes more profitable than starting a war.
Now nonviolence starts to work like a flywheel.
It enhances peace even further.
Where there is no conflict, trade flourishes.
And trade is another important incentive against violence.
With trade, there's mutual interdependency and mutual gain between parties.
And when there is mutual gain, both sides stand to lose more than they would gain if they started a war.
War is simply no longer the best option, and that is why violence has decreased.
It is this legitimate, controlled use of the gun that has contributed greatly to reducing the statistics of war, conflict and violence around the globe.
It is this participation in peacekeeping missions that has led to the resolution of many civil wars.
My soldiers use the gun as an instrument of peace.
And this is exactly why failed states are so dangerous.
That is why failed states can drag down a whole region into chaos and conflict.
That is why spreading the concept of the constitutional state is such an important aspect of our foreign missions.
That is why we train police officers, we train judges, we train public prosecutors around the world.
And that is why -- and in the Netherlands, we are very unique in that -- that is why the Dutch constitution states that one of the main tasks of the armed forces is to uphold and promote the international rule of law.
Ladies and gentlemen, looking at this gun, we are confronted with the ugly side of the human mind.
Every day I hope that politicians, diplomats, development workers can turn conflict into peace and threat into hope.
And I hope that one day armies can be disbanded and humans will find a way of living together without violence and oppression.
Until that day comes, I stand for my father who tried to shoot the Nazis with an old gun.
I stand for my men and women who are prepared to risk their lives for a less violent world for all of us.
It takes hard work, often behind the scenes.
It takes good equipment and well-trained, dedicated soldiers.
I hope you will support the efforts of our armed forces to train soldiers like this young captain and provide her with a good gun, instead of the bad gun my father was given.
I hope you will support our soldiers when they are out there, when they come home and when they are injured and need our care.
They put their lives on the line, for us, for you, and we cannot let them down.
I hope you will respect my soldiers, this soldier with this gun.
Because she wants a better world.
Because she makes an active contribution to a better world, just like all of us here today.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And once our lives are touched by cancer, we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons, or three tools, that are available to fight the disease: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
And once we get involved in the therapeutic decisions, again either personally or with our loved ones and family members, we also very quickly learn the benefits, the trade-offs and the limitations of these tools.
And they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer.
To understand how Tumor Treating Fields work, we first need to understand what are electric fields.
Let me first address a few popular misconceptions.
First of all, electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue.
Electric fields are not ionizing radiation, like X-rays or proton beams, that bombard tissue to disrupt DNA.
And electric fields are not magnetism.
What electric fields are are a field of forces.
The best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity.
Gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses.
They float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them.
But as that space shuttle returns to Earth, and as the astronauts enter the Earth's gravitational field, they begin to see the effects of gravity.
And as they land, they're fully aligned in the gravitational field.
And that's why we have to use our muscle energy to stand up, to walk around and to lift things.
In cancer, cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth.
We can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it's a mini space station.
And in that space station we have the genetic material, the chromosomes, within a nucleus.
And out in the cytoplasmic soup we have special proteins that are required for cell division that float freely in this soup in three dimensions.
Importantly, those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body.
As cell division begins the nucleus disintegrates, the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell and those special proteins undergo a three-dimensional sequence whereby they attach and they literally click into place end-on-end to form chains.
These chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells.
And this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells, two cancer cells become four cancer cells, and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth.
Tumor Treating Fields use externally placed transducers attached to a field generator to create an artificial electric field on that space station.
And when that cellular space station is within the electric field, it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them.
And it prevents them from forming those chains, those mitotic spindles, that are necessary to pull the genetic material into the daughter cells.
What we see is that the cells will attempt to divide for several hours.
And they will either enter into this so-called cellular suicide, programmed cell death, or they will form unhealthy daughter cells and enter into apoptosis once they have divided.
This is cultures, identical cultures, of cervical cancer cells.
And we've stained these cultures with a green florescent dye so that we can look at these proteins that form these chains.
The first clip shows a normal cell division without the Tumor Treating Fields.
What we see are, first of all, a very active culture, a lot of divisions, and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated.
We'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide.
But see how much of the protein is still throughout the nucleus, even in the dividing cell.
And then this bubbling, this membrane bubbling, is the hallmark of apoptosis in this cell.
Formation of healthy mitotic spindles is necessary for division in all cell types.
Now importantly, these Tumor Treating Fields have no effect on normal undividing cells.
In that time, Novocure's developed two systems -- one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body.
The first cancer that we have focused on is the deadly brain cancer, GBM.
GBM affects about 10,000 people in the U.S. each year.
It's a death sentence.
The expected five year survival is less than five percent.
And the typical patient with optimal therapy survives just a little over a year, and only about seven months from the time that the cancer is first treated and then comes back and starts growing again.
Novocure conducted its first phase three randomized trial in patients with recurrent GBM.
So these are patients who had received surgery, high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy, and that had failed and their tumors had grown back.
We divided the patients into two groups.
The first group received second-line chemotherapy, which is expected to double the life expectancy, versus no treatment at all.
What we saw in that trial is that that the life expectancies of both groups -- so the chemotherapy treated group and the Tumor Treating Field group -- was the same.
But importantly, the Tumor Treating Field group suffered none of the side effects typical of chemotherapy patients.
They had no pain, suffered none of the infections.
Importantly, it was the first time ever that the FDA included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim.
He won the gold medal in Moscow in the 4,000 meter pursuit.
And five years ago, Robert was diagnosed with GBM.
He received surgery.
He received high dose radiation to the head.
And he received first-line chemotherapy.
A year after this treatment -- in fact, this is his baseline MRI.
You can see that the black regions in the upper right quadrant are the areas where he had surgery.
And a year after that treatment, his tumor grew back with a vengeance.
At this point, he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live.
He entered our trial.
And here we can see him getting the therapy.
First of all, these electrodes are noninvasive.
They're attached to the skin in the area of the tumor.
Here you can see that a technician is placing them on there much like bandages.
The patients learn to do this themselves And then the patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life.
It doesn't interfere with computers or electrical equipment.
These are Robert's MRIs, again, under only TTField treatment.
It's a medical device; it works when it's on.
It's still there.
By month 12, we could argue whether there's a little bit of material around the edges, but it's essentially completely gone.
It's now five years since Robert's diagnosis, and he's alive, but importantly, he's healthy and he's at work.
I'm going to let him, in this very short clip, describe his impressions of the therapy in his own words.
(Video) Robert Dill-Bundi: My quality of life, I rate what I have today a bit different than what most people would assume.
I am the happiest, the happiest person in the world.
And every single morning I appreciate life.
Every night I fall asleep very well, and I am, I repeat, the happiest man in the world, and I'm thankful I am alive.
BD: Novocure's also working on lung cancer as the second target.
We've run a phase two trial in Switzerland on, again, recurrent patients -- patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back.
I'm going to show you another clip of a woman named Lydia.
Lydia's a 66 year-old farmer in Switzerland.
She was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago.
She underwent four different regimes of chemotherapy over two years, none of which had an effect.
Her cancer continued to grow.
Three years ago, she entered the Novocure lung cancer trial.
You can see, in her case, she's wearing her transducer arrays, one of the front of her chest, one on the back, and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver.
You can see the Tumor Treating Field field generator, but importantly you can also see that she is living her life.
And when we talked to her, she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy, she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions.
Her whole family suffered as her side effect profile came and went.
Now she can run all of the activities of her farm.
It's only the beginning.
(Applause) In the lab, we've observed tremendous synergies between chemotherapy and Tumor Treating Fields.
There's research underway now at Harvard Medical School to pick the optimum pairs to maximize that benefit.
We also believe that Tumor Treating Fields will work with radiation and interrupt the self-repair mechanisms that we have.
There's now a new research project underway at the Karolinska in Sweden to prove that hypothesis.
We have more trials planned for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
And I firmly believe that in the next 10 years Tumor Treating Fields will be a weapon available to doctors and patients for all of these most-difficult-to-treat solid tumors.
I'm also very hopeful that in the next decades, we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed.
I was two years older than my sister at the time -- I mean, I'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war.
And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry.
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story -- (Laughter) which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side.
Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor.
I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.
I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible.
And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before -- (Laughter) (Laughter ends) heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could -- she didn't even see it coming -- I was trying hard to be on my best behavior.
And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled.
So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy.
And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times.
I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed?
Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn."
(Laughter) Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn.
And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn.
And the latter won.
Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn -- (Laughter) with one broken leg.
We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.
When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph.
This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning.
And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data.
There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- I know who you are, I saw you earlier -- that's no problem.
And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.
(Laughter) So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos.
How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit?
If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?"
scientists change the answer to "How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?"
We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again.
But normal is merely average.
And positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average.
Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why?
Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you.
The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive.
And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world.
This creates "the medical school syndrome."
(Laughter) I have a brother in-law named Bobo, which is a whole other story.
Bobo called me on the phone -- (Laughter) from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "Shawn, I have leprosy."
(Laughter) Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare.
But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.
(Laughter) We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.
Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality.
When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up -- I know some of you know this.
When they'd visit, they'd look around, and say, "This dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's."
It does, because that was Hogwart's and that's Harvard.
And when they see this, they say, "Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard?
Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness.
90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world.
And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality.
What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.
And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert will speak about adolescent depression.
Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying.
Wednesday night is eating disorders.
Thursday night is illicit drug use.
And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness."
(Laughter) I said, "That's most people's Friday nights."
(Laughter) (Applause) Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all.
The absence of disease is not health.
Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success.
In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn.
And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful.
That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.
Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like.
You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it.
And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there.
We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society.
If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed.
In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves.
Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed.
Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.
Which means we can reverse the formula.
If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.
We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of.
Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.
We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive.
We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day.
And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.
Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it.
Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters.
We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand.
And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness.
We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network.
And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.
I'm going to talk to you today about the design of medical technology for low-resource settings.
I study health systems in these countries.
And one of the major gaps in care, almost across the board, is access to safe surgery.
Now one of the major bottlenecks that we've found that's sort of preventing both the access in the first place, and the safety of those surgeries that do happen, is anesthesia.
And actually, it's the model that we expect to work for delivering anesthesia in these environments.
Here, we have a scene that you would find in any operating room across the US, or any other developed country.
In the background there is a very sophisticated anesthesia machine.
And this machine is able to enable surgery and save lives because it was designed with this environment in mind.
In order to operate, this machine needs a number of things that this hospital has to offer.
It needs an extremely well-trained anesthesiologist with years of training with complex machines to help her monitor the flows of the gas and keep her patients safe and anesthetized throughout the surgery.
It's a delicate machine running on computer algorithms, and it needs special care, TLC, to keep it up and running, and it's going to break pretty easily.
And when it does, it needs a team of biomedical engineers who understand its complexities, can fix it, can source the parts and keep it saving lives.
It's a pretty expensive machine.
It needs a hospital whose budget can allow it to support one machine costing upwards of 50 or $100,000.
And perhaps most obviously, but also most importantly -- and the path to concepts that we've heard about kind of illustrates this -- it needs infrastructure that can supply an uninterrupted source of electricity, of compressed oxygen, and other medical supplies that are so critical to the functioning of this machine.
In other words, this machine requires a lot of stuff that this hospital cannot offer.
This is the electrical supply for a hospital in rural Malawi.
In this hospital, there is one person qualified to deliver anesthesia, and she's qualified because she has 12, maybe 18 months of training in anesthesia.
And the price tag of the machine that I mentioned could represent maybe a quarter or a third of the annual operating budget for this hospital.
And finally, I think you can see that infrastructure is not very strong.
This hospital is connected to a very weak power grid, one that goes down frequently.
And you can imagine, the generator breaks down or runs out of fuel.
And the World Bank sees this and estimates that a hospital in this setting in a low-income country can expect up to 18 power outages per month.
So it seems crazy, but the model that we have right now is taking those machines that were designed for that first environment that I showed you and donating or selling them to hospitals in this environment.
And the first surgery of the day happened to be an obstetrical case.
A woman came in, she needed an emergency C-section to save her life and the life of her baby.
And everything began pretty auspiciously.
The nurse was there.
She was able to anesthetize her quickly, and it was important because of the emergency nature of the situation.
And everything began well until the power went out.
And now in the middle of this surgery, the surgeon is racing against the clock to finish his case, which he can do -- he's got a headlamp.
This routine surgery that many of you have probably experienced, and others are probably the product of, has now become a tragedy.
And what's so frustrating is this is not a singular event; this happens across the developing world.
35 million surgeries are attempted every year without safe anesthesia.
My colleague, Dr. Paul Fenton, was living this reality.
He was the chief of anesthesiology in a hospital in Malawi, a teaching hospital.
He went to work every day in an operating theater like this one, trying to deliver anesthesia and teach others how to do so using that same equipment that became so unreliable, and frankly unsafe, in his hospital.
And after umpteen surgeries and, you can imagine, really unspeakable tragedy, he just said, "That's it. I'm done. That's enough.
There has to be something better."
He took one part from here and another from there, and he tried to come up with a machine that would work in the reality that he was facing.
Here it is, back at home at that same hospital, developed a little further, 12 years later, working on patients from pediatrics to geriatrics.
Let me show you a little bit about how this machine works.
Voila!
When you have electricity, everything in this machine begins in the base.
There's a built-in oxygen concentrator down there.
Now you've heard me mention oxygen a few times at this point.
Essentially, to deliver anesthesia, you want as pure oxygen as possible, because eventually you're going to dilute it, essentially, with the gas.
And the mixture that the patient inhales needs to be at least a certain percentage oxygen or else it can become dangerous.
But so in here when there's electricity, the oxygen concentrator takes in room air.
So all this concentrator does is take that room air in, filter it and send 95 percent pure oxygen up and across here, where it mixes with the anesthetic agent.
Now before that mixture hits the patient's lungs, it's going to pass by here -- you can't see it, but there's an oxygen sensor here -- that's going to read out on this screen the percentage of oxygen being delivered.
Now if you don't have power, or, God forbid, the power cuts out in the middle of a surgery, this machine transitions automatically, without even having to touch it, to drawing in room air from this inlet.
Everything else is the same.
The only difference is that now you're only working with 21 percent oxygen.
But we've put a long-life battery backup on here.
This is the only part that's battery backed up.
But this gives control to the provider, whether there's power or not, because they can adjust the flows based on the percentage of oxygen they see that they're giving the patient.
It's just a reality of anesthesia, the lungs can be paralyzed.
We've seen surgeries for three or four hours to ventilate the patient on this.
And it's by design.
You do not need to be a highly trained, specialized anesthesiologist to use this machine, which is good because, in these rural district hospitals, you're not going to get that level of training.
It's also designed for the environment that it will be used in.
And so it's not going to break very easily, but if it does, virtually every piece in this machine can be swapped out and replaced with a hex wrench and a screwdriver.
And finally, it's affordable.
So in other words, what we have here is a machine that can enable surgery and save lives, because it was designed for its environment, just like the first machine I showed you.
Is it working?
Well, we've seen good results so far.
This is in 13 hospitals in four countries, and since 2010, we've done well over 2,000 surgeries with no clinically adverse events.
This really seems like a cost-effective, scalable solution to a problem that's really pervasive.
But we still want to be sure that this is the most effective and safe device that we can be putting into hospitals.
So to do that, we've launched a number of partnerships with NGOs and universities, to gather data on the user interface, on the types of surgeries it's appropriate for, and ways we can enhance the device itself.
One of those partnerships is with Johns Hopkins just here in Baltimore.
They have a really cool anesthesia simulation lab out in Baltimore.
So we're taking this machine and recreating some of the operating theater crises that this machine might face in one of the hospitals that it's intended for, and in a contained, safe environment, evaluating its effectiveness.
We're then able to compare the results from that study with real-world experience, because we're putting two of these in hospitals that Johns Hopkins works with in Sierra Leone, including the hospital where that emergency C-section happened.
So I've talked a lot about anesthesia, and I tend to do that.
Who gets safe surgery and who doesn't?
But you know, it's just one of so many ways that design, appropriate design, can have an impact on health outcomes.
If more people in the health-delivery space really working on some of these challenges in low-income countries could start their design process, their solution search, from outside of that proverbial box and inside of the hospital -- In other words, if we could design for the environment that exists in so many parts of the world, rather than the one that we wished existed -- we might just save a lot of lives.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So I'm going to start out by showing just one very boring technology slide.
And then, so if you can just turn on the slide that's on.
This happens to be a slide of some analysis that we were doing about the power of RISC microprocessors versus the power of local area networks.
And the interesting thing about it is that this slide, like so many technology slides that we're used to, is a sort of a straight line on a semi-log curve.
In other words, every step here represents an order of magnitude in performance scale.
And this is a new thing that we talk about technology on semi-log curves.
Something really weird is going on here.
Now why do we draw technology curves in semi-log curves?
And they don't tell us much.
Now if I graph, for instance, some other technology, say transportation technology, on a semi-log curve, it would look very stupid, it would look like a flat line.
But when something like this happens, things are qualitatively changing.
So if transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day after tomorrow, I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds.
Now the question that I'd like to ask is, if you look at these exponential curves, they don't go on forever.
One of two things is going to happen.
Either it's going to turn into a sort of classical S-curve like this, until something totally different comes along, or maybe it's going to do this.
That's about all it can do.
Now I'm an optimist, so I sort of think it's probably going to do something like that.
If so, that means that what we're in the middle of right now is a transition.
What's that new state that the world is heading toward?
Because the transition seems very, very confusing when we're right in the middle of it.
Now when I was a kid growing up, the future was kind of the year 2000, and people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000.
Now here's a conference in which people talk about the future, and you notice that the future is still at about the year 2000.
So in other words, the future has kind of been shrinking one year per year for my whole lifetime.
Now I think that the reason is because we all feel that something's happening there.
That transition is happening. We can all sense it.
And we know that it just doesn't make too much sense to think out 30, 50 years because everything's going to be so different that a simple extrapolation of what we're doing just doesn't make any sense at all.
Now in order to do that I'm going to have to talk about a bunch of stuff that really has nothing to do with technology and computers.
Because I think the only way to understand this is to really step back and take a long time scale look at things.
So I think this picture makes sense if you look at it a few billion years at a time.
And I think that there's theories that are beginning to understand about how it started with RNA, but I'm going to tell a sort of simple story of it, which is that, at that time, there were little drops of oil floating around with all kinds of different recipes of chemicals in them.
And those were the most primitive forms of cells in a sense, those little drops of oil.
And so every drop was a little bit different.
So those tended to live longer, get expressed more.
Now that's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life, but when things got interesting was when these drops learned a trick about abstraction.
They learned to record the information that was the recipe of the cell onto a particular kind of chemical called DNA.
So in other words, they worked out, in this mindless sort of evolutionary way, a form of writing that let them write down what they were, so that that way of writing it down could get copied.
In fact the recipe for us, our genes, is exactly that same code and that same way of writing.
In fact, every living creature is written in exactly the same set of letters and the same code.
And I've got here a little 100 micrograms of white powder, which I try not to let the security people see at airports.
(Laughter) But this has in it -- what I did is I took this code -- the code has standard letters that we use for symbolizing it -- and I wrote my business card onto a piece of DNA and amplified it 10 to the 22 times.
So if anyone would like a hundred million copies of my business card, I have plenty for everyone in the room, and, in fact, everyone in the world, and it's right here.
(Laughter) If I had really been a egotist, I would have put it into a virus and released it in the room.
(Laughter) So what was the next step?
Writing down the DNA was an interesting step.
And that caused these cells -- that kept them happy for another billion years.
But then there was another really interesting step where things became completely different, which is these cells started exchanging and communicating information, so that they began to get communities of cells.
I don't know if you know this, but bacteria can actually exchange DNA.
Now that's why, for instance, antibiotic resistance has evolved.
Some bacteria figured out how to stay away from penicillin, and it went around sort of creating its little DNA information with other bacteria, and now we have a lot of bacteria that are resistant to penicillin, because bacteria communicate.
Now what this communication allowed was communities to form that, in some sense, were in the same boat together; they were synergistic.
So they survived or they failed together, which means that if a community was very successful, all the individuals in that community were repeated more and they were favored by evolution.
Now the transition point happened when these communities got so close that, in fact, they got together and decided to write down the whole recipe for the community together on one string of DNA.
And so the next stage that's interesting in life took about another billion years.
And at that stage, we have multi-cellular communities, communities of lots of different types of cells, working together as a single organism.
Your skin cell is really useless without a heart cell, muscle cell, a brain cell and so on.
So these communities began to evolve so that the interesting level on which evolution was taking place was no longer a cell, but a community which we call an organism.
Now the next step that happened is within these communities.
These communities of cells, again, began to abstract information.
And those are the neural structures.
And that was the brains and the nervous system of those communities.
And that gave them an evolutionary advantage.
Because at that point, an individual -- learning could happen within the time span of a single organism, instead of over this evolutionary time span.
So an organism could, for instance, learn not to eat a certain kind of fruit because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it.
So that nervous system, the fact that they built these special information structures, tremendously sped up the whole process of evolution.
Because evolution could now happen within an individual.
And for example, the most sophisticated version that we're aware of is human language.
It's really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it.
Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head.
So this allows us now to begin to start functioning as a single organism.
So for example, the invention of language was a tiny step in that direction.
Telephony, computers, videotapes, CD-ROMs and so on are all our specialized mechanisms that we've now built within our society for handling that information.
And it all connects us together into something that is much bigger and much faster and able to evolve than what we were before.
So now, evolution can take place on a scale of microseconds.
So the first steps of the story that I told you about took a billion years a piece.
Then the next steps, like language and so on, took less than a million years.
And these next steps, like electronics, seem to be taking only a few decades.
The process is feeding on itself and becoming, I guess, autocatalytic is the word for it -- when something reinforces its rate of change.
The more it changes, the faster it changes.
And I think that that's what we're seeing here in this explosion of curve.
We're seeing this process feeding back on itself.
Now I design computers for a living, and I know that the mechanisms that I use to design computers would be impossible without recent advances in computers.
So right now, what I do is I design objects at such complexity that it's really impossible for me to design them in the traditional sense.
I don't know what every transistor in the connection machine does.
There are billions of them.
Instead, what I do and what the designers at Thinking Machines do is we think at some level of abstraction and then we hand it to the machine and the machine takes it beyond what we could ever do, much farther and faster than we could ever do.
One method that's particularly interesting that I've been using a lot lately is evolution itself.
So what we do is we put inside the machine a process of evolution that takes place on the microsecond time scale.
So for example, in the most extreme cases, we can actually evolve a program by starting out with random sequences of instructions.
Say, "Computer, would you please make a hundred million random sequences of instructions.
Let's say I want to sort numbers, as a simple example I've done it with.
So find the programs that come closest to sorting numbers.
But one of them, by luck, may put two numbers in the right order.
And I say, "Computer, would you please now take the 10 percent of those random sequences that did the best job.
And let's reproduce them by a process of recombination analogous to sex."
Take two programs and they produce children by exchanging their subroutines, and the children inherit the traits of the subroutines of the two programs.
So I've got now a new generation of programs that are produced by combinations of the programs that did a little bit better job.
Say, "Please repeat that process."
Introduce some mutations perhaps.
And try that again and do that for another generation.
Well every one of those generations just takes a few milliseconds.
So I can do the equivalent of millions of years of evolution on that within the computer in a few minutes, or in the complicated cases, in a few hours.
But they do the job.
And in fact, I know, I'm very confident that they do the job because they come from a line of hundreds of thousands of programs that did the job.
In fact, their life depended on doing the job.
(Laughter) I was riding in a 747 with Marvin Minsky once, and he pulls out this card and says, "Oh look. Look at this.
It says, 'This plane has hundreds of thousands of tiny parts working together to make you a safe flight.' Doesn't that make you feel confident?"
(Laughter) In fact, we know that the engineering process doesn't work very well when it gets complicated.
So we're beginning to depend on computers to do a process that's very different than engineering.
And yet, we don't quite understand the options of it.
So in a sense, it's getting ahead of us.
We're now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we'll be able to run this process much faster.
And what we are is we're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms.
And I think all of us here are a part of producing whatever that next thing is.
(Applause)
Hi.
In fact, I'm one of the majority of my generation who can't afford a home.
And in 2017, home ownership amongst young Australians has fallen to the lowest level in recorded history.
So, foolishly or otherwise, I decided to build my own home.
Architects cater for the one percent, builders are scarce, so service is inconsistent and prices are high.
The single biggest investment in my life, and I was amazed how little self-determination, choice and, ultimately, control I had.
What's more, I was doubly surprised at how vulnerable this made me feel.
Frankly, I felt trapped.
So, I reflected on this for quite some time.
And I realized what I wanted was democratized design and construction.
And that led to me asking one very simple question: What is building a house?
Well, it turns out that building a house is making a series of decisions, some with physical consequences, within a defined set of parameters.
Now, having worked in software applications for some time now, this all sounded very familiar to me.
So I built a computer game.
A game that puts the home builder back at the center of the largest purchase in their life, elevating them from spectator to player.
A game with full visibility of the costs and environmental impact of each new attribute you add.
Using modular components, players select items from their library and drag them into their world.
Each item, be it a wall, a solar battery or even an armchair, contains all of the information for the system to calculate costs, environmental impact and even a happiness tally for the player.
Eighty-three percent of home builders said that next to cost, environmentally friendly features were the most important things to them.
Born green.
Sustainable housing is often associated with wealth and affluence, but that shouldn't be the case.
In fact, truly sustainable housing should be available to everyone and affordable for all.
But something was still bugging me, something was still keeping me up at night.
What about those people who have genuinely no control over where they live?
That's an astonishing 35 million homes globally, every year.
And in Australia alone, we have a shortfall of 250,000 dwellings.
And in addition to that, we have 190,000 families on the assisted-housing wait list; families in need of a home.
Between now and 2050, when the global population is set to move from today's 7.6 billion to tomorrow's 9.8 billion people, hundreds of millions of people will experience security, health and safety issues.
It's the 21st century.
What if -- what if -- we could restore control and dignity to those individuals by giving them a home, but not just any home: their home, and a home of their design.
We're currently adapting our game so that when a player builds a home, they're contributing to a home for someone in need.
And I know this sounds like a lofty goal, and it is ridiculously ambitious, but today, our current operating model operates at a ten-to-one ratio.
So for every 10 homes we build, we can build a home for someone in need.
(Applause) This is made possible because today, with design for manufacture and assembly, which uses light gauge steel frame construction, shipped and assembled on-site, we can decrease construction costs by 20 percent and environmental waste by 15 percent, saving time, money and keeping tons of waste out of landfills.
The power in modular construction is that you can build year-round with confidence in your costs, in your quality, and in your delivery date, in your build date.
But -- that doesn't get me to my goal.
So I've been traveling the world, looking at different alternatives of construction 3-D printing, trying to find technology that will help me deliver on my ambition.
And this is just to name a few, but some of the really exciting innovations happening all over the world are happening in Italy, France, Dubai and Australia.
And they use robotic arms to print everything from solid stone to concrete, to wax.
In Italy, they have developed a technique using sorel cement.
Sorel cement was originally invented in 1867, and it's the beautiful chemical marriage of magnesium oxide and local sand, which they can now use to print solid stone walls.
And in France, they have a regulator-approved although still experimental process where they print two parallel tracks of foam insulation and pour concrete in the middle to create solid stone.
And in Dubai, sitting at the foot of those two glorious Emirates Towers, is a vision of the future in the middle of the desert.
They've got their experimental office of the future, which is constructed using 3-D printed concrete which was printed in China and shipped and assembled on location in Dubai.
And not to be outdone, in Australia, we've pioneered an amazing technology that allows you to print wax molds and pour concrete over the top of them, allowing you to create really intricately beautiful and cost-effective facades that you can see in person the next time you travel the London Underground.
But all of these things are tools -- hammer of tomorrow, if you like.
And the one common thread that connects all these things is computer-aided design.
We will need models to build using these techniques, models like the ones being developed by players in our game.
And there are many more applications still.
And we could provide rapid, on-site assistance in emergency housing situations.
In the words of one of my players, "I want to take matters into my own hands and live by example."
Thank you.
(Applause)
So the other morning I went to the grocery store and an employee greeted me with a "Good morning, sir, can I help you with anything?"
The person smiled and we went our separate ways.
I grabbed Cheerios and I left the grocery store.
And I went through the drive-through of a local coffee shop.
But for me, neither of these people are wrong, but they're also not completely right.
This cute little human is my almost-two-year-old Elliot.
And over the past two years, this kid has forced me to rethink the world and how I participate in it.
I identify as transgender and as a parent, that makes me a transparent.
(Laughter) (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) As you can see, I took this year's theme super literal.
(Laughter) Like any good dad joke should.
More specifically, I identify as genderqueer.
And there are lots of ways to experience being genderqueer, but for me that means I don't really identify as a man or a woman.
But it doesn't mean that these interactions aren't uncomfortable.
Like the time at a bar in college when a bouncer physically removed me by the back of the neck and threw me out of a woman's restroom.
But for me, authenticity doesn't mean "comfortable."
It means managing and negotiating the discomfort of everyday life, even at times when it's unsafe.
But for me, the possibility is what this child, who will grow to be a teenager and then a real-life adult, will call me for the rest of our lives, was both extremely scary and exciting.
And I spent nine months wrestling with the reality that being called "mama" or something like it didn't feel like me at all.
And no matter how many times or versions of "mom" I tried, it always felt forced and deeply uncomfortable.
The idea of having two moms is not super novel, especially where we live.
So I tried other words.
And when I played around with "daddy," it felt better.
It felt like a pair of shoes that you really liked but you needed to wear and break in.
And I knew the idea of being a female-born person being called "daddy" was going to be a harder road with a lot more uncomfortable moments.
But, before I knew it, the time had come and Elliot came screaming into the world, like most babies do, and my new identity as a parent began.
I decided on becoming a daddy, and our new family faced the world.
Now one of the most common things that happens when people meet us is for people to "mom" me.
(Laughter) So, option one is to ignore the assumption and allow folks to continue to refer to me as "mom," which is not awkward for the other party, but is typically really awkward for us.
And it usually causes me to restrict my interaction with those people.
Option one.
Option two is to stop and correct them and say something like, "Actually, I'm Elliot's dad" or "Elliot calls me 'daddy.'" And when I do this, one or two of the following things happen.
Folks take it in stride and say something like, "Oh, OK."
And move on.
Do you want to be a man?"
Or say things like, "How can she be a father?
Only men can be dads."
And all of these scenarios involve a level of discomfort, even in the best case.
And I'll say that over time, my ability to navigate this complicated map has gotten easier.
But the discomfort is still there.
Now, I won't stand here and pretend like I've mastered this, it's pretty far from it.
There's no way to be sure of anyone's reaction, and I want to be sure that folks have good intentions, that people are good.
But we live in a world where someone's opinion of my existence can be met with serious threats to me or even my family's emotional or physical safety.
So I weigh the costs against the risks and sometimes the safety of my family comes before my own authenticity.
I don't want my fears and insecurities to be placed on her, to dampen her spirit or make her question her own voice.
I need to model agency, authenticity and vulnerability, and that means leaning into those uncomfortable moments of being "momed" and standing up and saying, "No, I'm a dad.
(Laughter) Now, there have already been plenty of uncomfortable moments and even some painful ones.
But there's also been, in just two short years, validating and at times transformative moments on my journey as a dad and my path towards authenticity.
When we got our first sonogram, we decided we wanted to know the sex of the baby.
We shared the photo with our families like everyone does and soon after, my mom showed up at our house with a bag filled -- I'm not exaggerating, it was like this high and it was filled, overflowing with pink clothes and toys.
Now I was a little annoyed to be confronted with a lot of pink things, and having studied gender and spent countless hours teaching about it in workshops and classrooms, I thought I was pretty well versed on the social construction of gender and how sexism is a devaluing of the feminine and how it manifests both explicitly and implicitly.
But this situation, this aversion to a bag full of pink stuff, forced me to explore my rejection of highly feminized things in my child's world.
No matter how much I believed in gender neutrality in theory, in practice, the absence of femininity is not neutrality, it's masculinity.
If I only dress my baby in greens and blues and grays, the outside world doesn't think, "Oh, that's a cute gender-neutral baby."
I want a balanced environment for her to explore and make sense of in her own way.
We even picked a gender-neutral name for our female-born child.
But gender neutrality is much easier as a theoretical endeavor than it is as a practice.
And in my attempts to create gender neutrality, I was inadvertently privileging masculinity over femininity.
So, rather than toning down or eliminating femininity in our lives, we make a concerted effort to celebrate it.
We value femininity and masculinity while also being highly critical of it.
And we do all this in hopes that we model a healthy and empowered relationship with gender for our kid.
Now this work to develop a healthy relationship with gender for Elliot made me rethink and evaluate how I allowed sexism to manifest in my own gender identity.
I had to choose option two.
I had to engage with some of my most uncomfortable parts to move towards my most authentic self.
And that meant I had to get real about the discomfort I have with my body.
It's pretty common for trans people to feel uncomfortable in their body, and this discomfort can range from debilitating to annoying and everywhere in between.
And learning my body and how to be comfortable in it as a trans person has been a lifelong journey.
I've always struggled with the parts of my body that can be defined as more feminine -- my chest, my hips, my voice.
And I've made the sometimes hard, sometimes easy decision to not take hormones or have any surgeries to change it to make myself more masculine by society's standards.
And while I certainly haven't overcome all the feelings of dissatisfaction, I realized that by not engaging with that discomfort and coming to a positive and affirming place with my body, I was reinforcing sexism, transphobia and modeling body shaming.
If I hate my body, in particular, the parts society deems feminine or female, I potentially damage how my kid can see the possibilities of her body and her feminine and female parts.
If I hate or am uncomfortable with my body, how can I expect my kid to love hers?
Now it would be easier for me to choose option one: to ignore my kid when she asks me about my body or to hide it from her.
But I have to choose option two every day.
So I work every day to try and be more comfortable in this body and in the ways I express femininity.
So I talk about it more, I explore the depths of this discomfort and find language that I feel comfortable with.
And this daily discomfort helps me build both agency and authenticity in how I show up in my body and in my gender.
And when she's developmentally able to, I want to talk to her about my journey with my body.
I want her to see my journey towards authenticity even when it means showing her the messier parts.
We have a wonderful pediatrician and have established a good relationship with our kid's doctor.
And when Elliot was first born, we took her to the pediatrician and we met our first nurse -- we'll call her Sarah.
Very early in in our time with Sarah, we told her how I was going to be called "dad" and my partner is "mama."
And about a year later, Sarah switched shifts and we started working with a new nurse -- we'll call her Becky.
Sarah's warm and bubbly and said hi to Elliot and me and my wife and when talking to Elliot said something like, "Is your daddy holding your toy?"
Now out of the corner of my eye, I could see Becky swing around in her chair and make daggers at Sarah.
And as the conversation shifted to our pediatrician, I saw Sarah and Becky's interaction continue, and it went something like this.
Sarah, shaking her head "no" and mouthing the word "no, dad."
So this went back and forth in total silence a few more times until we walked away.
Sarah could have chosen option one, ignored Becky, and let her refer to me as mom.
It would have been easier for Sarah.
She could have put the responsibility back on me or not said anything at all.
But in that moment, she chose option two.
She chose to confront the assumptions and affirm my existence.
She insisted that a person who looks and sounds like me can in fact be a dad.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that refuses to acknowledge trans people and the diversity of trans people in general.
And my hope is that when confronted with an opportunity to stand up for someone else, we all take action like Sarah, even when there's risk involved.
So some days, the risk of being a genderqueer dad feels too much.
And I'm sure it will continue to be the hardest, yet the most rewarding experience of my life.
But despite this challenge, every day has felt 100 percent worth it.
So each day I affirm my promise to Elliot and that same promise to myself.
To love her and myself hard with forgiveness and compassion, with tough love and with generosity.
To give room for growth, to push beyond comfort in hopes of attaining and living a more meaningful life.
I know in my head and in my heart that there are hard and painful and uncomfortable days ahead.
My head and my heart also know that all of it will lead to a more rich, authentic life that I can look back on without regrets.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's really, really great to be here.
You have the power to change the world.
I’m not saying that to be cliché, you really have the power to change the world.
And that's an idea.
Now, maybe some of you guys have tried to convey your idea and it wasn't adopted, it was rejected, and some other mediocre or average idea was adopted.
And the only difference between those two is in the way it was communicated.
Because if you communicate an idea in a way that resonates, change will happen, and you can change the world.
In my family, we collect these vintage European posters.
Every time we go to Maui, we go to the dealer there, and he turns these great big posters.
And this one time I was flanked by my two kids and he turns the page and this poster is underneath, and right when I lean forward and say, "Oh my God, I love this poster," both of my kids jumped back and they are like, "Oh my God, mom, it's you."
And this is the poster.
The thing I loved about this poster was the irony.
Here's this chick all fired up, headed into battle -- as the standard bearer -- and she's holding these little Suavitos baking spices, like something so seemingly insignificant, though she's willing to risk, you know, life and limb to promote this thing.
So if you are to swap out those little Suavitos baking spices with a presentation -- Yeah, it's me, pretty fired up.
I really think they have the power to change the world when you communicate effectively through them.
And changing the world is hard.
So it has to come out of you and out into the open for people to see.
And the way that ideas are conveyed the most effectively is through story.
You know, for thousands of years, illiterate generations would pass on their values and their culture from generation to generation, and they would stay intact.
So there's something kind of magical about a story structure that makes it so that when it's assembled, it can be ingested and then recalled by the person who's receiving it.
We actually physically react when someone is telling us a story.
So even though the stage is the same, a story can be told, but once a presentation is told, it completely flatlines.
And I wanted to figure out why.
So I wanted to figure out, how do you incorporate story into presentations.
So we've had thousands of presentations back at the shop -- hundreds of thousands of presentations, actually, so I knew the context of a really bad presentation.
I decided to study cinema and literature, and really dig in and figure out what was going on and why it was broken.
So it was obvious to start with Aristotle, he had a three-act structure, a beginning, a middle and an end.
We studied poetics and rhetoric, and a lot of presentations don't even have that in its most simple form.
And then when I moved on to studying hero archetypes, I thought, "OK, the presenter is the hero, they're up on the stage, they're the star of the show."
It's easy to feel, as the presenter, that you're the star of the show.
So in reality, the presenter isn't the hero, the audience is the hero of our idea.
So if you look at Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, just in the front part, there were some really interesting insights there.
So there is this likable hero in an ordinary world, and they get this call to adventure.
So the world is kind of brought out of balance.
They're like, "I don't know if I want to jump into this," and then a mentor comes along and helps them move from their ordinary world into a special world.
And that's the role of the presenter.
It's to be the mentor. You're not Luke Skywalker, you're Yoda.
You're the one that actually helps the audience move from one thing and into your new special idea, and that's the power of a story.
So in its most simple structure, it's a three-part structure of a story.
Now, he was a German dramatist ...
he was a German dramatist and he believed there is a five-act structure, which has an exposition, a rising action, a climax, a falling action and a denouement, which is the unraveling or the resolution of the story.
A story has an arc -- well, an arc is a shape.
So I thought, hey, if presentations had a shape, what would that shape be?
And how did the greatest communicators use that shape, or do they use a shape?
So I'll never forget, it was a Saturday morning.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh, if this shape is real, I should be able to take two completely different presentations and overlay it, and it should be true."
So I took the obvious, I took Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and I took Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone launch speech, I overlaid it over it, and it worked.
I sat in my office, just astounded.
I actually cried a little, because I was like, "I've been given this gift," and here it is, this is the shape of a great presentation.
Isn't it amazing?
(Laughter) I was crying.
You know, here's the status quo, here's what's going on.
So it's like, you know, here's the past, here's the present, but look at our future.
Here's a problem, but look at that problem removed.
So the middle goes back and forth, it traverses between what is and what could be, what is and what could be.
Because what you are trying to do is make the status quo and the normal unappealing, and you're wanting to draw them towards what could be in the future with your idea adopted.
Now, on your way to change the world, people are going to resist.
So you'll encounter resistance.
It's similar to sailing.
When you're sailing against the wind and there is wind resistance, you have to move your boat back and forth, and back and forth.
That's so you can capture the wind.
You have to actually capture the resistance coming against you when you're sailing.
Now interesting, if you capture the wind just right and you set your sail just right, your ship will actually sail faster than the wind itself.
You need to describe the world as a new bliss.
"This is utopia with my idea adopted."
"This is the way the world is going to look, when we join together and we solve this big problem."
You need to use that as your ending, in a very poetic and dramatic way.
So, interestingly, when I was done, I was like, "You know what? I could use this as an analysis tool."
Changed the world of personal computing, changed the music industry and now he's on his way to change the mobile device industry.
So he's definitely changed the world.
And this is the shape of his iPhone launch 2007, when he launched his iPhone.
It's a 90-minute talk and you can see he starts with what is, traverses back and forth and ends with what could be.
And these lines are representative there.
And then towards the end you'll see a blue line, which will be the guest speaker.
So this is where it gets kind of interesting: every tick mark here is when he made them laugh.
So he kicks off what could be with, "This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years."
So he is launching a product that he's known about already for a couple of years.
So this is not a new product to him.
He marvels at his own product.
He is modeling for the audience what he wants them to feel.
So he kicks off with what could be with, "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything."
Now, at the beginning of it, he actually keeps the phone off.
You'll see that the line is pretty white up until this point, so he goes off between, "Here's this new phone, and here's the sucky competitors.
Here's this new phone, and here's the sucky competitors."
And then, right about here, he has the star moment -- and that something we'll always remember.
He turns the phone on.
The audience sees scrolling for the first time, you can hear the oxygen sucked out of the room.
They gasped. You can actually hear it.
So if we move along this model, you can see the blue, where the external speakers are going, and towards the bottom right, the line breaks.
He wants to keep this heightened sense of excitement.
He tells a personal story, right there, where the technology didn't work.
So he's the master communicator, and he turns to story to keep the audience involved.
So the top right he ends with the new bliss.
He leaves them with the promise that Apple will continue to build revolutionary new products.
So let's look at Mr. King.
He was an amazing visionary, a clergyman who spent his life working hard for equality.
And this is the shape of the "I Have a Dream" speech.
You can see he starts with what is, moves back and forth between what is and what could be, and ends with a very poetic new bliss, which is the famous part we all know.
So I'm going to spread it out a little bit here, stretch it for you, and what I'm doing here is I put the actual transcript there along with the text.
But at the end of every line break, I broke the line, because he took a breath and he paused.
Now he was a Southern Baptist preacher, most people hadn't heard that, so he had a real cadence and a rhythm that was really new for people there.
The blue bars here are going to be when he used the actual rhetorical device of repetition.
So he was repeating himself, he was using the same words and phrases, so people could remember and recall them.
But then he also used a lot of metaphors and visual words.
This was a way to take really complicated ideas and make them memorable and knowledgeable, so people got it.
He actually created very -- almost like scenes with his words to make it so they could envision what he was saying.
And then there were also a lot of familiar songs and scriptures that he used.
This is just the front end of it that you're seeing.
And then he also made a lot of political references of the promises that were made to the people.
Well, everyone knows what it's like to not have money in your account.
So he used the metaphor people were very familiar with.
But when they really charged up, the very first time they really screamed was: "So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice."
So when we move along a little farther in the model, you'll see it goes back and forth at a more frenzied pace.
And this is when he goes back and forth, and back and forth.
So he says, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the meaning of its creed.
Because he uses -- you can look at the four shades of green, there's a lot of blue there, which was a lot of repetition -- he had a heightened sense of repetition.
And the green was a heightened sense of songs and scriptures.
So the first batch of green was the actual scripture from the Book of Isaiah.
The second batch of green was "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."
Now, that's a familiar song that was specifically very significant for the black people at the time, because this song was the song they chose to change the words to as an outcry, saying that promises had not been kept.
So the third batch of green was actually a stanza from "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."
And then the fourth was a Negro spiritual.
"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!"
He pulled from songs that they'd sung together as an outcry against this outrage, and he used those as a device to connect and resonate with the audience.
So he was a great man. He had a big, big dream.
There's a lot of people here, you guys have really big dreams.
It's not easy to change the world; it's a big job.
You know he was -- his house was bombed, he was stabbed with a letter opener, ultimately, he lost his life, you know, for what he cared about.
But what happens is that it basically is a little bit like that basic story structure.
Life can be like that.
We're just like, you know, "I had this idea, but I'm not going to put it out there.
It's been rejected."
And you know, if anyone -- if I can do this, anybody can do this.
First time I got to go to a camp with my sister, I was abused.
Wasn't the first time I was abused, it was just the most aggressive.
And my mom and dad -- they married each other three times, (Audience murmurs) Yeah, that was tumultuous, and when they weren't fighting they were helping sober up some alcoholic that was living with us because they were both sober alcoholics.
So my mom abandoned us when I was sixteen years old.
And I married. I met a man.
Fell in love. I went to a year of college.
I did what every single, bright, young girl should do -- I got married when I was eighteen years old.
I knew, I knew that I was born for more than this.
And right at the point in the story of my life I had a choice.
I could just say, you know, life is too hard to change the world.
But I chose a different story for my life.
(Laughter) Don't you know it?
You can change your life.
You can change the world that you have control over, you can change your sphere.
I want to encourage you to do that.
It's a place that you get to create.
(Applause)
How should a group of people, who perhaps live in a city or in the continent or even the whole globe, share and manage common resources?
How should we make the rules that govern us?
This has always been an important question.
And today, I think it's even more important than ever if we want to address rising inequality, climate change, the refugee crisis, just to name a few major issues.
It's also a very old question.
Humans have been asking themselves this question ever since we lived in organized societies.
He thought we needed benevolent guardians who could make decisions for the greater good of everyone.
Kings and queens thought they could be those guardians, but during various revolutions, they tended to lose their heads.
And this guy, you probably know.
Here in Hungary, you lived for many years under one attempt to implement his answer of how to live together.
His answer was brutal, cruel and inhumane.
But a different answer, a different kind of answer, which went more or less into hibernation for 2,000 years, has had profound recent success.
That answer is, of course, democracy.
If we take a quick look at the modern history of democracy, it goes something like this.
And the graph does this, the important point of which, is this extraordinary increase over time, which is why the 20th century has been called the century of democracy's triumph, and why, as Francis Fukuyama said in 1989, some believe that we have reached the end of history, that the question of how to live together has been answered, and that answer is liberal democracy.
I want to find out what you think.
The first question is: Who thinks living in a democracy is a good thing?
Who likes democracy?
Come on, there must be one politician in the audience somewhere.
(Laughter) No.
But my point is, if liberal democracy is the end of history, then there's a massive paradox or contradiction here.
Why is that?
And that's the second question.
Our politics is broken, our politicians aren't trusted, and the political system is distorted by powerful vested interests.
I think there's two ways to resolve this paradox.
One is to give up on democracy; it doesn't work.
Let's elect a populist demagogue who will ignore democratic norms, trample on liberal freedoms and just get things done.
And I want you to get critical.
But its common name is "random selection."
(Laughter) Let's think about that for a few more minutes, shall we?
Imagine we chose you and you and you and you and you down there and a bunch of other random people, and we put you in our parliament for the next couple of years.
Of course, we could stratify the selection to make sure that it matched the socioeconomic and demographic profile of the country and was a truly representative sample of people.
This would be a microcosm of society.
And this microcosm would simulate how we would all think, if we had the time, the information and a good process to come to the moral crux of political decisions.
And although you may not be in that group, someone of your age, someone of your gender, someone from your location and someone with your background would be in that room.
The decisions made by these people would build on the wisdom of crowds.
And they could prove that diversity can trump ability when confronting the wide array of societal questions and problems.
It would not be government by referendum.
These informed, deliberating people would move beyond public opinion to the making of public judgments.
And I'm sure we'd all be pretty sad to see that.
(Laughter) Very interestingly, random selection was a key part of how democracy was done in ancient Athens.
It's an ancient Athenian random-selection device.
The ancient Athenians randomly selected citizens to fill the vast majority of their political posts.
They knew that elections were aristocratic devices.
They knew that career politicians were a thing to be avoided.
And I think we know these things as well.
But more interesting than the ancient use of random selection is its modern resurgence.
The rediscovery of the legitimacy of random selection in politics has become so common lately, that there's simply too many examples to talk about.
But the perhaps surprising but overwhelming and compelling evidence from all these modern examples is that it does work.
If you give people responsibility, they act responsibly.
Of course not.
And the answer to that question, to me at least, is obviously yes.
Which gets us back to our original question: How should we live together?
But how would we get from here to there?
How could we fix our broken system and remake democracy for the 21st century?
Well, there are several things that we can do, and that are, in fact, happening right now.
We can introduce it to schools and workplaces and other institutions, like Democracy In Practice is doing in Bolivia.
We can hold policy juries and citizens' assemblies, like the newDemocracy Foundation is doing in Australia, like the Jefferson Center is doing in the US and like the Irish government is doing right now.
We could build a social movement demanding change, which is what the Sortition Foundation is doing in the UK.
Perhaps the first step would be a second chamber in our parliament, full of randomly selected people -- a citizens' senate, if you will.
There's a campaign for a citizens' senate in France and another campaign in Scotland, and it could, of course, be done right here in Hungary.
That would be kind of like a Trojan horse right into the heart of government.
Here in Hungary, systems have been created, and systems have been torn down and replaced in the past.
Change can and does happen.
It's just a matter of when and how.
Thank you. (Hungarian) Thank you.
(Applause)
It is an immigrant that doesn't know that he can call his family for free.
It is a child who can't resolve his homework, because he doesn't have access to information.
The digital divide is a new illiteracy.
"Digital divide" is also defined as: the gap between individuals and communities that have access to information technologies and those that don't.
Why does this happen? It happens because of 3 things.
The first is that people can't get access to these technologies because they can't afford them.
The third is because they don't know the benefits derived from technology.
So let's consider some very basic statistics.
The population of the world is nearly seven billion people.
This is approximately 30% of the entire world population, which means that the remaining 70% of the world -- close to five billion people -- do not have access to a computer or the internet.
Let's think about that number for a second.
Five billion people; that's four times the population of India, that have never touched a computer, have never accessed the internet.
So this is a digital abyss that we're talking about, this is not a digital divide.
Here we can see a map by Chris Harrison that shows the internet connections around the world.
What we can see is that most of the internet connections are centered on North America and Europe, while the rest of the world is engulfed in the dark shadow of digital divide.
Next, we can see connections, city-to-city, around the world, and we can see that most of the information generated is being generated between North America and Europe, while the rest of the world is not broadcasting their ideas or information.
So what does this mean?
We are living in a world that seems to be having a digital revolution, a revolution that everyone here thinks that we're part of, but the 70% of the world that is digitally excluded is not part of this.
What does this mean?
Well, the people that will be digitally excluded won't be able to compete in the labor markets of the future, they won't be connected, they'll be less informed, they'll be less inspired and they'll be less responsible.
Internet should not be a luxury, it should be a right, because it is a basic social necessity of the 21st century.
We can't operate without it.
(Applause) Thank you.
It allows us to connect to the world.
It empowers us.
It gives us social participation. It is a tool for change.
And so, how are we going to bridge this digital divide?
Well, there are many models that try and bridge the digital divide, that try and include the population at large.
But the question is: Are they really working?
I'm sure everybody here knows One Laptop per Child, where one computer is given to one child.
The problem with this is, do we really want children to take computers to their homes, homes that have adverse conditions?
And we also must understand that by giving a child a computer, we're also transferring costs, very high costs, such as internet connection, electricity, maintenance, software, updates.
So we must create different models, models that help the families rather than add a burden on them.
Also, let's not forget about the carbon footprint.
Imagine five billion laptops.
What would the world look like then?
Imagine the hazardous residue that would be generated from that.
Imagine the trash.
So if we give one computer to one person, and we multiply that times five billion, even if that laptop is a hundred dollars, then we would have 483 trillion dollars.
Now let's consider we're only counting the youth, ages 10 to 24.
That's approximately 30% of the digitally excluded population.
Then that would be 145 trillion dollars.
What nation has this amount of money?
This is not a sustainable model.
We created the RIA, in Spanish, or in English, Learning and Innovation Network, which is a network of community centers that bring education through the use of technology.
We wanted to increase the number of users per computer in such a way that we could dilute the cost of infrastructure, the cost per user, and that we could bring education and technology to everybody within these communities.
Let's look at a basic comparison.
The RIA has 1,650 computers.
If we had used the One Laptop per Child model of a 1 to 1 ratio, then we would have benefited 1,650 users.
What we did instead is set up centers that have longer hours of operation than schools, that also include all of the population -- our youngest user is 3 years old, the oldest is 86 -- and with this, in less than two years, we were able to reach 140,000 users, out of which -- (Applause) Thank you.
out of which, 34,000 have already graduated from our courses.
Another thing with One Laptop per Child is that it doesn't guarantee the educational use of a computer.
We need to use it as a means, not as an end.
Well, you can't just go into a community and pretend to change it, you need to look at a lot of factors.
So what we do is a thing we call "urban acupuncture."
So take, for example, Ecatepec.
This is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Mexico.
Then we look at income, we look at education.
Then we set up a center there in the place that's going to heal the body, a little needle to change the city body.
And so, there are four basic elements that we need to consider when we're using education through technology.
The first one is we need to create spaces.
We need to create a space that is welcoming to the community, a space that is according to the needs of the children and of the elders and of every possible person that lives within that community.
So we create these spaces that are all made with recycled materials.
We use modular architecture to lower the ecological impact.
The internet is a very complex organism that is fueled of the ideas, the thoughts and the emotions of human beings.
We need to create networks that aid in exchanging information.
Third, content.
Education is nothing without content.
And you can't pretend to have a relationship of only a computer with a child.
So we create a route, a very basic learning route, where we teach people how to use a computer, how to use the internet, how to use office software, and in 72 hours, we create digital citizens.
You can't pretend that people are just going to touch a computer and become digitally included, you need to have a process.
And after this, then they can take on a longer educational route.
And then fourth, training.
We need to train not only the users, but we need to train the people that will facilitate learning for these people.
When you're talking about the digital divide, people have stigmas, people have fears; people don't understand how it can complement their lives.
So what we do is train facilitators so that they can help in breaking that digital barrier.
We have created a digital learning community.
But there is one more element, which is the benefits that technology can create, because it is not printed, static content.
So we have we do is, we provide content, then we do training, then we analyze the user patterns so that we can improve content.
It allows us to deliver education according to different types of intelligence and according to different user needs.
With this in mind, we have to think that technology is something that can modify according to human processes.
I want to share a story.
In 2006, I went to live here.
This is one of the poorest communities in all of Mexico.
I went to film a documentary on the people that live off trash, entirely of trash -- their houses are built with trash, they eat trash, they dress in trash.
And after two months of living with them, of seeing the children and the way they work, I understood that the only thing that can change and that can break the poverty cycle is education.
And we can use technology to bring education to these communities.
Here is another shot.
The main message is that technology is not going to save the world; we are, and we can use technology to help us.
I'm sure everybody here has experienced it; what moves technology is human energy.
So let's use this energy to make the world a better place.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When we park in a big parking lot, how do we remember where we parked our car?
Here's the problem facing Homer.
And we're going to try to understand what's happening in his brain.
So we'll start with the hippocampus, shown in yellow, which is the organ of memory.
If you have damage there, like in Alzheimer's, you can't remember things including where you parked your car.
It's named after Latin for "seahorse," which it resembles.
And like the rest of the brain, it's made of neurons.
So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it.
And the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other.
The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected.
And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food.
So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here.
And when it fires a little spike of electricity, there's going to be a red dot and a click.
And it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike.
And if we record from lots of different neurons, we'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment, like in this square box shown here.
So together they form a map for the rest of the brain, telling the brain continually, "Where am I now within my environment?"
Place cells are also being recorded in humans.
So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring.
And some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town.
So how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment?
Well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important.
And when you expand the box, the firing location expands.
And if you put another wall inside the box, then the cell fires in both place wherever there's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box.
So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you -- extended buildings and so on -- is particularly important for the hippocampus.
And indeed, on the inputs to the hippocampus, cells are found which project into the hippocampus, which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it's exploring around.
So the cell on the left, you can see, it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east, whether it's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table, which the animals are running around.
And the cell on the right there fires whenever there's a boundary to the south, whether it's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart.
So that's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it's exploring around.
We can also test where we think objects are, like this goal flag, in simple environments -- or indeed, where your car would be.
And then, if we put them back in the environment, generally they're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was.
In that case, we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment.
And what you see, for example, if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment, and then if you ask people where it was, but you've made the environment bigger, where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out.
It's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location, and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern.
But we also know where we are through movement.
Now grid cells are found, again, on the inputs to the hippocampus, and they're a bit like place cells.
But now as the rat explores around, each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid.
And if you record from several grid cells -- shown here in different colors -- each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment, and each cell's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells.
So together, it's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment -- a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you'd find on a map, but using triangles.
And as it moves around, the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is, so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment.
Well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry, the same orientations of grid, shown in orange here, it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between.
So we can put people in an MRI scanner and have them do a little video game like the one I showed you and look for this signal.
And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats.
So back to Homer.
He's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked.
And that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells.
He's also remembering the path he took out of the car park, which would be represented in the firing of grid cells.
And that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car's actually there.
But he knows where it was, so he knows to go and get it.
So beyond spatial memory, if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain, we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks, like remembering the last time you went to a wedding, for example.
So it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene, at least, of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them.
And grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space.
Another kind of cell, head direction cells, which I didn't mention yet, they fire like a compass according to which way you're facing.
They could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery, so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding, for example.
So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Qatar is no exception to the region.
It's a very young nation led by young people.
We have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the iPods, and for me the abaya, my traditional dress that I'm wearing today.
Now this is not a religious garment, nor is it a religious statement.
Instead, it's a diverse cultural statement that we choose to wear.
Now I remember a few years ago, a journalist asked Dr. Sheikha, who's sitting here, president of Qatar University -- who, by the way, is a woman -- he asked her whether she thought the abaya hindered or infringed her freedom in any way.
Her answer was quite the contrary.
Instead, she felt more free, more free because she could wear whatever she wanted under the abaya.
(Laughter) My point is here, people have a choice -- just like the Indian lady could wear her sari or the Japanese woman could wear her kimono.
We are changing our culture from within, but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions.
We know that modernization is happening.
And yes, Qatar wants to be a modern nation.
But at the same time we are reconnecting and reasserting our Arab heritage.
It's important for us to grow organically.
And we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance.
In fact, research has shown that the more the world is flat, if I use Tom Friedman's analogy, or global, the more and more people are wanting to be different.
And for us young people, they're looking to become individuals and find their differences amongst themselves.
Which is why I prefer the Richard Wilk analogy of globalizing the local and localizing the global.
We don't want to be all the same, but we want to respect each other and understand each other.
And therefore tradition becomes more important, not less important.
Life necessitates a universal world, however, we believe in the security of having a local identity.
And this is what the leaders of this region are trying to do.
We're trying to be part of this global village, but at the same time we're revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development.
And I think a lot of people in this room, I can see a lot of you are in the same position as myself.
And I'm sure, although we can't see the people in Washington, they are in the same position.
We're continuously trying to straddle different worlds, different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others.
So I want to ask a question: What should culture in the 21st century look like?
In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, the telephone, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others?
I'm not sure of how many of you in Washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and, the more recent, Museum of Islamic Art opened in Qatar in 2008.
I myself am personalizing these cultural developments, but I also understand that this has to be done organically.
Yes, we do have all the resources that we need in order to develop new cultural institutions, but what I think is more important is that we are very fortunate to have visionary leaders who understand that this can't happen from outside, it has to come from within.
You might be surprised to know that most people in the Gulf who are leading these cultural initiatives happen to be women.
No, I don't think so.
I think that women in this part of the world realize that culture is an important component to connect people both locally and regionally.
It's a natural component for bringing people together, discussing ideas -- in the same way we're doing here at TED.
We're here, we're part of a community, sharing out ideas and discussing them.
Art becomes a very important part of our national identity.
The existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation's development of cultural identity is very important.
You know, art and culture is big business.
Ask me.
Ask the chairpersons and CEOs of Sotheby's and Christie's.
Ask Charles Saatchi about great art.
They make a lot of money.
So I think women in our society are becoming leaders, because they realize that for their future generations, it's very important to maintain our cultural identities.
Why else do Greeks demand the return of the Elgin Marbles?
And why is there an uproar when a private collector tries to sell his collection to a foreign museum?
Why does it take me months on end to get an export license from London or New York in order to get pieces into my country?
In few hours, Shirin Neshat, my friend from Iran who's a very important artist for us will be talking to you.
She lives in New York City, but she doesn't try to be a Western artist.
Instead, she tries to engage in a very important dialogue about her culture, nation and heritage.
She does that through important visual forms of photography and film.
In the same way, Qatar is trying to grow its national museums through an organic process from within.
Our mission is of cultural integration and independence.
We don't want to have what there is in the West.
We don't want their collections.
We want to build our own identities, our own fabric, create an open dialogue so that we share our ideas and share yours with us.
In a few days, we will be opening the Arab Museum of Modern Art.
(Laughter) Now this museum is just as important to us as the West.
Some of you might have heard of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, but I doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in Picasso's studio in Paris in the 1930s.
For me it was a new discovery.
And I think with time, in the years to come we'll be learning a lot about our Picassos, our Legers and our Cezannes.
Now visual expression is just one form of culture integration.
We have realized that recently more and more people are using the means of YouTube and social networking to express their stories, share their photos and tell their own stories through their own voices.
In a similar way, we have created the Doha Film Institute.
Now the Doha Film Institute is an organization to teach people about film and filmmaking.
Today I am proud to say we have trained and educated over 66 Qatari women filmmakers to edit, tell their own stories in their own voices.
(Applause) Now if you'll allow me, I would love to share a one-minute film that has proven to show that a 60-sec film can be as powerful as a haiku in telling a big picture.
And this is one of our filmmakers' products.
(Video) Boy: Hey listen! Did you know that the stocks are up?
Boy: No, you play mom and I play dad. (Girl: But it's my game.) Play by yourself then.
Useless.
Thank you. Thank you!
(Applause) SM: Going back to straddling between East and West, last month we had our second Doha Tribeca Film Festival here in Doha.
The Doha Tribeca Film Festival was held at our new cultural hub, Katara.
It attracted 42,000 people, and we showcased 51 films.
Now the Doha Tribeca Film Festival is not an imported festival, but rather an important festival between the cities of New York and Doha.
It's important for two things.
First, it allows us to showcase our Arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, New York City.
At the same time, we are inviting them to come and explore our part of the world.
They're learning our culture, our language, our heritage and realizing we're just as different and just the same as each other.
Now over and over again, people have said, "Let's build bridges," and frankly, I want to do more than that.
I would like break the walls of ignorance between East and West -- no, not the soft option that we have discussed before, but rather the soft power that Joseph Nye has spoken about before.
Culture's a very important tool to bring people together.
We should not underestimate it.
"Know thyself," that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling.
Now I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I know that me as an individual and we as a nation welcome this community of ideas worth spreading.
This is a very interesting journey.
I welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Shokran.
(Applause)
It's August 5, 2010.
A massive collapse at the San José Copper Mine in Northern Chile has left 33 men trapped half a mile -- that's two Empire State Buildings -- below some of the hardest rock in the world.
They will find their way to a small refuge designed for this purpose, where they will find intense heat, filth and about enough food for two men for 10 days.
No drilling technology in the industry is capable of getting through rock that hard and that deep fast enough to save their lives.
It's not even clear if the miners are alive.
So what's "teaming"?
Teaming is teamwork on the fly.
It's coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries of all kinds -- expertise, distance, time zone, you name it -- to get work done.
Think of your favorite sports team, because this is different.
Sports teams work together: that magic, those game-saving plays.
Now, sports teams win because they practice.
But you can only practice if you have the same members over time.
And so you can think of teaming ...
Sports teams embody the definition of a team, the formal definition.
It's a stable, bounded, reasonably small group of people who are interdependent in achieving a shared outcome.
You can think of teaming as a kind of pickup game in the park, in contrast to the formal, well-practiced team.
It's because it's the way more and more of us have to work today.
One place where this is true is hospitals.
This is where I've done a lot of my research over the years.
So it turns out hospitals have to be open 24/7.
And patients -- well, they're all different.
The average hospitalized patient is seen by 60 or so different caregivers throughout his stay.
They come from different shifts, different specialties, different areas of expertise, and they may not even know each other's name.
Consider what it takes to create an animated film, an award-winning animated film.
I had the good fortune to go to Disney Animation and study over 900 scientists, artists, storytellers, computer scientists as they teamed up in constantly changing configurations to create amazing outcomes like "Frozen."
They just work together, and never the same group twice, not knowing what's going to happen next.
Now, taking care of patients in the emergency room and designing an animated film are obviously very different work.
Yet underneath the differences, they have a lot in common.
You have to get different expertise at different times, you don't have fixed roles, you don't have fixed deliverables, you're going to be doing a lot of things that have never been done before, and you can't do it in a stable team.
Now, this way of working isn't easy, but as I said, it's more and more the way many of us have to work, so we have to understand it.
And I would argue that it's especially needed for work that's complex and unpredictable and for solving big problems.
Maybe you've seen some of the rhetoric: mixed-use designs, zero net energy buildings, smart mobility, green, livable, wonderful cities.
We have the vocabulary, we have the visions, not to mention the need.
We have the technology.
Two megatrends -- urbanization, we're fast becoming a more urban planet, and climate change -- have been increasingly pointing to cities as a crucial target for innovation.
And now around the world in various locations, people have been teaming up to design and try to create green, livable, smart cities.
Their goal was to build a demo smart city from scratch.
OK, so ...
We had inadvertently discovered what I call "professional culture clash" with this project.
You know, software engineers and real estate developers think differently -- really differently: different values, different time frames -- time frames is a big one -- and different jargon, different language.
I think this is a bigger problem than most of us realize.
In fact, I think professional culture clash is a major barrier to building the future that we aspire to build.
This is the question I've been trying to solve for a number of years in many different workplaces with my research.
Now, to begin to get just a glimpse of the answer to this question, let's go back to Chile.
In Chile, we witnessed 10 weeks of teaming by hundreds of individuals from different professions, different companies, different sectors, even different nations.
And as this process unfolded, they had lots of ideas, they tried many things, they experimented, they failed, they experienced devastating daily failure, but they picked up, persevered, and went on forward.
And really, what we witnessed there was they were able to be humble in the face of the very real challenge ahead, curious -- all of these diverse individuals, diverse expertise especially, nationality as well, were quite curious about what each other brings.
And they were willing to take risks to learn fast what might work.
And ultimately, 17 days into this remarkable story, ideas came from everywhere.
They came from NASA.
They came from Chilean Special Forces.
They came from volunteers around the world.
And while many of us, including myself, watched from afar, these folks made slow, painful progress through the rock.
It's just a remarkable moment.
And with just a very small incision, they were able to find it through a bunch of experimental techniques.
And then for the next 53 days, that narrow lifeline would be the path where food and medicine and communication would travel, while aboveground, for 53 more days, they continued the teaming to find a way to create a much larger hole and also to design a capsule.
This is the capsule.
And then on the 69th day, over 22 painstaking hours, they managed to pull the miners out one by one.
So how did they overcome professional culture clash?
Let's call this "situational humility."
You can be sure, as I said before, people were very curious, and this situational humility combined with curiosity creates a sense of psychological safety that allows you take risks with strangers, because let's face it: it's hard to speak up, right?
It's hard to offer an idea that might be a stupid idea if you don't know people very well.
You need psychological safety to do that.
They overcame what I like to call the basic human challenge: it's hard to learn if you already know.
And so we've got to remind ourselves -- and we can do it -- to be curious; to be curious about what others bring.
But there's another barrier, and you all know it.
You wouldn't be in this room if you didn't know it.
And to explain it, I'm going to quote from the movie "The Paper Chase."
This, by the way, is what Hollywood thinks a Harvard professor is supposed to look like.
You be the judge.
The professor in this famous scene, he's welcoming the new 1L class, and he says, "Look to your left. Look to your right.
one of you won't be here next year."
What message did they hear? "It's me or you."
For me to succeed, you must fail.
It's me or you.
It's awfully hard to team if you inadvertently see others as competitors.
So we have to overcome that one as well, and when we do, the results can be awesome.
Abraham Lincoln said once, "I don't like that man very much. I must get to know him better."
Think about that -- I don't like him, that means I don't know him well enough.
But when we step back and reach out and reach across, miracles can happen.
How quickly can you find the unique talents, skills and hopes of your neighbor, and how quickly, in turn, can you convey what you bring?
Because for us to team up to build the future we know we can create that none of us can do alone, that's the mindset we need.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The kind of harassment that women face in Pakistan is very serious and leads to sometimes deadly outcomes.
This kind of harassment keeps women from accessing the internet -- essentially, knowledge.
It's a form of oppression.
Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, with 140 million people having access to mobile technologies, and 15 percent internet penetration.
And this number doesn't seem to go down with the rise of new technologies.
Pakistan is also the birthplace of the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai.
But that's just one aspect of Pakistan.
Another aspect is where the twisted concept of honor is linked to women and their bodies; where men are allowed to disrespect women and even kill them sometimes in the name of so-called "family honor"; where women are left to die right outside their houses for speaking to a man on a mobile phone, in the name of "family honor."
Let me say this very clearly: it's not honor; it's a cold-blooded murder.
I come from a very small village in Punjab, Pakistan, where women are not allowed to pursue their higher education.
The elders of my extended family didn't allow their women to pursue their higher education or their professional careers.
However, unlike the other male guardians of my family, my father was one who really supported my ambitions.
To get my law degree, of course, it was really difficult, and [there were] frowns of disapproval.
But in the end, I knew it's either me or them, and I chose myself.
(Applause) My family's traditions and expectations for a woman wouldn't allow me to own a mobile phone until I was married.
When I resisted this idea of being surveilled by my ex-husband, he really didn't approve of this and threw me out of his house, along with my six-month-old son, Abdullah.
Why are women not allowed to enjoy the same equal rights enshrined in our Constitution?
While the law states that a woman has the same equal access to the information, why is it always men -- brothers, fathers and husbands -- who are granting these rights to us, effectively making the law irrelevant?"
So I decided to take a step, instead of keep questioning these patriarchal structures and societal norms.
And I founded the Digital Rights Foundation in 2012 to address all the issues and women's experiences in online spaces and cyberharassment.
From lobbying for free and safe internet to convincing young women that access to the safe internet is their fundamental, basic, human right, I'm trying to play my part in igniting the spark to address the questions that have bothered me all these years.
With a hope in my heart, and to offer a solution to this menace, I started Pakistan's and the region's first cyberharassment help line in December 2016 -- (Applause) to extend my support to the women who do not know who to turn to when they face serious threats online.
I think of the women who do not have the necessary support to deal with the mental trauma when they feel unsafe in online spaces, and they go about their daily activities, thinking that there is a rape threat in their in-box.
Safe access to the internet is an access to knowledge, and knowledge is freedom.
When I fight for women's digital rights, I'm fighting for equality.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Shall I ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations?
I'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old.
(Laughter) All right.
Do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age?
(Applause) Dinosaurs are kind of funny, you know.
(Laughter) We're going to kind of go in a different direction right now.
(Laughter) That's it.
(Laughter) People ask me a lot -- in fact, one of the most asked questions I get is, why do children like dinosaurs so much?
And I usually just say, "Well, dinosaurs were big, different and gone."
So that's sort of the theme: big, different and gone.
The title of my talk: Shape-shifting Dinosaurs: The cause of a premature extinction.
Now I assume that we remember dinosaurs.
And there's lots of different shapes.
A long time ago, back in the early 1900s, museums were out looking for dinosaurs.
They went out and gathered them up.
And this is an interesting story.
So if the museum in Toronto went out and collected a Tyrannosaur, a big one, then the museum in Ottawa wanted a bigger one, and a better one.
And this was in the early 1900s.
By about 1970, some scientists were sitting around and they thought, "What in the world -- Look at these dinosaurs, they're all big.
Where are all the little ones?"
(Laughter) And they thought about it and they even wrote papers about it: "Where are the little dinosaurs?"
(Laughter) Well, go to a museum, you'll see, see how many baby dinosaurs there are.
(Laughter) But all they had were big dinosaurs.
And it comes down to a couple of things.
First off, scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs.
They like to name anything.
Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.
(Laughter) And so every time they found something that looked a little different, they named it something different.
And what happened, of course, is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs.
In 1975, a light went on in somebody's head.
Dr. Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do, which is different than the way reptiles grow.
And in fact, he used the cassowary as an example.
They're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny.
So allometric cranial ontogeny is relative skull growth.
So this was a problem, and Peter Dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called Hypacrosaurus.
And he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like, if it grew in sort of a linear fashion, it would have a crest about half the size of the adult.
So this was interesting.
I mean, if they'd have just taken that, taken Peter Dodson's work, and gone on with that, then we would have a lot less dinosaurs than we have.
But scientists have egos; they like to name things.
And so they went on naming dinosaurs because they were different.
Now we have a way of actually testing to see whether a dinosaur, or any animal, is a young one or an older one.
But cutting into the bones of a dinosaur is hard to do, as you can imagine, because in museums, bones are precious.
They put them in foam, little containers.
(Laughter) But I have a museum and I collect dinosaurs and I can saw mine open.
So that's what I do.
(Applause) So if you cut open a little dinosaur, it's very spongy inside, like A.
And if you cut into an older dinosaur, it's very massive.
You can tell it's mature bone.
So what I want to do is show you these.
In North America in the northern plains of the United States and the southern plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan, there's this unit of rock called the Hell Creek Formation that produces the last dinosaurs that lived on Earth.
And there are 12 of them that everyone recognizes -- I mean the 12 primary dinosaurs that went extinct.
And so we will evaluate them.
And that's sort of what I've been doing.
Now as you can imagine, cutting open a leg bone is one thing, but when you go to a museum and say, "You don't mind if I cut open your dinosaur's skull, do you?"
they say, "Go away."
(Laughter) So here are 12 dinosaurs.
And we want to look at these three first.
So these are dinosaurs that are called Pachycephalosaurus.
And everybody knows that these three animals are related.
And the assumption is that they're related like cousins or whatever.
But no one ever considered that they might be more closely related.
In other words, people looked at them and they saw the differences.
You can only determine relatedness by looking for similarities.
So people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are.
Pachycephalosaurus has a big, thick dome on its head, and it's got some little bumps on the back of its head, and it's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose.
And then Stygimoloch, another dinosaur from the same age, lived at the same time, has spikes sticking out the back of its head.
It's got a little, tiny dome, and it's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose.
And then there's this thing called Dracorex hogwartsia.
Dragon.
So here's a dinosaur that has spikes sticking out of its head, no dome and gnarly stuff on its nose.
But they did look at these three and they said, "These are three different dinosaurs, and Dracorex is probably the most primitive of them.
And the other one is more primitive than the other."
But if you line them up, if you just take those three skulls and just line them up, they line up like this.
Dracorex is the littlest one, Stygimoloch is the middle-size one, Pachycephalosaurus is the largest one.
(Laughter) But it didn't give them a clue.
(Laughter) Because, well we know why.
Scientists like to name things.
So if we cut open Dracorex -- I cut open our Dracorex -- and look, it was spongy inside, really spongy inside.
If you cut open Stygimoloch, it is doing the same thing.
The dome, that little dome, is growing really fast.
It's inflating very fast.
What's interesting is the spike on the back of the Dracorex was growing very fast as well.
And if we look at Pachycephalosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus has a solid dome and its little bumps on the back of its head were also resorbing.
So just with these three dinosaurs, as a scientist, we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal.
Which of course means that Stygimoloch and Dracorex are extinct.
(Laughter) OK.
(Laughter) Which of course means we have 10 primary dinosaurs to deal with.
So a colleague of mine at Berkeley -- he and I were looking at Triceratops.
And before the year 2000 -- now remember, Triceratops was first found in the 1800s -- before 2000, no one had ever seen a juvenile Triceratops.
So everyone had a big one.
So we have a whole bunch of them at our museum.
(Laughter) If you look at the Triceratops, you can see it's changing, it's shape-shifting.
If you look along the edge of the frill, they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the Pachycephalosaurs.
(Laughter) and look inside.
And the middle-size one is really spongy.
But what was interesting was the adult Triceratops was also spongy.
And this is a skull that is two meters long.
It's a big skull.
But there's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a Triceratops, except it's bigger, and it's called Torosaurus.
And Torosaurus, when we cut into it, has mature bone.
But it's got these big holes in its shield.
And everybody says, "A Triceratops and a Torosaurus can't possibly be the same animal because one of them's bigger than the other one."
(Laughter) "And it has holes in its frill."
And they said, "Well, no, but it has holes in its frill."
So one of my graduate students, John Scannella, looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in Triceratops and, of course it's open, in Torosaurus -- so he found the transitional ones between Triceratops and Torosaurus, which was pretty cool.
So now we know that Torosaurus is actually a grown-up Triceratops.
Now when we name dinosaurs, when we name anything, the original name gets to stick and the second name is thrown out.
So Torosaurus is extinct.
Triceratops, if you've heard the news, a lot of the newscasters got it all wrong.
(Laughter) All right, so we can do this with a bunch of dinosaurs.
I mean, here's Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan.
Anatotitan: giant duck.
So we look at the bone histology.
The bone histology tells us that Edmontosaurus is a juvenile, or at least a subadult, and the other one is an adult, and we have an ontogeny.
And the last one is T. Rex.
So there's these two dinosaurs, T. Rex and Nanotyrannus.
(Laughter) Again, it makes you wonder.
They were looking at them and they said, "One's got 17 teeth, and the biggest one's got 12 teeth.
And that doesn't make any sense at all, because we don't know of any dinosaurs that gain teeth as they get older.
So it must be true -- they must be different."
And sure enough, Nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone.
And of course, Nano has 17.
And we just went out and looked at other people's collections and we found one that has sort of 15 teeth.
So again, real easy to say that Tyrannosaurus ontogeny included Nanotyrannus, and therefore we can take out another dinosaur.
(Laughter) So when it comes down to our end Cretaceous, we have seven left.
And that's a good number.
Now as you can imagine, this is not very popular with fourth-graders.
(Laughter) Fourth-graders love their dinosaurs, they memorize them.
And they're not happy with this.
(Laughter) Thank you very much.
If there's one city in the world where it's hard to find a place to buy or rent, it's Sydney.
And if you've tried to find a home here recently, you're familiar with the problem.
Every time you walk into an open house, you get some information about what's out there and what's on the market, but every time you walk out, you're running the risk of the very best place passing you by.
So how do you know when to switch from looking to being ready to make an offer?
This is such a cruel and familiar problem that it might come as a surprise that it has a simple solution.
37 percent.
(Laughter) If you want to maximize the probability that you find the very best place, you should look at 37 percent of what's on the market, and then make an offer on the next place you see, which is better than anything that you've seen so far.
Or if you're looking for a month, take 37 percent of that time -- 11 days, to set a standard -- and then you're ready to act.
We know this because trying to find a place to live is an example of an optimal stopping problem.
A class of problems that has been studied extensively by mathematicians and computer scientists.
I'm a computational cognitive scientist.
I spend my time trying to understand how it is that human minds work, from our amazing successes to our dismal failures.
To do that, I think about the computational structure of the problems that arise in everyday life, and compare the ideal solutions to those problems to the way that we actually behave.
As a side effect, I get to see how applying a little bit of computer science can make human decision-making easier.
(Laughter) I would always try and act in the way that I thought was rational, reasoning through every decision, trying to figure out the very best action to take.
But this is an approach that doesn't scale up when you start to run into the sorts of problems that arise in adult life.
(Laughter) She pointed out that I was taking the wrong approach to solving this problem -- and she later became my wife.
(Laughter) When you're looking for life advice, computer scientists probably aren't the first people you think to talk to.
Living life like a computer -- stereotypically deterministic, exhaustive and exact -- doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
When applied to the sorts of difficult problems that arise in human lives, the way that computers actually solve those problems looks a lot more like the way that people really act.
Take the example of trying to decide what restaurant to go to.
This is a problem that has a particular computational structure.
You've got a set of options, you're going to choose one of those options, and you're going to face exactly the same decision tomorrow.
In that situation, you run up against what computer scientists call the "explore-exploit trade-off."
You have to make a decision about whether you're going to try something new -- exploring, gathering some information that you might be able to use in the future -- or whether you're going to go to a place that you already know is pretty good -- exploiting the information that you've already gathered so far.
It's also the problem that technology companies face when they're trying to do something like decide what ad to show on a web page.
Should they show a new ad and learn something about it, or should they show you an ad that they already know there's a good chance you're going to click on?
When you're trying to decide what restaurant to go to, the first question you should ask yourself is how much longer you're going to be in town.
Just go to a place you already know is good.
But if you're going to be there for a longer time, explore.
Try something new, because the information you get is something that can improve your choices in the future.
This principle can give us insight into the structure of a human life as well.
Babies don't have a reputation for being particularly rational.
They're always trying new things, and you know, trying to stick them in their mouths.
At the other end of the spectrum, the old guy who always goes to the same restaurant and always eats the same thing isn't boring -- he's optimal.
(Laughter) He's exploiting the knowledge that he's earned through a lifetime's experience.
You don't have to go to the best restaurant every night.
Take a chance, try something new, explore.
You might learn something.
And the information that you gain is going to be worth more than one pretty good dinner.
Computer science can also help to make it easier on us in other places at home and in the office.
Martha Stewart turns out to have thought very hard about this -- (Laughter) and she has some good advice.
She says, "Ask yourself four questions: How long have I had it?
Is it a duplicate of something that I already own?
And when was the last time I wore it or used it?"
But there's another group of experts who perhaps thought even harder about this problem, and they would say one of these questions is more important than the others.
The people who design the memory systems of computers.
Most computers have two kinds of memory systems: a fast memory system, like a set of memory chips that has limited capacity, because those chips are expensive, and a slow memory system, which is much larger.
In order for the computer to operate as efficiently as possible, you want to make sure that the pieces of information you want to access are in the fast memory system, so that you can get to them quickly.
Each time you access a piece of information, it's loaded into the fast memory and the computer has to decide which item it has to remove from that memory, because it has limited capacity.
Over the years, computer scientists have tried a few different strategies for deciding what to remove from the fast memory.
They've tried things like choosing something at random or applying what's called the "first-in, first-out principle," which means removing the item which has been in the memory for the longest.
And there's a certain kind of logic to this.
If it's been a long time since you last accessed that piece of information, it's probably going to be a long time before you're going to need to access it again.
You have limited capacity, and you need to try and get in there the things that you're most likely to need so that you can get to them as quickly as possible.
Recognizing that, maybe it's worth applying the least recently used principle to organizing your wardrobe as well.
So if we go back to Martha's four questions, the computer scientists would say that of these, the last one is the most important.
This idea of organizing things so that the things you are most likely to need are most accessible can also be applied in your office.
The Japanese economist Yukio Noguchi actually invented a filing system that has exactly this property.
He started with a cardboard box, and he put his documents into the box from the left-hand side.
As a result, the documents would be ordered from left to right by how recently they had been used.
Before you dash home and implement this filing system -- (Laughter) it's worth recognizing that you probably already have.
typically maligned as messy and disorganized, a pile of papers is, in fact, perfectly organized -- (Laughter) as long as you, when you take a paper out, put it back on the top of the pile, then those papers are going to be ordered from top to bottom by how recently they were used, and you can probably quickly find what you're looking for by starting at the top of the pile.
Organizing your wardrobe or your desk are probably not the most pressing problems in your life.
But even in those cases, computer science can offer some strategies and perhaps some solace.
When computers face hard problems, they deal with them by making them into simpler problems -- by making use of randomness, by removing constraints or by allowing approximations.
Solving those simpler problems can give you insight into the harder problems, and sometimes produces pretty good solutions in their own right.
Knowing all of this has helped me to relax when I have to make decisions.
You could take the 37 percent rule for finding a home as an example.
There's no way that you can consider all of the options, so you have to take a chance.
And even if you follow the optimal strategy, you're not guaranteed a perfect outcome.
If you follow the 37 percent rule, the probability that you find the very best place is -- funnily enough ...
(Laughter) 37 percent.
But that's the best that you can do.
Ultimately, computer science can help to make us more forgiving of our own limitations.
And as long as you've used the best process, you've done the best that you can.
Sometimes those best processes involve taking a chance -- not considering all of your options, or being willing to settle for a pretty good solution.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Because, of course, this is a photograph that you can't take with your camera.
Yet, my interest in photography started as I got my first digital camera at the age of 15.
It mixed with my earlier passion for drawing, but it was a bit different, because using the camera, the process was in the planning instead.
And when you take a photograph with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger.
So to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time.
I felt like anyone could do that.
So I wanted to create something different, something where the process starts when you press the trigger.
Photos like this: construction going on along a busy road.
But it has an unexpected twist.
Or photos like these -- both dark and colorful, but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism.
When I say realism, I mean photo-realism.
So it's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really.
What creates the illusion?
Sometimes the perspective is the illusion.
But in the end, it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface.
It's not really what is realistic, it's what we think looks realistic really.
So I think the basics are quite simple.
And let me show you a simple example.
Here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects, something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world.
But combined in a certain way, they can create something that still looks three-dimensional, like it could exist.
So we trick our brains, because our brain simply doesn't accept the fact that it doesn't really make sense.
And I see the same process with combining photographs.
It's just really about combining different realities.
So the things that make a photograph look realistic, I think it's the things that we don't even think about, the things all around us in our daily lives.
But when combining photographs, this is really important to consider, because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow.
So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result.
As you can see, these images aren't really special.
So the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective.
Secondly, photos combined should have the same type of light.
And these two images both fulfill these two requirements -- shot at the same height and in the same type of light.
So by matching color, contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images, adding photographic defects like depth of field, desaturated colors and noise, we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image, despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically.
So here's another example.
(Laughter) One might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what's manipulated.
But this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations.
I personally think that it's easier to actually create a place than to find a place, because then you don't need to compromise with the ideas in your head.
But it does require a lot of planning.
And getting this idea during winter, I knew that I had several months to plan it, to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically.
So for example, the fish was captured on a fishing trip.
The underwater part was captured in a stone pit.
And yeah, I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more Swedish.
It always starts with a sketch, an idea.
And here every piece is very well planned.
And if you do a good job capturing the photos, the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic.
So all the tools are out there, and the only thing that limits us is our imagination.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I wanted to just start by asking everyone a question: How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader?
I've asked that question all across the country, and everywhere I ask it, no matter where, there's a huge portion of the audience that won't put up their hand.
And I've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us.
We've taken this title of "leader" and treat it as something that one day we're going to deserve.
But to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we're not comfortable with.
And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we've convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating.
We start to devalue the things we can do every day, We take moments where we truly are a leader and we don't let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it.
I've been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work with amazing people who've helped me redefine leadership in a way that I think has made me happier.
With my short time today, I want to share with you the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition.
I went to a little school called Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
And on my last day there, a girl came up to me and said, "I remember the first time I met you."
And she told me a story that had happened four years earlier.
She said, "On the day before I started university, I was in the hotel room with my mom and dad, and I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn't do this, that I wasn't ready for university, that I just burst into tears.
My mom and dad were amazing.
They were like, "We know you're scared, but let's just go tomorrow, go to the first day, and if at any point you feel as if you can't do this, that's fine; tell us, and we'll take you home.
We love you no matter what.'" She says, "So I went the next day.
I made that decision and as soon as I made it, an incredible feeling of peace came over me.
I turned to my mom and dad to tell them we needed to go home, and at that moment, you came out of the student union building wearing the stupidest hat I've ever seen in my life."
(Laughter) "It was awesome.
And you stared. It was creepy."
(Laughter) This girl knows what I'm talking about.
(Laughter) "Then you looked at the guy next to me, smiled, reached into your bucket, pulled out a lollipop, held it out to him and said, 'You need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman next to you.'" She said, "I've never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life.
He just kind of held the lollipop out like this."
(Laughter) "I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop.
As soon as I did, you got this incredibly severe look on your face, looked at my mom and dad and said, 'Look at that! Look at that!
Twenty feet in every direction, everyone started to howl.
I knew I was where I was supposed to be; I knew I was home.
And I haven't spoken to you once in the four years since that day.
But I heard that you were leaving, and I had to come and tell you you've been an incredibly important person in my life.
She gets six feet away, turns around, smiles and goes, "You should probably know this, too: I'm still dating that guy, four years later."
(Laughter) A year and a half after I moved to Toronto, I got an invitation to their wedding.
(Laughter) Here's the kicker: I don't remember that.
I have no recollection of that moment.
That was such an eye-opening, transformative moment for me, to think that maybe the biggest impact I'd ever had on anyone's life, a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say, "You've been an important person in my life," was a moment that I didn't even remember.
How many of you guys have a lollipop moment, a moment where someone said or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better?
See, why not?
We celebrate birthdays, where all you have to do is not die for 365 days -- (Laughter) Yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it.
Every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment.
You've made someone's life better by something you said or did.
As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership beyond us and make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day, from ourselves and from each other.
Marianne Williamson said, "Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate.
[It] is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light and not our darkness that frightens us."
My call to action today is that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other's lives.
We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments -- how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward and how many we say thank you for.
And if we can understand leadership like that, I think if we can redefine leadership like that, I think we can change everything.
And it's a simple idea, but I don't think it's a small one.
I want to thank you so much for letting me share it with you today.
It's interesting, because it was six years ago when I was pregnant with my first child that I discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body.
Now it's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin.
And these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors.
That was the start of my journey to make this film, "Toxic Baby."
And it doesn't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue.
One is that you and I all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents didn't have.
And many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we're seeing across industrialized nations.
I'll show you some statistics.
So for example, in the United Kingdom, the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation.
Very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the U.S.
In Canada, we're now looking at one in 10 Canadian children with asthma.
That's a four-fold increase.
Again, similar story around the world.
In the United States, probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities.
Again, we're seeing that trend across Europe, across North America.
Interestingly, one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the U.S.
So a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes, premature puberty.
So it's interesting for me, when I'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things, that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs.
(Laughter) Tyrone Hayes: It was a surprise to me as well that I would be talking about pesticides, that I'd be talking about public health, because, in fact, I never thought I would do anything useful.
In fact, my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when I was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if I would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians, or my frogs.
It turns out, atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world.
It's the number one contaminant of groundwater, drinking water, rain water.
In 2003, after my studies, it was banned in the European Union, but in that same year, the United States EPA re-registered the compound.
We were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine -- 0.1 parts per billion -- that it produced animals that look like this.
These are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes, two ovaries, another large testis, more ovaries, which is not normal ...
(Laughter) even for amphibians.
In some cases, another species like the North American Leopard Frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes.
(Laughter) In recent studies that we've published, we've shown that some of these animals when they're exposed to atrazine, some of the males grow up and completely become females.
So these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship.
And not only do these genetic males mate with other males, they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they're genetic males.
What we proposed, and what we've now generated support for, is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance.
Normally the testes should make testosterone, the male hormone.
But what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme, the machinery if you will, aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen.
And as a result, these exposed males lose their testosterone, they're chemically castrated, and they're subsequently feminized because now they're making the female hormone.
Because it turns out that the number one cancer in women, breast cancer, is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase.
So when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast, aromatase converts androgens into estrogens, and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads.
In fact, this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole, which blocks aromatase, blocks estrogen, so that if you developed a mutated cell, it doesn't grow into a tumor.
Now what's interesting is, of course, that we're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine, the number one contaminant in drinking water, that does the opposite -- turns on aromatase, increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors, breast cancer, in humans.
And so I find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it, we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment.
PJC: So speaking of estrogen, one of the other compounds that Tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol A, BPA, which has been in the news recently.
It's a plasticizer.
It's a compound that's found in polycarbonate plastic, which is what baby bottles are made out of.
And what's interesting about BPA is that it's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy.
And there have been many, many, many studies that have shown that BPA leaches from babies' bottles into the formula, into the milk, and therefore into the babies.
So we're dosing our babies, our newborns, our infants, with a synthetic estrogen.
Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups.
But just two weeks before that, the U.S. Senate refused to even debate the banning of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups.
So it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is.
(Video) PJC: With many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol A, it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children.
The baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure.
However, if we parents are unaware, we are leaving our children to fend for themselves.
TH: And what Penelope says here is even more true.
For those of you who don't know, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction.
Scientists agree now.
We are losing species from the Earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared, and leading that loss are amphibians.
80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline.
And I believe, many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline.
In part, amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they don't have protection from contaminants in the water -- no eggshells, no membranes and no placenta.
In fact, our invention -- by "our" I mean we mammals -- one of our big inventions was the placenta.
But we also start out as aquatic organisms.
But it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals, the placenta, cannot evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we're generating new chemicals that it's never seen before.
The evidence of that is that studies in rats, again with atrazine, show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion.
Because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones.
Of those that don't abort, atrazine causes impaired mammary, or breast, development in the exposed daughters in utero, so that their breast don't develop properly.
And as a result, when those rats grow up, their pups experience retarded growth and development because they can't make enough milk to nourish their pups.
So the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to.
And given the life of many of these chemicals, generations, years, dozens of years, that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren's grandchildren by things that we're putting into the environment today.
And this is not just philosophical, it's already known, that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen, PCBs, DDT cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby's in the womb.
In addition to that, after the baby's born, our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they're born.
We already know that chemicals like DDT and DES and atrazine can also pass over into milk, again, affecting our babies even after their born.
PJC: So when Tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ, I'm thinking, how do I demonstrate that?
How do you show that?
And it's interesting when you make a film like this, because you're stuck trying to visualize science that there's no visualization for.
And I have to take a little bit of artistic license.
(Video) (Ringing) Old man: Placenta control.
Oh what?
(Snoring) (Honk) Puffuffuff, what?
Never heard of it.
And so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child, it made me start to think, what would my fetus say to me?
What would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure that's happening everyday, day after day?
PJC: It's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this.
This is our issue, because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children.
We are in effect polluting our children.
So my child's death, my baby's death, really brought home the resonance of what I was trying to make in this film.
And it's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story, which is not what you originally intend.
And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment.
This is my toxic baby.
And that's something that's just profound and sad, but astonishing because so many of us don't actually know this.
TH: One of this things that's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at TEDWomen is that, well, I think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said, "Turn to the man at your table and tell them, 'When the revolution starts, we've got your back.'" The truth is, women, you've had our back on this issue for a very long time, starting with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" to Theo Colborn's "Our Stolen Future" to Sandra Steingraber's books "Living Downstream" and "Having Faith."
And perhaps it's the connection to our next generation -- like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago -- perhaps it's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area.
But for the men here, I want to say it's not just women and children that are at risk.
And of course, we don't do these experiments in humans, but just by coincidence, my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count, low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine.
These are just men who live in an agricultural community.
Men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine.
And the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine, up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men.
Of course, most of them, 90 percent are Mexican, Mexican-American.
And it's not just atrazine they're exposed to.
They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas.
And many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50.
It shouldn't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us, just like Rachel Carson and others have warned.
As evident in this slide from Lake Nabugabo in Uganda, the agricultural runoff from this crop, which goes into these buckets, is the sole source of drinking, cooking and bathing water for this village.
Now if I told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes, the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear.
You would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it.
We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it.
PJC: So it doesn't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue.
And I kept thinking over and over again this question.
We know so much about global warming and climate change, and yet, we have no concept of what I've been calling internal environmentalism.
And my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps, but it's also about our children as well.
Thank you.
(Applause)
A whip-like straw.
Powerful, crushing blades.
A pointed, piercing tube.
There are nearly a million known insect species in the world, but most have one of just five common types of mouthparts.
And that’s extremely useful to scientists because when they encounter an unfamiliar insect in the wild, they can learn a lot about it just by examining how it eats.
Scientific classification, or taxonomy, is used to organize all living things into seven levels: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.
The features of an insect’s mouthparts can help identify which order it belongs to, while also providing clues about how it evolved and what it feeds on.
The chewing mouthpart is the most common.
It’s also the most primitive— all other mouthparts are thought to have started out looking like this one before evolving into something different.
It features a pair of jaws called mandibles with toothed inner edges that cut up and crush solid foods, like leaves or other insects.
You can find this mouthpart on ants from the Hymenoptera order, grasshoppers and crickets of the Orthoptera order, dragonflies of the Odonata order, and beetles of the Coleoptera order.
This beak can pierce plant or animal tissue to suck up liquids like sap or blood.
It can also secrete saliva with digestive enzymes that liquefy food for easier sucking.
Insects in the Hemiptera order have piercing-sucking mouthparts and include bed bugs, cicadas, aphids, and leafhoppers.
Insects of the Lepidoptera order— butterflies and moths— keep their proboscises rolled up tightly beneath their heads when they’re not feeding and unfurl them when they come across some sweet nectar.
With the sponging mouthpart, there’s yet another tube, this time ending in two spongy lobes that contain many finer tubes called pseudotracheae.
The pseudotracheae secrete enzyme-filled saliva and soak up fluids and dissolved foods by capillary action.
House flies, fruit flies, and the other non-biting members of the Diptera order are the only insects that use this technique.
Biting flies within Diptera, like mosquitoes, horse flies, and deer flies, have a piercing-sucking mouthpart instead of the sponging mouthpart.
On this type of mouthpart, the mandibles themselves are not actually used for eating.
For bees and wasps, members of the Hymenoptera order, they serve instead as tools for pollen-collecting and wax-molding.
Of course, in nature, there are always exceptions to the rules.
The juvenile stages of some insects, for example, have completely different kinds of mouths than their adult versions, like caterpillars, which use chewing mouthparts to devour leaves before metamorphosing into butterflies and moths with siphoning mouthparts.
Still, mouthpart identification can, for the most part, help scientists—and you —categorize insects.
So why not break out a magnifying lens and learn a little more about who’s nibbling your vegetable garden, biting your arm, or just flying by your ear.
Every year in the United States alone, 2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together -- (Laughter) And not to have sex with anyone else.
Ever.
He buys a ring, she buys a dress.
They go shopping for all sorts of things.
She takes him to Arthur Murray for ballroom-dancing lessons.
And the big day comes.
(Laughter) These optimistic young bastards promise to honor and cherish each other through hot flashes and midlife crises and a cumulative 50-pound weight gain, until that far-off day, when one of them is finally able to rest in peace.
(Laughter) You know, because they can't hear the snoring anymore.
And then they'll get stupid drunk and smash cake in each other's faces and do the Macarena.
even though we know, statistically, half of them will be divorced within a decade.
They'll keep forgetting anniversaries and arguing about where to spend holidays and debating -- (Laughter) Which way the toilet paper should come off of the roll.
And some of them will even still be enjoying each other's company when neither of them can chew solid food anymore.
And researchers want to know why.
What can we learn from them?
Well, researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out.
And they try to pinpoint what it is that sets them apart from their miserable neighbors and friends.
And it turns out, the success stories share a few similarities, beyond that they don't have sex with other people.
For instance, in the happiest marriages, the wife is thinner and better-looking than the husband.
It's obvious that this leads to marital bliss, because women -- we care a great deal about being thin and good-looking, whereas men mostly care about sex, ideally, with women who are thinner and better looking than they are.
The beauty of this research, though, is that no one is suggesting that women have to be thin to be happy.
So instead of all that laborious dieting and exercising, we just need to wait for them to get fat -- (Laughter) Maybe bake a few pies.
This is good information to have, and it's not that complicated.
(Laughter) Research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives.
For example: the happy wife.
Instead of pointing out her husband's growing gut or suggesting he go for a run, she might say, "Wow, honey, thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner."
"Yeah, it was devastating when we lost everything in that fire.
But it's kind of nice sleeping out here under the stars.
And it's a good thing you've got all that body fat to keep us warm."
(Laughter) One of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do housework, the more attractive his wife will find him.
(Laughter) But here's what's going on here.
The more attractive she finds him, the more sex they have; the more sex they have, the nicer he is to her; the nicer he is to her, the less she nags him about leaving wet towels on the bed, and ultimately, they live happily ever after.
Here's an interesting one.
One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce.
The data were based entirely on whether people looked happy in these early pictures.
Now, I don't know how old all of you are, but when I was a kid, your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called "film."
And, by God, film was expensive.
But still, I have a huge pile of fake happy childhood pictures and I'm glad they make me less likely than some people to get a divorce.
So, what else can you do to safeguard your marriage?
Do not win an Oscar for best actress.
(Laughter) I'm serious.
Bettie Davis, Joan Crawford, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon -- all of them single, soon after taking home that statue.
They actually call it the Oscar curse.
It is the marriage kiss of death and something that should be avoided.
It turns out, merely watching a romantic comedy causes relationship satisfaction to plummet.
(Laughter) Apparently, the bitter realization that maybe it could happen to us, but it obviously hasn't and it probably never will, makes our lives seem unbearably grim in comparison.
Yeah.
But here's a scary one: divorce is contagious.
My husband and I have watched quite a few friends divide their assets and then struggle with being our age and single in an age of sexting and Viagra and eHarmony.
And I'm thinking they've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could.
So now you may be wondering: Why does anyone get married ever?
Well, the US federal government counts more than a thousand legal benefits to being someone's spouse.
A list that includes visitation rights in jail, but hopefully, you'll never need that one.
But beyond the profound federal perks, married people make more money.
We're healthier, physically and emotionally.
We produce happier, more stable and more successful kids.
We have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends, believe it or not.
We even live longer, which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place.
The bottom line is: whether you're in it or you're searching for it, I believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting.
So I hope you'll use the information I've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors.
So I'm obviously going to need fatten him up.
And like I said, we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up.
So we have to keep an eye on that.
And we do like a cocktail or two.
On the other hand, I have the fake happy picture thing.
But just in case, I plan to work extra hard to not win an Oscar anytime soon.
I'll see you at the bar.
Thank you so much.
I am a journalist.
My job is to talk to people from all walks of life, all over the world.
Today, I want to tell you why I decided to do this with my life and what I've learned.
My story begins in Caracas, Venezuela, in South America, where I grew up; a place that to me was, and always will be, filled with magic and wonder.
Frоm a very young age, my parents wanted me to have a wider view of the world.
I remember one time when I was around seven years old, my dad came up to me and said, "Mariana, I'm going to send you and your little sister..."
- who was six at the time - "...to a place where nobody speaks Spanish.
I want you to experience different cultures."
He went on and on about the benefits of spending an entire summer in this summer camp in the United States, stressing a little phrase that I didn't pay too much attention to at the time: "You never know what the future holds."
Meanwhile, in my seven-year-old mind, I was thinking, we were going to get to summer camp in Miami.
(Laughter) Maybe it was going to be even better, and we were going to go a little further north, to Orlando, where Mickey Mouse lived.
(Laughter) I got really excited.
My dad, however, had a slightly different plan.
Frоm Caracas, he he sent us to Brainerd, Minnesota.
We got there, and one of the first things I noticed was that the other kids' hair was several shades of blonde, and most of them had blue eyes.
The first night, the camp director gathered everyone around the campfire and said, "Kids, we have a very international camp this year; the Atencios are here from Venezuela."
(Laughter) The other kids looked at us as if we were from another planet.
Or, "Do you go to school on a donkey or a canoe?"
(Laughter) I would try to answer in my broken English, and they would just laugh.
I know they were not trying to be mean; they were just trying to understand who we were, and make a correlation with the world they knew.
We could either be like them, or like characters out of a book filled with adventures, like Aladdin or the Jungle Book.
We certainly didn't look like them, we didn't speak their language, we were different.
When you're seven years old, that hurts.
But I had my little sister to take care of, and she cried every day at summer camp.
So I decided to put on a brave face, and embrace everything I could about the American way of life.
We later did what we called "the summer camp experiment," for eight years in different cities that many Americans haven't even heard of.
Making a friend was a special reward.
Everybody wants to feel valued and accepted, and we think it should happen spontaneously, but it doesn't.
When you're different, you have to work at belonging.
Later on, when I was in high school, my dad expanded on his summer plan, and from Caracas he sent me to Wallingford, Connecticut, for the senior year of high school.
This time, I remember daydreaming on the plane about "the American high school experience" - with a locker.
It was going to be perfect, just like in my favorite TV show: "Saved by the Bell."
Her name was Fatima, and she was Muslim from Bahrain, and she was not what I expected.
See, as a teenager, I wanted to fit in even more, I wanted to be popular, maybe have a boyfriend for prom, and I felt that Fatima just got in the way with her shyness and her strict dress code.
I didn't realize that I was making her feel like the kids at summer camp made me feel.
This was the high school equivalent of asking her, "Do you know what a hamburger is?"
I have to be honest with you, we only lasted a couple of months together, because she was later sent to live with a counselor instead of other students.
I remember thinking, "Ah, she'll be okay.
She's just different."
You see, when we label someone as different, it dehumanizes them in a way.
So, how do we recognize our blind spots?
It begins by understanding what makes you different, by embracing those traits.
Only then can you begin to appreciate what makes others special.
I had found that boyfriend for prom, made a group of friends, and practically forgotten about Fatima, until everybody signed on to participate in this talent show for charity.
But I was determined to find something of value.
And I go, "Whenever, wherever, we're meant to be together," and I said, "My name is Mariana, and I'm going to auction a dance class."
It seemed like the whole school raised their hand to bid.
My dance class really stood out from, like, the 10th violin class offered that day.
I felt really special.
She was from the Middle East, just like Shakira's family was from the Middle East.
She could have probably taught me a thing or two about belly dancing, had I been open to it.
If you're watching at home, take a piece of paper, and write down what makes you different.
Remember, it is the first step in appreciating what makes others special.
When I went back home to Venezuela, I began to understand how these experiences were changing me.
Being able to speak different languages, to navigate all these different people and places, it gave me a unique sensibility.
I was finally beginning to understand the importance of putting myself in other people's shoes.
That is a big part of the reason why I decided to become a journalist.
It was right around the time, however, when the Venezuelan government shut down the biggest television station in our country.
Censorship was growing, and my dad came up to me once again and said, "How are you going to be a journalist here?
That's what he had been preparing me for.
That is what the future held for me.
So in 2008, I packed my bags, and I came to the United States, without a return ticket this time.
I was painfully aware that, at 24 years old, I was becoming a refugee of sorts, an immigrant, the other, once again, and now for good.
I was able to come on a scholarship to study journalism.
I remember when they gave me my first assignment to cover the historic election of President Barack Obama.
I felt so lucky, so hopeful.
I was, like, "Yes, this is it.
I've come to post-racial America, where the notion of us and them is being eroded, and will probably be eradicated in my lifetime."
Boy, was I wrong, right?
Why didn't Barack Obama's presidency alleviate racial tensions in our country?
Why do some people still feel threatened by immigrants, LGBTQ, and minority groups who are just trying to find a space in this United States that should be for all of us?
I didn't have the answers back then, but on November 8th, 2016, when Donald Trump became our president, it became clear that a large part of the electorate sees them as "the others."
Some see people coming to take their jobs, or potential terrorists who speak a different language.
Meanwhile, minority groups oftentimes just see hatred, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness on the other side.
It's like we're stuck in these bubbles that nobody wants to burst.
The only way to do it, the only way to get out of it is to realize that being different also means thinking differently.
It takes courage to show respect.
In the words of Voltaire: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it."
Failing to see anything good on the other side makes a dialogue impossible.
Without a dialogue, we will keep repeating the same mistakes, because we will not learn anything new.
I covered the 2016 election for NBC News.
And I wanted to do something different.
I watched election results with undocumented families.
Few thought of sharing that moment with people who weren't citizens, but actually stood the most to lose that night.
When it became apparent that Donald Trump was winning, this eight-year-old girl named Angelina rushed up to me in tears.
She sobbed, and she asked me if her mom was going to be deported now.
Here was this little girl who was around the same age I was when I went to camp in Brainerd.
She already knows she is "the other."
She walks home from school in fear, every day, that her mom can be taken away.
So, how do we put ourselves in Angelina's shoes?
How do we make her understand she is special, and not simply unworthy of having her family together?
By giving camera time to her and families like hers, I tried to make people see them as human beings, and not simply "illegal aliens."
Yes, they broke a law, and they should pay a penalty for it, but they've also given everything for this country, like many other immigrants before them have.
I've already told you how my path to personal growth started.
The day, April 10th, 2014, I was driving to the studio, and I got a call from my parents.
"Are you on the air?" they asked.
I immediately knew something was wrong.
"It's your sister; she's been in a car accident."
It was as if my heart stopped.
They say your life can change in a split second.
Mine did at that moment.
My sister went from being my successful other half, only a year apart in age, to not being able to move her legs, sit up, or get dressed by herself.
This was terrifying.
Throughout the course of two years, my sister underwent 15 surgeries, and she spent the most of that time in a wheelchair.
But that wasn't even the worst of it.
It was the way people looked at her, looked at us, changed.
Everywhere we went, I realized that people just saw a poor girl in a wheelchair.
After fighting like a warrior, I can thankfully tell you that today my sister is walking, and has recovered beyond anyone's expectations.
(Applause) Thank you.
Being able to reimagine yourself beyond what other people see, that is the toughest task of all, but it's also the most beautiful.
People with physical or neurological difficulties, environmentally impacted communities, immigrants, boys, girls, boys who want to dress as girls, girls with veils, women who have been sexually assaulted, athletes who bend their knee as a sign of protest, black, white, Asian, Native American, my sister, you, or me.
We all want what everyone wants: to dream and to achieve.
Well, if you look at my story, from being born somewhere different, to belly dancing in high school, to telling stories you wouldn't normally see on TV, what makes me different is what has made me stand out and be successful.
I have traveled the world, and talked to people from all walks of life.
Let's celebrate those imperfections that make us special.
We are all different.
We are all quirky, and unique, and that is what makes us wonderfully human.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
Bigger welcome! Hello, San Francisco!
TEDx – oh my God, blinding light!
Hi, everybody! How are you?
My name is Mel Robbins, and for the last seventeen years, I have done nothing but help people get everything that they want.
So, I've done it in the courtroom, in the boardroom, in the bedroom, in people's living room, whatever room you want to be in, if I'm there, I will help you get whatever you want by any means necessary.
For the last three years – I host a syndicated radio show.
Five days a week, I go live in forty cities and I talk to men and women across America who feel stuck.
Do you know that a third of Americans feel dissatisfied with their lives right now?
And I've come face to face with it in this new show that I'm doing, which is also insane, it's called "In-laws".
I move in with families across America – (Laughter) You guessed it!
– who are at war with their in-laws.
I'm here for you.
I'm going to tell you everything I know in less than eighteen minutes about how to get what you want.
So I want you to take a millisecond right now and think about what you want.
You!
And I want you to be selfish.
(Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon.
Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to triple your income?
Do you want to start a nonprofit? Do you want to find love?
That's part of the problem. You won't pick.
So, we're going to be talking about how you get what you want.
It's very simple.
And you could probably find at least, I don't know - a thousand blogs documenting the step, by step, by step transformation that somebody else is already doing.
(Laughter) You can just walk in their footsteps – just use the science of drafting.
It all comes down to one word: F*©#.
The f-bomb. It's everywhere!
I honestly don't understand what the appeal is of the word.
I mean, you don't sound smart when you say it.
"How you doing?" "Oh, I'm fine."
I don't think so!
Because if you're fine, you don't have to do anything about it.
What a flimsy and feeble word!
Tell the truth!
It's the areas in your life where you've given up.
Where you've said, "Oh, I'm fine. My mom's never going to change, so I just can't have that conversation."
"I'm fine. We've got to wait until the kids graduate, before we get divorced, so we'll just sleep in separate bedrooms."
"I'm fine. I lost my job, I can barely pay my bills, but whatever – It's hard to get a job."
And they took into account all of the wars, and the natural disasters, and the dinosaurs, and everything else.
Isn't that amazing? Doug: I'm so lucky!
You have life-changing ideas for a reason, and it's not to torture yourself.
Thank you. Thank you, Doug. (Applause) Christine was right when she said all of you could be on stage.
All day long you have ideas that could change your life, that could change the world, that could change the way that you feel, and what do you do with them? Nothing!
What's the first decision you made this morning?
And I get it! Your bed is comfortable! It's cosy, it's warm!
If you're lucky, you've got somebody that you love next to you, or in my case, I've got my husband and my two kids and possibly the dog.
And the reason why I'm bringing up this first decision that you made today, and the inner snooze alarm, is because in any area of your life that you want to change, any – there's one fact that you need to know.
Ever.
Scientists call it activation energy.
So try this test tomorrow.
You think you're so fancy, I know, you're attending TED.
(Laughter) Try this.
Tomorrow morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes earlier.
No snooze, no delay, no, "I'll just wait here for five seconds because Mel's not standing here" – Do it.
And the reason why I want you to do it is because you will come face to face with the physical, and I mean physical force that's required to change your behavior.
Do you think that somebody who needs to lose weight ever feels like going on a diet?
Of course not!
I don't think so!
What's interesting about being an adult is that when you become eighteen, nobody tells you that it's now going to be your job to parent yourself.
Get off the damn DS!
If you're going to have a nude party in my bathroom, at least clean it up!
(Laughter) God, chew with your mouth closed! We're not a barn, for crying out loud!
Alright, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry.
As parents, and you were a kid, your parents make you do the things you don't feel like doing.
And then you'll plateau out, get bored, "I hate this job. Blah blah boring."
But it's not easy.
You have to force yourself.
That's the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake.
And guess which one your brain likes better: autopilot.
You've had the experience where you've driven to work and you get there and you're like, "Oh my God, I don't remember ever driving here."
(Laughter) You weren't drunk! That was your brain on autopilot.
It was functioning just at this level.
And the problem with your mind is that anytime you do anything that's different from your normal routine, guess what your brain does — emergency brake!
And it has that reaction for everything. Everything!
And you think for the hundredth time, "I'm going to kill them.
But that's not your normal routine, is it?
So your mind goes: emergency brake!
And if you think about your life, it's kind of funny because we are kids and then we become adults, and we spend so much time trying to push our life into some sort of stable routine, and then we grow bored of it!
It's the routine that's killing you.
I have this theory about why people get stuck in life.
So, most of you've probably taken your Basic Psych 101 class, and you've bumped into Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs"?
Well, your body is kinda cool. Because you have these basic needs.
And your body is wired to send you signals.
If you need water, what do you feel?
I think when you feel stuck or dissatisfied in your life, it's a signal.
And it's not a signal that your life is broken.
Your need for exploration.
Everything about your life, about your body, grows!
Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows for your entire life.
And your soul needs exploration and growth.
And the only way you'll get it is by forcing yourself to be uncomfortable.
If you're in your head, you're behind enemy lines.
In fact, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we would institutionalize you. (Laughter) You would not hang out with people that talk to you the way you talk to yourself.
So get out of your head!
And if you listen to how you feel, when it comes to what you want – you will not get it.
Because you will never feel like it.
And you need to get outside your comfort zone.
It's not about taking risks, it's about getting outside your comfort zone.
But once you're up, it's great.
Those first three seconds when you're sitting here in a stadium like this and somebody says, "Get up and come dance," and you think, "Oh, I should do that," and then you're like, "Uhmm."
That experience that you had when you had the impulse to do it and then you didn't do the activation energy required to force yourself, your emergency brake got pulled – "I'm sitting right here.
I'm not going up with those crazy people, I don't like to dance..."
What happened for me is I came up, and I bumped into Rachel, and then we started talking, and next thing you know, she's tweeting.
That's where the magic is.
So everything I do – oh, OK, this is the last part. Sorry.
So one more thing that you can use, I call it the five-second-rule.
Your mind can process a facial expression in 33 milliseconds.
Kill it!
If you have the impulse to get up and come dance while the band is playing, if you don't stand up in five seconds, you're going to pull the emergency brake.
If you have an impulse about, you were inspired by somebody's speech today, and you don't do something within five seconds – write a note, send yourself a text – anything physical to marry it with the idea, you will pull the emergency brake and kill the idea.
Your problem isn't ideas. Your problem is you don't act on them.
You kill them. It's not my fault. It's not anybody's fault.
You're doing it to yourself. Stop it!
And it's not going to happen in your head.
That's why you're here!
Experiment with it, and I think you'll be shocked about what happens.
And one more thing, I want you to know that everything that I do, whether it's the radio show, or the television show, or the book that I wrote, or the column, it's for you.
And if there is anything that I can do, if I can do anything to make you do the things you don't want to do, so you can have what you want, I will do it.
(Applause) Thank you! Thank you, yes! Stand up!
Because I am a millennial computer scientist book author standing on a TEDx stage, and yet, I've never had a social media account.
How this happened was actually somewhat random.
Social media first came onto my radar when I was at college, my sophomore year of college, this is when Facebook arrived at our campus.
So in sort of a fit of somewhat immature professional jealousy, I said, "I'm not going to use this thing.
And from the clarity you can get when you have some objectivity, some perspective on it, I realized this seems a little bit dangerous.
So I never signed up.
It turns out I still have friends, I still know what's going on in the world; as a computer scientist I still collaborate with people all around the world, I'm still regularly exposed serendipitously to interesting ideas, and I rarely describe myself as lacking entertainment options.
So I've been OK, but I'd go even farther and say not only I am OK without social media but I think I'm actually better off.
I think I'm happier, I think I find more sustainability in my life, and I think I've been more successful professionally because I don't use social media.
So my second goal here on stage is try to convince more of you to believe the same thing.
So, if the theme of this TEDx event is "Future Tense," I guess, in other words, this would be my vision of the future, would be one in which fewer people actually use social media.
That's a big claim, I think I need to back it up.
So I thought, what I would do is take the three most common objections I hear when I suggest to people that they quit social media, and then for each of these objections, I'll try to defuse the hype and see if I can actually push in some more reality.
This is the first most common objection I hear.
That's not a hermit, that's actually a hipster web developer down from 8th Street; I'm not sure.
Hipster or hermit? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
To reject social media would be an act of extreme [bloodism].
I can't take such a big stance in my life."
My reaction to that objection is I think that is nonsense.
Social media is not a fundamental technology.
Which is to say, it's a source of entertainment, it's an entertainment product.
So to say that you don't use social media should not be a large social stance, it's just rejecting one form of entertainment for others.
There should be no more controversial than saying, "I don't like newspapers, I like to get my news from magazines," or "I prefer to watch cable series, as opposed to network television series."
My use of the slot machine image up here also is not accidental because if you look a little bit closer at these technologies, it's not just that they're a source of entertainment but they're a somewhat unsavory source of entertainment.
We now know that many of the major social media companies hire individuals called attention engineers, who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling, among other places, to try to make these products as addictive as possible.
That is the desired use case of these products: is that you use it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit that can be extracted from your attention and data.
So it's not a fundamental technology, it's just a source of entertainment, one among many, and it's somewhat unsavory if you look a little bit closer.
Here's the second common objection I hear when I suggest that people quit social media.
The objection goes as follows, "Cal, I can't quit social media because it is vital to my success in the 21st century economy.
If I do not have a well-cultivated social media brand, people won't know who I am, people won't be able to find me, opportunities won't come my way, and I will effectively disappear from the economy."
Again my reaction is once again: this objection also is nonsense.
I recently published this book that draws on multiple different strands of evidence to make the point that, in a competitive 21st century economy, what the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
If you produce something that's rare and valuable, the market will value that.
Well, social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that doesn't produce a lot of value; it's something that any six-year-old with a smartphone can do.
It's instead going to reward the deep, concentrated work required to build real skills and to apply those skills to produce things - like a craftsman - that are rare and that are valuable.
You will be able to write your own ticket, and build the foundation of a meaningful and successful professional life, regardless of how many Instagram followers you have.
This is the third comment objection I hear when I suggest to people that they quit social media; in some sense, I think it might be one of the most important.
This objection goes as follows, "Cal, maybe I agree, maybe you're right; it's not a fundamental technology.
Maybe using social media is not at the core of my professional success.
It's harmless, I have some fun on it - weird: Twitter's funny - I don't even use it that much, I'm a first adopter, it's kind of interesting to try it out, and maybe I might miss out something if I don't use it.
What's the harm?"
In this case, what it misses is what I think is a very important reality that we need to talk about more frankly, which is that social media brings with it multiple, well-documented, and significant harms.
We actually have to confront these harms head-on when trying to make decisions about whether or not we embrace this technology and let it into our lives.
I just argued before that the ability to focus intensely, to produce things that are rare and valuable, to hone skills the market place value on, that this is what will matter in our economy.
But right before that, I argued that social media tools are designed to be addictive.
The actual designed desired-use case of these tools is that you fragment your attention as much as possible throughout your waking hours; that's how these tools are designed to use.
We have a growing amount of research which tells us that if you spend large portions of your day in a state of fragmented attention - large portions of your day, breaking up your attention, to take a quick glance, to just check, - "Let me quickly look at Instagram" - that this can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration.
In other words, you could permanently reduce your capacity to do exactly the type of deep effort that we're finding to be more and more necessary in an increasingly competitive economy.
So social media use is not harmless, it can actually have a significant negative impact on your ability to thrive in the economy.
I'm especially worried about this when we look at the younger generation, which is the most saturated in this technology.
If you lose your ability to sustain concentration, you're going to become less and less relevant to this economy.
There's also psychological harms that are well documented that social media brings, that we do need to address.
We know from the research literature that the more you use social media, the more likely you are to feel lonely or isolated.
We know that the constant exposure to your friends carefully curated, positive portrayals of their life can leave you to feel inadequate, and can increase rates of depression.
And something I think we're going to be hearing more about in the near future is that there's a fundamental mismatch between the way our brains are wired and this behavior of exposing yourself to stimuli with intermittent rewards throughout all of your waking hours.
It short-circuits the brain, and we're starting to find it has actual cognitive consequences, one of them being this sort of pervasive background hum of anxiety.
That's the canary in the coal mine.
This type of behavior is a mismatch for our brain wiring and can make you feel miserable.
So there's real cost to social media use; which means when you're trying to decide, "Should I use this or not?", saying it's harmless is not enough.
You actually have to identify a significantly positive, clear benefit that can outweigh these potential, completely non-trivial harms.
People often ask, "OK, but what is life like without social media?"
That can actually be a little bit scary to think about.
According to people who went through this process, there can be a few difficult weeks.
It actually is like a true detox process.
The first two weeks can be uncomfortable: you feel a little bit anxious, you feel like you're missing a limb.
But after that, things settle down, and actually, life after social media can be quite positive.
First, it can be quite productive.
I'm a professor at a research institution, I've written five books, I rarely work past 5 pm on a weekday.
Part of the way I'm trying to able to pull that off is because it turns out, if you treat your attention with respect, - so you don't fragment it; you allow it to stay whole, you preserve your concentration - when it comes time to work you can do one thing after another, and do it with intensity, and intensity can be traded for time.
Something else I can report back from life without social media is that outside of work, things can be quite peaceful.
It sounds old-fashioned, but they were onto something back then.
It's actually a restorative, peaceful way to actually spend your time out of work.
So life without social media is really not so bad.
If you pull together these threads, you see my full argument that not everyone, but certainly much more people than right now, much more people should not be using social media.
Nonsense: it's a slot machine in your phone.
We can discard with this notion that you won't get a job without it.
Nonsense: anything a six-year-old with a smartphone can do is not going to be what the market rewards.
And then I emphasized the point that there's real harms with it.
So it's not just harmless.
Finally I noted, that life without social media: there's real positives associated with it.
So I'm hoping that when many of you actually go through this same calculus, you'll at least consider the perspective I'm making right now, which is: many more people would be much better off if they didn't use this technology.
Some of you might disagree, some of you might have scathing but accurate critiques of me and my points, and of course, I welcome all negative feedback.
I just ask that you direct your comments towards Twitter.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm Sam, and I just turned 17.
A few years ago, before my freshman year in High School, I wanted to play snare drum in the Foxboro High School Marching Band, and it was a dream that I just had to accomplish.
But each snare drum and harness weighed about 40 pounds each, and I have a disease called Progeria.
So just to give you an idea, I weigh only about 50 pounds.
So, logistically, I really couldn't carry a regular sized snare drum, and because of this the band director assigned me to play pit percussion during the halftime show.
Now pit percussion was fun.
It involved some really cool auxiliary percussion instruments, like the bongos, timpani, and timbales, and cowbell.
So it was fun, but it involved no marching, and I was just so devastated.
So my family and I worked with an engineer to design a snare drum harness that would be lighter, and easier for me to carry.
So after continuous work, we made a snare drum apparatus that weighs only about 6 pounds.
(Applause) I just want to give you some more information about Progeria.
It affects only about 350 kids today, worldwide.
So it's pretty rare, and the effects of Progeria include: tight skin, lack of weight gain, stunted growth, and heart disease.
Last year my Mom and her team of scientists published the first successful Progeria Treatment Study, and because of this I was interviewed on NPR, and John Hamilton asked me the question: "What is the most important thing that people should know about you?"
And my answer was simply that I have a very happy life.
(Applause) So even though there are many obstacles in my life, with a lot of them being created by Progeria, I don't want people to feel bad for me.
I don't think about these obstacles all the time, and I'm able to overcome most of them anyway.
So I’m here today, to share with you my philosophy for a happy life.
Now people sometimes ask me questions like, "Isn’t it hard living with Progeria?" or "What daily challenges of Progeria do you face?"
And I’d like to say that, even though I have Progeria, most of my time is spent thinking about things that have nothing to do with Progeria at all.
When I can’t do something like run a long distance, or go on an intense roller coaster, I know what I’m missing out on.
Yeah, so -- (Laughter) However, sometimes I need to find a different way to do something by making adjustments, and I want to put those things in the "can do" category.
Kind of like you saw with the drum earlier.
So here’s a clip with me playing Spider-Man with the Foxboro High School Marching Band at halftime a couple of years ago.
(Video) ♫ Spider-Man theme song ♫ (Applause) Thank you.
All right, all right, so -- That was pretty cool, and so I was able to accomplish my dream of playing snare drum with the marching band, as I believe I can do for all of my dreams.
So hopefully, you can accomplish your dreams as well, with this outlook.
The next aspect to my philosophy is that I surround myself with people I want to be with, people of high quality.
I’m extremely lucky to have an amazing family, who have always supported me throughout my entire life.
And I’m also really fortunate to have a really close group of friends at school.
Now we’re kind of goofy, a lot of us are band geeks, but we really enjoy each other’s company, and we help each other out when we need to.
So we’re juniors in High School now, and we can now mentor younger band members, as a single collective unit.
What I love about being in a group like the band, is that the music that we make together, is true, is genuine, and it supersedes Progeria.
But even having made a documentary, going on TV a couple of times, I feel like I’m at my highest point when I’m with the people that surround me every day.
(Applause) Thank you.
The third aspect to the philosophy is, Keep moving forward.
Here’s a quote by a man you may know, named Walt Disney, and it’s one of my favorite quotes.
I always try to have something to look forward to.
It doesn’t have to be big.
It could be anything from looking forward to the next comic book to come out, or going on a large family vacation, or hanging out with my friends, to going to the next High School football game.
However, all of these things keep me focused, and know that there’s a bright future ahead, and may get me through some difficult times that I may be having.
I try hard not to waste energy feeling badly for myself, because when I do, I get stuck in a paradox, where there’s no room for any happiness or any other emotion.
When I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer.
I wanted to be an inventor, who would catapult the world into a better future.
Maybe this came from my love of Legos, and the freedom of expression that I felt when I was building with them.
And this was also derived from my family and my mentors, who always make me feel whole, and good about myself.
Now today my ambitions have changed a little bit, I’d like to go into the field of Biology, maybe cell biology, or genetics, or biochemistry, or really anything.
This is a friend of mine, who I look up to, Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and this is us at TEDMED last year, chatting away.
I feel that no matter what I choose to become, I believe that I can change the world.
And as I’m striving to change the world, I will be happy.
About four years ago, HBO began to film a documentary about my family and me called “Life According to Sam”.
That was a pretty great experience, but it was also four years ago.
And like anyone, my views on many things have changed, and hopefully matured, like my potential career choice.
Like my mentality, and philosophy towards life.
It used to be like this thing that prevents me from doing all this stuff, that causes other kids to die, that causes everybody to be stressed, and now it’s a protein that is abnormal, that weakens the structure of cells.
So, and it takes a burden off of me because now I don’t have to think about Progeria as an entity.
Okay, pretty good, huh?
(Applause) Thank you.
So, as you can see I’ve been thinking this way for many years.
But I’d never really had to apply all of these aspects of my philosophy to the test at one time, until last January.
But knowing that I was going to get better, and looking forward to a time that I would feel good again, helped me to keep moving forward.
Sometimes I faltered, I had bad days, but I realized that being brave isn’t supposed to be easy.
And for me, I feel it’s the key way to keep moving forward.
So, all in all, I don’t waste energy feeling bad for myself.
My school’s homecoming dance is tomorrow night, and I will be there.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
You are bold, you are brilliant, and you are beautiful.
There is no other woman like you.
You are capable.
I'm going to choose to love you.
(Laughter) That's alright. I'm going to keep you.
And cellulite, I have not forgotten about you.
I love you.
It's true, honestly.
I felt free once I realized I was never going to fit the narrow mold that society wanted me to fit in.
And that's OK.
I love every part of me.
My name is Ashley Graham, and I'm a model and body activist.
Over the last 15 years, I've come to the conclusion that there is no one perfect body.
Because I, like you, possess a wonderfully unique and diverse physique.
Now, the fashion industry may persist to label me as "plus size", but I like to think of it as 'my size'.
In fact, did you know that the plus size fashion industry actually starts at a US size 8?
So basically what I'm saying is that the majority of this room right now is considered plus size.
How does it make you feel to be labeled?
I really feel like we need to start looking beyond the plus size model paradigms to what it actually means to be a model in 2015.
My journey begins in Lincoln, Nebraska.
I was 12 years old and scouted in a mall.
At 13, I signed with a major modeling agency and was traveling the world.
At 17, I graduated and moved to New York, and while most kids are going through their self-discovery stage in college, my self discovery stage was in the midst of catwalks, catalogs, and casting calls.
I was working as a full time plus size model.
Back in Nebraska, I was known as the "Fat Model".
The girl who is pretty for a big girl.
I always hated answering that question: "What do you do for a living?"
And, you are reading it correctly, "cantaloupes-large breasts".
I was helping women across America at the age of 15 dress their big boobs.
But you know what the first thing that someone in middle school pointed out to me besides-- well, besides the obvious?
Was that fold above my knee.
As a young model, my confidence was tugged at and pulled in all different directions.
I struggled to achieve true confidence.
And to fill the void on the inside, I began to cave to all the vices being thrown my way.
Between the parties, the men, the alcohol, I was looking for self love, for affirmation from somebody, when in reality, I didn't love who I was, and I couldn't seem to get a handle on regulating my own weight.
I began to face my insecurities head on.
And instead, I was filling my life with temporary fixes.
I, like so many young women, have struggled to love who I am.
And Dove's global report on attitudes towards beauty actually did a survey with thousands of women in ten different countries.
That only 2% of women find themselves beautiful.
We need to work together to redefine the global vision of beauty.
And it starts with becoming your own role model.
As a curvy woman it was the assumption that I should look up to Marilyn Monroe or Jennifer Lopez mainly because they were two of the most notable curvy women in the public eye that were being praised for their curves.
But these weren't my role models.
She told me I was beautiful, and she never devalued herself.
She told me and taught me that true beauty comes from within and that validation and self worth must also come from within.
Plus-size fashion is an 18-billion-dollar industry.
And now IMG, the world's number one modeling agency, has signed me and other models that are not defined by their size.
My body, like my confidence, has been picked apart, manipulated, and controlled by others who didn't necessarily understand it.
I had to learn to reclaim my body as my own.
And in reclaiming my body as my own, I understood as a woman that I had a greater purpose.
I had a greater purpose to redefine beauty.
The feminine beauty.
Curvy models are becoming more and more vocal about the isolating nature of the term plus size.
We are calling ourselves what we want to be called: women with shapes that are our own.
I believe beauty is beyond size.
But you know, people in the fashion industry actually told me that I would never be in magazines let alone the covers of them.
Well, I guess we've proven them wrong.
Five covers in a little over a year.
And I was one of the very first curvy models to be featured in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.
(Applause) Thank you.
I have achieved, and I'm still achieving what was seemingly impossible.
My goal is to give a voice to young women.
To give a voice to young women who struggle to find someone they can look up to.
For women who have relinquished their rights to someone else.
Uplift the important women in your lives.
Be you. Be real. Be authentic.
Be your favorite kind of woman.
Don't let anybody else take that job.
And remember this is the generation of body diversity.
I now invite all of you to #TEDxBV15 with your own self-affirming words.
There may not be a full-length mirror in front of each of you today, but I want to challenge you to think about what you would want to say to yourself in the mirror with your own self-affirming words.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi.
I've got a question for you: how many people here would say they can draw?
They think,"You can either do it, or you can't."
Because when people say they can't draw, I think it's more to do with beliefs rather than talent and ability.
We are not going to be painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.
But would you be happy if, by the end of this session, you could draw pictures a little bit like this?
(Audience murmuring) Oh, yes!
(Laughter) Or even a little bit like this?
(Laughter) Actually, there are only two things you need to do to be able to achieve this.
(Audience) Yes!
That's going to be our first cartoon.
It's a character called Spike.
I'd like you to draw along with me.
I'll draw the first line, you draw, and when you've done that, look up, and I'll know you're ready for the next line.
Start with the nose.
Now the eyes.
That's it.
Next, the mouth. Nice, big smile.
Next, some spiky hair.
Pen to the left of the neck, top of the T-shirt.
Line to the left, line to the right.
(Laughter) OK.
Nose.
Eyes.
Smile.
That's it.
Pen to the left of the mouth, under the hair, little V-shape for the top, line to the left, line to the right.
So we've got another character. Let's call her Thelma.
(Laughter) So, we've got Spike and Thelma.
Another little variation. You're getting the idea.
But this time we'll change the eyes slightly.
Look, two circles together like that.
That's it.
Little circle colored in there.
Next, the ear.
Now, we'll have some fun with the hair, watch.
Nice curly hair.
Line to the left, line to the right.
I think we'll call him Jeff.
You're getting the idea.
(Laughter) So we'll start with a nose again.
Next, the mouth slightly different.
Triangle.
And watch, a couple of triangles to make a little bow.
Triangle at the bottom, rest of the hair.
Drop a line for the neck.
Now the V-shape.
Line to the left, line to the right.
Let's call her Pam.
(Laughter) Take a rest.
You're getting the idea. All we're doing is little variations.
This is a great little technique.
Just draw a nose a bit like Spike's.
Next, draw some frames, so two circles like that with a little bit in between.
Next, the ear.
(Laughter) And then, little bit there.
Hopefully, we've done enough to convince you that in fact we can all draw.
The first example is: I've worked a lot with children and students in schools.
Actually the little ones, they just draw fine, but when they get to about 15 or 16, most of them think they can't draw.
But I worked with them.
I worked this week in a school where I was coaching them on using pictures for memory.
A girl was trying to remember what red blood cells do, and she drew this little picture of a red blood cell carrying a handbag with O2 on it to remind her that the red blood cells carry oxygen to all parts of the body.
The other people I worked with are many adults in all walks of life, and particularly in business, and they often will want to make presentations memorable.
So again, a quick cartoon or sketch could be really good for that.
And again, most people think they can't draw, but take this example.
Couple of wavy lines, little boat could be a metaphor to represent we're all in this together.
Yeah.
But the third example is - you shouldn't have favorites, should you?
This is my favorite.
Have you ever been at the party when someone asks you what you do?
It gets a little bit skeptical when people ask me that.
This lady said to me, well - I said, "I do a little bit of training, and I teach people to draw," and she said, "Would you come along and do some for our group?"
She said, "I work with some people" - she was a volunteer - a group of people who have suffered strokes.
So I said I would, and I booked the time in.
Have you ever done that?
But then, as I got near of the time, I got more apprehensive, because then I was thinking, "I've worked with children, with all sorts of adults; I've never worked with a group like this."
It turns out it was all part of a charity called TALK.
This TALK charity is a wonderful charity that helps people who've suffered strokes, but have a particular condition known as aphasia.
The key thing is it affects their ability to communicate.
But actually, I needn't have worried, because I'm going to show you now the work that they did.
It was one of the best things I've ever done.
I'm going to show you the first slide.
I taught them Spike, just like I did for you, and I want you to see the reaction on their faces when they did this.
(Audience) Oh.
What you can see here are two of the stroke recoverers on the left and right, and one of the volunteer helpers in the center.
Each stroke recoverer, there are about 36 in the room with volunteers as well, there's one-to-one helpers.
Let's look at another picture.
This is a gentleman called David, and he's holding up his picture, and you can tell it was the picture of Spike, can't you?
In fact, I think he's drawn Spike even better there.
But what I didn't realize until even after the session was that the number of the people in this session, including David, were drawing with their wrong hand.
David's stroke meant that it affected the right side of his body, and he drew with his left hand, as many did.
Nobody mentioned it to me, nobody complained.
It was an inspirational session for me.
It was quite a humbling session, one of the best things I felt I've ever done.
At the end of it, I had a lovely email from doctor Mike Jordan, and he's the chair of the TALK group; happens to be a medical doctor, but he's the chair of the group.
It's a bit more than that; this sort of activity really builds their confidence."
So it's great. I thought that was a lovely example to share.
(Audience) Yes.
So start with a big nose, a bit like Spike's.
Little V-shape, line to the left, line to the right.
And you've got Albert Einstein.
How many other beliefs and limiting thoughts do we all carry around with us every day?
Beliefs that we could perhaps potentially challenge and think differently about.
If we did challenge those beliefs and think differently about them, apart from drawing, what else would be possible for us all?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I would like to talk to you about why many ehealth projects fail.
And we think, we like to think, that this is one of the major problems why all -- maybe not all -- but most of the ehealth projects fail, since we stopped listening.
It's a very simple thing. It's got one knob, on/off.
And I put my challenge on 95 kg.
But there's another thing.
As some of you might know, I've got more than 4000 followers on Twitter.
So every morning, I hop on my weight scale and before I'm in my car, people start talking to me, "I think you need a light lunch today, Lucien."
(Laughter) But that's the nicest thing that could happen, since this is peer pressure.
But on the other hand, it also could be used to get people out of their chairs and try to work together in some kind of gaming activity to get more control of their health.
And people will be able, from their homes, to take their blood pressure, send it to their doctor and eventually share it with others, for instance, for over a 100 dollars.
And you can do this with techniques like this, but also by crowdsourcing.
And one of the things we did, that I would like to share with you introduced by a little video.
(Music) (Heart-beat) We've all got navigation controls in our car.
We perfectly know where all the ATMs are, just about the city of Maastricht.
And sure, we could find fast food chains.
But where would be the nearest AED to help this patient?
So what we did, we crowdsourced the Netherlands.
And over 10,000 AEDs in the Netherlands already have been submitted.
We made an application for Layar: Augmented Reality, to find these AEDs.
And whenever you are in a city like Maastricht, and somebody collapses, you can use your iPhone, and within the next weeks also your Microsoft cellphone, to find the nearest AED, which can save lives.
And as of today, we would like to introduce this, not only as AED4EU, which is what the product is called, but also AED4US.
And we would like to start this on a worldwide level.
And ask all of our colleagues in the rest of the world, colleague universities, to help us to find and work and act like a hub to crowdsource all these AEDs all around the world, that whenever you're on holiday and somebody collapses, might it be your own relative or someone just in front of you, you can find this.
The other thing we would like to ask is of companies also all over the world that will be able to help us validate these AEDs.
(Applause)
"Listen.
Do you hear that?"
my grandmother asked me.
"Listen.
With the keenest of ears, I would hear family chatter, laughter, the wind howling and even crickets chirping.
All these sounds crisscrossed into each other, and I would hear rhythm in between.
I have been beating the same plates, shakers, drums, pans and so much more ever since to become a professional drummer and percussionist.
(Applause) As I grew up, subconsciously, I felt a strong urge to hide my newfound hobby.
Even without it being said out loud, I knew that somehow it was wrong to do what I was doing.
In most of the ceremonies, I noticed that most of the women and girls were not in sight, but when they were, I noticed that they would wear their dancing skirts and shake their waists off, singing, clapping, ululating, while the men filled up the rhythm section.
A few years later, I came to understand what tradition and culture meant, and what was considered taboo or otherwise.
In the majority of African cultures, women have been forbidden to play drums and percussion for a very long time.
I believe this taboo stems from the psychological and traditional belief that the woman is an inferior being.
I grew up hearing that the place of the woman is in the kitchen or in the other room.
(Laughter) Women had been brainwashed and led on for so long until we had fallen victim and actually started believing in this ourselves.
This, coupled with the lack of interest to educate women, played a major, major role in etching this into our minds.
The sounds of the drum provoke emotion and movement.
Essentially, the drum is a very sensual instrument.
Once at a festival, a man asked me how I dared put a drum in between my legs.
I have repeatedly been questioned why I would choose to play drums instead of practicing journalism, which I studied for my undergraduate, which has been termed "more decent."
The sight of a woman playing drums enfeebles her, makes her less feminine, less desirable, but all this optimally puts her on a lower social stand.
Drumming has essentially represented the strong African heritage, and its importance can be seen in the many aspects of the African tradition.
However, this same drum is disappearing very fast from the music scene, and the traditional genre is losing its popularity very quickly amongst the people.
Inspired by the need to preserve this culture, I am teaching the significance and the importance of the drum to young boys, women and girls.
In my journey as a percussion teacher, I have realized that very many women actually want to play the drum, but at the same time, they fear it.
Some fear how society will perceive them.
Others fear the physical pain that comes with playing.
Oh yes, it's not that easy.
Some, because their spouses don't approve of them, and others generally fear the responsibility of being a bearer of culture.
I believe, or I think that all these fears are etched in the collective feminine cautiousness because when we learn of the atrocities that have happened to women, continentally especially, it serves as a constant reminder that one step out of our designated place may end up in very serious consequences.
Well, I use my drum to tell my story and my people's stories.
My roots shaped me and my culture is here to stay with me.
Women can be custodians of culture, too.
We are born to bring forth life, to nurture it.
(Applause) We are definitely here to stay.
Thank you.
Basking sharks are awesome creatures.
They grow 10 meters long; some say bigger.
They're the second-largest fish in the world.
They're also harmless plankton-feeding animals.
We're very lucky in Ireland, we have plenty of basking sharks and plenty of opportunities to study them.
They were very important, for the oil out of their liver.
A third of the basking shark's size is their liver, and it's full of oil, gallons of oil.
That oil was used especially for lighting, but also for dressing wounds and other things.
In fact, the streetlights in 1742, of Galway, Dublin and Waterford, were lit with sunfish oil.
"Sunfish" is one of the words for basking sharks.
So they were incredibly important animals.
They've been around a long time, very important to coastal communities.
This is Keem Bay up in Achill Island.
This is probably the biggest threat to sharks worldwide -- the finning of sharks.
We're often frightened of sharks, thanks to "Jaws."
Maybe five or six people get killed by sharks every year.
We kill about 100 million sharks a year.
So I don't know what the balance is, but I think sharks have more right to be fearful of us than we have of them.
It was a well-documented fishery.
As you can see here, it peaked in the '50s, where they were killing 1,500 sharks a year.
And it declined very fast -- a classic boom-and-bust fishery, which suggests that a stock has been depleted or there's low reproductive rates.
They killed about 12,000 sharks within this period, literally just by stringing a Manila rope off the tip of Keem Bay up in Achill Island.
Sharks were still killed up into the mid-80s, especially out of places like Dunmore East in County Waterford.
About two and a half, 3,000 sharks were killed up till '85, mainly by Norwegian vessels.
You can't really see, but these are Norwegian basking shark hunting vessels.
The black line in the crow's nest signifies this is a shark vessel, rather than a whaling vessel.
The importance of basking sharks to the coast communities is recognized through the language.
Another title would be "liop an dá lapa," "the unwieldy beast with two fins."
That's a lovely, evocative name.
On Tory Island -- a strange place anyway -- they were known as "muldoons."
(Laughter) No one seems to know why.
But more commonly all around the island, they were known as the sunfish.
And this represents their habit of basking on the surface when the sun is out.
Some say it's not population decline, it might be a change in the distribution of plankton.
It's been suggested that these sharks would make fantastic indicators of climate change, as they're basically continuous plankton recorders, swimming around with their mouth open.
They're not protected in Ireland; in fact, they have no legislative status in Ireland whatsoever, despite our importance for the species and also the historical context within which basking sharks reside.
We know very little about them.
It's a fantastic opportunity for a scientist to see and experience basking sharks.
It gives us a fantastic opportunity to study them, to get access to them.
What we've been doing for a couple years -- last year was a big year -- is we started tagging sharks, so we could try to get some idea of sight fidelity and movement and things like that.
So we concentrated mainly in North Donegal and West Kerry as the two areas where I was mainly active.
This is a beachcaster rod with a tag on the end.
You go up in your boat and tag the shark.
And we were very effective.
We tagged 105 sharks last summer.
Half the challenge to get access is to be in the right place at the right time.
But it's a very simple, easy technique; I'll show you what it looks like.
We use a pole camera on the boat to actually film the shark.
One, it's to try and work out the gender of the shark.
We also deployed some satellite tags, so we did use high-tech stuff as well.
What they do is store the data.
What happens is, you set the tag to detach from the shark after a fixed period -- in this case, eight months -- and literally to the day, the tag popped off, drifted up, said hello to the satellite and sent, not all the data, but enough data for us to use.
This is the only way to really work out their behavior and movements when they're underwater.
Basically, it spent all its time, the last eight months, in Irish waters.
On Christmas, it was out on the shelf edge.
Colleagues from the Isle of Man last year actually tagged one shark that went from the Isle of Man to Nova Scotia in about 90 days.
Another colleague in the States tagged about 20 sharks off Massachusetts.
His tags didn't really work.
His tags popped off in the Caribbean, and even in Brazil.
We thought basking sharks were temperate animals and lived in our latitudes, but in actual fact, they're obviously crossing the equator as well.
So very simple things like that, we're trying to learn about basking sharks.
One thing that I think is a very surprising and strange thing is just how low the genetic diversity of sharks is.
I'm not a geneticist, so I won't pretend to understand the genetics.
And that's why it's great to have collaboration.
Take me away.
So when they looked at the genetics of basking sharks, they found that the diversity was incredibly low.
If you look at the first line, really, you can see that all these different shark species are all quite similar.
I think this means they're all sharks and they've come from a common ancestry.
But if you look at nucleotide diversity, which is more genetics that are passed on through the parents, you see that basking sharks, if you look at the first study, was order of magnitude less diverse even than other shark species.
You can see this work was only done in 2006.
Before 2006, we had no idea of the genetic variability of basking sharks.
Were there subpopulations?
And that's very important if you want to know what the population size is, and the status of the animals.
So, Les Noble in Aberdeen kind of found this a bit unbelievable, really.
So he did another study using microsatellites, which is much more expensive, much more time-consuming, and to his surprise, came up with almost identical results.
So it does seem to be that basking sharks, for some reason, have incredibly low diversity.
And it's thought maybe it was a genetic bottleneck, thought to have been 12,000 years ago, and this has caused a very low diversity.
And yet, if you look at the whale shark, which is the other plankton-eating large shark, its diversity is much greater.
So it doesn't really make sense at all.
They all basically seem the same.
I don't understand or pretend to understand this; I suspect most geneticists don't either, but they produce the numbers.
So you can actually estimate the population size based on the diversity of the genetics.
That's it -- 8,000 animals in the world.
So what it tells us, actually, is that there's actually a risk of extinction of this species because its population is so small.
In fact, of those 20,000, 8,000 were thought to be females.
They didn't get enough samples to really explore the genetics in enough detail.
So, where do you get samples from for your genetic analysis?
We might get two or three dead sharks washed up in Ireland a year, if we're kind of lucky.
Another source would be fisheries' bycatch.
That's banned now, and that'll be good news for the sharks.
And some are caught in nets, in trawls.
They even put a recipe up on the wall, until they were told it was illegal.
So if you look at all those studies I showed you, the total number of samples worldwide is 86, at present.
So it's very important work, and they can ask some really good questions, and tell us about population size and subpopulations and structure, but they're constrained by lack of samples.
And then when myself and Emmett got back to Malin Head, to the pier, I noticed some black slime on the front of the boat.
I used to spend a lot of time on commercial fishing boats, and I remember fishermen saying they can tell when a basking shark has been caught in a net, because it leaves a black slime behind.
So that must have come from the shark.
We would use conventional methods; I have a crossbow -- you see it in my hand there, which we use to sample whales and dolphins for genetic studies as well.
So I tried that, I tried many techniques.
So I scraped it off.
I had a little tube with alcohol in it to send to the geneticists.
So I scraped the slime off and sent it to Aberdeen, and said, "You might try that."
And they sat on it for months.
It was only because we had a conference on the Isle of Man.
But I kept emailing Les, saying, "Have you had a chance to look at my slime?"
And he was like, "Yeah, yeah. Later."
And he was amazed that they actually got DNA from the slime.
They amplified it and they tested it, and they found, yes, this was actually basking shark DNA, which was got from the slime.
So he was very excited.
And I thought, "Hey, you know, I can build on this."
So we thought, OK, we're going to try to get out and get some slime.
I then thought I'd invest 7.95 -- the price is still on it -- in my local hardware store in Kilrush for a mop handle, and even less money on some oven cleaners.
(Laughter) I was desperate to have an opportunity to get some sharks.
And this was into August now, and normally sharks peak in June, July, and you rarely see them, or rarely can be in the right place to find sharks into August.
We were desperate, so we rushed out to the Blaskets as soon as we heard there were sharks there, and managed to find some sharks.
So by just rubbing the mop handle down the shark as it swam under the boat -- you see a shark running under the boat here -- we managed to collect slime.
Look at that lovely black shark slime.
Five individual sharks were sampled using Simon's Shark Slime Sampling System.
(Laughter) (Applause) I've been working on whales and dolphins in Ireland for 20 years now, and they're a bit more dramatic.
You probably saw the humpback whale footage we got a month or two ago off County Wexford.
So this is possibly going to be my legacy -- Simon's Shark Slime.
One thing that is very useful is that we use a pole camera -- this is my colleague, Joanne, with a pole camera -- where you can look underneath the shark.
So you can quite easily tell the gender of the shark.
If we can tell the gender of the shark before we sample it, we can tell the geneticist this was taken from a male or a female.
Being able to tell the gender of a shark is very important for things like policing the trade in basking shark and other species through the sightings, because it is illegal to trade in these sharks.
And they are caught and are on the market.
So as a field biologist, you just want to get encounters with these animals, and learn as much as you can.
They're often quite brief, they're often very seasonally constrained.
But isn't it fantastic that you can then offer these samples and opportunities to other disciplines, such as the geneticists, who can gain so much more from that.
So as I said, these things are sent to you in strange ways.
(Applause)
Its origins are firmly rooted in the analog age.
The catalyst for this change was the major earthquake that struck Haiti on the 12th of January in 2010.
Haiti was a game changer.
The earthquake destroyed the capital of Port-au-Prince, claiming the lives of some 320,000 people, rendering homeless about 1.2 million people.
Government institutions were completely decapitated, including the presidential palace.
I remember standing on the roof of the Ministry of Justice in downtown Port-au-Prince.
For those of us on the ground in those early days, it was clear for even the most disaster-hardened veterans that Haiti was something different.
But Haiti provided us with something else unprecedented.
Haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world where people have access to mobile smart devices.
Because out of the urban devastation in Port-au-Prince came a torrent of SMS texts -- people crying for help, beseeching us for assistance, sharing data, offering support, looking for their loved ones.
This was a situation that traditional aid agencies had never before encountered.
We were in one of the poorest countries on the planet, but 80 percent of the people had mobile devices in their hands.
Outside Haiti also, things were looking different.
Tens of thousands of so-called digital volunteers were scouring the Internet, converting tweets that had already been converted from texts and putting these into open-source maps, layering them with all sorts of important information -- people like Crisis Mappers and Open Street Map -- and putting these on the Web for everybody -- the media, the aid organizations and the communities themselves -- to participate in and to use.
Back in Haiti, people were increasingly turning to the medium of SMS.
They understood more than we did people's innate need to be connected.
Never having been confronted with this type of situation before, we wanted to try and understand how we could tap into this incredible resource, how we could really leverage this incredible use of mobile technology and SMS technology.
We started talking with a local telecom provider called Voilà, which is a subsidiary of Trilogy International.
We had basically three requirements.
We wanted to communicate in a two-way form of communication.
We wanted to be able to target specific geographic communities.
And we wanted it to be easy to use.
Out of this rubble of Haiti and from this devastation came something that we call TERA -- the Trilogy Emergency Response Application -- which has been used to support the aid effort ever since.
It has been used to help communities prepare for disasters.
It has been used to signal early warning in advance of weather-related disasters.
It's used for public health awareness campaigns such as the prevention of cholera.
And it is even used for sensitive issues such as building awareness around gender-based violence.
But does it work?
We have just published an evaluation of this program, and the evidence that is there for all to see is quite remarkable.
Some 74 percent of people received the data.
Those who were intended to receive the data, 74 percent of them received it.
96 percent of them found it useful.
83 percent of them took action -- evidence that it is indeed empowering.
And 73 percent of them shared it.
The TERA system was developed from Haiti with support of engineers in the region.
It is a user-appropriate technology that has been used for humanitarian good to great effect.
Right across the developing world, citizens and communities are using technology to enable them to bring about change, positive change, in their own communities.
The grassroots has been strengthened through the social power of sharing and they are challenging the old models, the old analog models of control and command.
One illustration of the transformational power of technology is in Kibera.
Kibera is one of Africa's largest slums.
It's on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya.
It's home to an unknown number of people -- some say between 250,000 and 1.2 million.
If you were to arrive in Nairobi today and pick up a tourist map, Kibera is represented as a lush, green national park devoid of human settlement.
Young people living in Kibera in their community, with simple handheld devices, GPS handheld devices and SMS-enabled mobile phones, have literally put themselves on the map.
They have collated crowd-sourced data and rendered the invisible visible.
People like Josh and Steve are continuing to layer information upon information, real-time information, Tweet it and text it onto these maps for all to use.
You can find out about the health centers.
They also have their own news network on YouTube with 36,000 viewers at the moment.
They're showing us what can be done with mobile, digital technologies.
They're showing that the magic of technology can bring the invisible visible.
And they are giving a voice to themselves.
They are telling their own story, bypassing the official narrative.
In Mongolia for instance, where 30 percent of the people are nomadic, SMS information systems are being used to track migration and weather patterns.
And if people are migrating into urban, unfamiliar, concrete environments, they can also be helped in anticipation with social supporters ready and waiting for them based on SMS knowledge.
In Nigeria, open-source SMS tools are being used by the Red Cross community workers to gather information from the local community in an attempt to better understand and mitigate the prevalence of malaria.
And not only is it empowering to the communities, but really importantly, this information stays in the community where it is needed to formulate long-term health polices.
We are on a planet of seven billion people, five billion mobile subscriptions.
By 2015, there will be three billion smartphones in the world.
The U.N. broadband commission has recently set targets to help broadband access in 50 percent of the Developing World, compared to 20 percent today.
We are hurtling towards a hyper-connected world where citizens from all cultures and all social strata will have access to smart, fast mobile devices.
People are understanding, from Cairo to Oakland, that there are new ways to come together, there are new ways to mobilize, there are new ways to influence.
A transformation is coming which needs to be understood by the humanitarian structures and humanitarian models.
The collective voices of people needs to be more integrated through new technologies into the organizational strategies and plans of actions and not just recycled for fundraising or marketing.
We need to, for example, embrace the big data, the knowledge that is there from market leaders who understand what it means to use and leverage big data.
One idea that I'd like you to consider, for instance, is to take a look at our IT departments.
They're normally backroom or basement hardware service providers, but they need to be elevated to software strategists.
We need people in our organizations who know what it's like to work with big data.
We need technology as a core organizational principle.
We need technological strategists in the boardroom who can ask and answer the question, "What would Amazon or Google do with all of this data?"
and convert it to humanitarian good.
The possibilities that new digital technologies are bringing can help humanitarian organizations, not only ensure that people's right to information is met, or that they have their right to communicate, but I think in the future, humanitarian organizations will also have to anticipate the right for people to access critical communication technologies in order to ensure that their voices are heard, that they're truly participating, that they're truly empowered in the humanitarian world.
It has always been the elusive ideal to ensure full participation of people affected by disasters in the humanitarian effort.
We now have the tools. We now have the possibilities.
I believe we need to bring the humanitarian world from analog to digital.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
The world's largest and most devastating environmental and industrial project is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the world, Canada's boreal forest.
It stretches right across Northern Canada, in Labrador, it's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world: the George River caribou herd, numbering approximately 400,000 animals.
Wetlands, globally, are one of the most endangered ecosystems.
They're absolutely critical ecosystems, they clean air, they clean water, they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases, and they're home to a huge diversity of species.
And these incredibly beautiful boreal forests were the inspiration for some of the most famous art in Canadian history, the Group of Seven were very inspired by this landscape, and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our natural heritage, but also an important part of our cultural heritage.
In Manitoba, this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and this is the home of the newly designated UNESCO Cultural Heritage site.
In the North, the boreal is bordered by the tundra, and just below that, in Yukon, we have this incredible valley, the Tombstone Valley.
And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd.
Now you've probably heard about the Porcupine caribou herd in the context of its breeding ground in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Well, the wintering ground is also critical and it also is not protected, and is potentially, could be potentially, exploited for gas and mineral rights.
And I think that one of the reasons why so many of these groups have retained a link to the past, know their native languages, the songs, the dances, the traditions, I think part of that reason is because of the remoteness, the span and the wilderness of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem.
And I think particularly now, as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis, we can learn so much from these people who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem for over 10,000 years.
In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis of all of these values that we've been talking about, and I think these are some of the core values that make us proud to be Canadians.
This is the Alberta tar sands, the largest oil reserves on the planet outside of Saudi Arabia.
And the mining and the exploitation of that is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before.
If you look at that truck there, it is the largest truck of its kind on the planet.
It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high.
Within the dimensions of that truck, you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home quite easily.
So instead of thinking of that as a truck, think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home.
That's not a bad size home.
And line those trucks / homes back and forth across there from the bottom all the way to the top.
And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is.
Now, here you see -- of course, as you go further on, these trucks become like a pixel.
That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area, probably much larger than the city of Victoria.
And this is just one of a number of mines, 10 mines so far right now.
This is one section of one mining complex, and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process.
The other method of extraction is what's called the in situ.
And here, massive amounts of water are superheated and pumped through the ground, through these vasts networks of pipelines, seismic lines, drill paths, compressor stations.
It impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness, where there is 90 percent reduction of key species, like woodland caribou and grizzly bears, and it consumes even more energy, more water, and produces at least as much greenhouse gas.
So these in situ developments are at least as ecologically damaging as the mines.
The oil produced from either method produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil.
This is one of the reasons why it's called the world's dirtiest oil.
It's also one of the reasons why it is the largest and fastest-growing single source of carbon in Canada, and it is also a reason why Canada is now number three in terms of producing carbon per person.
So they decided to call it oil sands.
The tar sands consume more water than any other oil process, three to five barrels of water are taken, polluted and then returned into tailings ponds, the largest toxic impoundments on the planet.
SemCrude, just one of the licensees, in just one of their tailings ponds, dumps 250,000 tons of this toxic gunk every single day.
So far, this is enough toxin to cover the face of Lake Erie a foot deep.
And the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres.
That's two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan.
That's like from Wall Street at the southern edge of Manhattan up to maybe 120th Street.
And you can see in the context, it's just a relatively small section of one of 10 mining complexes and another 40 to 50 on stream to be approved soon.
And of course, these tailings ponds -- well, you can't see many ponds from outer space and you can see these, so maybe we should stop calling them ponds -- these massive toxic wastelands are built unlined and on the banks of the Athabasca River.
And the Athabasca River drains downstream to a range of aboriginal communities.
In Fort Chipewyan, the 800 people there, are finding toxins in the food chain, this has been scientifically proven.
The tar sands toxins are in the food chain, and this is causing cancer rates up to 10 times what they are in the rest of Canada.
The incredibly high price of flying food into these remote Northern aboriginal communities and the high rate of unemployment makes this an absolute necessity for survival.
And not that many years ago, I was lent a boat by a First Nations man, and he said, "When you go out on the river, do not under any circumstances eat the fish.
It's carcinogenic."
And as a parent, I just can't imagine what that does to your soul.
And that's what we're doing.
The boreal forest is also perhaps our best defense against global warming and climate change.
The boreal forest sequesters more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem.
And what we're doing is we're destroying this carbon sink, turning it into a carbon bomb.
And we're replacing that with the largest industrial project in the history of the world, which is producing the most high-carbon greenhouse-gas emitting oil in the world.
And we're doing this on the second largest oil reserves on the planet.
This is one of the reasons why Canada, originally a climate change hero -- we were one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Accord.
Now we're the country that has full-time lobbyists in the European Union and Washington DC, threatening trade wars when these countries talk about wanting to bring in positive legislation to limit the import of high-carbon fuels, of greenhouse gas emissions, anything like this, at international conferences, whether they're in Copenhagen or Cancun, international conferences on climate change, we're the country that gets the dinosaur award every single day, as being the biggest obstacle to progress on this issue.
Just 70 miles downstream is the world's largest freshwater delta, the Peace-Athabasca Delta, the only one at the juncture of all four migratory flyways.
This is a globally significant wetland, perhaps the greatest on the planet.
Incredible habitat for half the bird species you find in North America, migrating here.
And also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison, and also, of course, critical habitat for another whole range of other species.
But it too is being threatened by the massive amount of water being drawn from the Athabasca, which feeds these wetlands, and also the incredible toxic burden of the largest toxic unlined impoundments on the planet, which are leaching in to the food chain for all the species downstream.
So as bad as all that is, things are going to get much worse -- much, much worse.
This is the infrastructure as we see it about now.
This is what's planned for 2015.
And you can see here the Keystone Pipeline, which would take tar sands raw down to the Gulf Coast, punching a pipeline through the agricultural heart of North America, of the United States, and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world by consumption of the United States, and promoting a huge disincentive to a sustainable clean-energy future for America.
Here you see the route down the Mackenzie valley.
This would put a pipeline to take natural gas from the Beaufort Sea through the heart of the third largest watershed basin in the world, and the only one which is 95 percent intact.
And building a pipeline with an industrial highway would change forever this incredible wilderness, which is a true rarity on the planet today.
So the Great Bear Rainforest is just over the hill there, within a few miles, we go from these dry boreal forests of 100-year-old trees, maybe 10 inches across, and soon, we're in the coastal temperate rainforest, rain-drenched, 1,000-year-old trees, 20 feet across, a completely different ecosystem.
And the Great Bear Rainforest is generally considered to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world.
And yet there's a proposal, of course, to build a pipeline to take huge tankers, 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez, through some of the most difficult-to-navigate waters in the world, where only just a few years ago, a BC ferry ran aground.
When one of these tar sands tankers, carrying the dirtiest oil, 10 times as much as the Exxon Valdez, eventually hits a rock and goes down, we're going to have one of the worst ecological disasters this planet has ever seen.
And here we have the plan out to 2030.
In doing so, we'll be removing a large part of our greatest carbon sink and replacing it with the most high greenhouse-gas emission oil in the future.
The world does not need any more tar mines.
The world does not need any more pipelines to wed our addiction to fossil fuels.
And the world certainly does not need the largest toxic impoundments to grow and multiply and further threaten the downstream communities.
And let's face it, we all live downstream in an era of global warming and climate change.
What we need, is we all need to act to ensure that Canada respects the massive amounts of freshwater that we hold in this country.
We need to ensure that these wetlands and forests that are our best and greatest and most critical defense against global warming are protected, and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere.
And we need to all gather together and say no to the tar sands.
there is a huge network all over the world, fighting to stop this project.
Everyone in this room, everyone across Canada, everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play and, I think, a responsibility.
Because what we do here is going to change our history, it's going to color our possibility to survive, and for our children to survive and have a rich future.
It could destroy the Athabasca Delta, the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet.
It could destroy the Great Bear Rainforest, the largest temperate rainforest in the world.
And it could have huge impacts on the future of the agricultural heartland of North America.
I hope that you will all, if you've been moved by this presentation, join with the growing international community to get Canada to step up to its responsibilities, to convince Canada to go back to being a climate change champion instead of a climate change villain, and to say no to the tar sands, and yes to a clean energy future for all.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
The sky is inherently democratic.
But like so many beautiful things around us, it's slipping away from us, and we haven't even noticed, because we're honestly not really looking.
Well, we look at our phones, we look at our computers, we look at screens of all kinds.
And honestly, we rarely even take the trouble to look up enough to see each other, let alone taking that next step to looking up at the actual sky.
Now, there's a tendency to think that the loss of our dark night skies is the inevitable outcome of progress, change, technology.
And you know, that's just simply not true.
I never saw a truly dark night sky until I was 15.
I was here, in Arizona.
You see, I'm from New York City, and in New York, you can see the moon, you can see a couple of stars.
As a result, most of my colleagues who are astronomers spent at least part of their youth looking up at the sky in their backyard.
I don't really know many constellations.
But I'll never forget that experience of the first time I saw the dark night sky.
And I was just flabbergasted at how many stars there were.
And I felt tiny.
Then I also felt like, "Where's this been hiding this whole time?
Who's been hiding this sky from me?"
Take a look at our planet.
This is our planet from space.
Unlike stars, which are hot and glow invisible light so we can see them, our planet is, astronomically speaking, pretty cold.
So it doesn't really glow.
When you see the planet looking like a blue-green marble the way it does in this picture, you're seeing it because the sunlight is reflecting off of it, and that's why you can see the oceans, the clouds, the land.
This is our earth at night, and it is one of the most striking examples of how we have affected our planet on a global scale.
Now, of course, there are broad expanses of ocean that are still dark, and in many underdeveloped areas there's still darkness.
We tend to think, when we think of places being lit up, of very extreme examples -- Times Square, the Vegas Strip.
But really what that picture shows you is that it's not just these extreme examples, it's anywhere that uses outdoor lighting.
This tends to be a really dramatic effect on the ground.
An individual light bulb can light up your whole room, more or less.
All of that light that gets scattered outwards and upwards doesn't actually help you light the area around you.
What it does is scatters up into the sky and becomes what we call "light pollution."
Even if you don't care anything about stargazing, this should worry you, because it means that 60-70% of the energy we use to light the outdoors is wasted by blotting out the stars.
Now, like I said, I'm a big fan of technology.
Obviously, I use technology every day; I'm a scientist.
And there's this tendency to say that it's progress that -- you know, I'm not suggesting we're going to all go live by candlelight.
Indeed, technology is allowing us to access the sky in ways that are impossible otherwise.
One of the greatest examples of this is, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble went up into space, it returns pictures daily, and it allows us to see things that we are incapable of seeing with our naked eye, in ways that we've never been able to do before in all of human history.
Other examples of this would be planetarium shows.
In the past couple of years, planetarium shows have become more high-tech with these great visualizations, and even though this isn't access directly to the sky, it's at least access to our knowledge about the sky.
And indeed, we can experience the sky in a planetarium in a way that is impossible for us to do just sitting out and looking in the dark.
All of you have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope and of planetariums.
But there are also ways for technology to enable participation in people's experience of the sky that you may not be familiar with.
These are called "citizen science projects."
Citizen science is when large research projects put their data online, teach ordinary people, like you, to go and interact with that data and actually contribute to the research by making interesting or necessary characterizations about it.
One such example of this is what I'm showing here, called "Galaxy Zoo."
Galaxy Zoo is a project where people get a 20-minute -- even less than that, actually -- tutorial on how to interact with these images of galaxies.
They learn to annotate the images, and within a couple of minutes, they're up and running, and they're making really useful categorizations and classifications of these galaxies.
Now, it's easy to understand why Galaxy Zoo would be an easy sell for people to be involved with: it involves pretty pictures; galaxies are, generally speaking, pretty attractive.
However, there are many other flavors of citizen science projects that people have delved into that have varying levels of abstraction, that you wouldn't necessarily think people would jump at.
One such example of this is the citizen science project associated with the mission that I'm part of, called the Kepler Mission.
Kepler is a space telescope and it looks for planets around other stars by measuring the light from those stars very precisely.
And we're looking for the dimmings caused by stars blocking off some of that light.
We have an associated citizen science project called "Planet Hunters."
Planet Hunters gives you, like Galaxy Zoo, a short tutorial, and within a couple of minutes, you're up and running; you're looking at data from the Kepler Mission and looking for planets.
However, not only are people interested in doing this, but the citizen scientists that work with Planet Hunters have actually found planets in the data that would have gone undiscovered otherwise.
You'll see that all the people who contributed are listed below, and it's sort of an odd amalgam of people's real names and their log-in names.
You'll notice if you look carefully, this is the first academic acknowledgment of the importance of Irish coffee in the discovery process.
(Laughter) I don't want to give you the idea that these are some out-of-work scientists or just a bunch of nerds that are really into this.
There are 60,000 people who participate in these projects, and most of them don't have technical backgrounds.
So clearly, what this is feeding into is people's curiosity and their willingness to be part of the scientific discovery process.
People want to do this.
But all of this technology and all these digitally mediated ways of experiencing the sky still have something of a feel to me like looking at an animal in a zoo.
It's a valid way of experiencing that thing -- indeed, the lion in the cage is still real, the Hubble images are indeed real, and you can get closer to a lion in a zoo than you can in the wild.
It's missing that savage beauty of experiencing that very thing in the wild for yourself, unmediated by a screen.
The experience of looking up and knowing that the sky you're looking at surrounds every known living thing in the universe is very profound.
Think about that for a moment.
We are the only planet we know of that has life on it.
One of the things that I really like about my work is that it allows me to step back from my every day and to experience the larger context, this feeling that just as we go out and try to find planets in the universe that might be like ours, it always reminds me of how precious what we have here is.
Our night sky is like a natural resource, it's as though it's a park that you can visit without ever having to travel there.
But like any natural resource, if we don't protect it, if we don't preserve it and treasure it, it will slip away from us and be gone.
So if you're interested in this, and this is something you want to learn more about, I encourage you in particular to visit darksky.org and to learn more about the choices you can make that can protect the dark night sky, because it belongs to everyone, it belongs to all of us, and therefore, it's ours to experience as we wish.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things.
Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many.
I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography -- or rather the biographies -- of one particular object, one remarkable thing.
It's about the size of a rugby ball.
It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun.
But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East.
And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet.
The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change.
And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast -- because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC.
And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling.
What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures.
And you all know roughly the story.
Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon.
He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple.
And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon.
Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast.
And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels.
He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia.
And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell.
It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people.
It's a great story. It's story we all know.
What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story.
Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight -- the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus.
And Cyrus makes a declaration.
And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people.
In ringing Babylonian -- it was written in Babylonian -- he says, "I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world."
This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got.
And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do?
He'll let them return to their countries.
And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place.
This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home.
They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple.
It's a central document in Jewish history.
This is the Jewish version of the same story.
"Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem.
Who is there among you of his people?
The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism.
As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism.
And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay.
Two great texts, what about the politics?
What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history.
The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire.
Cyrus begins in the 530s BC.
And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control.
This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it.
It was the largest empire the world had known until then.
Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale.
It had to be run in different languages.
The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing.
And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths.
Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society.
And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander.
It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.
The Greek invasions ended that.
But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central.
The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book "Cyropaedia" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler.
And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model.
And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution.
Jefferson was a great admirer -- the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state.
After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost -- until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon.
We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures.
No other evidence.
Suddenly, this appeared.
And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true.
It's a great 19th century moment.
But -- and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated -- the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated.
Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect.
And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk.
"Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name."
Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon.
Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free.
And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk.
The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this.
And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel -- the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people.
The question is, which god was it?
And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk.
And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me."
And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk.
Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts.
(Laughter) That's 1879.
40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world.
This time, the real politics of the contemporary world -- the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return.
And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side -- the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem.
You all know what happened.
The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over.
And another story of the cylinder begins.
The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah.
And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder.
When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty.
Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah.
10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979.
Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran -- until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks.
Then another Iran-Iraq war.
And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won.
It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians -- Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout.
And the obvious emblem is Cyrus.
It's the only object they want.
They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder.
And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time.
It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani.
It was a huge event.
This is the other side of that same picture.
And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of.
To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it.
It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad.
Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed?
Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated?
Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran.
And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today.
It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration.
It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta.
It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region.
A replica of this is at the United Nations.
In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place.
And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures.
It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories.
And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder?
The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely -- a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate.
But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers, for his storytelling, but even more, I think, for the beauty and precision of his prose.
Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable, vivid journey in translation.
Now I was a comparative literature major in college, which is like an English major, only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months, we got to read great literature in translation from around the world.
But not so with Márquez who once praised his translator's versions as being better than his own, which is an astonishing compliment.
It's called apropos of the Italian adage that I lifted from his forward, "If This Be Treason."
Now maybe that's been obvious to all of you for a long time, but for me, as often as I'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis, I had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light.
Ever since I can remember thinking consciously about such things, communication has been my central passion.
Even as a child, I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else.
So no ego problems.
It's funny, my wife, Daisy, whose family is littered with schizophrenics -- and I mean littered with them -- once said to me, "Chris, I already have a brother who thinks he's God.
I don't need a husband who wants to be."
Interestingly, when your opening line of communication is, "Hey, listen up, because I'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you," it's amazing how quickly you'll discover both ice and the firing squad.
And that's when I discovered comedy.
Now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language.
And I'm not talking about all comedy here, because, clearly, there's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel.
What I want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives -- comedy as the philosopher's stone.
It takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world.
Because that's what I take from the theme of this conference: Gained in Translation.
That it's about communication that doesn't just produce greater understanding within the individual, but leads to real change.
It's part of our survival package, and that's why it's become so important for us, and that's why we're always listening at that level.
And also because that's where, in terms of our own self-interest, we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond, our responsibility to the rest of the world.
Now if you think back on Tina Fey's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, they were devastating.
Fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate's fundamental lack of seriousness, cementing an impression that the majority of the American public still holds today.
And the key detail of this is that Fey's scripts weren't written by her and they weren't written by the SNL writers.
(Laughter) Here was a Palin impersonator quoting Palin word for word.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the first time that I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful John Edwards as the Breck girl I knew that he'd made a direct hit.
The description perfectly captured Edwards' personal vanity.
That ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career.
Now The Daily Show with John Stewart is by far the most -- (Applause) (Laughter) it's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy.
Survey after survey, from Pew Research to the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, has found that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows.
(Applause) Now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of Stewart's viewers, the larger point remains that Stewart's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts -- not because his intent is to inform. It's not.
His intent is to be funny.
It just so happens that Stewart's brand of funny doesn't work unless the facts are true.
And the result is great comedy that's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media.
Now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection.
A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's going over here and then all of a sudden you're transported over here.
And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain.
And just like that, you've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses.
This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate.
And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest -- race, religion, politics, sexuality -- only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view.
I have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda, which starts off by asking, how radical is the gay agenda?
Because from what I can tell, the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military, get married and start a family.
(Laughter) Three things I've tried to avoid my entire life.
(Laughter) And that's followed by these lines about gay adoption: What is the problem with gay adoption?
Why is this remotely controversial?
If you have a baby and you think that baby's gay, you should be allowed to put it up for adoption.
Now by taking the biblical epithet "abomination" and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence, a baby, this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity, through their laughter, to question its validity.
Misdirection isn't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve.
Economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy.
There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline.
(Laughter) That's an entire childhood in three words.
And one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it's inherently viral.
People can't wait to pass along that new great joke.
And this isn't some new phenomenon of our wired world.
Comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the Internet, social media, even cable TV.
Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident, I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that.
And I heard the exact same punchline on both coasts -- something about the Ignited Negro College Fund.
Clearly, it didn't come out of a Tonight Show monologue.
And my guess here -- and I have no research on this -- is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it, you'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession.
First there were drums and then knock-knock jokes.
(Laughter) But it's when you put all of these elements together -- when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that's crafted from honesty and integrity, it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation.
Now I have a close friend, Joel Pett, who's the editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader.
And he used to be the USA Today Monday morning guy.
I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009.
So we started talking about climate change.
And it turned out that Joel and I were both bothered by the same thing, which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or wasn't, which, to both of us, seems somewhat intentionally off point.
Because first of all, there's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists.
Now Governor Perry of my newly-adopted state of Texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, proclaiming over and over that the science wasn't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of Texas were on fire.
And Perry's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain.
Personally, I was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science.
(Laughter) But back in 2009, the question Joel and I kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science.
So we tossed it back and forth until Joel came up with this.
Cartoon: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
Not for God, not for country, not for profit -- just as a basic metric for global decision-making.
Shortly after the conference was over, Joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the EPA in Washington whose wall it now hangs on.
And it didn't stop there.
To date, Joel's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe.
(Applause) That is a lot of punch for 14 words.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago.
I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali.
And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic "The Mahabharata."
So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky.
Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out.
Now we do the same with drills and machines.
The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery.
And this made me really sad.
I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe.
I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends.
And it felt like technology should enable magic, not kill it.
When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch.
And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me.
It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination.
They stopped us from being inspired.
And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it.
And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world.
It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch.
Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial.
So it says, "Place your fingers upon each light."
And actually I become a character in the book.
At various points, a little letter drops down to me -- and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS -- which is actually addressed to me.
The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities.
Now I've been talking a lot about magic.
And I don't mean wizards and dragons, I mean the kind of childhood magic, those ideas that we all harbored as children.
This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason, was always really exciting to me.
Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble.
And so over here, each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device.
All along, all fantasy books have always had maps, but these maps have been static.
This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book.
Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary.
Over here, these are the Apsaras.
So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras?
These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book.
And so we're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children.
And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis.
(Music) Speaking of the environmental crisis, I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out.
But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology.
One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects.
When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells.
And somehow kids don't do that anymore.
So in bringing back this childhood ritual, you need to go out and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower and then tag it.
In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that.
A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, "Oh, I saw a fox today."
A child in India says, "I saw a monkey today."
In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities.
In the next book, we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality, you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that's outside your house.
At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves.
And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book.
We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together.
We're harnessing energy from the sun.
We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to talk about Save More Tomorrow.
It's a program that Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and I devised maybe 15 years ago.
Now you might ask, what is behavioral finance?
So let's think about how we manage our money.
Let's start with mortgages.
A lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford, and actually slightly bigger than that.
And then they blame the banks for being the bad guys who gave them the mortgages.
Let's also think about how we manage risks -- for example, investing in the stock market.
Two years ago, three years ago, about four years ago, markets did well.
These losses, they feel, emotionally, they feel very different from what we actually thought about it when markets were going up."
So we're probably not doing a great job when it comes to risk taking.
I would bet many more of you insure your iPhone -- you're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty.
What if you lose your iPhone?
I see a lot of hands coming down.
I would predict, if you're a representative sample, that many more of you insure your iPhones than your lives, even when you have kids.
We're not doing that well when it comes to insurance.
And I know it sounds crazy.
No one.
Behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics, trying to understand the money mistakes people make.
And I can keep standing here for the 12 minutes and 53 seconds that I have left and make fun of all sorts of ways we manage money, and at the end you're going to ask, "How can we help people?"
And that's what I really want to focus on today.
How do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make, and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions?
I want to address the issue of savings.
We have on the screen a representative sample of 100 Americans.
First thing to notice is, half of them do not even have access to a 401(k) plan.
They cannot have money go away from their paycheck into a 401(k) plan before they see it, before they can touch it.
What about the remaining half of the people?
Some of them elect not to save.
They're just too lazy.
How many people end up saving to a 401(k) plan?
One third of Americans.
Two thirds are not saving now.
Are they saving enough?
Nine out of 10 either cannot save through their 401(k) plan, decide not to save -- or don't decide -- or save too little.
We think we have a problem of people saving too much.
We have one person -- well, actually we're going to slice him in half because it's less than one percent.
Roughly half a percent of Americans feel that they save too much.
That's what I really want to focus on.
We have to understand why people are not saving, and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions, and then see how powerful it might be.
So let me divert for a second as we're going to identify the problems, the challenges, the behavioral challenges, that prevent people from saving.
Suppose we had another wonderful TED event next week.
And during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate.
How many of you think you would like to have bananas during this hypothetical TED event next week?
Wonderful.
Well that's at least what one wonderful study predicted.
And then count down the days and see what people ended up eating.
What does it have to do with time and savings, this issue of immediate gratification?
We think about saving. We know we should be saving.
We know we'll do it next year, but today let us go and spend.
Christmas is coming, we might as well buy a lot of gifts for everyone we know.
So this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving, but end up spending.
Let me now talk about another behavioral obstacle to saving having to do with inertia.
Wonderful study comparing different countries.
We're going to look at two similar countries, Germany and Austria.
And in Germany, if you would like to donate your organs -- God forbid something really bad happens to you -- when you get your driving license or an I.D., you check the box saying, "I would like to donate my organs."
Not many people like checking boxes.
Twelve percent do.
Austria, a neighboring country, slightly similar, slightly different.
What's the difference?
You will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not.
But when you get your driving license, you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ.
That's kind of too much effort.
One percent check the box. The rest do nothing.
Doing nothing is very common.
In Germany, 12 percent check the box.
Twelve percent are organ donors.
Huge shortage of organs, God forbid, if you need one.
Therefore, 99 percent of people are organ donors.
Inertia, lack of action.
Very powerful.
We're going to talk about what happens if people are overwhelmed and scared to make their 401(k) choices.
In too many 401(k) plans, if people do nothing, it means they're not saving for retirement, if they don't check the box.
And checking the box takes effort.
One more before we flip the challenges into solutions, having to do with monkeys and apples.
No, no, no, this is a real study and it's got a lot to do with behavioral economics.
One group of monkeys gets an apple, they're pretty happy.
The other group gets two apples, one is taken away.
They still have an apple left.
This is the notion of loss aversion.
We hate losing stuff, even if it doesn't mean a lot of risk.
Those 20 dollars might have been a quick lunch.
So this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too, because people, mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because I have to cut my spending.
So we talked about all sorts of behavioral challenges having to do with savings eventually.
We talked about inertia and organ donations and checking the box.
If people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401(k) plan, they're going to keep procrastinating and not join.
And last, we talked about loss aversion, and the monkeys and the apples.
If people frame mentally saving for retirement as a loss, they're not going to be saving for retirement.
So we've got these challenges, and what Richard Thaler and I were always fascinated by -- take behavioral finance, make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action -- flip the challenges into solutions.
And we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called Save More, not today, Tomorrow.
Save More Tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year -- sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas, volunteering more in the community, exercising more and doing all the right things on the planet.
Now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action.
It's an autopilot.
Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more, they have to spend less, and that's painful.
Well, maybe it shouldn't be just January.
Maybe we should make people save more when they make more money.
So that is the program, embarrassingly simple, but as we're going to see, extremely powerful.
We first implemented it, Richard Thaler and I, back in 1998.
Mid-sized company in the Midwest, blue collar employees struggling to pay their bills repeatedly told us they cannot save more right away.
We invited them to save three percentage points more every time they get a pay raise.
And here are the results.
It's real.
It's not just numbers on a piece of paper.
This is a real difference.
By now, about 60 percent of the large companies actually have programs like this in place.
It's been part of the Pension Protection Act.
And needless to say that Thaler and I have been blessed to be part of this program and make a difference.
One is behavioral finance is extremely powerful.
This is just one example.
Message two is there's still a lot to do.
This is really the tip of the iceberg.
If you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it, we need to think about that.
If you're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they're taking or taking too little risk, we need to think about that.
If you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets, we need to think about that.
The average actually, the record is in Singapore.
The average household spends $4,000 a year on lottery tickets.
One last question: How many of you feel comfortable that as you're planning for retirement you have a really solid plan when you're going to retire, when you're going to claim Social Security benefits, what lifestyle to expect, how much to spend every month so you're not going to run out of money?
Less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience.
Behavioral finance has a long way.
There's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go -- that small girl now living in San Francisco and speaking to you today.
It is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together.
He is a poet, a playwright, a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country's unity and freedom.
Imagine him as the communists enter Saigon -- confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste.
Words, for so long his friends, now mocked him.
He retreated into silence.
He is my grandfather.
But our lives are much more than our memories.
My grandmother never let me forget his life.
My duty was not to allow it to have been in vain, and my lesson was to learn that, yes, history tried to crush us, but we endured.
The next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea.
My mother, Mai, was 18 when her father died -- already in an arranged marriage, already with two small girls.
For her, life had distilled itself into one task: the escape of her family and a new life in Australia.
It was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed.
All the adults knew the risks.
The greatest fear was of pirates, rape and death.
Like most adults on the boat, my mother carried a small bottle of poison.
If we were captured, first my sister and I, then she and my grandmother would drink.
My first memories are from the boat -- the steady beat of the engine, the bow dipping into each wave, the vast and empty horizon.
I don't remember the pirates who came many times, but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat, or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours.
But I do remember the lights on the oil rig off the Malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died, the journey's end too much for him, and the first apple I tasted, given to me by the men on the rig.
After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne.
And the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together.
We settled in Footscray, a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants.
Unlike the settled middle-class suburbs, whose existence I was oblivious of, there was no sense of entitlement in Footscray.
And the snippets of halting English were exchanged between people who had one thing in common: They were starting again.
My mother worked on farms, then on a car assembly line, working six days, double shifts.
We were poor.
Two pairs of stockings for school, each to hide the holes in the other.
There was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying, "I will bypass you."
My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed.
My mother was exhausted each night, but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house.
My mother suffered from nightmares, all about the boat.
And my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so I could wake her.
And the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition, angry and inflexible, and troubled children caught between two worlds.
Grants and sponsors were sought.
Centers were established.
I lived in parallel worlds.
In one, I was the classic Asian student, relentless in the demands that I made on myself.
In the other, I was enmeshed in lives that were precarious, tragically scarred by violence, drug abuse and isolation.
And for that work, when I was a final-year law student, I was chosen as the Young Australian of the Year.
I didn't know the protocols.
I didn't know how to use the cutlery.
I told my mother I couldn't do it.
She reminded me that I was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat.
"Just do it," she said, "and don't be what you're not."
So I spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and disenfranchised.
And the more candidly I spoke, the more I was asked to speak.
I met people from all walks of life, so many of them doing the thing they loved, living on the frontiers of possibility.
And even though I finished my degree, I realized I could not settle into a career in law.
And I realized, at the same time, that it is OK to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene -- and not just OK, but something to be thankful for, perhaps a gift from the boat.
Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons, can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province.
I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not in the way that you fear.
Possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged.
There was an energy there, an implacable optimism, a strange mixture of humility and daring.
I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label "It can't be done" was an irresistible challenge.
For a year, we were penniless.
At the end of each day, I made a huge pot of soup which we all shared.
Most of our ideas were crazy, but a few were brilliant, and we broke through.
I made the decision to move to the US after only one trip.
Three months later, I had relocated, and the adventure has continued.
Before I close, though, let me tell you about my grandmother.
Life hadn't changed for centuries.
Her father died soon after she was born.
At 17, she became the second wife of a mandarin whose mother beat her.
With no support from her husband, she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case, and a far greater sensation when she won.
(Laughter) (Applause) "It can't be done" was shown to be wrong.
I was taking a shower in a hotel room in Sydney the moment she died, 600 miles away, in Melbourne.
I looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side.
I knew she had come to say goodbye.
A few days later, we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and sat around her casket.
My mother asked us to feel her hand.
She asked the monk, "Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?"
Given who we were and how life had shaped us, we can now see that the men that might have come into our lives would have thwarted us.
I don't know.
(Applause) Trevor Neilson: And also, Tan's mother is here today, in the fourth or fifth row.
(Applause)
I'm a computer science professor, and my area of expertise is computer and information security.
When I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity to overhear my grandmother describing to one of her fellow senior citizens what I did for a living.
Apparently, I was in charge of making sure that no one stole the computers from the university. (Laughter) And, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for her to think, because I told her I was working in computer security, and it was interesting to get her perspective.
But that's not the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say about my work.
The most ridiculous thing I ever heard is, I was at a dinner party, and a woman heard that I work in computer security, and she asked me if -- she said her computer had been infected by a virus, and she was very concerned that she might get sick from it, that she could get this virus. (Laughter) And I'm not a doctor, but I reassured her that it was very, very unlikely that this would happen, but if she felt more comfortable, she could be free to use latex gloves when she was on the computer, and there would be no harm whatsoever in that.
What I'm going to talk to you about today are some hacks, some real world cyberattacks that people in my community, the academic research community, have performed, which I don't think most people know about, and I think they're very interesting and scary, and this talk is kind of a greatest hits of the academic security community's hacks.
So the first one I'm going to talk about are implanted medical devices.
Now medical devices have come a long way technologically.
You can see in 1926 the first pacemaker was invented.
1960, the first internal pacemaker was implanted, hopefully a little smaller than that one that you see there, and the technology has continued to move forward.
In 2006, we hit an important milestone from the perspective of computer security.
And why do I say that?
One thing that brings us close to home is we look at Dick Cheney's device, he had a device that pumped blood from an aorta to another part of the heart, and as you can see at the bottom there, it was controlled by a computer controller, and if you ever thought that software liability was very important, get one of these inside of you.
Now what a research team did was they got their hands on what's called an ICD.
This is a defibrillator, and this is a device that goes into a person to control their heart rhythm, and these have saved many lives.
Well, in order to not have to open up the person every time you want to reprogram their device or do some diagnostics on it, they made the thing be able to communicate wirelessly, and what this research team did is they reverse engineered the wireless protocol, and they built the device you see pictured here, with a little antenna, that could talk the protocol to the device, and thus control it.
In order to make their experience real -- they were unable to find any volunteers, and so they went and they got some ground beef and some bacon and they wrapped it all up to about the size of a human being's area where the device would go, and they stuck the device inside it to perform their experiment somewhat realistically.
They launched many, many successful attacks.
I don't know why you would want to do that, but I sure wouldn't want that done to me.
And they were able to change therapies, including disabling the device -- and this is with a real, commercial, off-the-shelf device -- simply by performing reverse engineering and sending wireless signals to it.
There was a piece on NPR that some of these ICDs could actually have their performance disrupted simply by holding a pair of headphones onto them.
Now, wireless and the Internet can improve health care greatly.
There's several examples up on the screen of situations where doctors are looking to implant devices inside of people, and all of these devices now, it's standard that they communicate wirelessly, and I think this is great, but without a full understanding of trustworthy computing, and without understanding what attackers can do and the security risks from the beginning, there's a lot of danger in this.
This is a car, and it has a lot of components, a lot of electronics in it today.
In fact, it's got many, many different computers inside of it, more Pentiums than my lab did when I was in college, and they're connected by a wired network.
There's also a wireless network in the car, which can be reached from many different ways.
So there's Bluetooth, there's the FM and XM radio, there's actually wi-fi, there's sensors in the wheels that wirelessly communicate the tire pressure to a controller on board.
The modern car is a sophisticated multi-computer device.
And what happens if somebody wanted to attack this?
Well, that's what the researchers that I'm going to talk about today did.
Now, they have two areas they can attack.
One is short-range wireless, where you can actually communicate with the device from nearby, either through Bluetooth or wi-fi, and the other is long-range, where you can communicate with the car through the cellular network, or through one of the radio stations.
Think about it. When a car receives a radio signal, it's processed by software.
That software has to receive and decode the radio signal, and then figure out what to do with it, even if it's just music that it needs to play on the radio, and that software that does that decoding, if it has any bugs in it, could create a vulnerability for somebody to hack the car.
The way that the researchers did this work is, they read the software in the computer chips that were in the car, and then they used sophisticated reverse engineering tools to figure out what that software did, and then they found vulnerabilities in that software, and then they built exploits to exploit those.
They actually carried out their attack in real life.
The first threat model was to see what someone could do if an attacker actually got access to the internal network on the car.
The other threat model is that they contact you in real time over one of the wireless networks like the cellular, or something like that, never having actually gotten physical access to your car.
This is what their setup looks like for the first model, where you get to have access to the car.
Once you have control of the car's computers, you can do anything.
Well, what if you make the car always say it's going 20 miles an hour slower than it's actually going?
You might produce a lot of speeding tickets.
Then they went out to an abandoned airstrip with two cars, the target victim car and the chase car, and they launched a bunch of other attacks.
One of the things they were able to do from the chase car is apply the brakes on the other car, simply by hacking the computer.
They were able to disable the brakes.
They also were able to install malware that wouldn't kick in and wouldn't trigger until the car was doing something like going over 20 miles an hour, or something like that.
The results are astonishing, and when they gave this talk, even though they gave this talk at a conference to a bunch of computer security researchers, everybody was gasping.
All of these were implemented successfully.
How would you steal a car in this model?
You remotely unlock the doors through the computer that controls that, start the engine, bypass anti-theft, and you've got yourself a car.
Am I scaring you yet?
I've got a few more of these interesting ones.
This was Fabian Monrose's lab at the University of North Carolina, and what they did was something intuitive once you see it, but kind of surprising.
They videotaped people on a bus, and then they post-processed the video.
What you see here in number one is a reflection in somebody's glasses of the smartphone that they're typing in.
They wrote software to stabilize -- even though they were on a bus and maybe someone's holding their phone at an angle -- to stabilize the phone, process it, and you may know on your smartphone, when you type a password, the keys pop out a little bit, and they were able to use that to reconstruct what the person was typing, and had a language model for detecting typing.
What was interesting is, by videotaping on a bus, they were able to produce exactly what people on their smartphones were typing, and then they had a surprising result, which is that their software had not only done it for their target, but other people who accidentally happened to be in the picture, they were able to produce what those people had been typing, and that was kind of an accidental artifact of what their software was doing.
P25 radios are used by law enforcement and all kinds of government agencies and people in combat to communicate, and there's an encryption option on these phones.
This is what the phone looks like. It's not really a phone.
It's more of a two-way radio.
Could you run a denial-of-service, because these are first responders?
So, would a terrorist organization want to black out the ability of police and fire to communicate at an emergency?
They found that there's this GirlTech device used for texting that happens to operate at the same exact frequency as the P25, and they built what they called My First Jammer. (Laughter) If you look closely at this device, it's got a switch for encryption or cleartext.
You see the difference?
This is plain text. This is encrypted.
There's one little dot that shows up on the screen, and one little tiny turn of the switch.
And so the researchers asked themselves, "I wonder how many times very secure, important, sensitive conversations are happening on these two-way radios where they forget to encrypt and they don't notice that they didn't encrypt?"
So they bought a scanner. These are perfectly legal and they run at the frequency of the P25, and what they did is they hopped around frequencies and they wrote software to listen in.
If they found encrypted communication, they stayed on that channel and they wrote down, that's a channel that these people communicate in, these law enforcement agencies, and they went to 20 metropolitan areas and listened in on conversations that were happening at those frequencies.
They found that in every metropolitan area, they would capture over 20 minutes a day of cleartext communication.
Well, they found the names and information about confidential informants. They found information that was being recorded in wiretaps, a bunch of crimes that were being discussed, sensitive information.
It was mostly law enforcement and criminal.
They went and reported this to the law enforcement agencies, after anonymizing it, and the vulnerability here is simply the user interface wasn't good enough. If you're talking about something really secure and sensitive, it should be really clear to you that this conversation is encrypted.
The last one I thought was really, really cool, and I just had to show it to you, it's probably not something that you're going to lose sleep over like the cars or the defibrillators, but it's stealing keystrokes.
Now, we've all looked at smartphones upside down.
Every security expert wants to hack a smartphone, and we tend to look at the USB port, the GPS for tracking, the camera, the microphone, but no one up till this point had looked at the accelerometer.
The accelerometer is the thing that determines the vertical orientation of the smartphone.
They put a smartphone next to a keyboard, and they had people type, and then their goal was to use the vibrations that were created by typing to measure the change in the accelerometer reading to determine what the person had been typing.
Now, when they tried this on an iPhone 3GS, this is a graph of the perturbations that were created by the typing, and you can see that it's very difficult to tell when somebody was typing or what they were typing, but the iPhone 4 greatly improved the accelerometer, and so the same measurement produced this graph.
And then there's the attack phase, where you get somebody to type something in, you don't know what it was, but you use your model that you created in the training phase to figure out what they were typing.
They had pretty good success. This is an article from the USA Today.
Now, the system is interesting, because it produced "Illinois Supreme" and then it wasn't sure.
The model produced a bunch of options, and this is the beauty of some of the A.I. techniques, is that computers are good at some things, humans are good at other things, take the best of both and let the humans solve this one.
Don't waste computer cycles.
It's the Supreme Court, right?
And so, together we're able to reproduce typing simply by measuring the accelerometer.
Why does this matter? Well, in the Android platform, for example, the developers have a manifest where every device on there, the microphone, etc., has to register if you're going to use it so that hackers can't take over it, but nobody controls the accelerometer.
If someone is able to put malware on your iPhone, they could then maybe get the typing that you do whenever you put your iPhone next to your keyboard.
There's several other notable attacks that unfortunately I don't have time to go into, but the one that I wanted to point out was a group from the University of Michigan which was able to take voting machines, the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs that were going to be used in New Jersey in the election that were left in a hallway, and put Pac-Man on it.
So they ran the Pac-Man game.
What does this all mean?
Well, I think that society tends to adopt technology really quickly. I love the next coolest gadget.
But it's very important, and these researchers are showing, that the developers of these things need to take security into account from the very beginning, and need to realize that they may have a threat model, but the attackers may not be nice enough to limit themselves to that threat model, and so you need to think outside of the box.
What we can do is be aware that devices can be compromised, and anything that has software in it is going to be vulnerable. It's going to have bugs.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos.
It's true.
So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters.
We all want to be stars -- celebrities, singers, comedians -- and when I was younger, that seemed so very, very hard to do.
But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture.
Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday.
But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
So how does it happen?
All right, let's go.
(Video) Bear Vasquez: Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God!
KA: Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park.
In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times.
But he didn't actually set out to make a viral video, Bear.
He just wanted to share a rainbow.
Because that's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear.
(Laughter) And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact.
So what happened here?
Jimmy Kimmel actually.
Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become.
Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience.
(Video) Rebecca Black: ♫ It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. ♫ ♫ Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend. ♫ ♫ Friday, Friday. Gettin' down on Friday. ♫ KA: So you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope.
Rebecca Black's "Friday" is one of the most popular videos of the year.
It's been seen nearly 200 million times this year.
And similar to "Double Rainbow," it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere.
So what happened on this day?
Well it was a Friday, this is true.
And if you're wondering about those other spikes, those are also Fridays.
(Laughter) But what about this day, this one particular Friday?
Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about.
Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter.
And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it.
And now there are 10,000 parodies of "Friday" on YouTube.
Even in the first seven days, there was one parody for every other day of the week.
(Laughter) Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon -- either by spreading it or by doing something new with it.
(Music) So "Nyan Cat" is a looped animation with looped music.
It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year.
And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times.
(Laughter) Even cats were watching this video.
(Laughter) Cats were watching other cats watch this video.
(Laughter) But what's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie, geeky Internet culture.
(Laughter) Someone made an old timey version.
(Laughter) And then it went international.
(Laughter) An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of.
Because we don't just enjoy now, we participate.
And who could have predicted any of this?
Who could have predicted "Double Rainbow" or Rebecca Black or "Nyan Cat?"
What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it?
In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have.
When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested.
(Video) Casey Niestat: So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane, but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane.
And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively.
And so it all brings us to one big question ...
(Video) Bear Vasquez: What does this mean?
(Laughter) KA: What does it mean?
I mean, as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest stars in the world right now, Justin Bieber, got his start on YouTube.
And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture.
And these are not characteristics of old media, and they're barely true of the media of today, but they will define the entertainment of the future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet.
And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet Planet Ocean.
And the oceans are hugely productive, as you can see by the satellite image of photosynthesis, the production of new life.
In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe.
In addition to that, it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on Earth, and much of it we don't know about.
That's about 10 percent of our global needs and 100 percent of some island nations.
If you were to descend into the 95 percent of the biosphere that's livable, it would quickly become pitch black, interrupted only by pinpoints of light from bioluminescent organisms.
And if you turn the lights on, you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by, because those are the denizens of the deep, the things that live in the deep ocean.
This type of habitat covers more of the Earth's surface than all other habitats combined.
And yet, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about this habitat, despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water from those bodies.
And so 10 years ago, an international program began called the Census of Marine Life, which set out to try and improve our understanding of life in the global oceans.
It involved 17 different projects around the world.
As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects.
And I hope you'll appreciate the level of global coverage that it managed to achieve.
And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it.
Well, from that discussion grew this program that involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 countries around the world who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions at a combined cost of 650 million dollars to study the distribution, diversity and abundance of life in the global ocean.
And so what did we find?
We found spectacular new species, the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked -- from the shoreline to the abyss, form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between.
And the limiting step here wasn't the unknown diversity of life, but rather the taxonomic specialists who can identify and catalog these species that became the limiting step.
They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves.
There are actually four to five new species described everyday for the oceans.
And as I say, it could be a much larger number.
Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada -- It's an island off the east coast of that continent -- where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters in human history.
It's around 1900.
Now, when I was a boy of about his age, I would go out fishing with my grandfather and we would catch fish about half that size.
If you were to go out there today, 20 years after this fishery collapsed, if you could catch a fish, which would be a bit of a challenge, it would be half that size still.
Now most of us, and I would say me included, think that human exploitation of the oceans really only became very serious in the last 50 to, perhaps, 100 years or so.
The census actually tried to look back in time, using every source of information they could get their hands on.
Because science data really goes back to, at best, World War II, for the most part.
And so what they found, in fact, is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans.
So fishermen could only catch what they could either eat or sell that day.
But the Romans developed salting.
And with salting, it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances.
And so began industrial fishing.
They range from 65 to 98 percent for these major groups of organisms, as shown in the dark blue bars.
Now for those species the we managed to leave alone, that we protect -- for example, marine mammals in recent years and sea birds -- there is some recovery.
So it's not all hopeless.
Now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one.
It's from trophy fish caught off the coast of Florida.
And so this is a photograph from the 1950s.
I want you to notice the scale on the slide, because when you see the same picture from the 1980s, we see the fish are much smaller and we're also seeing a change in terms of the composition of those fish.
But this is no laughing matter.
The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity and we're responsible for it.
So what's left? Actually quite a lot.
And I want to start with a bit on technology, because, of course, this is a TED Conference and you want to hear something on technology.
So one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean are remotely operated vehicles.
So these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor where they're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom.
So a couple of years ago, I was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise and I couldn't go because of a scheduling conflict.
But through a satellite link I was able to sit at my study at home with my dog curled up at my feet, a cup of tea in my hand, and I could tell the pilot, "I want a sample right there."
And that's exactly what the pilot did for me.
That's the sort of technology that's available today that really wasn't available even a decade ago.
So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats that are very far from the surface and very far from light.
And so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans is acoustics, or sound waves.
And the advantage of sound waves is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light.
And so in this example, a census scientist took out two ships.
They would be received by a second ship, and that would give us very precise estimates, in this case, of 250 billion herring in a period of about a minute.
And to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool, because knowing how many fish are there is really critical.
We can also use satellite tags to track animals as they move through the oceans.
And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe, such as this elephant seal, it's an opportunity to send data back to shore and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean.
And so from that we can produce these tracks.
For example, the dark blue shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north Pacific.
Now I realize for those of you who are colorblind, this slide is not very helpful, but stick with me nonetheless.
For animals that don't surface, we have something called pop-up tags, which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets.
And then at some period of time it pops up to the surface and, again, relays that data back to shore.
And so from this we're able to identify these blue highways, these hot spots in the ocean, that should be real priority areas for ocean conservation.
And so there's a barcode on that product that tells the computer exactly what the product is.
Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding.
And what barcoding does is use a specific gene called CO1 that's consistent within a species, but varies among species.
And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify which species are which even if they look similar to each other, but may be biologically quite different.
Now one of the nicest examples I like to cite on this is the story of two young women, high school students in New York City, who worked with the census.
They went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in New York City and they barcoded it.
Well what they found was mislabeled fish.
So for example, they found something which was sold as tuna, which is very valuable, was in fact tilapia, which is a much less valuable fish.
So barcoding allows us to know what we're working with and also what we're eating.
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System is the database for all the census data.
It's open access; you can all go in and download data as you wish.
And it contains all the data from the census plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute.
And so what you can do with that is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans.
This is where our sampling effort has concentrated.
Now what you can see is we've sampled the area in the North Atlantic, in the North Sea in particular, and also the east coast of North America fairly well.
That's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region.
So even after a 10-year census, there are large areas that still remain unexplored.
And so they put this together, a list of all the species, where they're known to occur, and it really seemed like a very esoteric, scientific type of exercise.
But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill.
So what did we find?
But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries from the census.
So one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity?
And what we find if we plot up the well-known species is this sort of a distribution.
And what we see is that for coastal tags, for those organisms that live near the shoreline, they're most diverse in the tropics.
This is something we've actually known for a while, so it's not a real breakthrough.
You can do this on a global scale, but you can also do it on a regional scale.
And that's why biodiversity data can be so valuable.
Now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census are things that are small and hard to see, that certainly wasn't always the case.
For example, while it's hard to believe that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists, it did until a few years ago when South African fishermen requested an export permit and scientists realized that this was something new to science.
Similarly this Golden V kelp collected in Alaska just below the low water mark is probably a new species.
Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length.
But to be fair, it lives in the deep waters of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so it was a lot harder to find.
But there's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things.
This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp, it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago -- at least it was, until the census discovered it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia.
And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness, can hide secrets for a very long time.
If we look at distributions, in fact distributions change dramatically.
We also talked about the White Shark Cafe.
That's a question for the future.
One of the things that we're taught in high school is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive.
Now this little critter, it's only about half a millimeter in size, not terribly charismatic.
But it was only discovered in the early 1980s.
So now they know that, in fact, animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them, and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions.
If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean, this is what you'd be left behind with, and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor.
Now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles and not much biomass in between.
We found life in the extremes.
And we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island.
And this particular species really captured the public's attention.
Now in terms of the unknowns, there are many.
First of all, we might ask, how many fishes in the sea?
And so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery how many more species we're likely to discover.
And from that, we actually calculate that we know about 16,500 marine species and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go.
But the fishes, as I say, are the best known.
So our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms.
And what is does is predict how many more species there are on land and in the ocean.
And what they found is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean.
So we still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of unknowns.
Now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile.
And these mats actually cover an area the size of Greece.
And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye.
But you can imagine the biomass that represents.
But the really intriguing thing about the microbes is just how diverse they are.
A single drop of seawater could contain 160 different types of microbes.
And so as we see in this image of light during the night, there are lots of areas of the Earth where human development is much greater and other areas where it's much less, but between them we see large dark areas of relatively unexplored ocean.
The other point I'd like to make about this is that this ocean's interconnected.
And so the importance then of global collaboration becomes all the more important.
We've lost a lot of paradise.
For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea are now effectively gone.
There were trawls taken in the deep sea in the Mediterranean, which collected more garbage than they did animals.
And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be among the most pristine left on Earth.
And there are a lot of other pressures.
Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs.
On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes, we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs.
And I could spend the rest of my time, which is getting very limited, going through this litany of concerns about the ocean, but I want to end on a more positive note.
And so the grand challenge then is to try and make sure that we preserve what's left, because there is still spectacular beauty.
And the oceans are so productive, there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective, try to do better than we have in the past.
So we need to recognize those hot spots and do our best to protect them.
Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold, they worked under water and they worked above water trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery, the still vast unknown, the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life.
So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile, whether you're a stockbroker in New York City or whether you're a TEDster living in Edinburgh, the oceans matter.
And as the oceans go so shall we.
Thanks for listening.
(Applause)
Let's say that you wanted to conduct an experiment.
In this experiment, you randomly assign people to live in blasting zones or in control locations without explosives going off over their heads.
They live in the community for years, just downwind and downstream from sites where tons of explosives are used almost daily.
And millions of gallons of water contaminated.
That would be a rigorous, powerful scientific inquiry into the effects of these environmental exposures.
The institutional review board would never approve it; it would never pass human subjects review, because it would be unethical, immoral.
And yet in effect, it is happening right now.
In my mind, this prompts some questions.
What is the ethical obligation of the scientists who believes populations are in danger?
How much evidence is enough to be confident of our conclusions?
Where is the line between scientific certainty and the need to act?
The abbreviation for it is MTR.
It is a form of surface coal mining that takes place in Appalachia, here in the United States.
MTR occurs in four states: Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
Over 1.2 million acres have been mined in this way.
This is an area about the size of Delaware but it is spread over a footprint as large as Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
The trees are typically burned or dumped into adjacent valleys.
Then, to reach the buried coal seams, explosives are used to remove up to 800 feet of mountain elevation.
Over 1,500 tons of explosives are used for coal mining in West Virginia alone.
Every day.
So far, over 500 mountains have been destroyed.
The coal then has to be chemically treated, crushed and washed before it can be transported to power plants and burned.
This cleaning takes place on-site.
The process produces more air pollution and contaminates billions of gallons of water with metals, sulfates, cleaning chemicals and other impurities.
All of this to produce three percent of US electricity demand -- only three percent of US electricity demand.
What are the health impacts of mountaintop-removal mining?
There are over a million people who live in counties where MTR takes place and millions more downstream and downwind.
What has been the response of industry and government when these issues are documented?
And again, what is the ethical obligation of science when faced with this disturbing situation?
I began to research this issue in 2006.
I had just taken a job at West Virginia University.
Before then, I hadn't done any research related to coal.
But I started to hear stories from people who lived in these mining communities.
They said that the water they drank was not clean, that the air they breathed was polluted.
They would tell me about their own illnesses or illnesses in their family.
They were worried about how common cancer was in their neighborhoods.
I met with many people in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky to listen to those stories and hear their concerns.
I searched the scientific literature and was surprised to learn that nothing had been published on the public health effects of coal mining in the United States.
Many of my colleagues initially were skeptical that there would be any link between public health and mining.
They predicted that the health problems could be explained by poverty or by lifestyle issues, like smoking and obesity.
When I started, I thought maybe they would be right.
We started by analyzing existing databases that allowed us to link population health to mining activity and to control statistically for age, sex, race, smoking, obesity, poverty, education, health insurance and others we could measure.
We found evidence that confirmed the concerns of the residents, and we started to publish our findings.
Death rates from cancer are significantly elevated, especially for lung cancer.
We've seen evidence for higher rates of birth defects and for babies born at low birth weight.
The difference in total mortality equates to about 1,200 excess deaths every year in MTR areas, controlling for other risks.
Not only are death rates higher, but they increase as the levels of mining go up in a dose-response manner.
Next, we started to conduct community door-to-door health surveys.
We surveyed people living within a few miles of MTR versus similar rural communities without mining.
Survey results show higher levels of personal and family illness, self-reported health status is poorer, and illness symptoms across a broad spectrum are more common.
We all know that correlation does not prove causation.
These studies did not include data on the actual environmental conditions in mining communities.
We found that violations of public drinking-water standards are seven times more common in MTR areas versus non-mining areas.
We collected air samples and found that particulate matter is elevated in mining communities, especially in the ultra-fine range.
The dust in mining communities contains a complex mixture, but includes high levels of silica, a known lung carcinogen, and potentially harmful organic compounds.
We used the dust in laboratory experiments and found that it induced cardiovascular dysfunction in rats.
The dust also promoted the development of lung cancer in human in vitro lung cells.
This is just a quick summary of some of our studies.
The coal industry does not like what we have to say.
Just like the tobacco industry paid for research to defend the safety of smoking, so the coal industry has tried to do the same by paying people to write papers claiming that MTR is safe.
Lawyers have sent me harassing demands under the Freedom of Information Act, eventually denied by the courts.
I'd been attacked at public testimony at a Congressional hearing by a congressman with ties to the energy industry.
One governor has publicly declared that he refuses to read the research.
And after a meeting with a member of Congress, in which I specifically shared my research, I later heard that representative say they knew nothing about it.
I worked with scientists at the US Geological Survey on environmental sampling for more than two years.
In August of this year, the National Academy of Sciences was suddenly instructed by the federal government to stop their independent review of the public health consequences of surface mining.
These actions are politically motivated, in my view.
At conferences or meetings, they express skepticism.
OK, we are all taught, as scientists, to be skeptical.
They ask, "What about this possible explanation?"
"An in vitro study, what does that prove?"
"A rat study -- how do we know the same effects would be found in people?"
Maybe so.
Technically, you have to acknowledge that they could be right, but you know, maybe these health problems are not the result of some unmeasured confound.
Maybe they result from blowing up mountains over people's heads.
(Laughter) (Applause) There can always be doubt, if doubt is what you seek.
So perhaps you can understand why I've started to wonder, how much evidence is enough?
I've published over 30 papers on this topic so far.
Along with my coauthors, other researchers have added to the evidence, yet government doesn't want to listen, and the industry says it's only correlational.
They say Appalachians have lifestyle issues.
There comes a point where we don't need more research, where we can't ask people to be unwilling research subjects so we can do the next study.
As scientists, we follow the data wherever it goes, but sometimes data can only take us so far and we have to decide, as thinking, feeling human beings, what it means and when it is time to act.
I think that is true, not only for MTR but for other situations where evidence is strong and concerning but imperfect.
It may seem strange that there is any controversy over the health effects of mountaintop-removal mining.
But somehow, this subject has wound up in a scientific and political twilight zone alongside the debate over climate change or the argument years ago about whether or not smoking caused cancer.
In this twilight zone, much of the data seems to point to one conclusion.
But the economics or the politics or the prevailing public view insist on the opposite conclusion.
When you're a scientist and you think you have a valid insight where the health of entire populations is at stake but you find yourself trapped in this twilight zone of denial and disbelief, what is your moral and ethical obligation?
Obviously, scientists are responsible for telling the truth as they see it, based on evidence.
It can be extremely frustrating to wait around for public opinion or political consensus to catch up to the scientific understanding.
But the more controversial the subject and the more frustrating the debate, the more critical it is for scientists to preserve our objectivity and our reputation for integrity.
In the long run, our reputation for integrity is the most powerful tool that we have, even more powerful than the data itself.
Without an acknowledged integrity on the part of scientists, no amount of data will ever convince people to believe painful or difficult truths.
But when we cultivate and guard our reputation for integrity, when we patiently stand up for the data and keep doing the studies and keep calmly bringing the results to the public, that's when we have our greatest impact.
How many lives will be lost while we wait?
Too many already.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes.
And you'd think he was chasing finches, but he wasn't.
He was actually collecting fish.
And he described one of them as very "common."
Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List.
But the point is, we still come to Galapagos.
We still think it is pristine.
So what happens here?
The second story, also to illustrate another concept, is called shifting waistline.
(Laughter) Because I was there in '71, studying a lagoon in West Africa.
I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa.
And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there.
This was my first sunburn.
And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove.
And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters, a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia.
And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana.
When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size.
They were still kind of happy.
And the fish also were happy to be there.
So nothing has changed, but everything has changed.
My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia.
In the '70s -- well, beginning in the '60s -- Europe did lots of development projects.
Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers to impose on them industrial fishing.
And this boat, quite ugly, is called the Mutiara 4.
And I went sailing on it, and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea.
And what we caught, we didn't have words for it.
What we caught, I know now, is the bottom of the sea.
And 90 percent of our catch were sponges, other animals that are fixed on the bottom.
Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down.
This is a dead turtle.
But it's not documented.
We transform the world, but we don't remember it.
We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there.
And over time it changes -- it changes because people do things, or naturally.
Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward.
And the difference then, they perceive as a loss.
But they don't perceive what happened before as a loss.
And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now.
Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies, they killed animals and they didn't know they had done so after a few generations.
Because, obviously, an animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare.
So you don't lose abundant animals.
And therefore they're not perceived as a big loss.
They become rarer because we fish them.
Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline.
And the question is, why do people accept this?
And in fact, lots of people, scientists, will contest that it was really different.
And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented.
So you have a situation where people don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.
And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play.
We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low.
How about the people who can't do that because they have no access -- the people in the Midwest for example?
There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation.
This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay.
There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago -- 500 years ago.
And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like "Avatar."
(Laughter) And if you think about "Avatar," if you think of why people were so touched by it -- never mind the Pocahontas story -- why so touched by the imagery?
Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost.
And so my recommendation, it's the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do "Avatar II" underwater.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Let me begin with four words that will provide the context for this week, four words that will come to define this century.
It's full of us, it's full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands.
This is not a philosophical statement, this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology.
There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion -- that we're living beyond our means.
In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50 percent more Earth than we've got.
In financial terms, this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn, going further into debt every year.
But of course, you can't borrow natural resources, so we're burning through our capital, or stealing from the future.
What this means is our economy is unsustainable.
I'm not saying it's not nice or pleasant or that it's bad for polar bears or forests, though it certainly is.
What I'm saying is our approach is simply unsustainable.
In other words, thanks to those pesky laws of physics, when things aren't sustainable, they stop.
But that's not possible, you might think.
It will stop because of the end of trade resources.
It will stop because of the growing demand of us on all the resources, all the capacity, all the systems of the Earth, which is now having economic damage.
When we think about economic growth stopping, we go, "That's not possible," because economic growth is so essential to our society that is is rarely questioned.
Although growth has certainly delivered many benefits, it is an idea so essential that we tend not to understand the possibility of it not being around.
Even though it has delivered many benefits, it is based on a crazy idea -- the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet.
That the crazy idea is just that, it is crazy, and with the Earth full, it's game over.
Come on, you're thinking.
That's not possible.
Technology is amazing. People are innovative.
There are so many ways we can improve the way we do things.
That's all true.
Well, it's mostly true.
We are certainly amazing, and we regularly solve complex problems with amazing creativity.
So if our problem was to get the human economy down from 150 percent to 100 percent of the Earth's capacity, we could do that.
The problem is we're just warming up this growth engine.
China plans to be there in just 20 years.
The only problem with this plan is that it's not possible.
In response, some people argue, but we need growth, we need it to solve poverty.
We need it to develop technology.
We need it to keep social stability.
I find this argument fascinating, as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs.
It's like the Earth doesn't care what we need.
Mother nature doesn't negotiate; she just sets rules and describes consequences.
This is about food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives.
So the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient, solar-powered, knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion.
It's not that it's not possible to feed, clothe and house us all and have us live decent lives.
It certainly is.
See what happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate is that the system stops working and breaks down.
We've had science proving the urgency of change.
We've had economic analysis pointing out that, not only can we afford it, it's cheaper to act early.
And yet, the reality is we've done pretty much nothing to change course.
The story on food, on water, on soil, on climate is all much the same.
I actually don't say this in despair.
But it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we're not acting, we're not close to acting and we're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy.
And that's why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for.
So when does this transition begin?
I know most people don't see it that way.
We see the Occupy protests, we see spiraling debt crises, we see growing inequality, we see money's influence on politics, we see resource constraint, food and oil prices.
But we see, mistakenly, each of these issues as individual problems to be solved.
In fact, it's the system in the painful process of breaking down -- our system, of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth, is eating itself alive.
I could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this, but I won't because, if you want to see it, that evidence is all around you.
I want to talk to you about fear.
The crisis is now inevitable.
Of course, we can't know what will happen.
The future is inherently uncertain.
But let's just think through what the science is telling us is likely to happen.
Imagine our economy when the carbon bubble bursts, when the financial markets recognize that, to have any hope of preventing the climate spiraling out of control, the oil and coal industries are finished.
Imagine China, India and Pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water.
Imagine the Middle East without oil income, but with collapsing governments.
Imagine our highly-tuned, just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying.
Imagine 30 percent unemployment in America as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty.
Now imagine what that means for you, your family, your friends, your personal financial security.
Imagine what it means for your personal security as a heavily armed civilian population gets angrier and angrier about why this was allowed to happen.
Imagine what you'll tell your children when they ask you, "So, in 2012, Mom and Dad, what was it like when you'd had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row, when every scientific body in the world was saying you've got a major problem, when the oceans were acidifying, when oil and food prices were spiking, when they were rioting in the streets of London and occupying Wall Street?
When the system was so clearly breaking down, Mom and Dad, what did you do, what were you thinking?"
So how do you feel when the lights go out on the global economy in your mind, when your assumptions about the future fade away and something very different emerges?
Just take a moment and take a breath and think, what do you feel at this point?
Maybe fear.
Of course, we can't know what's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty.
We are in danger, all of us, and we've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat.
But this time it's not a tiger at the cave mouth.
You can't see the danger at your door.
That's why we need to feel our response now while the lights are still on, because if we wait until the crisis takes hold, we may panic and hide.
If we feel it now and think it through, we will realize we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Yes, things will get ugly, and it will happen soon -- certainly in our lifetime -- but we are more than capable of getting through everything that's coming.
You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right.
When we feel fear and we fear loss we are capable of quite extraordinary things.
Think about war.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it just took four days for the government to ban the production of civilian cars and to redirect the auto industry, and from there to rationing of food and energy.
Think about how an individual responds to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and how lifestyle changes that previously were just too difficult suddenly become relatively easy.
We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis.
And the good news, this one's a monster.
(Laughter) Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilization, but if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilization instead.
There's certainly no technical or economic barrier in the way.
Scientists like James Hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net CO2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades.
We developed a plan called "The One Degree War Plan" -- so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required.
To my surprise, eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap, not very cheap, but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization.
You can read the details, but in summary, we can transform our economy.
We can do it with existing political structures.
The only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel.
But fear can be paralyzing or motivating.
We need to accept the fear and then we need to act.
We need to act like the future depends on it.
We need to act like we only have one planet.
I know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do.
They're wrong.
We can be more, we can be much more.
We have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago.
We've built a powerful foundation of science, knowledge and technology -- more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent, meaningful and satisfying lives.
The Earth can support that if we choose the right path.
We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution -- like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality?
Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered.
Like generations before us, we'll be growing up in war -- not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age.
We can choose life over fear.
We can do what we need to do, but it will take every entrepreneur, every artist, every scientist, every communicator, every mother, every father, every child, every one of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Applause) (Video) Announcer: Threats, in the wake of Bin Laden's death, have spiked.
Announcer Two: Famine in Somalia. Announcer Three: Police pepper spray.
Announcer Four: Vicious cartels. Announcer Five: Caustic cruise lines.
Announcer Six: Societal decay. Announcer Seven: 65 dead.
Announcer Eight: Tsunami warning. Announcer Nine: Cyberattacks.
Multiple Announcers: Drug war. Mass destruction. Tornado.
Recession. Default. Doomsday. Egypt. Syria.
Crisis. Death. Disaster.
Oh, my God.
Peter Diamandis: So those are just a few of the clips I collected over the last six months -- could have easily been the last six days or the last six years.
The point is that the news media preferentially feeds us negative stories because that's what our minds pay attention to.
Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.
And because nothing is more important to us than survival, the first stop of all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala.
Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector.
So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news.
So given all of our digital devices that are bringing all the negative news to us seven days a week, 24 hours a day, it's no wonder that we're pessimistic.
It's no wonder that people think that the world is getting worse.
Perhaps instead, it's the distortions brought to us of what's really going on.
Perhaps the tremendous progress we've made over the last century by a series of forces are, in fact, accelerating to a point that we have the potential in the next three decades to create a world of abundance.
Now I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems -- climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage -- we surely do.
So let's look at what this last century has been to see where we're going.
Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled, average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled.
Childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10.
Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history.
And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years.
We truly are living in an extraordinary time.
And many people forget this.
And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher.
In fact, we redefine what poverty means.
Think of this, in America today, the majority of people under the poverty line still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, television, mobile phones, air conditioning and cars.
The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet, could have never dreamed of such luxuries.
Underpinning much of this is technology, and of late, exponentially growing technologies.
My good friend Ray Kurzweil showed that any tool that becomes an information technology jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law, and experiences price performance doubling every 12 to 24 months.
That's why the cellphone in your pocket is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the '70s.
Now look at this curve.
This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years.
I want you to notice two things from this curve.
This is the result of faster computers being used to build faster computers.
And also, even though it's plotted on a log curve on the left, it's curving upwards.
The rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster.
And on this curve, riding on Moore's Law, are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies available to all of us.
Cloud computing, what my friends at Autodesk call infinite computing; sensors and networks; robotics; 3D printing, which is the ability to democratize and distribute personalized production around the planet; synthetic biology; fuels, vaccines and foods; digital medicine; nanomaterials; and A.I.
I mean, how many of you saw the winning of Jeopardy by IBM's Watson?
I mean, that was epic.
In fact, I scoured the headlines looking for the best headline in a newspaper I could.
Jeopardy's not an easy game.
It's about the nuance of human language.
Four years ago here at TED, Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university called Singularity University.
And we teach our students all of these technologies, and particularly how they can be used to solve humanity's grand challenges.
Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students can touch the lives of a billion people today.
30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous.
Today we can point at dozens of companies that have done just that.
When I think about creating abundance, it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility.
You see, scarcity is contextual, and technology is a resource-liberating force.
So this is a story of Napoleon III in the mid-1800s.
He invited over to dinner the king of Siam.
But the King of Siam, he was fed with aluminum utensils.
You see, aluminum was the most valuable metal on the planet, worth more than gold and platinum.
It's the reason that the tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum.
You see, even though aluminum is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass, it doesn't come as a pure metal.
It's all bound by oxygen and silicates.
But then the technology of electrolysis came along and literally made aluminum so cheap that we use it with throw-away mentality.
So let's project this analogy going forward.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are on a planet that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy than we use in a year.
16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface every 88 minutes.
It's not about being scarce, it's about accessibility.
And there's good news here.
For the first time, this year the cost of solar-generated electricity is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in India -- 8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees.
The cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year.
Last month, MIT put out a study showing that by the end of this decade, in the sunny parts of the United States, solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour compared to 15 cents as a national average.
Now we talk about water wars.
Do you remember when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager spacecraft back towards the Earth, in 1990 after it just passed Saturn?
He took a famous photo. What was it called?
Because we live on a water planet.
We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water.
Yes, 97.5 percent is saltwater, two percent is ice, and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet, but here too there is hope.
And there is technology coming online, not 10, 20 years from now, right now.
There's nanotechnology coming on, nanomaterials.
And the conversation I had with Dean Kamen this morning, one of the great DIY innovators, I'd like to share with you -- he gave me permission to do so -- his technology called Slingshot that many of you may have heard of, it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator.
It's able to generate a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day out of any source -- saltwater, polluted water, latrine -- at less than two cents a liter.
And if that pans out, which I have every confidence it will, Coca-Cola will deploy this globally to 206 countries around the planet.
This is the kind of innovation, empowered by this technology, that exists today.
My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration of cellphones in the developing world by the end of 2013.
Think about it, that a Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago.
And if they're on a smartphone on Google, they've got access to more knowledge and information than President Clinton did 15 years ago.
They're living in a world of information and communication abundance that no one could have ever predicted.
Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing with Qualcomm Foundation something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize.
And to win, it needs to be able to diagnose you better than a team of board-certified doctors.
So literally, imagine this device in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors, 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers.
I call it the rising billion.
So the white lines here are population.
We just passed the seven billion mark on Earth.
By 2020, that's going from two billion to five billion Internet users.
These people represent tens of trillions of dollars injected into the global economy.
And they will get healthier by using the Tricorder, and they'll become better educated by using the Khan Academy, and by literally being able to use 3D printing and infinite computing [become] more productive than ever before.
How about a set of voices that have never been heard from before.
What about giving the oppressed, wherever they might be, the voice to be heard and the voice to act for the first time ever?
Let me share and close with a story that really got me excited.
There is a program that some of you might have heard of.
It's a game called Foldit.
It came out of the University of Washington in Seattle.
And this is a game where individuals can actually take a sequence of amino acids and figure out how the protein is going to fold.
And how it folds dictates its structure and its functionality.
And it's very important for research in medicine.
And this game has been played by university professors and so forth.
And it's literally, hundreds of thousands of people came online and started playing it.
And it showed that, in fact, today, the human pattern recognition machinery is better at folding proteins than the best computers.
And when these individuals went and looked at who was the best protein folder in the world, it wasn't an MIT professor, it wasn't a CalTech student, it was a person from England, from Manchester, a woman who, during the day, was an executive assistant at a rehab clinic and, at night, was the world's best protein folder.
Ladies and gentlemen, what gives me tremendous confidence in the future is the fact that we are now more empowered as individuals to take on the grand challenges of this planet.
We have the tools with this exponential technology.
We have the passion of the DIY innovator.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning.
I'm here today to talk about autonomous flying beach balls.
(Laughter) No, agile aerial robots like this one.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about the challenges in building these, and some of the terrific opportunities for applying this technology.
So these robots are related to unmanned aerial vehicles.
However, the vehicles you see here are big.
They weigh thousands of pounds, are not by any means agile.
In fact, many of these vehicles are operated by flight crews that can include multiple pilots, operators of sensors, and mission coordinators.
So these are helicopters with four rotors, and they're roughly a meter or so in scale, and weigh several pounds.
And so we retrofit these with sensors and processors, and these robots can fly indoors.
The robot I'm holding in my hand is this one, and it's been created by two students, Alex and Daniel.
So this weighs a little more than a tenth of a pound.
It consumes about 15 watts of power.
And as you can see, it's about eight inches in diameter.
So let me give you just a very quick tutorial on how these robots work.
So it has four rotors.
If you spin these rotors at the same speed, the robot hovers.
If you increase the speed of each of these rotors, then the robot flies up, it accelerates up.
Of course, if the robot were tilted, inclined to the horizontal, then it would accelerate in this direction.
So to get it to tilt, there's one of two ways of doing it.
So in this picture, you see that rotor four is spinning faster and rotor two is spinning slower.
And the other way around, if you increase the speed of rotor three and decrease the speed of rotor one, then the robot pitches forward.
And then finally, if you spin opposite pairs of rotors faster than the other pair, then the robot yaws about the vertical axis.
So an on-board processor essentially looks at what motions need to be executed and combines these motions, and figures out what commands to send to the motors -- 600 times a second.
That's basically how this thing operates.
So one of the advantages of this design is when you scale things down, the robot naturally becomes agile.
So here, R is the characteristic length of the robot.
It's actually half the diameter.
And there are lots of physical parameters that change as you reduce R.
The one that's most important is the inertia, or the resistance to motion.
So it turns out the inertia, which governs angular motion, scales as a fifth power of R.
So the smaller you make R, the more dramatically the inertia reduces.
So as a result, the angular acceleration, denoted by the Greek letter alpha here, goes as 1 over R.
It's inversely proportional to R.
So this should be clear in these videos.
On the bottom right, you see a robot performing a 360-degree flip in less than half a second.
So here the processes on board are getting feedback from accelerometers and gyros on board, and calculating, like I said before, commands at 600 times a second, to stabilize this robot.
So on the left, you see Daniel throwing this robot up into the air, and it shows you how robust the control is.
So why build robots like this?
Well, robots like this have many applications.
You can send them inside buildings like this, as first responders to look for intruders, maybe look for biochemical leaks, gaseous leaks.
You can also use them for applications like construction.
The robots can be used for transporting cargo.
So one of the problems with these small robots is their payload-carrying capacity.
So you might want to have multiple robots carry payloads.
This is a picture of a recent experiment we did -- actually not so recent anymore -- in Sendai, shortly after the earthquake.
So robots like this could be sent into collapsed buildings, to assess the damage after natural disasters, or sent into reactor buildings, to map radiation levels.
So one fundamental problem that the robots have to solve if they are to be autonomous, is essentially figuring out how to get from point A to point B.
So this gets a little challenging, because the dynamics of this robot are quite complicated.
In fact, they live in a 12-dimensional space.
So we use a little trick.
We take this curved 12-dimensional space, and transform it into a flat, four-dimensional space.
And that four-dimensional space consists of X, Y, Z, and then the yaw angle.
And so what the robot does, is it plans what we call a minimum-snap trajectory.
So to remind you of physics: You have position, derivative, velocity; then acceleration; and then comes jerk, and then comes snap.
So what that effectively does, is produce a smooth and graceful motion.
And it does that avoiding obstacles.
So these minimum-snap trajectories in this flat space are then transformed back into this complicated 12-dimensional space, which the robot must do for control and then execution.
So let me show you some examples of what these minimum-snap trajectories look like.
And in the first video, you'll see the robot going from point A to point B, through an intermediate point.
Here you have overhead motion capture cameras on the top that tell the robot where it is 100 times a second.
It also tells the robot where these obstacles are.
And the obstacles can be moving.
And here, you'll see Daniel throw this hoop into the air, while the robot is calculating the position of the hoop, and trying to figure out how to best go through the hoop.
So as an academic, we're always trained to be able to jump through hoops to raise funding for our labs, and we get our robots to do that.
(Applause) So another thing the robot can do is it remembers pieces of trajectory that it learns or is pre-programmed.
So here, you see the robot combining a motion that builds up momentum, and then changes its orientation and then recovers.
So it has to do this because this gap in the window is only slightly larger than the width of the robot.
So just like a diver stands on a springboard and then jumps off it to gain momentum, and then does this pirouette, this two and a half somersault through and then gracefully recovers, this robot is basically doing that.
So I want change gears.
So one of the disadvantages of these small robots is its size.
And I told you earlier that we may want to employ lots and lots of robots to overcome the limitations of size.
So one difficulty is: How do you coordinate lots of these robots?
So this is actually a piece of fig.
Actually you take any object coated with fig juice, and the ants will carry it back to the nest.
So these ants don't have any central coordinator.
But because they sense the neighbors and because they sense the object, they have implicit coordination across the group.
So this is the kind of coordination we want our robots to have.
So when we have a robot which is surrounded by neighbors -- and let's look at robot I and robot J -- what we want the robots to do, is to monitor the separation between them, as they fly in formation.
And then you want to make sure that this separation is within acceptable levels.
So again, the robots monitor this error and calculate the control commands 100 times a second, which then translates into motor commands, 600 times a second.
So this also has to be done in a decentralized way.
Again, if you have lots and lots of robots, it's impossible to coordinate all this information centrally fast enough in order for the robots to accomplish the task.
And then finally, we insist that the robots be agnostic to who their neighbors are.
So this is what we call anonymity.
So what I want to show you next is a video of 20 of these little robots, flying in formation.
They're monitoring their neighbors' positions.
As you can see here, they collapse from a three-dimensional formation into planar formation.
And to fly through obstacles, they can adapt the formations on the fly.
So again, these robots come really close together.
As you can see in this figure-eight flight, they come within inches of each other.
And despite the aerodynamic interactions with these propeller blades, they're able to maintain stable flight.
(Applause) So once you know how to fly in formation, you can actually pick up objects cooperatively.
So this just shows that we can double, triple, quadruple the robots' strength, by just getting them to team with neighbors, as you can see here.
One of the disadvantages of doing that is, as you scale things up -- so if you have lots of robots carrying the same thing, you're essentially increasing the inertia, and therefore you pay a price; they're not as agile.
Another application I want to show you -- again, this is in our lab.
So his algorithm essentially tells these robots how to autonomously build cubic structures from truss-like elements.
So his algorithm tells the robot what part to pick up, when, and where to place it.
So in this video you see -- and it's sped up 10, 14 times -- you see three different structures being built by these robots.
And again, everything is autonomous, and all Quentin has to do is to give them a blueprint of the design that he wants to build.
So all these experiments you've seen thus far, all these demonstrations, have been done with the help of motion-capture systems.
And what if there's no GPS?
So this robot is actually equipped with a camera, and a laser rangefinder, laser scanner.
And it uses these sensors to build a map of the environment.
What that map consists of are features -- like doorways, windows, people, furniture -- and it then figures out where its position is, with respect to the features.
The coordinate system is defined based on the robot, where it is and what it's looking at.
So I want to show you a clip of algorithms developed by Frank Shen and Professor Nathan Michael, that shows this robot entering a building for the very first time, and creating this map on the fly.
So the robot then figures out what the features are, it builds the map, it figures out where it is with respect to the features, and then estimates its position 100 times a second, allowing us to use the control algorithms that I described to you earlier.
So this robot is actually being commanded remotely by Frank, but the robot can also figure out where to go on its own.
So suppose I were to send this into a building, and I had no idea what this building looked like.
I can ask this robot to go in, create a map, and then come back and tell me what the building looks like.
So here, the robot is not only solving the problem of how to go from point A to point B in this map, but it's figuring out what the best point B is at every time.
And there are many applications of this technology.
But we're in Southern California, close to Los Angeles, so I have to conclude with something focused on entertainment.
I want to conclude with a music video.
I want to introduce the creators, Alex and Daniel, who created this video.
(Applause) So before I play this video, I want to tell you that they created it in the last three days, after getting a call from Chris.
And the robots that play in the video are completely autonomous.
You will see nine robots play six different instruments.
(Sound of air escaping from valve) (Music) (Whirring sound) (Music) (Applause) (Cheers)
When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time.
And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do.
Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity.
And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social.
And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better.
(Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.
And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit.
(Laughter) Yeah.
I did my best.
And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.
But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E.
And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer.
And I felt kind of guilty about this.
But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.
And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were.
But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too.
And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.
Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss.
Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best.
A third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half.
So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society.
We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing.
Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is.
Shyness is about fear of social judgment.
Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation.
So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments.
So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.
Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation.
So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows.
We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously.
But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks -- four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other.
And kids are working in countless group assignments.
Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members.
And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research.
(Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces.
Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers.
And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface.
Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all these people described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy.
And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to.
And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right.
Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts.
I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband.
And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum.
Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert.
He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all.
And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts.
And I often think that they have the best of all worlds.
And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance.
This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.
And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity.
So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations.
Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California.
And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona.
Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time.
And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up.
Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating -- and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe.
And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude.
It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it.
If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers -- Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community.
This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology.
It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions.
Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing.
So -- (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not.
Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces?
One answer lies deep in our cultural history.
But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude.
And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming.
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority."
What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business.
And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities.
And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers.
So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important.
And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
And they feature as their role models really great salesmen.
So that's the world we're living in today.
Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all.
The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust.
And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together.
But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems.
So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today.
Guess what?
I have a suitcase full of books.
Here's Margaret Atwood, "Cat's Eye."
Here's a novel by Milan Kundera.
And here's "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Maimonides.
But these are not exactly my books.
I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors.
My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books.
I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books.
Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read.
But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi.
He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought.
But here's the thing about my grandfather.
Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years.
But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him.
And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way.
So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write.
And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching.
But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion.
So I prepared for moments like these as best I could.
(Laughter) And that actually helped a lot.
But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change.
I mean, we are.
And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision.
Just stop it.
(Laughter) Thank you.
But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work.
We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own.
This is especially important for extroverted children too.
Be like Buddha, have your own revelations.
Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there.
So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books.
Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment.
Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy.
But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase.
And that's okay.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me.
I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row.
And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me.
And one of the things that's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity.
And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world.
And sometimes when it comes through TED, it has meaning and power that it doesn't have when it doesn't.
And I mention that because I think identity is really important.
And I think what we've learned is that, if you're a teacher your words can be meaningful, but if you're a compassionate teacher, they can be especially meaningful.
If you're a doctor you can do some good things, but if you're a caring doctor you can do some other things.
And so I want to talk about the power of identity.
I actually learned about this from my grandmother.
She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful.
She was the end of every argument in our family.
She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family.
She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved.
Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840's.
She was born in the 1880's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world.
And my grandmother was tough, but she was also loving.
When I would see her as a little boy, she'd come up to me and she'd give me these hugs.
And she'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she'd let me go.
And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her.
And the only challenge was that she had 10 children.
My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids.
And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her, it would be difficult to get her time and attention.
And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around.
And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me.
And I would look at her and I'd smile, but she was very serious.
And I remember this just like it happened yesterday.
She said, "Now you make sure you don't do that." I said, "Sure."
Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said, "I want you to know I've been watching you."
And she said, "I think you're special."
She said, "I think you can do anything you want to do."
She said, "The first thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always love your mom."
She said, "That's my baby girl, and you have to promise me now you'll always take care of her."
Well I adored my mom, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that."
Then she said, "The second thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing."
Then finally she said, "The third thing I want you to promise me is that you'll never drink alcohol."
(Laughter) Well I was nine years old, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that."
When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer -- I don't know where he got it -- and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods.
And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me.
My brother said, "Come on. We're doing this today; you always do what we do.
I had some, your sister had some. Have some beer."
And then my brother started staring at me.
(Laughter) I said, "Well, what are you talking about?"
He said, "Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special."
(Laughter) I was devastated.
(Laughter) And I'm going to admit something to you.
I know this might be broadcast broadly.
But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol.
(Applause) I don't say that because I think that's virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity.
We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do.
When I thought about my grandmother, of course she would think all her grandkids were special.
My grandfather was in prison during prohibition.
My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases.
This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago.
In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons.
Today, there are 2.3 million.
The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
We have seven million people on probation and parole.
And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world.
In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes.
One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole.
In urban communities across this country -- Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington -- 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole.
Our system isn't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race, they're also distorted by poverty.
And yet, we seem to be very comfortable.
The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems.
It's interesting to me.
We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work.
My state of Alabama, like a number of states, actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction.
We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
And there is this stunning silence.
I represent children.
A lot of my clients are very young.
The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison.
We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country.
The only country in the world.
I represent people on death row.
It's interesting, this question of the death penalty.
But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity.
Death penalty in America is defined by error.
For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row.
A kind of astonishing error rate -- one out of nine people innocent.
In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash.
But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem.
It's not our problem.
It's not our burden.
It's not our struggle.
I talk a lot about these issues.
I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill.
And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African-American history, I tell them about slavery.
I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II.
We don't really know very much about it.
But for African-Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror.
In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched.
They had to worry about being bombed.
It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives.
And these older people come up to me now and they say, "Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9/11."
And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid.
We don't like to talk about our history.
And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically.
We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts.
We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation.
In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation.
I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty.
And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, "There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings.
It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people."
And I thought about that.
I couldn't bear it.
And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people -- where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white -- in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched.
We love innovation.
We love technology. We love creativity.
We love entertainment.
But ultimately, those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, marginalization.
And for me, it becomes necessary to integrate the two.
Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world.
And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor, the disadvantaged, those who will never get to TED.
You know ultimately, we all have to believe things we haven't seen.
Innovation, creativity, development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone.
They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart.
And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things.
Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about this.
He said, "When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness."
Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don't pay attention to this.
I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks.
And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott -- amazing African-American woman -- and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King.
And these women would get together and just talk.
And I'd say, "Yes, Ma'am, I do."
And she'd say, "Well what are you going to do when you get here?"
I said, "I'm going to listen."
And I'd go over there and I would, I would just listen.
Tell me what you're trying to do."
And I began giving her my rap.
I said, "Well we're trying to challenge injustice.
We're trying to do something about the death penalty.
We're trying to reduce the prison population.
We're trying to end mass incarceration."
And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous.
We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering.
Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity.
I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do.
I've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.
I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar.
I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief.
I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer.
And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law.
I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth.
I don't believe that.
I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.
And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason.
Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated.
I sometimes push too hard.
I do get tired, as we all do.
Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important.
And I've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences.
And I go to the jail and I see my client who's 13 and 14, and he's been certified to stand trial as an adult.
How can a judge turn you into something that you're not?
And the judge has certified him as an adult, but I see this kid.
And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power.
You should ask for some of that.
And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion.
And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid.
And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: "Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive."
(Applause) And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct.
And the next morning, I woke up and I thought, now did I dream that crazy motion, or did I actually write it?
And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court.
And I finally decided, oh gosh, I've got to go to the court and do this crazy case.
And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed -- overwhelmed.
And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse.
And I was thinking, this is going to be so difficult, so painful.
And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse.
And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse.
When this man saw me, he came over to me and he said, "Who are you?"
I said, "I'm a lawyer." He said, "You're a lawyer?" I said, "Yes, sir."
And this man came over to me and he hugged me.
And he whispered in my ear.
He said, "I'm so proud of you."
And I have to tell you, it was energizing.
It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful.
And as soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming in.
He said, "Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion?"
I said, "Yes, sir. I did." And we started arguing.
And before I knew it, the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality.
And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth.
And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table.
About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break.
And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court.
He said, "Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom?"
I've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity.
That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone.
That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience, this community, to help you on your way and to do something on this issue.
BS: Well there are opportunities all around us.
If you live in the state of California, for example, there's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment.
For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years -- one billion dollars.
And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest.
And I think that opportunity exists all around us.
And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it's about increased incarceration rates.
BS: Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable.
The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn't really in violent crime categories.
It was this misguided war on drugs.
That's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population.
And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment.
And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle, for low-level property crimes, rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized.
I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime, not do less.
Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you.
(Applause)
A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink.
And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while.
And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, "You see this bar?
Points out the window.
"You see that stone wall out there?
I built that stone wall with my bare hands.
Points out the window.
"You see that pier on the lake out there?
I built that pier with my bare hands.
But you fuck one goat ... " (Laughter) Storytelling -- (Laughter) is joke telling.
It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings.
We all love stories.
We're born for them.
Stories affirm who we are.
We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning.
It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.
We all know what it's like to not care.
You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one.
That's not by chance, that's by design.
So it got me thinking, what if I told you my history was story, how I was born for it, how I learned along the way this subject matter?
And to make it more interesting, we'll start from the ending and we'll go to the beginning.
And so if I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story.
The film is "John Carter." It's based on a book called "The Princess of Mars," which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator.
And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, "See me at once."
But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property.
Thing only opens from the inside.
Come, let's go inside.
And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise.
Sometimes it's as simple as "Once upon a time ... " These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it.
And I always thought it was such a fantastic device.
It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "Here, let me tell you a story.
It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time."
In 2008, I pushed all the theories that I had on story at the time to the limits of my understanding on this project.
(Video) (Mechanical Sounds) ♫ And that is all ♫ ♫ that love's about ♫ ♫ And we'll recall ♫ ♫ when time runs out ♫ ♫ That it only ♫ (Laughter) AS: Storytelling without dialogue.
It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling.
It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal.
They just don't want to know that they're doing that.
That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal.
And it's like a magnet.
I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on "Finding Nemo."
The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience.
Editors and screenwriters have known this all along.
It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story.
I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not.
Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable.
I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston.
And I learned a key insight to character.
She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine.
And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch.
She gave a wonderful example of Michael Corleone, Al Pacino's character in "The Godfather," and that probably his spine was to please his father.
And it's something that always drove all his choices.
Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch.
And Woody's was to do what was best for his child.
And these spines don't always drive you to make the best choices.
All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it.
And some of us are born with temperaments that are positive, some are negative.
But a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it.
As parents, you're always learning who your children are.
They're learning who they are.
And you're still learning who you are.
So we're all learning all the time.
And that's why change is fundamental in story.
If things go static, stories die, because life is never static.
In 1998, I had finished writing "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting.
So I researched everything I possibly could.
And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty."
It's an incredibly insightful definition.
But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean?
In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts.
And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good.
So when we pitched "Toy Story" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, "You don't want me to sing, do you?"
And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time.
But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation.
We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves.
And they were: No songs, no "I want" moment, no happy village, no love story.
And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking.
So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions.
And we got a hold of that fax.
And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time.
That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story.
And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules.
Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character.
And we had naively thought, well Woody in "Toy Story" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from someplace.
(Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing?
Mr. Potato Head: You going to make us, Woody?
Slinky? Slink ... Slinky!
Are you deaf?
I said, take care of them.
Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them.
I don't think what you did was right.
Woody: What? Am I hearing correctly?
Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener?
AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable?
We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy.
And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally.
We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met.
And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story.
In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme.
And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia."
I could just tell there was a grand design under it -- in every shot, every scene, every line.
And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it.
Cyclist: Who are you?
Who are you?
AS: That was the theme: Who are you?
Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world.
A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
When I was five, I was introduced to possibly the most major ingredient that I feel a story should have, but is rarely invoked.
And this is what my mother took me to when I was five.
Look.
Bambi: Yippee!
Thumper: Some fun, huh, Bambi?
Come on. Get up.
Like this.
AS: I walked out of there wide-eyed with wonder.
And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder.
Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent.
It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower.
When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were.
And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn't see them because of my hair.
And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn't fully baked; I was very, very sick.
And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, "He's not going to live."
And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special.
I don't know if I really believe that.
I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong.
It's okay, daddy's here.
AS: And that's the first story lesson I ever learned.
Use what you know. Draw from it.
It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.
And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
What do I know that would cause me, a reticent, Midwestern scientist, to get myself arrested in front of the White House protesting?
And I was really lucky to go to the University of Iowa where I could study under Professor James Van Allen who built instruments for the first U.S. satellites.
Professor Van Allen told me about observations of Venus, that there was intense microwave radiation.
Did it mean that Venus had an ionosphere?
Or was Venus extremely hot?
The right answer, confirmed by the Soviet Venera spacecraft, was that Venus was very hot -- 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
And it was kept hot by a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere.
I was fortunate to join NASA and successfully propose an experiment to fly to Venus.
Our instrument took this image of the veil of Venus, which turned out to be a smog of sulfuric acid.
But while our instrument was being built, I became involved in calculations of the greenhouse effect here on Earth, because we realized that our atmospheric composition was changing.
Eventually, I resigned as principal investigator on our Venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important.
The greenhouse effect had been well understood for more than a century.
British physicist John Tyndall, in the 1850's, made laboratory measurements of the infrared radiation, which is heat.
And he showed that gasses such as CO2 absorb heat, thus acting like a blanket warming Earth's surface.
I worked with other scientists to analyze Earth climate observations.
In 1981, we published an article in Science magazine concluding that observed warming of 0.4 degrees Celsius in the prior century was consistent with the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2.
That Earth would likely warm in the 1980's, and warming would exceed the noise level of random weather by the end of the century.
We also said that the 21st century would see shifting climate zones, creation of drought-prone regions in North America and Asia, erosion of ice sheets, rising sea levels and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.
That paper was reported on the front page of the New York Times and led to me testifying to Congress in the 1980's, testimony in which I emphasized that global warming increases both extremes of the Earth's water cycle.
Heatwaves and droughts on one hand, directly from the warming, but also, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor with its latent energy, rainfall will become in more extreme events.
There will be stronger storms and greater flooding.
Global warming hoopla became time-consuming and distracted me from doing science -- partly because I had complained that the White House altered my testimony.
So I decided to go back to strictly doing science and leave the communication to others.
By 15 years later, evidence of global warming was much stronger.
I had the privilege to speak twice to the president's climate task force.
But energy policies continued to focus on finding more fossil fuels.
By then we had two grandchildren, Sophie and Connor.
I decided that I did not want them in the future to say, "Opa understood what was happening, but he didn't make it clear."
So I decided to give a public talk criticizing the lack of an appropriate energy policy.
I gave the talk at the University of Iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
This led to calls from the White House to NASA headquarters and I was told that I could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by NASA headquarters.
After I informed the New York Times about these restrictions, NASA was forced to end the censorship.
But there were consequences.
I had been using the first line of the NASA mission statement, "To understand and protect the home planet," to justify my talks.
Soon the first line of the mission statement was deleted, never to appear again.
Over the next few years I was drawn more and more into trying to communicate the urgency of a change in energy policies, while still researching the physics of climate change.
Let me describe the most important conclusion from the physics -- first, from Earth's energy balance and, second, from Earth's climate history.
Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed.
It reduces Earth's heat radiation to space, so there's a temporary energy imbalance.
More energy is coming in than going out, until Earth warms up enough to again radiate to space as much energy as it absorbs from the Sun.
So the key quantity is Earth's energy imbalance.
Is there more energy coming in than going out?
It will occur without adding any more greenhouse gasses.
Now finally, we can measure Earth's energy imbalance precisely by measuring the heat content in Earth's heat reservoirs.
The biggest reservoir, the ocean, was the least well measured, until more than 3,000 Argo floats were distributed around the world's ocean.
These floats reveal that the upper half of the ocean is gaining heat at a substantial rate.
The deep ocean is also gaining heat at a smaller rate, and energy is going into the net melting of ice all around the planet.
And the land, to depths of tens of meters, is also warming.
The total energy imbalance now is about six-tenths of a watt per square meter.
It's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity.
It's equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year.
That's how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day.
This imbalance, if we want to stabilize climate, means that we must reduce CO2 from 391 ppm, parts per million, back to 350 ppm.
That is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming.
Climate change deniers argue that the Sun is the main cause of climate change.
But the measured energy imbalance occurred during the deepest solar minimum in the record, when the Sun's energy reaching Earth was least.
Yet, there was more energy coming in than going out.
This shows that the effect of the Sun's variations on climate is overwhelmed by the increasing greenhouse gasses, mainly from burning fossil fuels.
Now consider Earth's climate history.
As you see, there's a high correlation between temperature, CO2 and sea level.
Climate change deniers like to use this fact to confuse and trick the public by saying, "Look, the temperature causes CO2 to change, not vice versa."
Small changes in Earth's orbit that occur over tens to hundreds of thousands of years alter the distribution of sunlight on Earth.
When there is more sunlight at high latitudes in summer, ice sheets melt.
Shrinking ice sheets make the planet darker, so it absorbs more sunlight and becomes warmer.
And more CO2 causes more warming.
So CO2, methane, and ice sheets were feedbacks that amplified global temperature change causing these ancient climate oscillations to be huge, even though the climate change was initiated by a very weak forcing.
The important point is that these same amplifying feedbacks will occur today.
While we can't say exactly how fast these amplifying feedbacks will occur, it is certain they will occur, unless we stop the warming.
There is evidence that feedbacks are already beginning.
Precise measurements by GRACE, the gravity satellite, reveal that both Greenland and Antarctica are now losing mass, several hundred cubic kilometers per year.
And the rate has accelerated since the measurements began nine years ago.
Methane is also beginning to escape from the permafrost.
The last time CO2 was 390 ppm, today's value, sea level was higher by at least 15 meters, 50 feet.
Where you are sitting now would be under water.
Most estimates are that, this century, we will get at least one meter.
I think it will be more if we keep burning fossil fuels, perhaps even five meters, which is 18 feet, this century or shortly thereafter.
The important point is that we will have started a process that is out of humanity's control.
Hundreds of New Orleans-like devastations around the world.
The monarch butterfly could be one of the 20 to 50 percent of all species that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates will be ticketed for extinction by the end of the century if we stay on business-as-usual fossil fuel use.
Global warming is already affecting people.
The Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico heatwave and drought last year, Moscow the year before and Europe in 2003, were all exceptional events, more than three standard deviations outside the norm.
Fifty years ago, such anomalies covered only two- to three-tenths of one percent of the land area.
In recent years, because of global warming, they now cover about 10 percent -- an increase by a factor of 25 to 50.
So we can say with a high degree of confidence that the severe Texas and Moscow heatwaves were not natural; they were caused by global warming.
An important impact, if global warming continues, will be on the breadbasket of our nation and the world, the Midwest and Great Plains, which are expected to become prone to extreme droughts, worse than the Dust Bowl, within just a few decades, if we let global warming continue.
More grandchildren helped me along.
Jake is a super-positive, enthusiastic boy.
It would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control.
Now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple, honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis, with the government not keeping one dime.
Most people would get more in the monthly dividend than they'd pay in increased prices.
This fee and dividend would stimulate the economy and innovations, creating millions of jobs.
It is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future.
Several top economists are coauthors on this proposition.
Jim DiPeso of Republicans for Environmental Protection describes it thusly: "Transparent. Market-based.
Sounds like a conservative climate plan."
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society, our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide, thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel -- mountaintop removal, longwall mining, fracking, tar sands, tar shale, deep ocean Arctic drilling.
This path, if continued, guarantees that we will pass tipping points leading to ice sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations.
And increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline.
Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth.
Yet, we dither, taking no action to divert the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes.
If we had started in 2005, it would have required emission reductions of three percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century.
If we start next year, it is six percent per year.
If we wait 10 years, it is 15 percent per year -- extremely difficult and expensive, perhaps impossible.
But we aren't even starting.
The science is clear.
I need your help to communicate the gravity and the urgency of this situation and its solutions more effectively.
We owe it to our children and grandchildren.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So a couple of years ago I started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they're supposed to hate; we have them work in government.
The program is called Code for America, and it's a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks.
We select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments.
Instead of sending them off into the Third World, we send them into the wilds of City Hall.
But really what they're doing is they're showing what's possible with technology today.
So meet Al.
Al is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston.
Here it kind of looks like he's looking for a date, but what he's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in, because he knows he's not very good at fighting fires when he's covered in four feet of snow.
Now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner?
We had a team of fellows in Boston last year through the Code for America program.
They were there in February, and it snowed a lot in February last year.
But one fellow in particular, a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober, noticed something else, and that's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things.
So he did what any good developer would do, he wrote an app.
This is a modest little app.
It's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year.
But it's doing something that no other government technology does.
It's spreading virally.
It's very important that these tsunami sirens work, but people steal the batteries out of them.
And then Seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains.
So we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this.
And this has spread just frictionlessly, organically, naturally.
We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people about two and a half months.
It was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids.
We were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels, it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars.
And that's nothing.
There is one project in the California court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and it doesn't work.
And there are projects like this at every level of government.
It suggests how government could work better -- not more like a private company, as many people think it should.
And that means permissionless, it means open, it means generative.
But what's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government -- not as the problem of an ossified institution, but as a problem of collective action.
And that's great news, because, it turns out, we're very good at collective action with digital technology.
Now there's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively.
It's not just Code for America fellows, there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities.
They haven't given up on government.
And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing.
Politics is not changing; government is changing.
And because government ultimately derives its power from us -- remember "We the people?" -- how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens.
Now I didn't know very much about government when I started this program.
And like a lot of people, I thought government was basically about getting people elected to office.
Well after two years, I've come to the conclusion that, especially local government, is about opossums.
This is the call center for the services and information line.
If you should ever have the chance to staff your city's call center, as our fellow Scott Silverman did as part of the program -- in fact, they all do that -- you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues, including having an opossum stuck in your house.
So Scott gets this call.
He types "Opossum" into this official knowledge base.
So that worked. So booya for Scott.
But that wasn't the end of the opossums.
Boston doesn't just have a call center.
It has an app, a Web and mobile app, called Citizens Connect.
Now we didn't write this app.
This is the work of the very smart people at the Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston.
So one day -- this is an actual report -- this came in: "Opossum in my trashcan. Can't tell if it's dead.
How do I get this removed?"
But what happens with Citizens Connect is different.
So Scott was speaking person-to-person.
But on Citizens Connect everything is public, so everybody can see this.
And in this case, a neighbor saw it.
And the next report we got said, "I walked over to this location, found the trashcan behind the house.
Opossum? Check. Living? Yep.
Goodnight sweet opossum."
So this is great. This is the digital meeting the physical.
And it's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game.
But it's also a great example of government as a platform.
And I don't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here.
I'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others.
And it could have connected them with government services if they'd been needed, but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services.
When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities.
We call animal control, it just costs a lot of money.
Now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it's not the same thing as politics.
And most people get that, but they think that one is the input to the other.
That our input to the system of government is voting.
Now how many times have we elected a political leader -- and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected -- and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs, and then not that much changes?
That's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top.
And what's under that is what we call bureaucracy.
And we say that word with such contempt.
People seem to think politics is sexy.
If we want this institution to work for us, we're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy.
Because that's where the real work of government happens.
We have to engage with the machinery of government.
It's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that's a response to the SEC's request for comment on the Financial Reform Bill.
That's not being politically active, that's being bureaucratically active.
Now for those of us who've given up on government, it's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children.
We can't do without government, but we do need it to be more effective.
The good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society.
And there's a generation out there that's grown up on the Internet, and they know that it's not that hard to do things together, you just have to architect the systems the right way.
Now the average age of our fellows is 28, so I am, begrudgingly, almost a generation older than most of them.
This is a generation that's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted.
They're not fighting that battle that we're all fighting about who gets to speak; they all get to speak.
They can express their opinion on any channel at any time, and they do.
They're using their hands.
And those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better.
But these apps are like little digital reminders that we're not just consumers, and we're not just consumers of government, putting in our taxes and getting back services.
We're more than that, we're citizens.
And we're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship.
So the question I have for all of you here: When it comes to the big, important things that we need to do together, all of us together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices, or are we also going to be a crowd of hands?
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's just a quick video of what we do.
(Laughter) We'll just -- we can just skip -- I'll just skip through the video instead ...
(Laughter) No.
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Music) This is not ...
(Laughter) Okay.
(Laughter) Solar technology is ...
(Applause)
I work as an artist and designer.
And I like to try to find the hidden talents of everyday things.
So before I get started, I want to show you a fast smattering of some examples of what I do.
But this talk today is really less about what I make and is more about why I make these things.
So, I get to tinker with everyday experiences.
As we go through our everyday lives, visual and experiential things exert this invisible authority over our brains at all times.
And they yield this power in subtle and sneaky ways.
So visuals, for example, speak volumes through these teeny, tiny details, codified in things like type, shape, color and texture.
a solar-powered Popsicle truck.
(Laughter) It educates the public about renewable energy.
It's basically a physical infographic on wheels.
And this unexpected pairing of sugar, bright colors and the threat of humanity's self-inflicted demise actually makes for a pretty convincing argument for solar.
People arrive at experiences like these with expectations.
In my work, I want to create disruptive wonder.
The small things we make can work to reinforce our assumptions about the world.
Because then, these small things act as sort of a humble back door into understanding a reality that's infinitely surprising.
This is how people find me in the world.
"Ken doll is near dot com."
(Laughter) A little bit creepy.
And "A colder melon skin."
Period.
(Laughter) Far better use of those kellianderson.com letters, I'm sure you'll agree.
This is a dumb game, but it underscores a belief I have, that the world is full of order that doesn't necessarily deserve our respect.
Sometimes, there's meaning, justice and logic present in the way things are.
I think that the moment we realize this is the moment we become creative people, because it prompts us to mess things up and do something better with the basic pieces of experience.
So today, I want to show you three projects that reconsider the vast properties of commonplace experience and try to do something better by doing something more absurd.
This first project is a holiday card I made for my friends.
And I did that through a holiday card, of course.
But paper has this memory; paper never forgets how it was bent.
I was able to use that material memory to guide the recipient through the experience of the card.
So when you first pick it up, while floppy, it's clear it wants to bend in all of these certain ways.
As people tinker with it, they discover that bending the card brings them through this simple story.
And as you can see, it's a story about itself.
(Laughter) This card is literally a four-frame documentary about receiving the card.
(Laughter) So it's a recursive experience.
(Applause) Oh, well, thank you.
This excites me, because it's a recursive experience of a holiday card that gets the viewer to feel this repetitive ritual of all holiday cards.
In a sense, that project was all about ritual becoming empty gesture.
And it speaks to the fact that the more an experience repeats itself, the less it means -- (Laughter) because we begin to take it for granted.
And that's why cliches aren't interesting, and why people get in car wrecks near their homes.
When we experience things over and over again, they just lose their gravity.
So while paper does have all of these astonishing, overlooked capabilities, it takes a hell of a lot of intervention into getting us to see it as new again.
(Laughter) This is a card I made for my friends Mike and Karen, who happen to be really awesome people.
So it was a really good excuse to push the boundaries of this format.
And as far as how to push it, the facts of our shared history made it clear that this card should be about music.
We're all total music nerds, and Karen and Mike have even recorded songs together.
And we found some with this guy, Mr. Wizard -- (Laughter) who had a much-beloved TV show, teaching kids about the science behind everyday things.
And I remembered this episode that demonstrated sound is physical, with this simple experiment.
He rolled up a cone of paper, he taped it shut, he taped a needle to the end of it, and -- voilà! -- it was a record player.
I remember seeing this as a kid, and it totally blew my mind.
So I explained this idea to Mike and Karen, and we all decided that it would be way better to make their guests paper record players, rather than traditional, boring invitations.
We started getting really, really excited.
And I started getting really nervous, because I'm the one who had to actually make it work.
So I began spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about needles: Like, would we find needles with the right fidelity?
I started calling paper suppliers, looking for the paper with the best audio properties.
(Laughter) And they thought I was crazy.
Meanwhile, Mike and Karen were recording a song, which they had mastered to a clear flexi disc.
(Laughter) So we did it, we really did it!
We made a paper record player -- 200 recipient-operated paper record players.
This is an actual recording of how it sounds.
(Music and singing) (Music ends) We were so excited when we finally got that to work.
(Laughter) And I was excited that we uncovered this hidden talent of paper in the process.
But we also have these assumptions -- (Laughter) that should be a lot scarier in a democracy, because they're like these little thought loopholes.
We sleepwalk through our assumptions about the authority in media and assumptions put forth about political realities by media, like newspapers.
But I, for one, have faith in these small, hacked experiences to inspire a sense of skepticism at this limited reality we've been handed.
And this next project demonstrates just that.
Imagine your normal, everyday commuter-newspaper-reading ritual.
But what if you are handed a paper filled with stories from an alternate reality?
This is something we actually did do in the fall of 2008, in a project that was conceptualized by artist Steve Lambert, organized by The Yes Men and executed by many, many people, some of whom are me.
We didn't ask anyone for permission, we just did it.
(Laughter) We had it mass-produced, and we put it in the hands of hundreds of thousands of commuters on a Thursday morning in New York City.
(Laughter) (Applause and cheers) Thanks!
(Applause) "Why?," you might ask.
"Why make a fake newspaper?"
Well, quite frankly, because the real newspaper is depressing.
We ostensibly live in a democracy where we should have some say in what happens in the world.
But the truth is, we never see the stories we want to see in the newspaper.
(Laughter) We put in all the policy ideas we thought would actually help the world.
Years before the withdrawal was even discussed, we ended the war in Iraq.
Years before Occupy Wall Street, we put in a maximum wage law -- (Laughter) to end the ginormous wage inequities between the lowest and highest income earners.
We returned civics class to high school curriculum.
So then students would know how their government works again.
There's a very important difference between these two papers.
(Laughter) And that's because our paper is postdated six months into the future, so when people are handed these on the street, they were literally getting an artifact from the utopian future, sort of a blueprint for an attainably utopian future brought about by this very important idea of popular pressure.
And our hoax worked perfectly.
Here's a video showing -- (Laughter) yes, we did that! -- showing the first few seconds of conflicted belief, where people could feel for a moment what -- (Laughter) Yes!
He made sure that the typography, the layout, the smell of the ink -- everything -- was just like a real "New York Times."
And I supplied fake advertisements from the utopian future.
(Laughter) We decided that the utopian future would be a perfect venue to help these companies who had done wrong in the past try making amends for that wrongdoing.
(Laughter) And we do this through the vocabulary of their own advertising.
So for Ikea, what if instead of cheap furniture, you could buy your own wind farm?
It comes flat-packed, clearly easy to assemble -- (Laughter) with that little zigzag tool and the wooden pegs.
More nefarious are companies like De Beers, who are making amends for their sale of blood diamonds by donating prosthetics to war-torn African countries.
And this is our take on a used car dealership ad.
They're now offering a "cash for polluters" program.
(Laughter) And here's my favorite, Dr. Zizmor, who is giving you a beautiful, clear conscience.
If you haven't taken a ride on the New York City subway, you may not know Dr. Z.
But if you have, then you do, because his cheesy rainbow ads are everywhere.
He's no longer cleaning up your face, now he's cleaning up our mess in Iraq.
(Laughter) So the news of our fake paper made it onto the real news all around the world.
We pushed our paper beyond its expected role in reporting the news, and we made a blueprint for a better world.
With those three projects, I demonstrate that by rejecting normal order, by messing things up and by rearranging the pieces, we can expand our notion of what we demand from reality.
So today, I want to put forth this idea that an avenue to better is through a million teeny, tiny disruptions to whatever is sitting in front of you.
(Laughter) Thank you.
(Applause)
Words matter.
They can heal and they can kill ...
I hated it.
The word genocide is clinical ...
bloodless ...
You need to know, in this kind of war, husbands kills wives, wives kill husbands, neighbors and friends kill each other.
Someone in power says, "Those over there ...
they don't belong.
They're not human."
And people believe it.
I don't want words to describe this kind of behavior.
I want words to stop it.
But where are the words to stop this?
And how do we find the words?
But I believe, truly, we have to keep trying.
I was born in Kigali, Rwanda.
I felt loved by my entire family and my neighbors.
I was constantly being teased by everybody, especially my two older siblings.
When I lost my front tooth, my brother looked at me and said, "Oh, it has happened to you, too?
(Laughter) I enjoyed playing everywhere, especially my mother's garden and my neighbor's.
I loved my kindergarten.
We sang songs, we played everywhere and ate lunch.
One night, my mom and dad came.
They had this strange look when they woke us.
They sent my older sister Claire and I to our grandparent's, hoping whatever was happening would blow away.
Soon we had to escape from there, too.
We hid, we crawled, we sometimes ran.
Sometimes I heard laughter and then screaming and crying and then noise that I had never heard.
You see, I did not know what those noises were.
I saw people who were not breathing.
I thought they were asleep.
I still didn't understand what death was, or killing in itself.
When we would stop to rest for a little bit or search for food, I would close my eyes, hoping when I opened them, I would be awake.
I had no idea which direction was home.
You are a refugee.
From age six to 12, I lived in seven different countries, moving from one refugee camp to another, hoping we would be wanted.
My older sister Claire, she became a young mother ...
and a master at getting things done.
And that's only the beginning, because even though I was 12 years old, sometimes I felt like three years old and sometimes 50 years old.
My past receded, grew jumbled, distorted.
Everything was too much and nothing.
Time seemed like pages torn out of a book and scattered everywhere.
This still happens to me standing right here.
In 2006, after 12 years being separated away from my family, and then seven years knowing that they were dead and them thinking that we were dead, we reunited ...
in the most dramatic, American way possible.
Live, on television -- (Laughter) on "The Oprah Show."
(Laughter) But after the show, as I spent time with my mom and dad and my little sister and my two new siblings that I never met, I felt anger.
And I know that there is absolutely nothing, nothing, that could restore the time we lost with each other and the relationship we could've had.
Soon, my parents moved to the United States, but like Claire, they don't talk about our past.
They live in never-ending present.
Though my family is alive -- yes, we were broken, and yes, we are numb and we were silenced by our own experience.
It's not just my family.
Rwanda is not the only country where people have turned on each other and murdered each other.
Not dead; yes, broken, numb and silenced by the violence of the world that has taken over.
You see, the chaos of the violence continues inside in the words we use and the stories we create every single day.
But also on the labels that we impose on ourselves and each other.
Once we call someone "other," "less than," "one of them" or "better than," believe me ...
More chaos and more noise that we will not understand.
Words will never be enough to quantify and qualify the many magnitudes of human-caused destruction.
Let's ask ourselves: Who are we without words?
Who are we without labels?
Who are we in our breath?
Who are we in our heartbeat?
(Applause)
(Laughter) I'm an economist.
I only want to talk to those of you who want a great career.
I know some of you have already decided you want a good career.
You're going to fail, too.
(Laughter) Canadian group, undoubtedly.
(Laughter) Those trying to have good careers are going to fail, because, really, good jobs are now disappearing.
There are great jobs and great careers, and then there are the high-workload, high-stress, bloodsucking, soul-destroying kinds of jobs, and practically nothing in-between.
So people looking for good jobs are going to fail.
I want to talk about those looking for great jobs, great careers, and why you're going to fail.
I'm not quite sure why you decide not to do it.
You're too lazy to do it. It's too hard.
So, for example, one of your great excuses is: (Sigh) "Well, great careers are really and truly, for most people, just a matter of luck.
So I'm going to stand around, I'm going to try to be lucky, and if I'm lucky, I'll have a great career.
Then, your other excuse is, "Yes, there are special people who pursue their passions, but they are geniuses.
When I was five, I thought I was a genius, but my professors have beaten that idea out of my head long since."
(Laughter) "And now I know I am completely competent."
But guess what?
This is almost 2012, and saying to the world, "I am totally, completely competent," is damning yourself with the faintest of praise.
Everybody knows that people who pursue their passions are somewhat obsessive.
You know, a fine line between madness and genius.
"I'm not weird. I've read Steven J.'s biography.
I am normal.
(Laughter) "Ah, but I still want a great career.
I'm not prepared to pursue my passion, so I know what I'm going to do, because I have a solution.
I have a strategy.
Mommy and Daddy told me that if I worked hard, I'd have a good career.
So, if you work hard and have a good career, if you work really, really, really hard, you'll have a great career.
Doesn't that, like, mathematically make sense?"
You know what? Here's a little secret: You want to work? You want to work really, really, really hard?
You know what? You'll succeed.
The world will give you the opportunity to work really, really, really, really hard.
But, are you so sure that that's going to give you a great career, when all the evidence is to the contrary?
So let's deal with those of you who are trying to find your passion.
You're trying to find your passion -- (Sigh) and you're so happy.
I say, "Do you have passion?"
"Your interest is compared to what?"
"Well, I'm interested in this."
"And what about the rest of humanity's activities?"
"I'm not interested in them."
"No. Not exactly."
Passion is your greatest love.
Passion, interest -- it's not the same thing.
Are you really going to go to your sweetie and say, "Marry me! You're interesting."
(Laughter) Won't happen.
(Laughter) What you want, what you want, what you want, is passion.
You need 20 interests, and then one of them, one of them might grab you, one of them might engage you more than anything else, and then you may have found your greatest love, in comparison to all the other things that interest you, and that's what passion is.
He was an economically rational person.
(Laughter) Yes, he did.
"I love you truly," he said. "I love you deeply.
I love you more than any other woman I've ever encountered.
I love you more than Mary, Jane, Susie, Penelope, Ingrid, Gertrude, Gretel -- I was on a German exchange program then.
She left the room halfway through his enumeration of his love for her.
Although, he did make a note to himself that the next time he proposed, it was perhaps not necessary to enumerate all of the women he had auditioned for the part.
You must look for alternatives so that you find your destiny, or are you afraid of the word "destiny"?
That's what we're talking about.
Your friends and family will be gathered in the cemetery, and there beside your gravesite will be a tombstone, and inscribed on that tombstone it will say, "Here lies a distinguished engineer, who invented Velcro."
But what that tombstone should have said, in an alternative lifetime, what it should have said if it was your highest expression of talent, was, "Here lies the last Nobel Laureate in Physics, who formulated the Grand Unified Field Theory and demonstrated the practicality of warp drive."
(Laughter) Velcro, indeed!
(Laughter) One was a great career.
But then, there are some of you who, in spite of all these excuses, you will find, you will find your passion.
I want to be a great friend.
I want to be a great parent, and I will not sacrifice them on the altar of great accomplishment."
Now, do you really want me to say now, tell you, "Really, I swear I don't kick children."
(Laughter) Look at the worldview you've given yourself.
You're a hero no matter what.
Yes, there was a little kid wandering through this building when I came here, and no, I didn't kick him.
(Laughter) Course, I had to tell him the building was for adults only, and to get out.
He mumbled something about his mother, and I told him she'd probably find him outside anyway.
Last time I saw him, he was on the stairs crying.
(Laughter) What a wimp.
(Laughter) But what do you mean? That's what you expect me to say.
Do you really think it's appropriate that you should actually take children and use them as a shield?
You know what will happen someday, you ideal parent, you?
I know what I'm going to do with my life."
Says your kid, "I have decided I want to be a magician.
I want to perform magic tricks on the stage."
(Laughter) And what do you say?
You're so good at math, why don't you --" The kid interrupts you and says, "But it is my dream. It is my dream to do this."
And what are you going to say?
"Look kid. I had a dream once, too, but -- But --" So how are you going to finish the sentence with your "but"?
Or are you going to tell him this: "I had a dream once, kid.
But then, you were born."
There was something you could have said to your kid, when he or she said, "I have a dream."
You could have said -- looked the kid in the face and said, "Go for it, kid!
Just like I did."
(Laughter) And so the sins of the parents are visited on the poor children.
Why will you seek refuge in human relationships as your excuse not to find and pursue your passion?
You know why.
It is because you are -- you know what you are.
You're afraid to look ridiculous.
But you're afraid.
And that's why you're not going to have a great career.
Unless -- "unless," that most evocative of all English words -- "unless."
So, those are the many reasons why you are going to fail to have a great career.
Unless -- Unless.
Thank you.
When you think about the brain, it's difficult to understand, because if I were to ask you right now, how does the heart work, you would instantly tell me it's a pump.
It pumps blood.
If I were to ask about your lungs, you would say it exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide.
That's easy.
If I were to ask you how the brain works, it's hard to understand because you can't just look at a brain and understand what it is.
It's not a mechanical object, not a pump, not an airbag.
To understand how the brain works, you have to go inside a living brain.
Because the brain's not mechanical, the brain is electrical and it's chemical.
Your brain is made out of 100 billion cells, called neurons.
And these neurons communicate with each other with electricity.
But we're not going to record my brain or your brain or your teachers' brains, we're going to use our good friend the cockroach.
Not just because I think they're cool, but because they have brains very similar to ours.
So if you learn a little bit about how their brains work, we're going to learn a lot about how our brains work.
I'm going to put them in some ice water here And then -- Audience: Ew! Greg Gabe: Yeah ...
Right now they're becoming anesthetized.
Because they're cold blooded, they become the temperature of the water and they can't control it so they just basically "chillax," right?
They're not going to feel anything, which may tell you a little about what we're going to do, a scientific experiment to understand the brain.
So ...
This is the leg of a cockroach.
Underneath each one of those is a cell, and this cell's a neuron that is going to send information about wind or vibration.
These cells are zipping up this information up to the brain using those little axons with electronic messages in there.
These are metal pins.
Now I'm going to take this leg, I'm going to put it in this invention that we came up with called the Spikerbox -- and this replaces lots of expensive equipment in a research lab, so you guys can do this in your own high schools, or in your own basements if it's me.
(Audience: Laughter) So, there.
(Tuning sound) To me, this is the most beautiful sound in the world.
This is what your brain is doing right now.
You have 100 billion cells making these raindrop-type noises.
Let's take a look at what it looks like, let's pull it up on the iPad screen.
You've got 100 billion cells in your brain doing this right now, sending all this information back about what you're seeing, hearing.
So what if we do an experiment?
If I blow on it you tell me if you hear anything.
(Blowing) (Sound changes) Let me just touch this with a little pen here.
That actually took a while in neuroscience to understand this.
This is called rate coding: the harder you press on something, the more spikes there are, and all that information is coming up to your brain.
That's how you perceive things.
So that's one way of doing an experiment with electricity.
That's how you move your muscles around.
Let's see what happens if I've plugged in something that's electric into the cockroach leg here.
It's my iPhone actually.
Do you guys know how your earbuds work in your ears?
But that current's the same currency that our brain uses, so we can send that to our cockroach leg and hopefully if this works, we can actually see what happens when we play music into the cockroach.
(Audience reacts and gasps) GG: So what's happening?
Audience: Wow!
The biggest speakers have the longest waves, which have the most current, and the current is what's causing these things to move.
So it's not just speakers that are causing electricity.
Microphones also cause electricity.
(Beat) So I'm going to go ahead and invite another person out on the stage here to help me out with this.
(Beatboxing) This is the first time this has ever happened in the history of mankind.
Human beatbox to a cockroach leg.
When you guys go back to your high school, think about neuroscience and how you guys can begin the neuro-revolution.
Thank you very much. Bye bye.
(Applause)
On a typical day at school, endless hours are spent learning the answers to questions, but right now, we'll do the opposite.
Do fish feel pain?
How about insects?
Was the Big Bang just an accident?
And is there a God?
Why do so many innocent people and animals suffer terrible things?
Is there really a plan for my life?
Is the future yet to be written, or is it already written and we just can't see it?
But then, do I have free will? I mean, who am I anyway?
But then, why am I conscious? What is consciousness?
Will robots become conscious one day?
I mean, I kind of assumed that some day I would be told the answers to all these questions.
Guess what? No one knows.
But diving into them is exciting because it takes you to the edge of knowledge, and you never know what you'll find there.
So, two questions that no one on Earth knows the answer to.
(Music) [How many universes are there?] Sometimes when I'm on a long plane flight, I gaze out at all those mountains and deserts and try to get my head around how vast our Earth is.
And then I remember that there's an object we see every day that would literally fit one million Earths inside it: the Sun.
It seems impossibly big.
And it gets worse.
There are maybe 100 billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes.
So if each star was the size of a single grain of sand, just the Milky Way has enough stars to fill a 30-foot by 30-foot stretch of beach three feet deep with sand.
And the entire Earth doesn't have enough beaches to represent the stars in the overall universe.
Holy Stephen Hawking, that is a lot of stars.
But he and other physicists now believe in a reality that is unimaginably bigger still.
I mean, first of all, the 100 billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are probably a minuscule fraction of the total.
The vast majority of the galaxies are separating from us so fast that light from them may never reach us.
Still, our physical reality here on Earth is intimately connected to those distant, invisible galaxies.
We can think of them as part of our universe.
They make up a single, giant edifice obeying the same physical laws and all made from the same types of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos, that make up you and me.
However, recent theories in physics, including one called string theory, are now telling us there could be countless other universes built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws.
Most of these universes could never support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond.
But nonetheless, combined, they make up a vast multiverse of possible universes in up to 11 dimensions, featuring wonders beyond our wildest imagination.
The leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made up of 10 to the 500 universes.
That's a one followed by 500 zeros, a number so vast that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe, and all of the atoms in all those universes each had their own universe, and you repeated that for two more cycles, you'd still be at a tiny fraction of the total, namely, one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth.
(Laughter) But even that number is minuscule compared to another number: infinity.
Some physicists think the space-time continuum is literally infinite and that it contains an infinite number of so-called pocket universes with varying properties.
How's your brain doing?
Quantum theory adds a whole new wrinkle.
I mean, the theory's been proven true beyond all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling, and some physicists think you can only un-baffle it if you imagine that huge numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and many of these universes would actually be very like the world we're in, would include multiple copies of you.
The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one.
Only one universe.
And a few philosophers and mystics might argue that even our own universe is an illusion.
All we know is the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity.
Well, I guess we know one other thing.
We just might be undergoing the biggest paradigm shift in knowledge that humanity has ever seen.
(Music) [Why can't we see evidence of alien life?] Somewhere out there in that vast universe there must surely be countless other planets teeming with life.
Conspiracy theorists claim that UFOs are visiting all the time and the reports are just being covered up, but honestly, they aren't very convincing.
In the past year, the Kepler space observatory has found hundreds of planets just around nearby stars.
If any one in 10,000 has conditions that might support a form of life, that's still 50 million possible life-harboring planets right here in the Milky Way.
So here's the riddle: our Earth didn't form until about nine billion years after the Big Bang.
Countless other planets in our galaxy should have formed earlier, and given life a chance to get underway billions, or certainly many millions of years earlier than happened on Earth.
If just a few of them had spawned intelligent life and started creating technologies, those technologies would have had millions of years to grow in complexity and power.
On Earth, we've seen how dramatically technology can accelerate in just 100 years.
In millions of years, an intelligent alien civilization could easily have spread out across the galaxy, perhaps creating giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or glorious works of art that fill the night sky.
At the very least, you'd think they'd be revealing their presence, deliberately or otherwise, through electromagnetic signals of one kind or another.
Why?
Well, there are numerous possible answers, some of them quite dark.
Maybe a single, superintelligent civilization has indeed taken over the galaxy and has imposed strict radio silence because it's paranoid of any potential competitors.
Or maybe they're not that intelligent, or perhaps the evolution of an intelligence capable of creating sophisticated technology is far rarer than we've assumed.
Maybe even that was incredibly lucky.
Maybe we are the first such civilization in our galaxy.
Or, perhaps civilization carries with it the seeds of its own destruction through the inability to control the technologies it creates.
But there are numerous more hopeful answers.
For a start, we're not looking that hard, and we're spending a pitiful amount of money on it.
Only a tiny fraction of the stars in our galaxy have really been looked at closely for signs of interesting signals.
Maybe as civilizations develop, they quickly discover communication technologies far more sophisticated and useful than electromagnetic waves.
Maybe all the action takes place inside the mysterious recently discovered dark matter, or dark energy, that appear to account for most of the universe's mass.
Perhaps intelligent civilizations come to realize that life is ultimately just complex patterns of information interacting with each other in a beautiful way, and that that can happen more efficiently at a small scale.
So, just as on Earth, clunky stereo systems have shrunk to beautiful, tiny iPods, maybe intelligent life itself, in order to reduce its footprint on the environment, has turned itself microscopic.
So the Solar System might be teeming with aliens, and we're just not noticing them.
Maybe the very ideas in our heads are a form of alien life.
Well, okay, that's a crazy thought.
The aliens made me say it.
But it is cool that ideas do seem to have a life all of their own and that they outlive their creators.
Maybe biological life is just a passing phase.
Well, within the next 15 years, we could start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising nearby planets that will reveal just how life-friendly they might be.
And meanwhile, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now releasing its data to the public so that millions of citizen scientists, maybe including you, can bring the power of the crowd to join the search.
And here on Earth, amazing experiments are being done to try to create life from scratch, life that might be very different from the DNA forms we know.
All of this will help us understand whether the universe is teeming with life or whether, indeed, it's just us.
Either answer, in its own way, is awe-inspiring, because even if we are alone, the fact that we think and dream and ask these questions might yet turn out to be one of the most important facts about the universe.
The quest for knowledge and understanding never gets dull.
And it's the crazy possibilities, the unanswered questions, that pull us forward.
So stay curious.
You know, I had a real rough time in school with ADD, and I have a PhD.
I earned a PhD, but ... tough to pay attention -- biology, geology, physics, chemistry -- really tough for me.
But in this picture here, you'll see that Earth is mostly water.
That's the Pacific.
Seventy percent of Earth is covered with water.
You can say, "Hey, I know Earth. I live here."
You don't know Earth.
You don't know this planet, because most of it's covered with that -- average depth, two miles.
"Explored," meaning, for the first time, go peek and see what's there.
So what I want to do today is show you some things about this planet, about the oceans.
I want to take you from shallow water down to the deep water, and hopefully, like me, you'll see some things that get you hooked on exploring planet Earth.
You know things like corals; you've seen plenty of corals, those of you who've been to the beach, snorkeling, know corals are an amazing place to go -- full of life, some big animals, small animals, some nice, some dangerous, sharks, whales, all that stuff.
They need to be protected from humanity.
But what you probably don't know is in the very deep part of the ocean, we have volcanic eruptions.
All over the world -- in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean.
In this place, the ocean floor, the rocks actually turn to liquid.
So you actually have waves on the ocean floor.
You'd say nothing could live there, but when we look in detail, even there, in the deepest, darkest places on Earth, we find life, which tells us that life really wants to happen.
Every time we go to the bottom of the sea, we explore with our submarines, with our robots, we see something that's usually surprising, sometimes it's startling and sometimes revolutionary.
You see that puddle of water sitting there.
We'll get closer, you'll see the beach a little bit better, some of the waves in that water, down there.
The thing that's special about this water is that it's at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
So you're sitting inside a submarine, looking out the window at a little pond of water beneath the sea.
Water is actually flowing through there.
This totally blew our minds.
How can you have this at the bottom?
You're in the ocean looking at more water.
And there's animals that only live in that water.
So, the bottom of the ocean -- I love this map, because it shows in the middle of the ocean, there's a mountain range.
It's the greatest mountain range on Earth, called the mid-ocean ridge -- 50,000 miles long, and we've hardly had a peek at it.
We find valleys, many thousands of valleys, larger, wider, deeper than the Grand Canyon.
We find, as I said, underwater lakes, rivers, waterfalls.
The largest waterfall on the planet is actually under the ocean, up near Iceland.
So the deal about the ocean is that to explore it, you've got to have technology.
You've got to have the talent, the team.
You've got to have the technology.
In this case, it's our ship, Atlantis, and the submarine, Alvin.
Inside that submarine -- this is an Alvin launch -- there's three people.
There's 47 other people, the teamwork on that ship, making sure that these people are okay.
Everybody in that submarine is thinking one thing right now: Should I have gone to the bathroom one more time?
There's a lovely color blue that penetrates right inside you.
You don't hear the surface ship anymore, you hear that pinging of a sonar.
Divers check out the sub to make sure the outside is okay, and then they say "Go," and down you go to the bottom of the ocean and it's an amazing trip.
So for two and a half hours, you sink down to the bottom.
All the way down -- we call it the mid-water -- from the top of the ocean down to the bottom, we find life.
They're absolutely some of the coolest creatures on Earth.
That's like a little lobster.
That one is like all these animals with their mouths hooked together, the colonial animals.
Some animals are tiny, some can be longer than this stage.
And you can't collect them with a net -- we have to go with our cameras and take a look at them.
The ocean is full of life.
And yet the deepest part of the ocean -- when we go to that mountain range, we find hot springs.
Now we were sure -- because this is poisonous water, because it's so deep it would crush the Titanic the same way you crush an empty cup in your hand -- we were sure there would be no life there at all.
Instead, we find more life and diversity and density than in the tropical rainforest.
So, in one instance, in one peek out the window of the sub, we discover something that revolutionizes the way we think about life on Earth; and that is, you don't always have to have sunlight to get life going.
There's big animals down there too, some that look familiar.
That guy's called Dumbo. I love him. Dumbo's great.
This guy -- oh man, I wish I had more footage of this.
Go online and look.
Vampyroteuthis infernalis. The vampire squid.
Incredibly cool.
In the darkness of the deep sea, he's got glowing tentacles, so if I'm coming at you like him, I put my arms out in the darkness so all you see are little glowing things over here.
Just an amazing animal.
(Laughter) "Vampire" squid, because when it gets protective, it pulls this black cape over its whole body, and curls up into a ball.
This ship, "The Ship of Dreams" -- a hundred years ago this coming April, this ship was supposed to show up in New York.
It's the Titanic.
I co-led an expedition out there last year.
We are learning so much about that ship.
Microbes are actually eating the hull of the Titanic.
That's where Jack was king of the world there on the bow of the Titanic.
And what's exciting to me is that we're making a virtual Titanic, so you can sit there at home with your joystick and your headset on, and you can actually explore the Titanic for yourself.
That's what we want to do, make these virtual worlds, so it's not Dave Gallo or someone else exploring the world; it's you.
So here's the bottom line: The oceans are unexplored and I can't begin to tell you how important that is, because they're important to us.
Seven billion people live on this planet and all of us are impacted by the sea, because the oceans control the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat.
So what's in that other 95 percent?
There's a quote I love by Marcel Proust: "The true voyage of exploration is not so much in seeking new landscapes," which we do, "but in having new eyes."
And so I hope today, by showing you some of this, it's given you some new eyes about this planet, and for the first time, I want you to think about it differently.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
(Applause)
One of the funny things about owning a brain is that you have no control over the things that it gathers and holds onto, the facts and the stories.
When Richard Feynman was a young boy in Queens, he went for a walk with his dad and his wagon and a ball.
And his dad said, "That's inertia."
Inertia is the name that scientists give to the phenomenon of the ball going to the back of the wagon."
(Laughter) "But in truth, nobody really knows."
Feynman went on to earn degrees at MIT, Princeton, he solved the Challenger disaster, he ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his Feynman diagrams, describing the movement of subatomic particles.
And play he did.
Eratosthenes was the third librarian at the great Library of Alexandria, and he made many contributions to science.
But the one he is most remembered for began in a letter that he received as the librarian, from the town of Swenet, which was south of Alexandria.
The letter included this fact that stuck in Eratosthenes' mind, and the fact was that the writer said, at noon on the solstice, when he looked down this deep well, he could see his reflection at the bottom, and he could also see that his head was blocking the sun.
I should tell you -- the idea that Christopher Columbus discovered that the world is spherical is total bull.
It's not true at all.
In fact, everyone who was educated understood that the world was spherical since Aristotle's time.
Aristotle had proved it with a simple observation.
He noticed that every time you saw the Earth's shadow on the Moon, it was circular, and the only shape that constantly creates a circular shadow is a sphere, Q.E.D. the Earth is round.
But nobody knew how big it was until Eratosthenes got this letter with this fact.
So he understood that the sun was directly above the city of Swenet, because looking down a well, it was a straight line all the way down the well, right past the guy's head up to the sun.
Eratosthenes knew another fact.
He knew that a stick stuck in the ground in Alexandria at the same time and the same day, at noon, the sun's zenith, on the solstice, the sun cast a shadow that showed that it was 7.2 degrees off-axis.
If you know the circumference of a circle, and you have two points on it, all you need to know is the distance between those two points, and you can extrapolate the circumference.
360 degrees divided by 7.2 equals 50.
He needed to know the distance between Swenet and Alexandria, which is good because Eratosthenes was good at geography.
In fact, he invented the word geography.
It needed to know the exact distance, so he knew very precisely that the distance between the two cities was 500 miles.
Multiply that times 50, you get 25,000, which is within one percent of the actual diameter of the Earth.
He did this 2,200 years ago.
Now, we live in an age where multi-billion-dollar pieces of machinery are looking for the Higgs boson.
We're discovering particles that may travel faster than the speed of light, and all of these discoveries are made possible by technology that's been developed in the last few decades.
But for most of human history, we had to discover these things using our eyes and our ears and our minds.
Armand Fizeau was an experimental physicist in Paris.
His specialty was actually refining and confirming other people's results, and this might sound like a bit of an also-ran, but in fact, this is the soul of science, because there is no such thing as a fact that cannot be independently corroborated.
And he was familiar with Galileo's experiments in trying to determine whether or not light had a speed.
Galileo had worked out this really wonderful experiment where he and his assistant had a lamp, each one of them was holding a lamp.
They just knew their timing.
And then they stood at two hilltops, two miles distant, and they did the same thing, on the assumption from Galileo that if light had a discernible speed, he'd notice a delay in the light coming back from his assistant's lamp.
But light was too fast for Galileo.
He was off by several orders of magnitude when he assumed that light was roughly ten times as fast as the speed of sound.
Fizeau was aware of this experiment.
And he solved this problem of Galileo's, and he did it with a really relatively trivial piece of equipment.
He did it with one of these.
It's got a bunch of notches and it's got a bunch of teeth.
This was Fizeau's solution to sending discrete pulses of light.
Why is that?
It's because the pulse of light is not coming back through the same notch.
And then, based on the distance between the two stations and the speed of his wheel and the number of notches in the wheel, he calculates the speed of light to within two percent of its actual value.
And he does this in 1849.
Whenever I'm having trouble understanding a concept, I go back and I research the people that discovered that concept.
What happens when you look at what the discoverers were thinking about when they made their discoveries, is you understand that they are not so different from us.
We are all bags of meat and water. We all start with the same tools.
I love the idea that different branches of science are called fields of study.
Most people think of science as a closed, black box, when in fact it is an open field.
And we are all explorers.
The people that made these discoveries just thought a little bit harder about what they were looking at, and they were a little bit more curious.
And their curiosity changed the way people thought about the world, and thus it changed the world.
They changed the world, and so can you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I have a question for you: Are you religious?
Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person.
Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent.
I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference.
(Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand.
Okay, that's the majority.
My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form.
My Talk today is about self-transcendence.
It's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
We talk about being uplifted or elevated.
Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor.
So here's the metaphor I'm offering today.
Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we're very familiar with.
But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase.
We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness.
In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience.
He collected all kinds of case studies.
He quoted the words of all kinds of people who'd had a variety of these experiences.
One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820.
And here's what Bradley said about it.
(Music) (Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, "Come."
The next day I rejoiced with trembling.
This world had no place in my affections.
Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous.
But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies.
JH: So note how Bradley's petty, moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase.
And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving.
The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase.
Some shut down the self using meditation.
Others use psychedelic drugs.
This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god.
Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence.
But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase.
Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature.
Others overcome their self at raves.
But here's the weirdest place of all: war.
So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war.
And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences.
I'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray.
Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II.
And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle.
Here's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase.
(Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives.
"I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes "our" and individual faith loses its central importance.
JH: So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away, and it feels good, it feels really good, in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives.
This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim.
Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man.
The lower level he called the level of the profane.
Now profane is the opposite of sacred.
It just means ordinary or common.
And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals.
But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change.
Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts.
Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community.
Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness.
And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it.
Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum, of making a group out of individuals.
Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended.
Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator.
And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9/11.
So let me summarize where we are.
I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human.
I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind.
I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred.
So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design?
Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands?
Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system -- this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain -- Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake?
Well many scientists who study religion take this view.
The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing.
And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves?
Well let me show you.
Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups.
He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition.
He said, "If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other."
In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection.
Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years, but it's about to make a major comeback this year, especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April, making a very strong case that we, and several other species, are products of group selection.
So look at it this way: You've got competition going on within groups and across groups.
Within this team there's competition.
There are guys competing with each other.
Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics.
So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other.
Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach.
But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats.
And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat, now they've got no choice but to cooperate because they're all in the same boat.
I mean, these things sound trite, but they are deep evolutionary truths.
Suppose we've got a group of little organisms -- they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what -- and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative.
Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth.
And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows.
But suppose then that one of them mutates.
There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy.
If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started.
It's not that hard a problem.
And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat.
For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus?
It's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism.
Somehow or other -- maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why -- but once they got a membrane around them, they were all in the same membrane, now all the wealth-created division of labor, all the greatness created by cooperation, stays locked inside the membrane and we've got a superorganism.
What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history.
Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different.
Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria.
It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives.
And the most cohesive hives won, just as Darwin said.
These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere.
And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods.
And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation -- a force for construction and destruction.
Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives.
Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart.
We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are.
In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines.
Nonetheless, when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement, they can move mountains.
Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you.
Do you think they're there pursuing their self-interest?
Or are they pursuing communal interest, which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole?
Okay, so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way.
And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way.
(Music) (Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained.
One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves.
We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained.
And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained.
I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound.
I don't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions.
I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas.
This is why politics is so tribal.
Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness.
It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas.
It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team.
And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life.
We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed.
We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort.
What should I do with my life?
One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top.
I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia.
And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish.
And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago.
JH: Thank you.
(Applause)
What I want to talk to you about today is virtual worlds, digital globes, the 3-D Web, the Metaverse.
What it means is the Web is going to become an exciting place again.
It's going to become super exciting as we transform to this highly immersive and interactive world.
With graphics, computing power, low latencies, these types of applications and possibilities are going to stream rich data into your lives.
So the Virtual Earth initiative, and other types of these initiatives, are all about extending our current search metaphor.
As we move to search, we rely on the relevance rankings, the Web matching, the index crawling.
We want to navigate, explore, discover information.
In order to do that, we have to put you as a user back in the driver's seat.
We need cooperation between you and the computing network and the computer.
So what better way to put you back in the driver's seat than to put you in the real world that you interact in every day?
So Virtual Earth is about starting off creating the first digital representation, comprehensive, of the entire world.
What we want to do is mix in all types of data.
Tag it. Attribute it. Metadata. Get the community to add local depth, global perspective, local knowledge.
So when you think about this problem, what an enormous undertaking. Where do you begin?
Well, we collect data from satellites, from airplanes, from ground vehicles, from people.
This process is an engineering problem, a mechanical problem, a logistical problem, an operational problem.
Here is an example of our aerial camera.
This is panchromatic. It's actually four color cones.
We collect four gigabits per second of data, if you can imagine that kind of data stream coming down.
We fly these airplanes at 5,000 feet in the air.
We sit here -- you know, think about the ground vehicles, the human scale -- what do you see in person? We need to capture that up close to establish that what it's like-type experience.
The poor PC guy. They're duct taping his head. They're just wrapping it on him.
Well, a little unknown secret is his brother actually works on the Virtual Earth team.
(Laughter). So they've got a little bit of a sibling rivalry thing going on here.
But let me tell you -- it doesn't affect his day job.
We think a lot of good can come from this technology.
This was after Katrina. We were the first commercial fleet of airplanes to be cleared into the disaster impact zone.
We flew the area. We imaged it. We sent in people. We took pictures of interiors, disaster areas. We helped with the first responders, the search and rescue.
Often the first time anyone saw what happened to their house was on Virtual Earth.
When we think about how all this comes together, it's all about software, algorithms and math.
Extract geometry from the images.
This process is a very calculated process.
We do this all through software, algorithms and math -- a highly automated pipeline creating these cities.
We took a decimal point off what it cost to build these cities, and that's how we're going to be able to scale this out and make this reality a dream.
We think about the user interface.
What we're doing is -- people like this a lot, this bird's eye imagery we work with. It's this high resolution data.
You can see all types of resolution. From here, I can slowly pan the image over.
By doing this I don't lose the original detail. In fact, I might be recording history.
I can look at it from multiple viewpoints and angles.
What we're trying to do is build a virtual world.
I thank you very much for your time.
(Applause)
The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional.
And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate.
For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft.
Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars ...
(Laughter) ... if we use pennies.
Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight.
But it's also a morally important one.
Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses.
This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum -- whatever sorghum is -- losing sorghum.
But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math.
Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene.
But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up.
And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up.
Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up.
So this small missing chunk here is puzzling.
(Laughter) (Applause) Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms -- one that didn't exist in the 90's.
What we're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy.
(Laughter) 50 billion dollars of it a year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times.
(Laughter) It's true.
(Applause) I have Excel.
(Laughter) The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people.
Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people.
And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries.
And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day.
And some people think that string theory is tough.
(Laughter) Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit.
Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law.
Now when this law first passed, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs.
And it was a big Christmas hit.
(Laughter) (Applause) These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media.
(Applause) Or about 75,000 jobs.
(Laughter) (Applause) Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best left to experts.
So that's it for now.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk.
I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life.
And I actually didn't leave my house for about three days.
The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch.
And when I walked in, she was already at the table.
I sat down, and she said, "God, you look like hell."
And she said, "What's going on?"
And I said, "I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability.
I had a slide that said 'Breakdown.' At what point did I think that was a good idea?"
(Laughter) And she said, "I saw your talk live-streamed.
It was not really you.
It was a little different than what you usually do.
But it was great."
And I said, "This can't happen.
YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube.
(Laughter) And she said, "Well, I think it's too late."
And she said, "Yeah."
I said, "Do you remember when we were in college, really wild and kind of dumb?"
I said, "Remember when we'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend's answering machine?
(Laughter) And she goes, "Uh... no."
(Laughter) Of course, the only thing I could say at that point was, "Yeah, me neither.
And I'm thinking to myself, "Brené, what are you doing?
Why did you bring this up?
Have you lost your mind?
(Laughter) So I looked back up and she said, "Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?"
(Laughter) And I said, "I'm just thinking about it a little bit."
(Laughter) She said, "You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever."
(Laughter) Then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic, but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic.
But I want to talk about what I've learned.
The first is: vulnerability is not weakness.
And that myth is profoundly dangerous.
Let me ask you honestly -- and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably -- so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome -- how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing or saying something vulnerable think, "God, vulnerability is weakness."
How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously?
The majority of people.
Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage?
Vulnerability is not weakness.
I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty.
And I've come to the belief -- this is my 12th year doing this research -- that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage -- to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.
One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country -- everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies.
And so many of the calls went like this, "Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk.
(Laughter) What would you like for me to talk about?
There's three big answers.
This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change.
(Laughter) So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
(Applause) To create is to make something that has never existed before.
There's nothing more vulnerable than that.
Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability.
The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned, is this: We have to talk about shame.
And I'm going to be really honest with you.
About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store.
(Laughter) (Laughter ends) I'm a fifth-generation Texan.
Our family motto is "Lock and load."
I am not a natural vulnerability researcher.
(Laughter) And then I hear, "Vulnerability TED!"
She's right here and she said, "You're the shame researcher who had the breakdown."
(Laughter) At this point, parents are, like, pulling their children close.
(Laughter) "Look away."
(Laughter) (Applause) And she looks back and does this, "I know."
(Laughter) And she said, "We watched your TED talk in my book club.
Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves 'The Breakdown Babes.'" (Laughter) And she said, "Our tagline is: 'We're falling apart and it feels fantastic.'" (Laughter) You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting.
(Sighs) So when I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure -- Like Ninja Barbie, but I'm Vulnerability TED -- I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind, because I spent six years studying shame before I started writing and talking about vulnerability.
And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic, no one wants to talk about it.
And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability.
I learned about these things from studying shame.
Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul.
And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there.
It is to put on some galoshes -- and walk through and find our way around.
Here's why.
We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country, and I think globally, around race, right?
Yes? We heard that.
Because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege.
And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.
And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn't mess it up here.
(Applause) I saw the TED Fellows my first day here.
And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia, because people were dying unnecessarily.
And he said, "I saw this need.
And he said, "And it didn't work.
(Laughter) And then I made it 32 more times, and then it worked."
You know what the big secret about TED is?
(Laughter) No, it is.
(Applause) You know why this place is amazing?
I've failed miserably, many times.
There's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt.
A lot of people refer to it as the "Man in the Arena" quote.
And it goes like this: "It is not the critic who counts.
The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat.
But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly."
When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, "I'm going in and I'm going to try this," shame is the gremlin who says, "Uh, uh.
You're not good enough.
You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you.
I know you don't think that you're pretty, smart, talented or powerful enough.
I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO."
Shame is that thing.
The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt.
Shame is "I am bad."
Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake.
Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake.
There's a huge difference between shame and guilt.
Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders.
Guilt, inversely correlated with those things.
The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive.
It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive.
The other thing you need to know about shame is it's absolutely organized by gender.
We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy.
Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath.
Shame feels the same for men and women, but it's organized by gender.
"I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine.
(Laughter) Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be.
And it's a straight-jacket.
For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations.
Weak.
It wasn't until a man looked at me after a book signing, and said, "I love what say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men."
And he said, "That's convenient."
(Laughter) And I said, "Why?"
But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?"
I said, "Yeah."
"They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down.
Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else."
So I started interviewing men and asking questions.
And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work.
(Laughter) But he really listens -- because that's all we need -- I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work.
(Laughter) When he asked about men, what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms, the answers were: always show emotional control, work is first, pursue status and violence.
If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame.
If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment.
If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path.
And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that's not what we want to see.
We want to be with you and across from you.
(Applause)
I have absolutely no background in biology, chemistry or engineering, so bear with me, because I'll be talking about biomedical engineering today.
(Laughter) And please do stay here in the meantime.
Industrial design is about making lots of things identical.
The downside about that is, there's something impersonal about lots of identical things, because when you're trying to design one thing for one person to solve one issue, you can't really do that when you're making things aimed more to a demographic model or to a marketing requirements document, which is what we live by.
Anyone here from MIT knows him or has a tattoo or poster of him somewhere.
(Laughter) Anyone else in the room, just for a hint, he is the engineer of engineers or the designer of designers.
He is the guy who made bionics a household word in the form of the polyester-clad Six Million Dollar Man that I grew up with.
It's not a profound philosophy, but it works for us.
What we don't see is the sculpture or the beauty or the individual qualities or the uniqueness or the elegance to them.
And that's great, except for a lot of people, that doesn't work.
People come to our studio all the time, and they have bubble wrap and duct tape, trying to approximate their original form.
The body, to us, is not a mechanical entity, where mechanical-only solutions can address them.
It's our personal sculpture, our kinematic sculpture.
It is our canvas; it represents not just our physicality, but also a lot of our personality as well.
So when you're designing for the body, maybe the thing isn't to design for mass production, but to design with the body in mind, to really think about curves instead of hard geometry, or uniqueness instead of identical.
The problem is, we're constrained by mass production, which makes a million identical things but can't make one unique, individualized thing.
You can take the sound-side limb there, the surviving limb, mirror it over, and from now on, anything in the process will recreate symmetry -- something as personal and as hard to achieve as symmetry in the body.
And you create a product that, no matter what, it's going to be as unique as their fingerprint.
So we run it through computer modeling, 3D CAD.
We tried this on Chad.
Chad is a competitive soccer player, lost his leg eight years ago to cancer.
The resulting parts recreated his shape and deliberately had an aesthetic that look like sporting gear.
Two things happened.
The other thing, though, is that the other members of the team stopped thinking of him as the amputee on the team.
Not that they didn't know, but it stopped becoming a focal point for him.
And there is a certain very quiet value in that, we like to believe.
James lost his leg in a motorcycle crash.
And the motorcycle is still a big part of James's personality and style.
Check out the tattoo on his forearm.
He has his tattoo, he has his morphology and he has the materials of his motorcycle.
It's kind of a chimera hybrid between the two, and James likes that.
(Laughter) So, we don't ever try to make something look like it could be human.
You don't look at him and say, "He's an amputee with a prosthetic."
Deborah wanted her curves back, but she also just wanted what came out of it to be really sexy, which is great for us to hear.
We created this lace pattern that lends itself well to 3D printing.
We created the first leg, I think, where the lace defines the contour of the leg, instead of the leg giving form to the lace.
We switched things over.
(Laughter) (Applause) We made another one where we laser-tattooed the leather, because how cool would it be to be able to change your tattoos out from one minute to the next?
We try to capture as much of somebody's personality as we can.
This is the raw computer data that we deal with.
He's kind of a classic, timeless-type personality, so we did herringbone tweed, but in polished nickel.
Part of it is, yes, we're showing off, because we can do this, but the other part is this connects him to what will be a part of him.
Tattoos are especially exciting for us.
What happens if you take the tattoo, which is a combination of somebody's personal taste and choice, and their morphology, but now, let's say, you remove the person.
So everything we do is about recreating and expressing something that means something to that person, and expressing that through what would be their body, whether it's speed or attitude or bling, whatever it is that captures and suggests them in the best way we can.
So why not just print the entire leg?
That's the concept that preceded the work we're doing now.
This is a three-dimensionally printed leg. It's symmetric to the other leg.
It is made in America, it is a trivially low-carbon footprint to create, curbside recyclable, costs about 4,000 dollars to create, and it is dishwasher-safe.
People don't think about that all the time, but yes, throw it in the dishwasher, it works just great.
The proof of concept works great, we're finding it; we'll get there.
Or, we upped the quality of the materials and created this for John.
The fun thing with John's leg is that when his fiancee looked at this, she joked and said, "I like that leg better than that leg."
(Laughter) And it's a joke -- she knows full well what he goes through -- but at the same time, there's something very valuable.
He turned to us and said, "Nobody says that."
That connected with him very deeply.
So we like to think that this is a new type of design, where you're turning the original process on its head, where there is a dialogue that forms between the designer and the end user, where the designer relinquishes some of the control -- designers hate doing that -- and instead, is the curator of a process.
And the end user relinquishes their body into the process, and their taste.
I'd like to think that speaks to a greater change that's happening in the design world altogether; in this case, it's one where products will be evaluated on how well they address the individual.
The individual will actually be part of the DNA of the end product itself.
Then he turned to us and said, "That's the first time I've felt that shape in eight years."
We thought about that.
And for all the technology and all the nights and energy we put into it, that's all we really wanted to hear.
(Applause)
I'm a believer.
I'm a believer in global warming, and my record is good on the subject.
But my subject is national security.
I'm talking about OPEC oil.
And let me take you back 100 years to 1912.
(Laughter) It wasn't. It was 1928.
But go back to 1912, 100 years ago, and look at that point what we, our country, was faced with.
It's the same energy question that you're looking at today, but it's different sources of fuel.
A hundred years ago we were looking at coal, of course, and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil.
At that point, we were looking for a fuel that was cleaner, it was cheaper, and it wasn't ours though, it was theirs.
So at that point, 1912, we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal.
But as we moved on to the period now, 100 years later, we're back really at another decision point.
What is the decision point?
It's what we're going to use in the future.
So from here, it's pretty clear to me, we would prefer to have cleaner, cheaper, domestic, ours -- and we have that, we have that -- which is natural gas.
So here you are, that the cost of all this to the world is 89 million barrels of oil, give or take a few barrels, every day.
And the cost annually is three trillion dollars.
And one trillion of that goes to OPEC.
That has got to be stopped.
Now if you look at the cost of OPEC, it cost seven trillion dollars -- on the Milken Institute study last year -- seven trillion dollars since 1976, is what we paid for oil from OPEC.
Now that includes the cost of military and the cost of the fuel both.
But it's the greatest transfer of wealth, from one group to another in the history of mankind.
And it continues.
Now when you look at where is the transfer of wealth, you can see here that we have the arrows going into the Mid-East and away from us.
I know the response to this.
I would bet there aren't 10 percent of you in the room that know how many aircraft carriers there are in the world.
Raise your hand if you think you know.
There are 12.
One is under construction by the Chinese and the other 11 belong to us.
Why do we have 11 aircraft carriers?
Are we smarter than anybody else? I'm not sure.
Why? Why are they in the Mid-East?
They're there to control, keep the shipping lanes open and make oil available.
And the United States uses about 20 million barrels a day, which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world.
And we're doing it with four percent of the population.
Somehow that doesn't seem right.
That's not sustainable.
So where do we go from here?
Yes, it's going to continue.
The slide you're looking at here is 1990 to 2040.
And when you look at what we're using the oil for, 70 percent of it is used for transportation fuel.
So when somebody says, "Let's go more nuclear, let's go wind, let's go solar," fine; I'm for anything American, anything American.
But if you're going to do anything about the dependency on foreign oil, you have to address transportation.
So here we are using 20 million barrels a day -- producing eight, importing 12, and from the 12, five comes from OPEC.
When you look at the biggest user and the second largest user, we use 20 million barrels and the Chinese use 10.
The Chinese have a little bit better plan -- or they have a plan; we have no plan.
If you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel, you will pay 2.2 trillion.
But the days of cheap oil are over.
They're over.
They make it very clear to you, the Saudis do, they have to have 94 dollars a barrel to make their social commitments.
It's what they have to pay for is what we are going to pay for oil."
There is no free market for oil.
And the OPEC nations are the ones that price the oil.
So where are we headed from here?
We're headed to natural gas.
Natural gas will do everything we want it to do.
It's 130 octane fuel.
It's 25 percent cleaner than oil.
It comes out of the ground at 130 octane.
Run it through the separator and you're ready to use it.
But here you can look at the list.
Natural gas will fit all of those.
It's for power generation, transportation, it's peaking fuel, it's all those.
Look at the bar on the left. It's 24 trillion.
Go forward and the estimates that you have from the EIA and onto the industry estimates -- the industry knows what they're talking about -- we've got 4,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that's available to us.
How does that translate to barrels of oil equivalent?
And they claim they have 250 billion barrels of oil, which I do not believe.
I think it's probably 175 billion barrels.
But anyway, whether they say they're right or whatever, we have plenty of natural gas.
And where I've targeted is on the heavy-duty trucks.
So you will cut 60 percent off of OPEC with eight million trucks.
There are 250 million vehicles in America.
So what you have is natural gas is the bridge fuel, is the way I see it.
(Laughter) That's your concern.
But when you look at the natural gas we have it could very well be the bridge to natural gas, because you have plenty of natural gas.
Now let me take you -- I've been a realist -- I went from theorist early to realist.
I'm back to theorist again.
If you look at the world, you have methane hydrates in the ocean around every continent.
And here you can see methane, if that's the way you're going to go, that there's plenty of methane -- natural gas is methane, methane and natural gas are interchangeable -- but if you decide that you're going to use some methane -- and I'm gone, so it's up to you -- but we do have plenty of methane hydrates.
So I think I've made my point that we have to get on our own resources in America.
And yet, we have no energy plan.
So there's nothing going on that impresses me in Washington on that plan, other than I'm trying to focus on that eight million 18-wheelers.
If we could do that, I think we would take our first step to an energy plan.
If we did, we could see that our own resources are easier to use than anybody can imagine.
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks for that.
So from your point of view, you had this great Pickens Plan that was based on wind energy, and you abandoned it basically because the economics changed.
What happened?
TBP: I lost 150 million dollars.
No, what happened to us, Chris, is that power, it's priced off the margin.
And so the margin is natural gas.
And at the time I went into the wind business, natural gas was nine dollars.
CA: So what happened was that, through increased ability to use fracking technology, the calculated reserves of natural gas kind of exploded and the price plummeted, which made wind uncompetitive.
TBP: That's what happened.
The first one was Barnett Shale in Texas and then the Marcellus up in the Northeast across New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia; and Haynesville in Louisiana.
We are overwhelmed with natural gas.
CA: And now you're a big investor in that and bringing that to market?
TBP: Well you say a big investor.
It's my life.
I'm a geologist, got out of school in '51, and I've been in the industry my entire life.
I'm not a big natural gas producer.
Somebody the other day said I was the second largest natural gas producer in the United States.
CA: But natural gas is a fossil fuel.
So you believe in the threat of climate change.
TBP: Well you're going to have to use something.
(Laughter) CA: No, no. The argument that it's a bridge fuel makes sense, because the amount of CO2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal, correct?
And so everyone can be at least happy to see a shift from coal or oil to natural gas.
But if that's it and that becomes the reason that renewables don't get invested in, then, long-term, we're screwed anyway, right?
TBP: Well I'm not ready to give up, but Jim and I talked there as he left, and I said, "How do you feel about natural gas?"
And he said, "Well it's a bridge fuel, is what it is."
And I said, "Bridge to what?
CA: But I don't think that's right, Boone.
You're one of the few people in a position to really swing the debate.
Do you support the idea of some kind of price on carbon?
Does that make sense?
TBP: I don't like that because it ends up the government is going to run the program.
They just aren't, it's a bad deal.
But that only blew out 500 million.
But Chris, I think where we're headed, the long-term, I don't mind going back to nuclear.
And I can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be.
(Laughter) And number two, do not build a reformer on the ocean.
And now I think reformers are safe.
Move them inland and on very stable ground and build the reformers.
You can't -- okay.
CA: One of the questions from the audience is, with fracking and the natural gas process, what about the problem of methane leaking from that, methane being a worse global warming gas than CO2?
TBP: Fracking? What is fracking?
(Laughter) CA: We've got a little bit of accent incompatibility here, you know.
TBP: No, let me tell you, I've told you what my age was.
I don't know what in the hell he's talking about.
I mean seriously, the Department of Energy did not have anything to do with fracking.
Never had a problem with messing up an aquifer or anything else.
Now the largest aquifer in North America is from Midland, Texas to the South Dakota border, across eight states -- big aquifer: Ogallala, Triassic age.
There had to have been 800,000 wells fracked in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas in that aquifer.
I don't understand why the media is focused on Eastern Pennsylvania.
CA: All right, so you don't support a carbon tax of any kind or a price on carbon.
Your picture then I guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately, that we'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive?
TBP: Solar and wind, Jim and I agreed on that in 13 seconds.
CA: So how does the world get off fossil fuels?
TBP: How do we get there?
You'll keep using it. It is the cleanest of all.
And if you look at California, they use 2,500 buses.
LAMTA have been on natural gas for 25 years.
The Ft. Worth T has been on it for 25 years.
Why? Air quality was the reason they used natural gas and got away from diesel.
Why are all the trash trucks today in Southern California on natural gas?
It's because of air quality.
How in the hell can we get off the natural gas at some point?
And I say, that is your problem.
(Laughter) CA: All right, so it's the bridge fuel.
What is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out.
TBP: I lost 150 million on the wind, okay.
Because, again, I'm trying to get energy solved for America.
CA: Boone, I really, really appreciate you coming here, engaging in this conversation.
And that was a real gift you gave this audience.
Thank you so much. (TBP: You bet, Chris. Thank you.) (Applause)
So this is the leading killer of women.
It's a closely held secret for reasons I don't know.
In addition to making this personal -- so we're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women's relationship with their heart -- we're going to wax into the politics.
Because the personal, as you know, is political.
Since 1984, more women die in the U.S. than men.
So where we used to think of heart disease as being a man's problem primarily -- which that was never true, but that was kind of how everybody thought in the 1950s and '60s, and it was in all the textbooks.
It's certainly what I learned when I was training.
If we were to remain sexist, and that was not right, but if we were going to go forward and be sexist, it's actually a woman's disease.
So it's a woman's disease now.
And one of the things that you see is that male line, the mortality is going down, down, down, down, down.
And you see the female line since 1984, the gap is widening.
More and more women, two, three, four times more women, dying of heart disease than men.
And that's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change.
So what this really suggested to us at the national level was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, which had been developed in men, by men, for men for the last 50 years -- and they work pretty well in men, don't they? -- weren't working so well for women.
So that was a big wake-up call in the 1980's.
Heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer.
And the breast cancer campaign -- again, this is not a competition.
We're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign.
Now sometimes when people see this, I hear this gasp.
I'm going to tell you why.
Heart disease kills people, often very quickly.
So the first time heart disease strikes in women and men, half of the time it's sudden cardiac death -- no opportunity to say good-bye, no opportunity to take her to the chemotherapy, no opportunity to help her pick out a wig.
Breast cancer, mortality is down to four percent.
Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan stood up and said, "I'm a breast cancer survivor," and it was okay to talk about it.
Women are living longer than ever.
That has to happen in heart disease, and it's time.
It's not happening, and it's time.
We owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women.
As Barbara depicted in one of her amazing movies, "Yentl," she portrayed a young woman who wanted an education.
And she wanted to study the Talmud.
She had to look like a man.
She had to make other people believe that she looked like a man and she could have the same rights that the men had.
Bernadine Healy, Dr. Healy, was a cardiologist.
And right around that time, in the 1980's, that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up, up, up, up, up, she wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine and said, the Yentl syndrome.
Women are dying of heart disease, two, three, four times more than men.
Mortality is not going down, it's going up.
And she questioned, she hypothesized, is this a Yentl syndrome?
And here's what the story is.
Doctor Healy then subsequently became the first female director of our National Institutes of Health.
And it funds a lot of my research.
It was a very big deal for her to become director.
And she started, in the face of a lot of controversy, the Women's Health Initiative.
And every woman in the room here has benefited from that Women's Health Initiative.
It told us about hormone replacement therapy.
She was like, "Nope. Sorry. Women are worth it."
Well there was a little piece of that Women's Health Initiative that went to National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which is the cardiology part of the NIH.
And we got to do the WISE study -- and the WISE stands for Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation -- and I have chaired this study for the last 15 years.
Why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease?
So in the WISE, 15 years ago, we started out and said, "Well wow, there's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that."
And our colleagues in Washington, D.C.
You're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology.
(Laughter) So I'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first.
Horrible chest pain.
There's a big clot in the middle of the artery.
And they go up to the cath lab and boom, boom, boom get rid of the clot.
That's a man heart attack.
I'm not sure what it was. Might have been gas.
So we picked up on that and we said, "You know, we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called IVUS: intravascular ultrasound."
When we watch people become obese, where do men get fat?
All over.
Cellulite here, cellulite here.
He's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries.
Panel B is the woman, very smooth.
(Laughter) And if you did that angiogram, which is the red, you can see the man's disease.
So that was a discovery.
So we are working now on a non-invasive -- again, these are all invasive studies.
Ideally you would love to do all this non-invasively.
And again, 50 years of good non-invasive stress testing, we're pretty good at recognizing male-pattern disease with stress tests.
So this is cardiac magnetic resonance imaging.
We're doing this at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in the Women's Heart Center.
This is not in your community hospital, but we would hope to translate this.
This was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart.
And if you look carefully, you can see that there's a black blush right there.
The second reason we really liked MRI is that there's no radiation.
So unlike the CAT scans, X-rays, thalliums, for women whose breast is in the way of looking at the heart, every time we order something that has even a small amount of radiation, we say, "Do we really need that test?"
You can't go and order it yet, but this is an area of active inquiry where actually studying women is going to advance the field for women and men.
What are the downstream consequences then, when female-pattern heart disease is not recognized?
And when the woman has male-pattern disease -- so she looks like Barbara in the movie -- they get treated.
And when you have female-pattern and you look like a woman, as Barbara does here with her husband, they don't get the treatment.
And those little red boxes are deaths.
And that is female-pattern and why we think the Yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps.
There's been wonderful news also about studying women, finally, in heart disease.
And one of the the cutting-edge areas that we're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy.
If you ask, what is the big difference between women and men physiologically?
Why are there women and men?
Because women bring new life into the world.
So we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury, doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs, which is one of the things that we're trying to do with stem cell therapy.
These are female and male stem cells.
Or do you want these guys, that look like they're out to lunch?
(Laughter) And some of our investigative teams have demonstrated that female stem cells -- and this is in animals and increasingly we're showing this in humans -- that female stem cells, when put even into a male body, do better than male stem cells going into a male body.
One of the things that we say about all of this female physiology -- because again, as much as we're talking about women and heart disease, women do, on average, have better longevity than men -- is that unfolding the secrets of female physiology and understanding that is going to help men and women.
So this is not a zero-sum game in anyway.
And remember, paths crossed in 1984, and more and more women were dying of cardiovascular disease.
So just like the breast cancer story, doing research, getting awareness going, it works, you just have to get it going.
And I would propose, with the better longevity that women have overall, that women probably should theoretically do better, if we could just get treated.
We've worked on this for 15 years.
And I've told you, we've been working on male-pattern heart disease for 50 years.
So we're 35 years behind.
So what do we need to do?
Women have heard the call for breast cancer and they have come out for awareness campaigns.
And women do fundraising.
This is what we need to do with heart disease now.
And it's political.
Women's health, from a federal funding standpoint, sometimes it's popular, sometimes it's not so popular.
So I implore you to join the Red Dress Campaign in this fundraising.
Breast cancer, as we said, kills women, but heart disease kills a whole bunch more.
So if we can be as good as breast cancer and give women this new charge, we have a lot of lives to save.
So thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
So my name is Taylor Wilson.
I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist, which may be a little hard to believe, but I am.
So nuclear fusion is our energy future.
And the second point, making the case that kids can really change the world.
So you may ask -- (Applause) You may ask me, well how do you know what our energy future is?
Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old.
That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor.
I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old.
I decided I wanted to make a star.
Now most of you are probably saying, well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion.
I don't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy.
It doesn't produce more energy out than I put in, but it still does some pretty cool stuff.
And I assembled this in my garage, and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada, Reno.
And it slams together deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it.
So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun.
So this previous year, I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has.
For hundreds of dollars, I've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I built this in my garage.
(Applause) And I've developed a system to produce medical isotopes.
Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes.
So that's my fusion reactor in the background there.
That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor.
Oh, by the way, I make yellowcake in my garage, so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians.
So maybe I don't want to admit to that.
This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world.
And this is me with President Obama, showing him my Homeland Security research.
(Applause) So in about seven years of doing nuclear research, I started out with a dream to make a "star in a jar," a star in my garage, and I ended up meeting the president and developing things that I think can change the world, and I think other kids can too.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
And let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about.
Because the mixing of those two media is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act.
(Laughter) It's a great way to start sentences.
When I was him back then, I was approached by J. Walter Thompson, the ad company, and they were hired sort of by the Sundance Channel.
And the idea was to have me record some of my poems and then they would find animators to animate them.
And I was initially resistant, because I always think poetry can stand alone by itself.
Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results, in all cases.
And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.
And surely, if you're reading a poem that mentions a cow, you don't need on the facing page a drawing of a cow.
I mean, let's let the reader do a little work.
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Loony Tunes cartoons.
Bugs Bunny is my muse.
And I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places -- poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
When I was Poet Laureate, there I go again -- I can't help it, it's true -- (Laughter) I created a poetry channel on Delta Airlines that lasted for a couple of years.
Start a meeting with a poem. That would be an idea you might take with you.
So let us start with the first one.
It's a little poem called "Budapest," and in it I reveal, or pretend to reveal, the secrets of the creative process.
(Video) Narration: "Budapest."
My pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.
(Applause) Writing is not actually as easy as that for me.
One of my students came up after class, an introductory class, and she said, "You know, poetry is harder than writing," which I found both erroneous and profound.
(Laughter) So I like to at least pretend it just flows out.
A friend of mine has a slogan; he's another poet.
He says that, "If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you ever tried."
(Laughter) The next poem is also rather short.
Poetry just says a few things in different ways.
And it uses the imagery of dollhouse furniture.
Some days I put the people in their places at the table, bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.
Very funny.
(Applause) BC: There's a horror movie in there somewhere.
And the poem begins with a certain species of forgetfulness that someone called literary amnesia, in other words, forgetting the things that you have read.
(Video) Narration: "Forgetfulness."
It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago, you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag.
And even now, as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
No wonder the Moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
(Applause) BC: The next poem is called "The Country" and it's based on, when I was in college I met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine.
He lived, and still does, in rural Vermont.
And when I would go up to the country, he would teach me things like deer hunting, which meant getting lost with a gun basically -- (Laughter) and trout fishing and stuff like that.
(Laughter) And in that way we traded lore with each other.
The poem that's coming up is based on him trying to tell me a little something about a domestic point of etiquette in country living that I had a very hard time, at first, processing.
It's called "The Country."
(Video) Narration: "The Country."
I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches just lying around the house, because the mice might get into them and start a fire.
Who could not see him rounding a corner, the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam, the sudden flare and the creature, for one bright, shining moment, suddenly thrust ahead of his time -- now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid illuminating some ancient night?
(Applause) BC: Thank you.
And that to me was a bad start to the afterlife, having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified.
So the little poem is called "The Dead."
(Video) Narration: "The Dead."
The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
And when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them, which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes.
(Applause) BC: I'm not sure if other poems will be animated.
It took a long time -- I mean, it's rather uncommon to have this marriage -- a long time to put those two together.
(Laughter) I just have time to read a more recent poem to you.
If it has a subject, the subject is adolescence.
It's called "To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl."
"Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born, you would be all done in only one more year?
You're loved for just being you.
For some reason I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15.
(Laughter) But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
(Laughter) Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15 or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
(Laughter) By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes, but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house."
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Thanks.
(Applause)
Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys.
Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." (Laughter) So -- (Laughter) So with that in mind, I'm going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century.
Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century.
While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece.
Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from it's going to happen to everybody, is it's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it's currently on.
Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that.
What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis.
And what's really happened over the period of time that I've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then.
So what's happening now is there's been a big shift in the way that people die, and most of what they're dying of now isn't as amenable to what we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the '80s and '90s.
So we kind of got a bit caught up with this, and we haven't really squared with you guys about what's really happening now, and it's about time we did.
I kind of woke up to this bit in the late '90s when I met this guy.
This guy is called Jim, Jim Smith, and he looked like this.
I was called down to the ward to see him.
He's got pneumonia, and he looks like he needs intensive care.
His daughter's here and she wants everything possible to be done."
Which is a familiar phrase to us.
So I go down to the ward and see Jim, and his skin his translucent like this.
You can see his bones through the skin.
And she looked at me and said, "No, of course not!"
And I got talking to her, and after a while, she said to me, "You know, we always thought there'd be time."
Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasn't happening here.
And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill.
And I realized, of course, this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large.
Now, I work in acute care.
This is John Hunter Hospital.
So a colleague of mine from nursing called Lisa Shaw and I went through hundreds and hundreds of sets of notes in the medical records department looking at whether there was any sign at all that anybody had had any conversation about what might happen to them if the treatment they were receiving was unsuccessful to the point that they would die.
What we know is that obviously we are all going to die, but how we die is actually really important, obviously not just to us, but also to how that features in the lives of all the people who live on afterwards.
How we die lives on in the minds of everybody who survives us, and the stress created in families by dying is enormous, and in fact you get seven times as much stress by dying in intensive care as by dying just about anywhere else, so dying in intensive care is not your top option if you've got a choice.
And, if that wasn't bad enough, of course, all of this is rapidly progressing towards the fact that many of you, in fact, about one in 10 of you at this point, will die in intensive care.
In the U.S., it's one in five.
In Miami, it's three out of five people die in intensive care.
So this is the sort of momentum that we've got at the moment.
The ones you may know most about are the ones that are becoming increasingly of historical interest: sudden death.
It's quite likely in an audience this size this won't happen to anybody here.
Sudden death has become very rare.
The dying process of those with terminal illness that we've just seen occurs to younger people.
Only one in 10 people who are over 80 will die of cancer.
The big growth industry are these.
And this one's the biggest growth industry of all, and at least six out of 10 of the people in this room will die in this form, which is the dwindling of capacity with increasing frailty, and frailty's an inevitable part of aging, and increasing frailty is in fact the main thing that people die of now, and the last few years, or the last year of your life is spent with a great deal of disability, unfortunately.
We are all, most of us, living to reach this point.
You know, historically, we didn't do that.
I'm sorry to say that. (Laughter) What we did, anyway, look, what we did, we didn't just take this lying down at John Hunter Hospital and elsewhere.
We've started a whole series of projects to try and look about whether we could, in fact, involve people much more in the way that things happen to them.
But we realized, of course, that we are dealing with cultural issues, and this is, I love this Klimt painting, because the more you look at it, the more you kind of get the whole issue that's going on here, which is clearly the separation of death from the living, and the fear — Like, if you actually look, there's one woman there who has her eyes open.
Anyway, we had a major cultural issue.
Clearly, people didn't want us to talk about death, or, we thought that.
So with loads of funding from the Federal Government and the local Health Service, we introduced a thing at John Hunter called Respecting Patient Choices.
And when they expressed wishes, all of those wishes came true, as it were.
We were able to make that happen for them.
There has to be a little side road off there for people who don't want to go on that track.
The small idea is, let's all of us engage more with this in the way that Jason has illustrated.
Why can't we have these kinds of conversations with our own elders and people who might be approaching this?
"In the event that you became too sick to speak for yourself, who would you like to speak for you?"
The second thing you can say is, "Have you spoken to that person about the things that are important to you so that we've got a better idea of what it is we can do?"
The big idea, I think, is more political.
I suggested we should have Occupy Death.
Now, I'm an aging hippie.
I don't know, I don't think I look like that anymore, but I had, two of my kids were born at home in the '80s when home birth was a big thing, and we baby boomers are used to taking charge of the situation, so if you just replace all these words of birth, I like "Peace, Love, Natural Death" as an option.
I do think we have to get political and start to reclaim this process from the medicalized model in which it's going.
I want to make it absolutely crystal clear to you all, I hate euthanasia. I think it's a sideshow.
I'm more interested in what happens to the 99.5 percent of people who don't want to do that.
I think most people don't want to be dead, but I do think most people want to have some control over how their dying process proceeds.
So I'm an opponent of euthanasia, but I do think we have to give people back some control.
It deprives euthanasia of its oxygen supply.
She founded the hospice movement.
And she said, "You matter because you are, and you matter to the last moment of your life."
And I firmly believe that that's the message that we have to carry forward.
Thank you. (Applause)
Imagine spending seven years at MIT and research laboratories, only to find out that you're a performance artist.
(Laughter) I'm also a software engineer, and I make lots of different kinds of art with the computer.
And I think the main thing that I'm interested in is trying to find a way of making the computer into a personal mode of expression.
And many of you out there are the heads of Macromedia and Microsoft, and in a way those are my bane: I think there's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think about what's possible on the computer.
Of course, it's also a great liberating force that makes possible, you know, publishing and so forth, and standards, and so on.
Chris has asked me to do a short performance, and so I'm going to take just this time -- maybe 10 minutes -- to do that, and hopefully at the end have just a moment to show you a couple of my other projects in video form.
Thank you.
(Applause) We've got about a minute left.
I'd just like to show a clip from a most recent project.
I did a performance with two singers who specialize in making strange noises with their mouths.
And the idea is to visualize their speech and song behind them with a large screen.
We used a computer vision tracking system in order to know where they were.
And since we know where their heads are, and we have a wireless mic on them that we're processing the sound from, we're able to create visualizations which are linked very tightly to what they're doing with their speech.
This will take about 30 seconds or so.
He's making a, kind of, cheek-flapping sound.
Thanks very much. There's always lots more.
I'm overtime, so I just wanted to say you can, if you're in New York, you can check out my work at the Whitney Biennial next week, and also at Bitforms Gallery in Chelsea.
And with that, I think I should give up the stage, so, thank you so much.
I told you three things last year.
And that animated graphics can make a difference.
Things are changing and today, on the United Nations Statistic Division Home Page, it says, by first of May, full access to the databases.
(Applause) And if I could share the image with you on the screen.
So three things have happened.
And let me repeat what you saw last year.
Here you have the fertility rate -- the number of children per woman -- and there you have the length of life in years.
At that time there was a "we" and "them."
There was a huge difference in the world.
And this is what happens.
You can see how China is the red, big bubble.
The blue there is India.
And it's Africa that stands out as the problem down here, doesn't it?
This is more or less what we saw last year, and this is how it will go on into the future.
Because this is where we are.
I expect to live 100 years.
And this is where we are today.
Now could we look here instead at the economic situation in the world?
Here you have child mortality -- that is, survival -- four kids dying there, 200 dying there.
And this is GDP per capita on this axis.
And this was 2007.
Some countries still had statistics.
(Laughter) But they were down here. They had 1,000 dollars per person per year.
And they lost one-fifth of their kids before their first birthday.
So this is what happens in the world, if we play the entire world.
You see the importance of that?
And here, children don't live longer.
The last century, 1870, was bad for the kids in Europe, because most of this statistics is Europe.
It was only by the turn of the century that more than 90 percent of the children survived their first year.
This is India coming up, with the first data from India.
There he died, then Deng Xiaoping brings money.
And the bubbles keep moving up there, and this is what the world looks like today.
(Applause) Let us have a look at the United States.
And we can see that the United States goes to the right of the mainstream.
And down in 1915, the United States was a neighbor of India -- present, contemporary India.
And that means United States was richer, but lost more kids than India is doing today, proportionally.
And look here -- compare to the Philippines of today.
The Philippines of today has almost the same economy as the United States during the First World War.
About 1957 here, the health of the United States is the same as the Philippines.
And this is the drama of this world which many call globalized, is that Asia, Arabic countries, Latin America, are much more ahead in being healthy, educated, having human resources than they are economically.
And 1957 -- the United States had the same economy as Chile has today.
And how long do we have to bring United States to get the same health as Chile has today?
I think we have to go, there -- we have 2001, or 2002 -- the United States has the same health as Chile.
Chile's catching up!
Within some years Chile may have better child survival than the United States.
And behind the health is the educational level.
And we go back to 1920, and I want to look at Japan.
And I want to look at Sweden and the United States.
And I'm going to stage a race here between this sort of yellowish Ford here and the red Toyota down there, and the brownish Volvo.
The Toyota has a very bad start down here, you can see, and the United States Ford is going off-road there.
And the Volvo is doing quite fine.
This is the war. The Toyota got off track, and now the Toyota is coming on the healthier side of Sweden -- can you see that?
And they are taking over Sweden, and they are now healthier than Sweden.
That's the part where I sold the Volvo and bought the Toyota.
(Laughter) And now we can see that the rate of change was enormous in Japan.
They really caught up.
And this changes gradually.
We have to look over generations to understand it.
And let me show you my own sort of family history -- we made these graphs here.
And this is the same thing, money down there, and health, you know?
And this is my family.
This is Sweden, 1830, when my great-great-grandma was born.
Sweden was like Sierra Leone today.
And this is when great-grandma was born, 1863.
And Sweden was like Mozambique.
And this is when my grandma was born, 1891.
She took care of me as a child, so I'm not talking about statistic now -- now it's oral history in my family.
That's when I believe statistics, when it's grandma-verified statistics.
(Laughter) I think it's the best way of verifying historical statistics.
Sweden was like Ghana.
It's interesting to see the enormous diversity within sub-Saharan Africa.
I told you last year, I'll tell you again, my mother was born in Egypt, and I -- who am I?
I'm the Mexican in the family.
And my daughter, she was born in Chile, and the grand-daughter was born in Singapore, now the healthiest country on this Earth.
It bypassed Sweden about two to three years ago, with better child survival.
But they're very small, you know?
They're so close to the hospital we can never beat them out in these forests.
(Laughter) But homage to Singapore.
Singapore is the best one.
Now this looks also like a very good story.
This is 1962, and United States was emitting 16 tons per person.
And China was emitting 0.6, and India was emitting 0.32 tons per capita.
Well, you see the nice story of getting richer and getting healthier -- everyone did it at the cost of emission of carbon dioxide.
And we don't have all the updated data any longer, because this is really hot data today.
And in the discussion I attended with global leaders, you know, many say now the problem is that the emerging economies, they are getting out too much carbon dioxide.
The Minister of the Environment of India said, "Well, you were the one who caused the problem."
The OECD countries -- the high-income countries -- they were the ones who caused the climate change.
"But we forgive you, because you didn't know it.
And everyone is responsible for the per capita emission."
And this is really what has to be changed.
The world is quite a messy place.
This we can call Dollar Street.
Everyone lives on this street here.
This family earns about one dollar per day.
We drive up the street here, we find a family here which earns about two to three dollars a day.
And how do they live?
If we look at the bed here, we can see that they sleep on a rug on the floor.
This is what poverty line is -- 80 percent of the family income is just to cover the energy needs, the food for the day.
This is two to five dollars. You have a bed.
And here it's a much nicer bedroom, you can see.
(Laughter) And this is the sofa, how it will emerge from there.
And the interesting thing, when you go around here in the photo panorama, you see the family still sitting on the floor there.
And if you really want to see the difference, you look at the toilet over here.
I spent 20 years in interviews with African farmers who were on the verge of famine.
The nice thing here is that you can't see who are the researchers in this picture.
That's when research functions in poor societies -- you must really live with the people.
And these two young farmers, they are girls now -- because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS -- they discuss with a trained agronomist.
This is one of the best agronomists in Malawi, Junatambe Kumbira, and he's discussing what sort of cassava they will plant -- the best converter of sunshine to food that man has found.
And they are very, very eagerly interested to get advice, and that's to survive in poverty.
That's one context.
Getting out of poverty.
The women told us one thing. "Get us technology.
Get us a mill so that we can mill our flour, then we will be able to pay for the rest ourselves."
Technology will bring you out of poverty, but there's a need for a market to get away from poverty.
And this woman is very happy now, bringing her products to the market.
She wants her kid to be healthy, so she can go to the market and doesn't have to stay home.
You can do this.
I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible.
In 50 years they've gone from a pre-Medieval situation to a very decent 100-year-ago Europe, with a functioning nation and state.
I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years.
It's this stupid concept of developing countries that puts us, Argentina and Mozambique together 50 years ago, and says that Mozambique did worse.
We have to know a little more about the world.
He knows everything.
He knows the name of the grape, the temperature and everything.
I only know two types of wine -- red and white.
(Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries -- industrialized and developing.
And I know 200, I know about the small data.
(Applause) But I have to get serious. And how do you get serious?
(Laughter) Homage to the Office package, no?
Or if you are a teacher, you'll love UNESCO, and so on.
We need everything.
All these things are important for development, especially when you just get out of poverty and you should go towards welfare.
Now, what we need to think about is, what is a goal for development, and what are the means for development?
Economic growth to me, as a public-health professor, is the most important thing for development because it explains 80 percent of survival.
Governance. To have a government which functions -- that's what brought California out of the misery of 1850.
It was the government that made law function finally.
Education, human resources are important.
Health is also important, but not that much as a mean.
Environment is important.
Now what about goals? Where are we going toward?
We are not interested in money.
Money is not a goal.
Health I give two points. I mean it's nice to be healthy -- at my age especially -- you can stand here, you're healthy.
Environment is very, very crucial.
But where are the important goals?
Human rights is the goal, but it's not that strong of a mean for achieving development.
And culture. Culture is the most important thing, I would say, because that's what brings joy to life.
So the seemingly impossible is possible.
Even African countries can achieve this.
And remember, please remember my main message, which is this: the seemingly impossible is possible.
(Laughter) (Applause) Bring me my sword!
Sword swallowing is from ancient India.
It's a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious.
(Laughter) And I will now prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible by taking this piece of steel -- solid steel -- this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army, 1850, in the last year we had war.
And it's all solid steel -- you can hear here.
And I'm going to take this blade of steel, and push it down through my body of blood and flesh, and prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible.
Can I request a moment of absolute silence?
(Applause)
If in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage, some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid, the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately.
But coal plants, nuclear plants can't respond fast enough.
A giant battery could.
With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal, gas and nuclear do today.
With it, we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn't shine.
And that changes everything.
Because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings, here to center stage.
Today I want to tell you about such a device.
It's called the liquid metal battery.
It's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs.
Now the theme of this year's TED Conference is Full Spectrum.
The OED defines spectrum as "The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part."
So I'm not here today only to tell you how my team at MIT has drawn out of nature a solution to one of the world's great problems.
We're going to do it the old-fashioned American way, we're going to invent our way out, working together.
(Applause) Now let's get started.
The battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor, Alessandro Volta, at the University of Padua in Italy.
His invention gave birth to a new field of science, electrochemistry, and new technologies such as electroplating.
Perhaps overlooked, Volta's invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor.
(Laughter) Until Volta, nobody could imagine a professor could be of any use.
This is the starting point for designing a battery -- two electrodes, in this case metals of different composition, and an electrolyte, in this case salt dissolved in water.
Now I've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid-level storage is compelling, but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid -- namely uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super-low cost.
We need to think about the problem differently.
We need to think big, we need to think cheap.
So let's abandon the paradigm of let's search for the coolest chemistry and then hopefully we'll chase down the cost curve by just making lots and lots of product.
So that means that certain parts of the periodic table are axiomatically off-limits.
This battery needs to be made out of earth-abundant elements.
I say, if you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt -- (Laughter) preferably dirt that's locally sourced.
And we need to be able to build this thing using simple manufacturing techniques and factories that don't cost us a fortune.
So about six years ago, I started thinking about this problem.
And in order to adopt a fresh perspective, I sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage.
In fact, I looked to a technology that neither stores nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity, huge amounts of it.
I'm talking about the production of aluminum.
And just a few short years following their discovery, aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material.
You're looking at the cell house of a modern aluminum smelter.
It's about 50 feet wide and recedes about half a mile -- row after row of cells that, inside, resemble Volta's battery, with three important differences.
Volta's battery works at room temperature.
It's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that's a solution of salt and water.
Today, we can produce virgin metal from ore at a cost of less than 50 cents a pound.
That's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy.
It is this that caught and held my attention to the point that I became obsessed with inventing a battery that could capture this gigantic economy of scale.
And I did.
I made the battery all liquid -- liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte.
So I put low-density liquid metal at the top, put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between.
For me, the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table, enunciated by another professor, Dimitri Mendeleyev.
And that includes our own bodies.
I recall the very moment one day when I was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance, different, opposite density and high mutual reactivity.
I felt the thrill of realization when I knew I'd come upon the answer.
Magnesium for the top layer.
And antimony for the bottom layer.
You know, I've got to tell you, one of the greatest benefits of being a professor: colored chalk.
(Laughter) So to produce current, magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion, which then migrates across the electrolyte, accepts two electrons from the antimony, and then mixes with it to form an alloy.
The electrons go to work in the real world out here, powering our devices.
Now to charge the battery, we connect a source of electricity.
It could be something like a wind farm.
And this forces magnesium to de-alloy and return to the upper electrode, restoring the initial constitution of the battery.
And the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature.
It's pretty cool, at least in theory.
But does it really work?
So what to do next?
We go to the laboratory.
No, I hire a student and mentor him, teach him how to think about the problem, to see it from my perspective and then turn him loose.
This is that student, David Bradwell, who, in this image, appears to be wondering if this thing will ever work.
What I didn't tell David at the time was I myself wasn't convinced it would work.
But David's young and he's smart and he wants a Ph.D., and he proceeds to build -- (Laughter) He proceeds to build the first ever liquid metal battery of this chemistry.
And based on David's initial promising results, which were paid with seed funds at MIT, I was able to attract major research funding from the private sector and the federal government.
And that allowed me to expand my group to 20 people, a mix of graduate students, post-docs and even some undergraduates.
And I was able to attract really, really good people, people who share my passion for science and service to society, not science and service for career building.
And if you ask these people why they work on liquid metal battery, their answer would hearken back to President Kennedy's remarks at Rice University in 1962 when he said -- and I'm taking liberties here -- "We choose to work on grid-level storage, not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
(Applause) So this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery.
We've operated over 400 of these, perfecting their performance with a plurality of chemistries -- not just magnesium and antimony.
Along the way we scaled up to the 20 watt-hour cell.
I call it the hockey puck.
And then it was onto the saucer.
That's 200 watt-hours.
The technology was proving itself to be robust and scalable.
But the pace wasn't fast enough for us.
So a year and a half ago, David and I, along with another research staff-member, formed a company to accelerate the rate of progress and the race to manufacture product.
So today at LMBC, we're building cells 16 inches in diameter with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour -- 1,000 times the capacity of that initial shotglass cell.
We call that the pizza.
It's going to be 36 inches in diameter.
We call that the bistro table, but it's not ready yet for prime-time viewing.
And one variant of the technology has us stacking these bistro tabletops into modules, aggregating the modules into a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field.
And this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours -- two million watt-hours.
That's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households.
So here you have it, grid-level storage: silent, emissions-free, no moving parts, remotely controlled, designed to the market price point without subsidy.
So what have we learned from all this?
(Applause) So what have we learned from all this?
They lie beyond the visible.
Avoid thermal runaway.
Our battery can handle the very high temperature rises that come from current surges.
Scaling: Conventional wisdom says reduce cost by producing many.
And finally, human resources: Conventional wisdom says hire battery experts, seasoned professionals, who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge.
To develop liquid metal battery, I hired students and post-docs and mentored them.
In a battery, I strive to maximize electrical potential; when mentoring, I strive to maximize human potential.
So you see, the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology, it's a blueprint for inventing inventors, full-spectrum.
(Applause)
You should be nice to nerds.
I'm just saying.
Scientists and engineers change the world.
I'd like to tell you about a magical place called DARPA where scientists and engineers defy the impossible and refuse to fear failure.
Now these two ideas are connected more than you may realize, because when you remove the fear of failure, impossible things suddenly become possible.
If you really ask yourself this question, you can't help but feel uncomfortable.
I feel a little uncomfortable.
Because when you ask it, you begin to understand how the fear of failure constrains you, how it keeps us from attempting great things, and life gets dull, amazing things stop happening.
Sure, good things happen, but amazing things stop happening.
Now I should be clear, I'm not encouraging failure, I'm discouraging fear of failure.
The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way.
We're tested.
And in part, that testing feels an appropriate part of achieving something great.
In 1895, Lord Kelvin declared that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible.
In October of 1903, the prevailing opinion of expert aerodynamicists was that maybe in 10 million years we could build an aircraft that would fly.
And two months later on December 17th, Orville Wright powered the first airplane across a beach in North Carolina.
The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet.
That was 1903.
Ferdinand Foch, a French army general credited with having one of the most original and subtle minds in the French army, said, "Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value."
40 years later, aero experts coined the term transonic.
They debated, should it have one S or two?
You see, they were having trouble in this flight regime, and it wasn't at all clear that we could fly faster than the speed of sound.
In 1947, there was no wind tunnel data beyond Mach 0.85.
And yet, on Tuesday, October 14th, 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into the cockpit of his Bell X-1 and he flew towards an unknown possibility, and in so doing, he became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound.
Six of eight Atlas rockets blew up on the pad.
After 11 complete mission failures, we got our first images from space.
And on that first flight we got more data than in all U-2 missions combined.
It took a lot of failures to get there.
Since we took to the sky, we have wanted to fly faster and farther.
And to do so, we've had to believe in impossible things.
And we've had to refuse to fear failure.
Today, we don't talk about flying transonically, or even supersonically, we talk about flying hypersonically -- not Mach 2 or Mach 3, Mach 20.
At Mach 20, we can fly from New York to Long Beach in 11 minutes and 20 seconds.
At that speed, the surface of the airfoil is the temperature of molten steel -- 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit -- like a blast furnace.
DARPA's hypersonic test vehicle is the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built.
Now the Minotaur IV has too much impulse, so we have to bleed it off by flying the rocket at an 89 degree angle of attack for portions of the trajectory.
That's an unnatural act for a rocket.
The third stage has a camera.
We call it rocketcam.
And it's pointed at the hypersonic glider.
This is the actual rocketcam footage from flight one.
Now to conceal the shape, we changed the aspect ratio a little bit.
But this is what it looks like from the third stage of the rocket looking at the unmanned glider as it heads into the atmosphere back towards Earth.
We've flown twice.
In the first flight, no aerodynamic control of the vehicle.
But we collected more hypersonic flight data than in 30 years of ground-based testing combined.
And in the second flight, three minutes of fully-controlled, aerodynamic flight at Mach 20.
You can't learn to fly at Mach 20 unless you fly.
And while there's no substitute for speed, maneuverability is a very close second.
If a Mach 20 glider takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds to get from New York to Long Beach, a hummingbird would take, well, days.
You see, hummingbirds are not hypersonic, but they are maneuverable.
In fact, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.
And so if we wanted to fly in this room or places where humans can't go, we'd need an aircraft small enough and maneuverable enough to do so.
This is a hummingbird drone.
It can fly in all directions, even backwards.
It can hover and rotate.
It weighs less than one AA battery.
In 2008, it flew for a whopping 20 seconds, a year later, two minutes, then six, eventually 11.
Many prototypes crashed -- many.
But there's no way to learn to fly like a hummingbird unless you fly.
It's great.
Matt is the first ever hummingbird pilot.
We cannot both fear failure and make amazing new things -- like a robot with the stability of a dog on rough terrain, or maybe even ice; a robot that can run like a cheetah, or climb stairs like a human with the occasional clumsiness of a human.
Or perhaps, Spider Man will one day be Gecko Man.
A gecko can support its entire body weight with one toe.
One square millimeter of a gecko's footpad has 14,000 hair-like structures called setae.
They are used to help it grip to surfaces using intermolecular forces.
Today we can manufacture structures that mimic the hairs of a gecko's foot.
The result, a four-by-four-inch artificial nano-gecko adhesive.
can support a static load of 660 pounds.
That's enough to stick six 42-inch plasma TV's to your wall, no nails.
So much for Velcro, right?
This is a spider mite.
It's one millimeter long, but it looks like Godzilla next to these micromachines.
In the world of Godzilla spider mites, we can make millions of mirrors, each one-fifth the diameter of a human hair, moving at hundreds of thousands of times per second to make large screen displays, so that we can watch movies like "Godzilla" in high-def.
And if we can build machines at that scale, what about Eiffel Tower-like trusses at the microscale?
From the smallest wisp of air to the powerful forces of nature's storms.
There are 44 lightning strikes per second around the globe.
Each lightning bolt heats the air to 44,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- hotter than the surface of the Sun.
What if we could use these electromagnetic pulses as beacons, beacons in a moving network of powerful transmitters?
Experiments suggest that lightning could be the next GPS.
Electrical pulses form the thoughts in our brains.
Using a grid the size of your thumb, with 32 electrodes on the surface of his brain, Tim uses his thoughts to control an advanced prosthetic arm.
And his thoughts made him reach for Katie.
This is the first time a human has controlled a robot with thought alone.
That moment mattered to Tim and Katie, and this green goo may someday matter to you.
This green goo is perhaps the vaccine that could save your life.
Tobacco plants can make millions of doses of vaccine in weeks instead of months, and it might just be the first healthy use of tobacco ever.
Last September, the gamers of Foldit solved the three-dimensional structure of the retroviral protease that contributes to AIDS in rhesus monkeys.
Now understanding this structure is very important for developing treatments.
For 15 years, it was unsolved in the scientific community.
The gamers of Foldit solved it in 15 days.
They were able to work together because they're connected by the Internet.
And others, also connected to the Internet, used it as an instrument of democracy.
And together they changed the fate of their nation.
The Internet is home to two billion people, or 30 percent of the world's population.
It allows us to contribute and to be heard as individuals.
It allows us to amplify our voices and our power as a group.
But it too had humble beginnings.
In 1969, the internet was but a dream, a few sketches on a piece of paper.
And then on October 29th, the first packet-switched message was sent from UCLA to SRI.
The first two letters of the word "Login," that's all that made it through -- an L and an O -- and then a buffer overflow crashed the system.
(Laughter) Two letters, an L and an O, now a worldwide force.
So who are these scientists and engineers at a magical place called DARPA?
They challenge existing perspectives at the edges of science and under the most demanding of conditions.
Sometimes we just forget.
You see, there was a time when you weren't afraid of failure, when you were a great artist or a great dancer and you could sing, you were good at math, you could build things, you were an astronaut, an adventurer, Jacques Cousteau, you could jump higher, run faster, kick harder than anyone.
You believed in impossible things and you were fearless.
You were totally and completely in touch with your inner superhero.
Scientists and engineers can indeed change the world.
So can you.
So go ahead, ask yourself, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
It's hard to hold onto this feeling, really hard.
Doubt and fear always creep in.
We think someone else, someone smarter than us, someone more capable, someone with more resources will solve that problem.
But there isn't anyone else; there's just you.
And if we're lucky, in that moment, someone steps into that doubt and fear, takes a hand and says, "Let me help you believe."
Jason started at DARPA on March 18th, 2010.
He was with our transportation team.
And on one particularly dark day for me, Jason sat down and he wrote an email.
He was encouraging, but firm.
In that moment and still today when I doubt, when I feel afraid, when I need to reconnect with that feeling, I remember his words, they were so powerful.
Text: "There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you."
♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ Voice: Because that's what being a superhero is all about.
RD: "There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you."
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Regina, thank you.
I have a couple of questions.
So that glider of yours, the Mach 20 glider, the first one, no control, it ended up in the Pacific I think somewhere.
RD: Yeah, yeah. It did. (CA: What happened on that second flight?) Yeah, it also went into the Pacific. (CA: But this time under control?) We didn't fly it into the Pacific.
CA: What do you picture that glider being used for?
RD: Well our responsibility is to develop the technology for this.
How it's ultimately used will be determined by the military.
Now the purpose of the vehicle though, the purpose of the technology, is to be able to reach anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes.
CA: And to carry a payload of more than a few pounds? (RD: Yeah.) Like what's the payload it could carry?
RD: No, not necessarily just a camera.
CA: It's amazing.
The hummingbird?
Isn't that a very expensive solution for a small maneuverable flying object?
And you have to revisit these questions over time.
The folks at AeroVironment tried 300 or more different wing designs, 12 different forms of the avionics.
It took them 10 full prototypes to get something that would actually fly.
But there's something really interesting about a flying machine that looks like something you'd recognize.
So we often talk about stealth as a means for avoiding any type of sensing, but when things looks just natural, you also don't see them.
CA: Ah. So it's not necessarily just the performance.
(Laughter) Because I think, as well as the awe of looking at that, I'm sure some people here are thinking, technology catches up so quick, how long is it before some crazed geek with a little remote control flies one through a window of the White House?
I mean, do you worry about the Pandora's box issue here?
That's what we do.
It's just the nature of what we do.
And we have to be, of course, mindful and responsible of how the technology is developed and ultimately used, but we can't simply close our eyes and pretend that it isn't advancing; it's advancing.
CA: I mean, you're clearly a really inspiring leader.
And you persuade people to go to these great feats of invention, but at a personal level, in a way I can't imagine doing your job.
Do you wake up in the night sometimes, just asking questions about the possibly unintended consequences of your team's brilliance?
I think you couldn't be human if you didn't ask those questions.
RD: Well I don't always have answers for them, right.
I think that we learn as time goes on.
My job is one of the most exhilarating jobs you could have.
I work with some of the most amazing people.
And with that exhilaration, comes a really deep sense of responsibility.
CA: Regina, that was jaw-dropping, as they say.
Thank you so much for coming to TED. (RD: Thank you.) (Applause)
Many times I go around the world to speak, and people ask me questions about the challenges, my moments, some of my regrets.
1998: A single mother of four, three months after the birth of my fourth child, I went to do a job as a research assistant.
I went to Northern Liberia.
This girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade.
She was the laughing stock of the community.
Her mother was often told by other women, "You and your child will die poor."
After two weeks of working in that village, it was time to go back.
I wish for her to be a nurse."
Dirt poor, living in the home with my parents, I couldn't afford to.
With tears in my eyes, I said, "No."
Two months later, I go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief.
And all day she walked around only in her underwear.
When I asked, "Who is that?"
She said, "That's Wei.
The meaning of her name is pig.
Her mother died while giving birth to her, and no one had any idea who her father was."
For two weeks, she became my companion, slept with me.
I bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll.
I wish to go with you.
I wish to go to school."
Dirt poor, no money, living with my parents, I again said, "No."
Two months later, both of those villages fell into another war.
Till today, I have no idea where those two girls are.
Fast-forward, 2004: In the peak of our activism, the minister of Gender Liberia called me and said, "Leymah, I have a nine-year-old for you.
I want you to bring her home because we don't have safe homes."
The story of this little girl: She had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months.
She came to me bloated, very pale.
Every night I'd come from work and lie on the cold floor.
I wish to go to school."
2010: A young woman stands before President Sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together, their father and mother died during the war.
She's 19; her dream is to go to college to be able to support them.
She's highly athletic.
One of the things that happens is that she applies for a scholarship.
Her dream of going to school, her wish of being educated, is finally here.
She goes to school on the first day.
The director of sports who's responsible for getting her into the program asks her to come out of class.
And for the next three years, her fate will be having sex with him every day, as a favor for getting her in school.
Globally, we have policies, international instruments, work leaders.
Great people have made commitments -- we will protect our children from want and from fear.
The U.N. has the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Countries like America, we've heard things like No Child Left Behind.
Other countries come with different things.
There is a Millennium Development called Three that focuses on girls.
All of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally, I think, has failed.
In Liberia, for example, the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls.
Teen prostitution is at its peak.
In one community, we're told, you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper.
Girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night.
And then someone asked me, just before my TEDTalk, a few days ago, "So where is the hope?"
Several years ago, a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women.
We created a space called the Young Girls Transformative Project.
We go into rural communities and all we do, like has been done in this room, is create the space.
And some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps, as young mothers, to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women.
One day she said to me, "My wish is to finish college and be able to support my children."
She's at a place where she can't find money to go to school.
She sells water, sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones.
And you would think she would take that money and put it back into her education.
Juanita is her name.
She takes that money and finds single mothers in her community to send back to school.
And if I can't be educated, when I see some of my sisters being educated, my wish has been fulfilled.
I wish for a better life.
This is the dream of the African girl.
Several years ago, there was one African girl.
This girl had a son who wished for a piece of doughnut because he was extremely hungry.
Angry, frustrated, really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children, this young girl started a movement, a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace.
I failed to fulfill the wish of those two girls.
These were the things that were going through the head of this other young woman -- I failed, I failed, I failed.
Women came out, protested a brutal dictator, fearlessly spoke.
This young woman wished also to go to school.
She went to school.
Today, this young woman is me, a Nobel laureate.
I'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish, in my tiny capacity, of little African girls -- the wish of being educated.
We set up a foundation.
We're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential.
I don't have much to ask of you.
I've also been to places in this U.S., and I know that girls in this country also have wishes, a wish for a better life somewhere in the Bronx, a wish for a better life somewhere in downtown L.A., a wish for a better life somewhere in Texas, a wish for a better life somewhere in New York, a wish for a better life somewhere in New Jersey.
Because all of these great innovators and inventors that we've talked to and seen over the last few days are also sitting in tiny corners in different parts of the world, and all they're asking us to do is create that space to unlock the intelligence, unlock the passion, unlock all of the great things that they hold within themselves.
Let's journey together. Let's journey together.
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much.
Right now in Liberia, what do you see as the main issue that troubles you?
LG: I've been asked to lead the Liberian Reconciliation Initiative.
As part of my work, I'm doing these tours in different villages and towns -- 13, 15 hours on dirt roads -- and there is no community that I've gone into that I haven't seen intelligent girls.
But sadly, the vision of a great future, or the dream of a great future, is just a dream, because you have all of these vices.
So what troubles me is that I was at that place and somehow I'm at this place, and I just don't want to be the only one at this place.
I'm looking for ways for other girls to be with me.
I want to look back 20 years from now and see that there's another Liberian girl, Ghanaian girl, Nigerian girl, Ethiopian girl standing on this TED stage.
And maybe, just maybe, saying, "Because of that Nobel laureate I'm here today."
CA: And in the last year, tell us one hopeful thing that you've seen happening.
LG: I can tell you many hopeful things that I've seen happening.
But in the last year, where President Sirleaf comes from, her village, we went there to work with these girls.
All of these girls went to the gold mine, and they were predominantly prostitutes doing other things.
We took 50 of those girls and we worked with them.
And this was at the beginning of elections.
This is a real rural village.
And the theme they used was: "Even pretty girls vote."
They were able to mobilize young women.
Rape is not barbaric, but the law, he said, was barbaric.
And when the girls started engaging him, he was very hostile towards them.
LG: You're welcome. (CA: Thank you.) (Applause)
This may sound strange, but I'm a big fan of the concrete block.
The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together.
Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world.
They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick at a time.
Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time.
Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this.
And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household.
It's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced -- or 75 bricks for every person on the planet.
You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings.
LEGO made it accessible.
LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination.
Meanwhile the exact same year, at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced, the next building block.
The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive.
Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time.
Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers.
A few years ago I started developing littleBits.
LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function.
And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets.
The bricks are color-coded.
Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire.
You put a blue to a green, you can make light.
Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine.
So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful.
Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures.
The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library.
We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick.
Lights, sounds, solar panels, motors -- everything should be accessible.
We've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them.
For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch.
So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material.
Here's an example of a project they made, a motion-activated confetti canon ball.
(Laughter) But wait, this is actually my favorite project.
(Laughter) To these non-engineers, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material.
And we want to make this material accessible to everyone.
So littleBits is open-source.
You can go on the website, download all the design files, make them yourself.
We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment.
It's a demonstration of augmented reality.
They are live and reacting to me in real time.
I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic.
And keep your eyes on the big screen.
Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery.
It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask, why, in a technological age, we continue to have this magical sense of wonder.
Magic is deception, but it is a deception we enjoy.
To enjoy being deceived, an audience must first suspend its disbelief.
It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that, for a moment, constitutes poetic faith.
MT: This faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience.
Without it, a script is just words.
Augmented reality is just the latest technology.
And sleight of hand is just an artful demonstration of dexterity.
We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies.
We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.
Without this ability there is no magic.
It was Jean Robert-Houdin, France's greatest illusionist, who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller.
Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler.
He is an actor playing the part of a magician.
The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction.
There are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome.
Now many of them are intensely dramatic.
Magicians play with fire and steel, defy the fury of the buzzsaw, dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape.
But audiences don't come to see the magician die, they come to see him live.
Because the best stories always have a happy ending.
The tricks of magic have one special element.
They are stories with a twist.
Now Edward de Bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines.
He said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think.
Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error.
The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable, but do not, in fact, match what is being done in front of them.
MT: In that respect, magic tricks are like jokes.
Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination.
But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected, we laugh.
The same thing happens when people watch magic tricks.
The finale defies logic, gives new insight into the problem, and audiences express their amazement with laughter.
It's fun to be fooled.
One of the key qualities of all stories is that they're made to be shared.
We feel compelled to tell them.
When I do a trick at a party -- (Laughter) that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again.
They want to share the experience.
It keeps me busy.
Now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained.
We think in narrative structures.
We connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood.
We all want to share our stories, whether it is the trick we saw at the party, the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation.
Today, thanks to technology, we can share those stories as never before, by email, Facebook, blogs, tweets, on TED.com.
The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story.
We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies.
Our stories make us the people we are and, sometimes, the people we want to be.
They give us our identity and a sense of community.
And if the story is a good one, it might even make us smile.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
So, without romanticizing this too much: imagine that you light your home with kerosene and candles every night, and that you do all of your cooking with charcoal.
This is how the world's two billion poorest people cook and light their homes every day.
This isn't just inconvenient, this is inefficient, it's expensive, it's harmful to human health, harmful to the environment, and it's unproductive.
And that's energy poverty.
I work in Haiti, where about 80% of the population lives in energy poverty.
The average household spends 10% of its income on kerosene for lighting – that's an order of magnitude greater than what the average US household spends on electricity to light their homes.
The 2008 hurricane season in Haiti caused about one billion dollars in damage.
So in the industrialized world, we built walls that protect us from the externalities of our energy use; we can afford to clean up acute environmental disasters; and we can also afford to adapt to chronic conditions like climate change.
That's not the case for Haiti. They can't afford this.
The only way they're going to lift themselves out of energy poverty is by adapting fuels that are more efficient, that are less expensive, that are better for human health, better for the environment and that are more productive.
So it turns out that those fuels and technologies exist, and this is an example of that.
This is a solar LED lightbulb that we sell for a retail price of about 10 dollars in rural Haiti.
That's a payback period of less than three months for the average Haitian household.
The first time I ever went down to Haiti was in August of 2008, sort of on a whim, and I was fielding surveys in the rural south of the country to assess the extent of energy poverty.
And at night, I would go around sometimes and I would speak with the street vendors and see if they were interested in buying these solar LED lamps.
One woman who I encountered turned down my offer, and she said, “Mon chéri, c'est trop Cher,” which basically means, “My dear, it's too expensive.” But I tried to explain to her, “Look, this is going to save you a lot of money, and it's going to give you even better light than what you're using now with the kerosene.” So I didn't make the sale, but I did learn a really important lesson, which is that technology, products, were not going to end energy poverty.
Specifically, there are two types of access that are going to end energy poverty: there's physical access, and there's financial access.
So, physical access -- what does that mean?
It's very expensive for low-income households in developing countries to reach major centers of commerce.
And it's basically impossible for them to order something off Amazon.com.
“The last mile” is a phrase that's normally associated with the telecommunications industry.
It means that last bit of wire that's necessary to connect the customer to the provider.
What we need for ending energy poverty are last-mile retailers that bring these clean energy products to the people.
The kerosene and charcoal value chains already figured this out: those fuels are ubiquitous across the entire country.
You can go to the most remote village in Haiti and you will find somebody selling kerosene and charcoal.
So the other type of access: financial.
Those subsidies don't exist in Haiti.
What they do have is microfinance.
So the prescription to end energy poverty is much more complicated than simply products.
We need to integrate financial access directly into new, innovative distribution models.
We need to redirect cash flows that are going now from the diaspora in the United States through Western Union wire transfers in cash directly into clean energy products that can be delivered to or picked up by their friends or family in Haiti.
So the next time you hear about a technology or product that's going to change the world, be a little bit skeptical.
Thank you.
(Applause)
[Stories from the Sea] [Fish Tale My Secret Life as Plankton] How did I get here?
Well, it's a stranger story than you might think.
I came from a world of drifters, a place few humans have ever seen.
The world of plankton.
["Plankton" comes from the Greek "planktos" for wandering] My fellow plankton came in all sizes, from tiny algae and bacteria to animals longer than a blue whale.
I shared my nursery with other embryos and juveniles, from clams and crabs to sea urchins and anemones.
(High pitch sound) We drifting animals are called zooplankton.
The most common animals here are copepods and krill.
A teaspoon of seawater can contain more than a million living creatures.
Trillions are born here, but only a few make it to adulthood.
He may be no larger than a pin head, but this crab larva is an arrow worm's worst nightmare.
(Bumping noises) (Buzzing) Epic battles between carnivores like these are just one way to get food.
But the real powers of this place come from phytoplankton.
Single-celled life that transforms sunlight and carbon dioxide into edible gold.
Phytoplankton are the base for the largest food web in the world.
(Maraca sound) I was part of the largest daily migration of life on Earth.
Some of these snare their prey with sticky tentacles, while others just take a bite out of their cousins.
And siphonophores that catch prey with toxic fishing lures.
Its monstrous looks inspired the movie "Aliens."
It can catch tiny bits in its bristles, but prefers larger prey like salps.
With two sets of eyes, this female prowls the deeper water.
Prey in hand, she performs one of the strangest behaviors in the entire animal kingdom.
Here among the plankton, the food web is so tangled and complex, even scientists don't know who eats whom.
I love this.
Getting that text was like getting a hug.
I embody the central paradox.
1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row.
I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine.
In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities.
We were exploring different aspects of ourselves.
I was excited.
And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world.
Now fast-forward to 2012.
I'm back here on the TED stage again.
My daughter's 20. She's a college student.
She sleeps with her cellphone, so do I.
And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine.
So what happened?
I'm still excited by technology, but I believe, and I'm here to make the case, that we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go.
Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives.
And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are.
Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.
So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings.
They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings.
People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting.
(Laughter) People explain to me that it's hard, but that it can be done.
Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents' full attention.
But then these same children deny each other their full attention.
This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together.
We're getting used to a new way of being alone together.
People want to customize their lives.
So you want to go to that board meeting, but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you.
And some people think that's a good thing.
A 50-year-old business man lamented to me that he feels he doesn't have colleagues anymore at work.
And he says he doesn't want to interrupt his colleagues because, he says, "They're too busy on their email."
But then he stops himself and he says, "You know, I'm not telling you the truth.
I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right.
An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, "Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation."
People say, "I'll tell you what's wrong with having a conversation.
We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.
Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding.
And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection.
And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.
I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question.
He said, "Don't all those little tweets, don't all those little sips of online communication, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?"
And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves.
For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development.
So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won't.
I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I've learned in the past 15 years.
That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology.
That's why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed -- so many automatic listeners.
And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.
Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other?
During my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood.
And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal.
It comforted her.
But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life.
That robot put on a great show.
And we're vulnerable.
People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing.
So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy, I was thinking, "That robot can't empathize.
It doesn't face death.
It doesn't know life."
And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing; I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work.
But when I stepped back, I felt myself at the cold, hard center of a perfect storm.
We expect more from technology and less from each other.
And I believe it's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable.
And we are vulnerable.
We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy.
And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control.
But we're not so comfortable.
These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies.
And that third idea, that we will never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches.
Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, they reach for a device.
Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light.
Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.
And so people try to solve it by connecting.
But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure.
It expresses, but it doesn't solve, an underlying problem.
But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves.
It's shaping a new way of being.
The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am.
We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we're having them.
The problem with this new regime of "I share therefore I am" is that, if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves.
Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments.
It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.
But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true.
And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.
When I spoke at TED in 1996, reporting on my studies of the early virtual communities, I said, "Those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-reflection."
And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance.
But it's not, it's early days.
I'm not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves.
Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children.
Create sacred spaces at home -- the kitchen, the dining room -- and reclaim them for conversation.
Do the same thing at work.
At work, we're so busy communicating that we often don't have time to think, we don't have time to talk, about the things that really matter.
Change that.
Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.
Because it's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other.
Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection -- how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves -- but it's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction.
I'm optimistic.
We have each other.
That we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler.
So in my work, I hear that life is hard, relationships are filled with risk.
And then there's technology -- simpler, hopeful, optimistic, ever-young.
It's like calling in the cavalry.
An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars, you can "Finally, love your friends love your body, love your life, online and with avatars."
We're drawn to virtual romance, to computer games that seem like worlds, to the idea that robots, robots, will someday be our true companions.
We spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends.
Now we all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet.
They need us.
Let's talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love.
Thank you.
(Applause)
First place I'd like to take you is what many believe will be the world's deepest natural abyss.
And I say believe because this process is still ongoing.
One of the things that's changed here, in the last 150 years since Jules Verne had great science-fiction concepts of what the underworld was like, is that technology has enabled us to go to these places that were previously completely unknown and speculated about.
Along the way we've discovered fantastic abysses and chambers so large that you can see for hundreds of meters without a break in the line of sight.
While our selection process is not as rigorous as NASA, it's nonetheless thorough.
We're looking for competence, discipline, endurance, and strength.
In case you're wondering, this is our strength test.
We have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance.
You're looking at Camp Two in a place called J2, not K2, but J2.
We're roughly two days from the entrance at that point.
The idea is to try to provide some measure of physical comfort while you're down there, otherwise in damp, moist, cold conditions in utterly dark places.
I should mention that everything you're seeing here, by the way, is artificially illuminated at great effort.
Otherwise it is completely dark in these places.
The deeper you go, the more you run into a conflict with water.
It's basically like a tree collecting water coming down.
So I've got a very brief clip here that was taken in the late 1980s.
(Video) Now I have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous.
We're going to be shooting from minus 2,600 meters -- that's a little over 8,600 feet down -- at 30 kilometers from the entrance.
The lead crews will be underground for pushing 30 days straight.
It's a place where there's a fold in the geologic stratum that collects water and fills to the roof.
Number one, it's the name of my rock band, and second, is because the confrontation of these things forced me to become an inventor.
And we've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this.
Here's a clip from a National Geographic movie that came out in 1999.
(Video) Narrator: Exploration is a physical process of putting your foot in places where humans have never stepped before.
This is where the last little nugget of totally unknown territory remains on this planet.
To experience it is a privilege.
Bill Stone: That was taken in Wakulla Springs, Florida.
Couple of things to note about that movie. Every piece of equipment that you saw in there did not exist before 1999.
This gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper, and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave, and it happened to be underwater in Wakulla Springs.
It was that gadget that serendipitously opened a door to another unexplored world.
This is Europa.
Carolyn Porco mentioned another one called Enceladus the other day.
For those who have never seen this story, Jim Cameron produced a really wonderful IMAX movie couple of years ago, called "Aliens of the Deep."
There was a brief clip -- (Video) Narrator: A mission to explore under the ice of Europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge.
Europa is so far away that even at the speed of light, it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle.
It has to be smart enough to avoid terrain hazards and to find a good landing site on the ice.
Now we have to get through the ice.
You need a melt probe.
It's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo.
The ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep.
You need an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle.
BS: What Jim didn't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier NASA had funded a team I assembled to develop a prototype for the Europa AUV.
And as the movie says, this is one smart puppy.
It's got 96 sensors, 36 onboard computers, 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code, packs more than 10 kilos of TNT in electrical onboard equivalent.
It's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything.
This is part of DEPTHX's mission.
How do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist?
If we see something that looks interesting, we pull it into a microscope.
The real hat trick for this vehicle, though, is a disruptive new navigation system we've developed, known as 3D SLAM, for simultaneous localization and mapping.
DEPTHX is an all-seeing eyeball.
Its sensor beams look both forward and backward at the same time, allowing it to do new exploration while it's still achieving geometric sensor-lock on what it's gone through already.
What I'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that's ever been done.
The government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024.
The successful conclusion of that mission will result in infrequent visitation of the moon by a small number of government scientists and pilots.
One of them is the requirement for economical earth-to-space transport.
Go, go, go.
The next thing we need are places to stay on orbit.
If it existed, it would change all future spacecraft design and space mission planning.
And the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram.
You'd pay 10,000 dollars for that in orbit.
That's more than you pay for TED, if Google dropped their sponsorship.
(Laughter) The second is more than 90 percent of the weight of a vehicle is in propellant.
Thus, every time you'd want to do anything in space, you are literally blowing away enormous sums of money every time you hit the accelerator.
So, what if you could get your gas at a 10th the price?
There is a place where you can.
There is a little-known mission that was launched by the Pentagon, 13 years ago now, called Clementine.
And the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon.
That signal was so strong, it could only have been produced by 10 trillion tons of water buried in the sediment, collected over millions and billions of years by the impact of asteroids and comet material.
If we're going to get that, and make that gas station possible, we have to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload through space.
The way you normally build a system right now is you have a tube stack that has to be launched from the ground, and resist all kinds of aerodynamic forces.
We can do it because in space there are no aerodynamics.
We can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything.
This is an idea that, again, came out of Livermore back in 1989, with Dr. Lowell Wood's group.
Bob Bigelow currently has a test article in the orbit.
When you're coming back from the moon, you have to deal with orbital mechanics.
It says you're moving 10,000 feet per second faster than you really want to be to get back to your gas station.
You got two choices.
You can burn rocket fuel to get there, or you can do something really incredible.
It has never been done.
The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency.
If you try to do that for the moon, you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there.
But if you send a mining team there, without the return propellant, first -- (Laughter) Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez?
This is not like that. I'm much more like Scotty.
I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it so we're not going to burn the gear.
But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it, and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done.
There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years.
That's not true.
In seven years, we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit.
We're living in one of the most exciting times in history.
We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space.
The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to the general exploration.
To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed.
We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Lewis and Clark expedition to Shackleton crater, to mine the moon for resources, and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit.
I intend to lead that expedition.
(Applause) It can be done in seven years with the right backing.
There was once a time when people did bold things to open the frontier.
We have collectively forgotten that lesson.
Now we're at a time when boldness is required to move forward.
100 years after Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote these words, I intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier, in our time, for all of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi.
(Laughter) I did that for two reasons.
(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to designing books.
But upon arrival there, in the fall of 1986, and doing a lot of interviews, I found that the only thing I was offered was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf, a book publisher.
I had absolutely no idea what I was about to become part of, and I was incredibly lucky.
Because that is what Knopf is.
It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world.
The stories can be anything, and some of them are actually true.
They all need a face.
Why? To give you a first impression of what you are about to get into.
A book designer gives form to content, but also manages a very careful balance between the two.
Now, the first day of my graphic design training at Penn State University, the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard, and wrote the word "Apple" underneath, and he said, "OK. Lesson one. Listen up."
(Laughter) And they deserve better.
And lo and behold, soon enough, I was able to put this theory to the test on two books that I was working on for Knopf.
The first was Katharine Hepburn's memoirs, and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich.
Now the Hepburn book was written in a very conversational style, it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you.
The Dietrich book was an observation by her daughter; it was a biography.
So the Hepburn story is words and the Dietrich story is pictures, and so we did this.
Pure content and pure form, side by side.
Someone is re-engineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from prehistoric amber.
Genius!
(Laughter) Now, luckily for me, I live and work in New York City, where there are plenty of dinosaurs.
(Laughter) So, I went to the Museum of Natural History, and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop, and I bought a book.
And I was particularly taken with this page of the book, and more specifically the lower right-hand corner.
I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point, I stopped -- when to keep going would seem like I was going too far.
And what I ended up with was a graphic representation of us seeing this animal coming into being.
We're in the middle of the process.
Very basic stuff, slightly suggestive of public park signage.
And even back then, Michael was on the cutting edge.
("Michael Crichton responds by fax:") ("Wow! Fucking Fantastic Jacket") (Laughter) (Applause) That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine.
(Laughter) I miss Michael.
And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal calls our legal department to see if they can maybe look into buying the rights to the image, just in case they might want to use it.
Well, they used it.
(Laughter) (Applause) And I was thrilled.
But not too long ago, I came upon this on the Web.
(Laughter) But if you think about it, from my head to my hands to his leg.
And it's a responsibility that I don't take lightly.
The book designer's responsibility is threefold: to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author.
David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, and the title essay in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony.
And the reason he went is because he had a fear of his body image, and he wanted to explore what was underlying that.
For me, it was simply an excuse to design a book that you could literally take the pants off of.
And David especially loved this design because at book signings, which he does a lot of, he could take a magic marker and do this.
(Laughter) Hello!
(Laughter) Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir called ["Dry"], and it's about his time in rehab.
In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive, and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic.
He did not think so, however, but his coworkers did an intervention and they said, "You are going to rehab, or you will be fired and you will die."
I want this book to look like it's lying to you, desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would.
The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine.
I set up the type, I printed it out on an Epson printer with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall and threw a bucket of water at it. Presto!
Not long after it came out, Augusten was waylaid in an airport and he was hiding out in the bookstore spying on who was buying his books.
(Laughter) And the guy behind the counter said, "I know, lady. They all came in that way."
(Laughter) Now, that's a good printing job.
It is a haiku, if you will, of the story.
This particular story by Osama Tezuka is his epic life of the Buddha, and it's eight volumes in all. But the best thing is when it's on your shelf, you get a shelf life of the Buddha, moving from one age to the next.
All of these solutions derive their origins from the text of the book, but once the book designer has read the text, then he has to be an interpreter and a translator.
("Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters.") (Laughter) All right, so I got a collection of the paintings together and I looked at them and I deconstructed them and I put them back together.
And so, here's the design, right?
But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf.
Ahh! We come upon them, the clandestine lovers. Let's draw them out.
Huhh! They've been discovered by the sultan.
Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger.
Try experiencing that on a Kindle.
(Laughter) Don't get me started.
But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness -- a little bit of humanity.
Then he'd run his hand over the rag paper, and the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages.
(Laughter) Now the Apple guys are texting, "Develop odor emission plug-in."
(Laughter) And the last story I'm going to talk about is quite a story.
A woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, she can't help but feel that, all of a sudden, she's entered a new reality that's just slightly different from the one that she left, but very similar, but different.
And so, we're talking about parallel planes of existence, sort of like a book jacket and the book that it covers.
So how do we show this?
So we're talking about different planes, different pieces of paper.
So even if you don't know anything about this book, you are forced to consider a single person straddling two planes of existence.
This debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list.
We're talking a 900-page book that is as weird as it is compelling, and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode.
(Laughter) Not exactly Jackie Collins.
Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list, eight printings, and still going strong.
So even though we love publishing as an art, we very much know it's a business too, and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky, that great art can be great business.
So that's my story. To be continued.
What does it look like?
(Applause)
For students, it's quite an experience, but for a school, it could be very difficult or expensive to maintain.
So to address this, we developed with a Dr. Brown in Stanford: virtual dissection table.
So we call this Anatomage Table.
So with this Anatomage Table, students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver.
And the table form is important, and since it's touch-interactive, just like the way they do dissections in the lab, or furthermore just the way a surgeon operates on a patient you can literally interact with your table.
Our digital body is one-to-one life size, so this is exactly the way students will see the real anatomy.
As you can see, I use my finger to interact with my digital body.
I'm going to do some cuts.
You can see some internal organs.
So we call this the slicer mode.
Right there.
This shows a lot of internal structures.
So if I want to see the back side, I can flip and see from behind.
Like this.
So if these images are uncomfortable to you or disturbing to you, that means we did the right job.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to peel off all the skin, muscles and bones, just to see a few internal organs.
Let's say I'm interested in looking at the heart.
I'm going to do some surgery here.
I'm going to cut some veins, arteries.
Oops! ...
You don't want to hear "oops" in real surgery.
(Laughter) Okay.
Let me zoom in.
And then you can see the inside of the heart.
Just like this, students can isolate anybody and dissect any way you want to.
Since it's digital, we can do reverse dissection.
Yep.
And I can build muscles gradually, just like that.
We can see tendons and muscles.
Wish I could build my muscle this fast.
(Laughter) And this is another way to learn anatomy.
Another thing I can show you is, more often than not, doctors get to meet patients in X-ray form.
So, Anatomage Table shows exactly how the anatomy will appear in X-ray.
It's a female now.
(Applause)
But first, I want to take you on a little journey.
Let's first visit our planet, but at night, and from space.
This is what our planet looks like from outer space at nighttime, if you were to take a satellite and travel around the planet. And the thing you would notice first, of course, is how dominant the human presence on our planet is.
But let's go back and drop it a little deeper and look during the daytime.
What we see during the day is our landscapes.
This is part of the Amazon Basin, a place called Rondônia in the south-center part of the Brazilian Amazon.
These cows are used for beef. We're going to eat these cows.
And these cows are eaten basically in South America, in Brazil and Argentina. They're not being shipped up here.
But this kind of fishbone pattern of deforestation is something we notice a lot of around the tropics, especially in this part of the world.
Let's come back again a few years later, here in 2003, and we'll see that that landscape actually looks a lot more like Iowa than it does like a rainforest.
In fact, what you're seeing here are soybean fields.
These soybeans are being shipped to Europe and to China as animal feed, especially after the mad cow disease scare about a decade ago, where we don't want to feed animals animal protein anymore, because that can transmit disease.
So soybeans have really exploded, showing how trade and globalization are really responsible for the connections to rainforests and the Amazon -- an incredibly strange and interconnected world that we have today.
Well, again and again, what we find as we look around the world in our little tour of the world is that landscape after landscape after landscape have been cleared and altered for growing food and other crops.
So one of the questions we've been asking is, how much of the world is used to grow food, and where is it exactly, and how can we change that into the future, and what does it mean?
Well, our team has been looking at this on a global scale, using satellite data and ground-based data kind of to track farming on a global scale.
This map shows the presence of agriculture on planet Earth.
The green areas are the areas we use to grow crops, like wheat or soybeans or corn or rice or whatever.
That's 16 million square kilometers' worth of land.
The second area, in brown, is the world's pastures and rangelands, where our animals live.
That area's about 30 million square kilometers, or about an Africa's worth of land, a huge amount of land, and it's the best land, of course, is what you see. And what's left is, like, the middle of the Sahara Desert, or Siberia, or the middle of a rain forest.
If we look at this carefully, we find it's about 40 percent of the Earth's land surface is devoted to agriculture, and it's 60 times larger than all the areas we complain about, our suburban sprawl and our cities where we mostly live.
Half of humanity lives in cities today, but a 60-times-larger area is used to grow food.
So this is an amazing kind of result, and it really shocked us when we looked at that.
So we're using an enormous amount of land for agriculture, but also we're using a lot of water.
This is a photograph flying into Arizona, and when you look at it, you're like, "What are they growing here?" It turns out they're growing lettuce in the middle of the desert using water sprayed on top.
Now, the irony is, it's probably sold in our supermarket shelves in the Twin Cities.
But what's really interesting is, this water's got to come from some place, and it comes from here, the Colorado River in North America.
Well, the Colorado on a typical day in the 1950s, this is just, you know, not a flood, not a drought, kind of an average day, it looks something like this.
The difference is mainly irrigating the desert for food, or maybe golf courses in Scottsdale, you take your pick.
Well, this is a lot of water, and again, we're mining water and using it to grow food, and today, if you travel down further down the Colorado, it dries up completely and no longer flows into the ocean.
We've literally consumed an entire river in North America for irrigation.
Well, that's not even the worst example in the world.
This probably is: the Aral Sea.
Now, a lot you will remember this from your geography classes.
This is in the former Soviet Union in between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, one of the great inland seas of the world.
But there's kind of a paradox here, because it looks like it's surrounded by desert. Why is this sea here?
The reason it's here is because, on the right-hand side, you see two little rivers kind of coming down through the sand, feeding this basin with water.
Those rivers are draining snowmelt from mountains far to the east, where snow melts, it travels down the river through the desert, and forms the great Aral Sea.
Well, in the 1950s, the Soviets decided to divert that water to irrigate the desert to grow cotton, believe it or not, in Kazakhstan, to sell cotton to the international markets to bring foreign currency into the Soviet Union.
They really needed the money.
Well, you can imagine what happens. You turn off the water supply to the Aral Sea, what's going to happen?
Here it is in 1973, 1986, 1999, 2004, and about 11 months ago.
Now a lot of us in the audience here live in the Midwest.
Imagine that was Lake Superior.
Imagine that was Lake Huron.
This is not only a change in water and where the shoreline is, this is a change in the fundamentals of the environment of this region.
Let's start with this.
There's a lot of toxic waste, a lot of things that were dumped there that are now becoming airborne.
One of those small islands that was remote and impossible to get to was a site of Soviet biological weapons testing.
You can walk there today.
Weather patterns have changed.
Nineteen of the unique 20 fish species found only in the Aral Sea are now wiped off the face of the Earth.
This is an environmental disaster writ large.
This is a picture that Al Gore gave me a few years ago that he took when he was in the Soviet Union a long, long time ago, showing the fishing fleets of the Aral Sea.
You see the canal they dug?
They were so desperate to try to, kind of, float the boats into the remaining pools of water, but they finally had to give up because the piers and the moorings simply couldn't keep up with the retreating shoreline.
I don't know about you, but I'm terrified that future archaeologists will dig this up and write stories about our time in history, and wonder, "What were you thinking?"
Well, that's the future we have to look forward to.
We already use about 50 percent of the Earth's fresh water that's sustainable, and agriculture alone is 70 percent of that.
So we use a lot of water, a lot of land for agriculture.
Usually when we think about the atmosphere, we think about climate change and greenhouse gases, and mostly around energy, but it turns out agriculture is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases too.
If you look at carbon dioxide from burning tropical rainforest, or methane coming from cows and rice, or nitrous oxide from too many fertilizers, it turns out agriculture is 30 percent of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere from human activity.
And yet, we don't talk about it very much.
So we have this incredible presence today of agriculture dominating our planet, whether it's 40 percent of our land surface, 70 percent of the water we use, 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions.
We've doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world simply by using fertilizers, causing huge problems of water quality from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, and it's also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss.
So without a doubt, agriculture is the single most powerful force unleashed on this planet since the end of the ice age. No question.
And it rivals climate change in importance.
And they're both happening at the same time.
But what's really important here to remember is that it's not all bad. It's not that agriculture's a bad thing.
In fact, we completely depend on it.
We have to provide food and feed and, yeah, fiber and even biofuels to something like seven billion people in the world today, and if anything, we're going to have the demands on agriculture increase into the future. It's not going to go away.
More importantly, changing diets.
As the world becomes wealthier as well as more populous, we're seeing increases in dietary consumption of meat, which take a lot more resources than a vegetarian diet does.
So more people, eating more stuff, and richer stuff, and of course having an energy crisis at the same time, where we have to replace oil with other energy sources that will ultimately have to include some kinds of biofuels and bio-energy sources.
So you put these together. It's really hard to see how we're going to get to the rest of the century without at least doubling global agricultural production.
Well, how are we going to do this? How are going to double global ag production around the world?
They have a lot of biodiversity, a lot of carbon, things we want to protect.
So we could grow more food by expanding farmland, but we'd better not, because it's ecologically a very, very dangerous thing to do.
This is work that we're doing to try to highlight places in the world where we could improve yields without harming the environment.
The green areas here show where corn yields, just showing corn as an example, are already really high, probably the maximum you could find on Earth today for that climate and soil, but the brown areas and yellow areas are places where we're only getting maybe 20 or 30 percent of the yield you should be able to get.
You see a lot of this in Africa, even Latin America, but interestingly, Eastern Europe, where Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries used to be, is still a mess agriculturally.
Now, this would require nutrients and water.
Plants need water and nutrients.
But we have to do it in a way that is sensitive to meeting the food security needs of the future and the environmental security needs of the future.
We have to figure out how to make this tradeoff between growing food and having a healthy environment work better.
Right now, it's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition.
We can grow food in the background -- that's a soybean field — and in this flower diagram, it shows we grow a lot of food, but we don't have a lot clean water, we're not storing a lot of carbon, we don't have a lot of biodiversity.
Now, when I talk about this, people often tell me, "Well, isn't blank the answer?" -- organic food, local food, GMOs, new trade subsidies, new farm bills -- and yeah, we have a lot of good ideas here, but not any one of these is a silver bullet.
And I love silver buckshot. You put it together and you've got something really powerful, but we need to put them together.
So what we have to do, I think, is invent a new kind of agriculture that blends the best ideas of commercial agriculture and the green revolution with the best ideas of organic farming and local food and the best ideas of environmental conservation, not to have them fighting each other but to have them collaborating together to form a new kind of agriculture, something I call "terraculture," or farming for a whole planet.
Now, having this conversation has been really hard, and we've been trying very hard to bring these key points to people to reduce the controversy, to increase the collaboration.
I want to show you a short video that does kind of show our efforts right now to bring these sides together into a single conversation. So let me show you that.
(Music) ("Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota: Driven to Discover") (Music) ("The world population is growing by 75 million people each year.
Today, we're nearing 7 billion people.
At this rate, we'll reach 9 billion people by 2040.
And we all need food.
But how?
How do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet?
We already know climate change is a big problem.
We need to face 'the other inconvenient truth.' A global crisis in agriculture.
Population growth + meat consumption + dairy consumption + energy costs + bioenergy production = stress on natural resources.
More than 40% of Earth's land has been cleared for agriculture.
Global croplands cover 16 million km².
That's almost the size of South America.
That's the size of Africa.
Agriculture uses 60 times more land than urban and suburban areas combined.
Irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet.
We use 2,800 cubic kilometers of water on crops every year.
That's enough to fill 7,305 Empire State Buildings every day.
Today, many large rivers have reduced flows.
Look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert.
Or the Colorado River, which no longer flows to the ocean.
Fertilizers have more than doubled the phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment.
Widespread water pollution and massive degradation of lakes and rivers.
Surprisingly, agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change.
It generates 30% of greenhouse gas emissions.
That's more than the emissions from all electricity and industry, or from all the world's planes, trains and automobiles.
Most agricultural emissions come from tropical deforestation, methane from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide from over-fertilizing.
And there's nothing we do that is more crucial to our survival.
As the world grows by several billion more people, We'll need to double, maybe even triple, global food production.
So where do we go from here?
We need a bigger conversation, an international dialogue.
We need to invest in real solutions: incentives for farmers, precision agriculture, new crop varieties, drip irrigation, gray water recycling, better tillage practices, smarter diets.
Advocates of commercial agriculture, environmental conservation, and organic farming...
There is no single solution.
How do we feed the world without destroying it?
Yeah, so we face one of the greatest grand challenges in all of human history today: the need to feed nine billion people and do so sustainably and equitably and justly, at the same time protecting our planet for this and future generations.
This is going to be one of the hardest things we ever have done in human history, and we absolutely have to get it right, and we have to get it right on our first and only try.
So thanks very much. (Applause)
I call myself a body architect.
I trained in classical ballet and have a background in architecture and fashion.
As a body architect, I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it.
I worked at Philips Electronics in the far-future design research lab, looking 20 years into the future.
I explored the human skin, and how technology can transform the body.
I started my own experiments.
These were the low-tech approaches to the high-tech conversations I was having.
(Laughter) I started a collaboration with a friend of mine, Bart Hess -- he doesn't normally look like this -- and we used ourselves as models.
We were creating visual imagery provoking human evolution.
Whilst I was at Philips, we discussed this idea of a maybe technology, something that wasn't either switched on or off, but in between.
A maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid.
I set up my studio in the red-light district and obsessively wrapped myself in plumbing tubing, and found a way to redefine the skin and create this dynamic textile.
And she talked about how technology with these new feathers, this new face paint, this punk, the way that we identify with the world, and we made this music video.
I'm fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology, and I remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology, in the future, away from disease and aging.
And I thought about this concept of, imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor, modify and biologically enhance it, and how would that change the way that we communicate with each other?
It redefines the role of skin, and our bodies become an atomizer.
I've learned that there's no boundaries, and if I look at the evolution of my work i can see threads and connections that make sense.
But when I look towards the future, the next project is completely unknown and wide open.
I feel like I have all these ideas existing embedded inside of me, and it's these conversations and these experiences that connect these ideas, and they kind of instinctively come out.
As a body architect, I've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever I want.
So here's to another day at the office.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you!
Thank you!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put your hands on top of your head.
Yeah. All right, now put your hands down.
Put the Pell Grants in there too. Yeah, you. Go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It ain't a game no more. I know you're hiding the money somewhere here.
Oh, you thought I was playing.
What do you, think this is a game? What?
I'll say something else. Don't call me crazy.
I'm telling you, now I'm about to go crazy. I'm about to go Tupac Thug Life in here.
Like, "I ain't a killer but don't push me. Revenge is like the sweetest joy --" Woo!
Do you know how hard it was to find these guns?
I'm just trying to get my education. You know what I mean?
And all these years, all y'all been doing is strangling the life out of my bank statement, leaving my pockets as vacant as parking lots.
Keep the body, take the money.
This seems all too familiar.
Sounds like the Thirteenth Amendment in reverse.
Don't call it financial aid if you're not helping anyone with it.
We have fought way too hard to let green paper build a barricade in front of our futures.
Just, please, put the money in the bag.
Put the money in the bag. I just want to go to school, man.
I just want to get my education. I just want to learn. I just want to grow.
Just put the money in the bag.
Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets.
It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004.
I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this.
I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before.
And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect.
But soon the idea began spreading virally.
People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards.
I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq.
PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world.
And this is my postcard collection today.
You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets.
I never did have someone."
Secrets can take many forms.
They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet.
(Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in.
I don't know.
This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard.
This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side.
I've found love. I'm happy."
Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now.
"Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead."
"I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people, so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself."
I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students.
And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students.
And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos.
And I should also mention that, just like today, at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone.
We all heard you pee."
(Laughter) This was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been worse.
(Laughter) "Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use.
I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.)" "One of these men is the father of my son.
He pays me a lot to keep it a secret."
(Laughter) "That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring.
It's in my pocket right now."
I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day.
It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column.
And he said, "Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life."
He said, "My knees are still shaking."
He said, "For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud.
I read some to her, she reads some to me."
He says, "It's really brought us closer together through the years.
And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom, I was beside myself.
And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other."
He said, "But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one."
But she finally did.
And he said, "She read it once and then she read it again."
And she turned to him and said, "Is that our cat?"
(Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out.
He popped the question, she said yes. It was a very happy ending.
So I emailed him back and I said, "Please share with me an image, something, that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending."
And he emailed me this picture.
(Laughter) "I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer.
I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you."
This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it, but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty.
Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera.
And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week.
And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for.
(Laughter) Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers.
And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge.
Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture.
"That's me, my husband and son.
The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother.
Thank you for making your site.
These pictures mean more to me than you know.
My son's birth is on this camera.
He turns four tomorrow."
This is the last postcard I have to share with you today.
"When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again."
When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died.
They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them, it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive.
One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother.
Secrets can take many forms.
They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again.
Voicemail recording: First saved voice message.
Grandma: ♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫ ♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake ♫ You're 21 years old today.
Have a real happy birthday, and I love you.
I'll say bye for now.
FW: Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching.
Have you ever sent yourself a postcard?
Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret?
I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets.
And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me.
(Laughter) (Applause)
I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after.
And I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century.
And what is interesting about him in relation to morality is that he lived at a time where religion's influence was waning, and he was sort of wondering, I think, what would happen with society if there was no religion or if there was less religion.
And so he painted this famous painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which some have interpreted as being humanity before the Fall, or being humanity without any Fall at all.
And so it makes you wonder, what would happen if we hadn't tasted the fruit of knowledge, so to speak, and what kind of morality would we have.
Much later, as a student, I went to a very different garden, a zoological garden in Arnhem where we keep chimpanzees.
This is me at an early age with a baby chimpanzee.
(Laughter) And I discovered there that the chimpanzees are very power-hungry and wrote a book about it.
And at that time the focus in a lot of animal research was on aggression and competition.
I'm not sure how well the chimpanzees read it, but they surely seemed interested in the book.
(Laughter) Now in the process of doing all this work on power and dominance and aggression and so on, I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after fights.
And so what you see here is two males who have had a fight.
They ended up in a tree, and one of them holds out a hand to the other.
And about a second after I took the picture, they came together in the fork of the tree and kissed and embraced each other.
This is the way bonobos do it. Bonobos do everything with sex.
And so they also reconcile with sex.
But the principle is exactly the same.
The principle is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict, so you need to do something about it.
So my whole picture of the animal kingdom, and including humans also, started to change at that time.
So we have this image in political science, economics, the humanities, the philosophy for that matter, that man is a wolf to man.
And so deep down, our nature is actually nasty.
I think it's a very unfair image for the wolf.
The wolf is, after all, a very cooperative animal.
And that's why many of you have a dog at home, which has all these characteristics also.
And it's really unfair to humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for.
So I started getting interested in those issues and studying that in other animals.
So these are the pillars of morality.
If you ask anyone, "What is morality based on?"
One is reciprocity, and associated with it is a sense of justice and a sense of fairness.
And the other one is empathy and compassion.
And human morality is more than this, but if you would remove these two pillars, there would be not much remaining, I think.
So let me give you a few examples here.
This is a very old video from the Yerkes Primate Center, where they trained chimpanzees to cooperate.
So this is already about a hundred years ago that we were doing experiments on cooperation.
What you have here is two young chimpanzees who have a box, and the box is too heavy for one chimp to pull in.
And of course, there's food on the box.
Otherwise they wouldn't be pulling so hard.
It's already a big advance over many other animals who wouldn't be able to do that.
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) [- and sometimes appears to convey its wishes and meanings by gestures.] Now look at what happens at the very end of this.
(Laughter) There are two interesting parts about this.
One is that the chimp on the right has a full understanding he needs the partner -- so a full understanding of the need for cooperation.
The second one is that the partner is willing to work even though he's not interested in the food.
Well, that probably has to do with reciprocity.
There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.
He will get a return favor at some point in the future.
We do the same task with elephants.
Another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy for a single elephant.
And so what we did in that case -- we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik -- is we have an apparatus around which there is a rope, a single rope.
And if you pull on this side of the rope, the rope disappears on the other side.
So two elephants need to pick it up at exactly the same time, and pull.
Otherwise nothing is going to happen and the rope disappears.
The first tape you're going to see is two elephants who are released together arrive at the apparatus.
And so they come together, they arrive together, they pick it up together, and they pull together.
But now we're going to make it more difficult.
Because the purpose of this experiment is to see how well they understand cooperation.
What we do in the next step is we release one elephant before the other and that elephant needs to be smart enough to stay there and wait and not pull at the rope -- because if he pulls at the rope, it disappears and the whole test is over.
Now this elephant does something illegal that we did not teach it.
(Laughter) But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have.
(Laughter) So the other elephant is now coming ...
(Laughter) This was the cooperation and reciprocity part.
Empathy is my main topic at the moment, of research.
And empathy has two qualities: One is the understanding part of it.
And the emotional part.
Empathy has basically two channels: One is the body channel, If you talk with a sad person, you're going to adopt a sad expression and a sad posture, and before you know it, you feel sad.
And that's sort of the body channel of emotional empathy, which many animals have.
That's why people keep mammals in the home and not turtles or snakes or something like that, who don't have that kind of empathy.
And then there's a cognitive channel, which is more that you can take the perspective of somebody else.
And that's more limited.
Very few animals, I think elephants and apes, can do that kind of thing.
In humans, of course, we can study that with yawn contagion.
Humans yawn when others yawn.
And it's related to empathy.
It activates the same areas in the brain.
And we study that in our chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head.
So that's what you see on the upper-left, an animated head that yawns.
And there's a chimpanzee watching, an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations.
(Laughter) So yawn contagion that you're probably all familiar with -- and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now -- is something that we share with other animals.
And that's related to that whole body channel of synchronization that underlies empathy, and that is universal in the mammals, basically.
And consolation behavior -- (Laughter) it's empathy driven.
Actually, the way to study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed, and then to see what young children do.
And so it is related to empathy, and that's the kind of expressions we look at.
We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about.
It's on altruism and chimpanzees, where the question is: Do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else?
We do that on chimpanzees that live in Lawrenceville, in the field station of Yerkes.
And so that's how they live.
In this case, we put two chimpanzees side-by-side, and one has a bucket full of tokens, and the tokens have different meanings.
So this is a study we did with Vicki Horner.
And here, you have the two color tokens.
So if this chimp makes the selfish choice, which is the red token in this case, he needs to give it to us, we pick it up, we put it on a table where there's two food rewards, but in this case, only the one on the right gets food.
The one on the left walks away because she knows already that this is not a good test for her.
Then the next one is the pro-social token.
So the one who makes the choices -- that's the interesting part here -- for the one who makes the choices, it doesn't really matter.
So the one who makes the choices always gets a reward.
And she should actually be choosing blindly.
So this is the 50 percent line, that's the random expectation.
And especially if the partner draws attention to itself, they choose more.
And this is what happens without a partner, when there's no partner sitting there.
So we found that the chimpanzees do care about the well-being of somebody else -- especially, these are other members of their own group.
And so this became a very famous study.
And there are now many more, because after we did this about 10 years ago, it became very well-known.
And we did that originally with Capuchin monkeys.
And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did.
It has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees.
So what we did is we put two Capuchin monkeys side-by-side.
And there's a very simple task that they need to do.
So that's the experiment we did.
Recently, we videotaped it with new monkeys who'd never done the task, thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction, and that turned out to be right.
The one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber.
The one who gets cucumber -- note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine.
Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens.
And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it.
And that's what she does.
And she gets a grape ...
and eats it.
She gives a rock to us now, gets, again, cucumber.
She needs to give it to us.
(Laughter) So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here.
(Laughter) (Applause) I still have two minutes left -- let me tell you a funny story about this.
This study became very famous and we got a lot of comments, especially anthropologists, economists, philosophers.
They didn't like this at all.
Because they had decided in their minds, I believe, that fairness is a very complex issue, and that animals cannot have it.
And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution.
(Laughter) And another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness, if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes.
Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan, who's been doing this with chimpanzees, had a couple of combinations of chimpanzees where, indeed, the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape.
So we're getting very close to the human sense of fairness.
And I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for a while.
I believe there's an evolved morality.
I think morality is much more than what I've been talking about, but it would be impossible without these ingredients that we find in other primates, which are empathy and consolation, pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness.
And so we work on these particular issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak, without necessarily god and religion involved, and to see how we can get to an evolved morality.
And I thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
Today, I'd like to talk with you about something that should be a totally uncontroversial topic.
But, unfortunately, it's become incredibly controversial.
This year, if you think about it, over a billion couples will have sex with one another.
(Laughter) And my idea is this -- all these men and women should be free to decide whether they do or do not want to conceive a child.
Over one billion people use birth control without any hesitation at all.
They want the power to plan their own lives and to raise healthier, better educated and more prosperous families.
But, for an idea that is so broadly accepted in private, birth control certainly generates a lot of opposition in public.
Some people worry that the real goal of family planning is to control populations.
These are all side issues that have attached themselves to this core idea that men and women should be able to decide when they want to have a child.
And as a result, birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda.
The victims of this paralysis are the people of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Here in Germany, the proportion of people that use contraception is about 66 percent.
In El Salvador, very similar, 66 percent.
Thailand, 64 percent.
But let's compare that to other places, like Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states in India.
In fact, if Uttar Pradesh was its own country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world.
Their contraception rate -- 29 percent.
Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, 10 percent.
Chad, 2 percent.
Their rate is about 12 percent.
One reason is that the most popular contraceptives are rarely available.
Women in Africa will tell you over and over again that what they prefer today is an injectable.
They get it in their arm -- and they go about four times a year, they have to get it every three months -- to get their injection.
The reason women like it so much in Africa is they can hide it from their husbands, who sometimes want a lot of children.
So can you imagine the situation -- she walks all this way to go get her injection.
She leaves her field, sometimes leaves her children, and it's not there.
This is the same story across the continent of Africa today.
And so what we've created as a world has become a life-and-death crisis.
There are 100,000 women [per year] who say they don't want to be pregnant and they die in childbirth -- 100,000 women a year.
There are another 600,000 women [per year] who say they didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, and they give birth to a baby and her baby dies in that first month of life.
I know everyone wants to save these mothers and these children.
But somewhere along the way, we got confused by our own conversation.
And we stopped trying to save these lives.
So if we're going to make progress on this issue, we have to be really clear about what our agenda is.
We're not talking about abortion.
We're not talking about population control.
Now, as a world, there are lots of things we have to do in the global health community if we want to make the world better in the future -- things like fight diseases.
So many children today die of diarrhea, as you heard earlier, and pneumonia.
They kill literally millions of children a year.
We also need to help small farmers -- farmers who plow small plots of land in Africa -- so that they can grow enough food to feed their children.
And we have to make sure that children are educated around the world.
But one of the simplest and most transformative things we can do is to give everybody access to birth control methods that almost all Germans have access to and all Americans, at some point, they use these tools during their life.
And I think as long as we're really clear about what our agenda is, there's a global movement waiting to happen and ready to get behind this totally uncontroversial idea.
When I grew up, I grew up in a Catholic home.
I still consider myself a practicing Catholic.
My mom's great-uncle was a Jesuit priest.
My great-aunt was a Dominican nun.
She was a schoolteacher and a principal her entire life.
In fact, she's the one who taught me as a young girl how to read.
I was very close to her.
And I went to Catholic schools for my entire childhood until I left home to go to university.
In my high school, Ursuline Academy, the nuns made service and social justice a high priority in the school.
Today, in the [Gates] Foundation's work, I believe I'm applying the lessons that I learned in high school.
So, in the tradition of Catholic scholars, the nuns also taught us to question received teachings.
And one of the teachings that we girls and my peers questioned was is birth control really a sin?
Because I think one of the reasons we have this huge discomfort talking about contraception is this lingering concern that if we separate sex from reproduction, we're going to promote promiscuity.
And I think that's a reasonable question to be asked about contraception -- what is its impact on sexual morality?
But, like most women, my decision about birth control had nothing to do with promiscuity.
I had a plan for my future. I wanted to go to college.
I studied really hard in college, and I was proud to be one of the very few female computer science graduates at my university.
I wanted to have a career, so I went on to business school and I became one of the youngest female executives at Microsoft.
I still remember, though, when I left my parents' home to move across the country to start this new job at Microsoft.
They had sacrificed a lot to give me five years of higher education.
But they said, as I left home -- and I literally went down the front steps, down the porch at home -- and they said, "Even though you've had this great education, if you decide to get married and have kids right away, that's OK by us, too."
They wanted me to do the thing that would make me the very happiest.
I was free to decide what that would be.
It was an amazing feeling.
In fact, I did want to have kids -- but I wanted to have them when I was ready.
And so now, Bill and I have three.
And when our eldest daughter was born, we weren't, I would say, exactly sure how to be great parents.
Maybe some of you know that feeling.
And so we waited a little while before we had our second child.
And it's no accident that we have three children that are spaced three years apart.
Now, as a mother, what do I want the very most for my children?
I want them to feel the way I did -- like they can do anything they want to do in life.
And so, what has struck me as I've travelled the last decade for the foundation around the world is that all women want that same thing.
Last year, I was in Nairobi, in the slums, in one called Korogocho -- which literally means when translated, "standing shoulder to shoulder."
And I spoke with this women's group that's pictured here.
And the women talked very openly about their family life in the slums, what it was like.
Marianne, in the center of the screen in the red sweater, she summed up that entire two-hour conversation in a phrase that I will never forget.
She said, "I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another."
That's universal.
We all want to bring every good thing to our children.
So many women suffer from domestic violence.
And they can't even broach the subject of contraception, even inside their own marriage.
There are many women who lack basic education.
For 250 years, parents around the world have been deciding to have smaller families.
The French started bringing down their family size in the mid-1700s.
And over the next 150 years, this trend spread all across Europe.
The surprising thing to me, as I learned this history, was that it spread not along socioeconomic lines but around cultural lines.
People who spoke the same language made that change as a group.
They made the same choice for their family, whether they were rich or whether they were poor.
The reason that trend toward smaller families spread was that this whole way was driven by an idea -- the idea that couples can exercise conscious control over how many children they have.
This is a very powerful idea.
In France, the average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row until it stabilized.
It took so long back then because the contraceptives weren't that good.
In Germany, this transition started in the 1880s, and it took just 50 years for family size to stabilize in this country.
And in Asia and Latin America, the transition started in the 1960s, and it happened much faster because of modern contraception.
I think, as we go through this history, it's important to pause for a moment and to remember why this has become such a contentious issue.
It's because some family planning programs resorted to unfortunate incentives and coercive policies.
For instance, in the 1960s, India adopted very specific numeric targets and they paid women to accept having an IUD placed in their bodies.
Now, Indian women were really smart in this situation.
When they went to get an IUD inserted, they got paid six rupees.
And so what did they do?
They waited a few hours or a few days, and they went to another service provider and had the IUD removed for one rupee.
For decades in the United States, African-American women were sterilized without their consent.
The procedure was so common it became known as the Mississippi appendectomy -- a tragic chapter in my country's history.
And as recently as the 1990s, in Peru, women from the Andes region were given anesthesia and they were sterilized without their knowledge.
There's no reason to believe that African women have innately different desires.
The question is: will we invest in helping all women get what they want now?
But here's the thing -- our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world.
It's what propels societies forward.
In that same slum in Nairobi, I met a young businesswoman, and she was making backpacks out of her home.
She and her young kids would go to the local jeans factory and collect scraps of denim.
She'd create these backpacks and resell them.
And when I talked with her, she had three children, and I asked her about her family.
And so when I asked her why, she simply said, "Well, because I couldn't run my business if I had another child."
She was incredibly optimistic about her family's future.
This is the same mental calculus that hundreds of millions of men and women have gone through.
In Bangladesh, there's a district called Matlab.
It's where researchers have collected data on over 180,000 inhabitants since 1963.
In the global health community, we like to say it's one of the longest pieces of research that's been running.
In one of the studies, what did they do?
Half the villagers were chosen to get contraceptives.
The families were healthier.
The women were less likely to die in childbirth.
Their children were less likely to die in the first thirty days of life.
The adult women's wages were higher.
Households had more assets -- things like livestock or land or savings.
So when you multiply these types of effects over millions of families, the product can be large-scale economic development.
People talk about the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s -- but it wasn't really a miracle.
One of the leading causes of economic growth across that region was this cultural trend towards smaller families.
Sweeping changes start at the individual family level -- the family making a decision about what's best for their children.
When they make that change and that decision, those become sweeping regional and national trends.
When families in sub-Saharan Africa are given the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves, I think it will help spark a virtuous cycle of development in communities across the continent.
We can help poor families build a better future.
We can insist that all people have the opportunity to learn about contraceptives and have access to the full variety of methods.
I think the goal here is really clear: universal access to birth control that women want.
And for that to happen, it means that both rich and poor governments alike must make contraception a total priority.
We can do our part, in this room and globally, by talking about the hundreds of millions of families that don't have access to contraception today and what it would do to change their lives if they did have access.
I think if Marianne and the members of her women's group can talk about this openly and have this discussion out amongst themselves and in public, we can, too.
Because like Marianne, we all want to bring every good thing to our children.
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you.
I have some questions for Melinda.
(Applause ends) Thank you for your courage and everything else.
So, Melinda, in the last few years I've heard a lot of smart people say something to the effect of, "We don't need to worry about the population issue anymore.
We're going to peak at nine or 10 billion. And that's it."
Are they wrong?
Melinda Gates: If you look at the statistics across Africa, they are wrong.
And I think we need to look at it, though, from a different lens.
I think that's one of the reasons we got ourselves in so much trouble on this issue of contraception.
We looked at it from top down and said we want to have different population numbers over time.
Yes, we care about the planet. Yes, we need to make the right choices.
But the choices have to be made at the family level.
And it's only by giving people access and letting them choose what to do that you get those sweeping changes that we have seen globally -- except for sub-Saharan Africa and those places in South Asia and Afghanistan.
CA: Some people on the right in America and in many conservative cultures around the world might say something like this: "It's all very well to talk about saving lives and empowering women and so on.
But, sex is sacred.
What you're proposing is going to increase the likelihood that lots of sex happens outside marriage.
And that is wrong."
What would you say to them?
MG: I would say that sex is absolutely sacred.
And it's sacred in Germany, and it's sacred in the United States, and it's sacred in France and so many places around the world.
And the fact that 98 percent of women in my country who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred.
And I think in that choice, we're also honoring the sacredness of the family and the sacredness of the mother's life and the childrens' lives by saving their lives.
To me, that's incredibly sacred, too.
CA: So what is your foundation doing to promote this issue?
MG: I would say this -- join the conversation.
We've listed the website up here. Join the conversation.
Tell your story about how contraception has either changed your life or somebody's life that you know.
We've got to give all women access -- no matter where they live."
And one of the things that we're going to do is do a large event July 11 in London, with a whole host of countries, a whole host of African nations, to all say we're putting this back on the global health agenda.
We're going to commit resources to it, and we're going to do planning from the bottom up with governments to make sure that women are educated -- so that if they want the tool, they have it, and that they have lots of options available either through their local healthcare worker or their local community rural clinic.
CA: Melinda, I'm guessing that some of those nuns who taught you at school are going to see this TED Talk at some point.
MG: I know they're going to see the TED Talk because they know that I'm doing it and I plan to send it to them.
And, you know, the nuns who taught me were incredibly progressive.
I hope that they'll be very proud of me for living out what they taught us about social justice and service.
I have come to feel incredibly passionate about this issue because of what I've seen in the developing world.
And yet they shouldn't be -- they should have a voice, they should have access.
And so I hope they'll feel that I'm living out what I've learned from them and from the decades of work that I've already done at the foundation.
CA: So, you and your team brought together today an amazing group of speakers to whom we're all grateful.
Did you learn anything?
(Laughter) MG: Oh my gosh, I learned so many things. I have so many follow-up questions.
You heard the discussion about the journey through energy, or the journey through social design, or the journey in the coming and saying, "Why aren't there any women on this platform?"
And I think for all of us who work on these development issues, you learn by talking to other people.
You learn by doing. You learn by trying and making mistakes.
Sometimes it's the questions you ask that helps lead to the answer the next person that can help you answer it.
CA: Melinda, thank you for inviting all of us on this journey with you.
Thank you so much. MG: Great. Thanks, Chris.
I'm a process engineer, I know all about boilers and incinerators and fabric filters, and cyclones, and things like that.
But I also have Marfan syndrome.
And in 1992, I participated in a genetic study, and found to my horror, as you can see from the slide, that my ascending aorta was not in the normal range, the green line at the bottom.
Everyone in here will be between 3.2-3.6, and I was already up at 4.4.
And as you can see, my aorta dilated progressively, and I got closer and closer to the point where surgery was going to be necessary.
Normally, warfarin.
The thought of the surgery was not attractive.
The thought of the warfarin was really quite frightening.
So I said to myself, "I'm an engineer, I'm in R&D, this is just a plumbing problem."
"I can do this, I can change this."
So I set out to change the entire treatment for aortic dilation.
The only real problem with the ascending aorta in people with Marfan syndrome is that it lacks some tensile strength.
If your high-pressure hose pipe or hydraulic line bulges a little, you just wrap some tape around it, it really is that simple.
So, where do we start?
In the middle, you can see that little structure squeezing out, that's the left ventricle, pushing blood out through the aortic valve.
You can see two of the leaflets of the aortic valve working there.
Up into the ascending aorta.
And it's that part, the ascending aorta, which dilates and ultimately bursts, which of course is fatal.
We started by organizing image acquisition from magnetic resonance and CT imaging machines, from which to make a model of the patient's aorta.
This is a model of my aorta.
I've got a real one in my pocket, if anyone would like to look at it, and play with it.
(Laughter) You can see it's quite a complex structure.
It then comes back into a round form, and then tapers and curves off.
We went through an iterative process of producing better and better models.
When we produced that model, we turned it into a solid, plastic model, as you can see, using a rapid prototyping technique, another engineering technique.
We then used that former to manufacture a perfectly bespoke porous textile mesh, which takes the shape of the former and perfectly fits the aorta.
So this is absolutely personalized medicine at its best, really.
John Pepper, bless his heart, professor of cardiothoracic surgery.
Never done it before in his life, he put the first one in, didn't like it, he put the second one in.
So the surgical implantation was actually the easiest part.
If you compare our new treatment to the existing alternative, the composite aortic root graft, there are one or two startling comparisons which I'm sure will be clear to all of you.
Two hours to install one of our devices, compared to 6 hours for the existing treatment.
We don't need any of that. We work on a beating heart.
He opens you up, he accesses the aorta while your heart is beating, all at the right temperature.
So it really is great.
I don't take any drugs at all, other than recreational ones that I would choose to take.
(Laughter) And in fact, if you speak to people who are on long-term warfarin, it is a serious compromise to your quality of life, and even worse, it inevitably foreshortens your life.
Back to the theme of the presentation, multidisciplinary research, how on earth does a process engineer used to working with boilers end up producing a medical device which transforms his own life?
Well, the answer to that is, a multidisciplinary team.
This is a list of the core team, and you can see there aren't only two principal technical disciplines there, medicine and engineering, but also, there are various specialists from within those two disciplines.
John Pepper was the cardiac surgeon who did all the actual work on me.
But everyone else had to contribute one way or another.
Raad Mohiaddin, a medical radiologist.
We had to get good-quality images from which to make the CAD model.
Warren Thornton, who still does all our CAD models for us, had to write a bespoke piece of CAD code to produce this model from this really rather difficult input data set.
There are some barriers to this, though, there are some problems.
I would think no one in this room understands the first four jargon points.
The engineers amongst you will recognize "rapid prototyping" and "CAD."
Taking the jargon out was very important to ensure that everyone in the team understood exactly what was meant when a particular phrase was used.
We took a lot of horizontal slice images through me, produced those slices and used them to build a CAD model.
And then we realized that it was actually a mirror image of the real aorta.
The Brompton Hospital was taken over by the Imperial College School of Medicine.
And there are some seriously bad relationship problems between the two organizations.
I was working with the Imperial and the Brompton, and this generated some serious problems for the project.
Research & Ethics Committee.
If you want to do anything new in surgery, you have to get a license from your local Research & Ethics.
I'm sure it's the same in Poland.
There will be some form of equivalent which licenses new types of surgery.
There were people on the Research & Ethics committee who really didn't want to see John Pepper succeed again.
Because he is so successful.
And they made extra problems for us.
Bureaucratic problems.
In the UK, we have the National Institute and Clinical Excellence.
So any other hospitals interested can come along, read the NICE report, get in touch with us, and then get doing it themselves.
A big problem with understanding one of those perspectives.
When we first approached one of the big, charitable UK organizations that fund this kind of stuff, we essentially gave them an engineering proposal.
They didn't understand it, they were doctors, next to God, it must be rubbish, they binned it.
Jargon is a huge problem when you try to work across disciplines, because in an engineering world, we all understand CAD and RP.
Not in the medical world.
I suppose the funding bureaucrats ultimately have to get their act together.
(Laughter) Which it probably is.
So many people in the medical world don't want to change.
Particularly when some jumped-up engineer has come along with the answer.
They don't want to change.
They simply want to do whatever they've done before.
And in fact, many surgeons in the UK are still waiting for one of our patients to have some sort of an episode, so that they could say, "Told you that was no good."
We've actually got 30 patients.
And still, there are people in the UK saying, "That external aortic root, it will never work, you know."
I'm sure everyone in this room has come across arrogance amongst medics, doctors, surgeons, at some point.
The middle point is simply the way that the doctors protect themselves.
I think it's not good, but that's my view.
Egos, of course, again a huge problem.
Tom Treasure, professor of cardiothoracic surgery.
(Laughter) When you have a group of people with different professional training, a different professional experience, they not only have a different knowledge base, but also a different perspective on everything.
And if you can bring them together, and get them talking and understanding each other, the results can be spectacular.
You can find really novel solutions that have never been looked at before, very quickly and easily.
The result of all this is that you can get incredibly quick progress on incredibly small budgets.
I'm so embarrassed at how cheap it was to get from my idea to me being implanted that I'm not prepared to tell you what it cost, because I suspect there are absolutely standard surgical treatments, probably in the USA, which cost more for a one-off patient than the cost of us getting from my dream to my reality.
That's all I want to say, and I've got three minutes left.
So, Ewa's going to like me.
I'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope.
When we go to the physician today -- when we go to the doctor's office and we walk in, there are words that we just don't want to hear.
There are words that we're truly afraid of.
Diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart failure, lung failure -- things that we know are debilitating diseases, for which there's relatively little that can be done.
This was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human.
It was basically a regenerative medicine issue.
Regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand.
It's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale.
We know that if we have a damaged hip, you can put an artificial hip in.
And this is the idea that Science Magazine used on their front cover.
This is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine.
This is not regenerative medicine.
Regenerative medicine is what Business Week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago.
The idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like -- and I'll come back to that theme a few times -- instead of doing that, we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue.
If you look back in history, Charles Lindbergh, who was better known for flying airplanes, was actually one of the first people along with Alexis Carrel, one of the Nobel Laureates from Rockefeller, to begin to think about, could you culture organs?
And they published this book in 1937, where they actually began to think about, what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs?
We've come a long way since then.
But before doing that, what I'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you.
Many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life, and reducing poverty, and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe.
And the longer we live, the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older.
And you can basically see that the richer a country is, the older the people are within it.
Why is this important?
And why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now?
If the average age of your population is 30, then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again, maybe a little bit of asthma.
If the average age in your country is 45 to 55, now the average person is looking at diabetes, early-onset diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease -- things that are inherently more difficult to treat, and much more expensive to treat.
This is from "The Untied States of America."
In 1930, there were 41 workers per retiree.
In 2010, two workers per retiree in the U.S.
And this is matched in every industrialized, wealthy country in the world.
It's actually quite interesting. If you do the right studies, you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care, plotted over your lifetime.
And you can actually -- (Laughter) -- we won't get into that.
You can prevent.
But perhaps most interesting, to me anyway, and most important, is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression, and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom.
Think of it in terms of diabetes, for instance.
Today, with diabetes, what do we do?
We diagnose the disease eventually, once it becomes symptomatic, and then we treat the symptom for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
But eventually it stops working, and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease.
Why couldn't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease, perhaps even before it was symptomatic?
This video, I think, gets across the concept that I'm talking about quite dramatically.
This is a newt re-growing its limb.
If a newt can do this kind of thing, why can't we?
But what we're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body, for tissues and for organs themselves.
So today's reality is that if we get sick, the message is we will treat your symptoms, and you need to adjust to a new way of life.
I would pose to you that tomorrow -- and when tomorrow is we could debate, but it's within the foreseeable future -- we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation.
There are 370 soldiers that have come back from Iraq that have lost limbs.
Imagine if instead of facing that, they could actually face the regeneration of that limb.
It's a wild concept.
How can we do that?
The way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body.
We need to learn to speak the body's language.
And to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus.
So our DNA has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms.
It's a natural process, but it is lost as we age.
In a child, before the age of about six months, if they lose their fingertip in an accident, they'll re-grow their fingertip.
By the time they're five, they won't be able to do that anymore.
And there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today.
Clearly, we heal ourselves in a natural process, using cells to do most of the work.
Secondly, we can use materials.
We heard yesterday about the importance of new materials.
If we can invent materials, design materials, or extract materials from a natural environment, then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself.
And finally, we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal.
And that idea was that the small intestine of a pig, if you threw away all the cells, and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active, may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself.
And he asked a very important question.
I wouldn't be telling you this story if it weren't compelling.
(Laughter) However, for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish -- even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends -- the lights are down. This is a good time to look at your feet, check your Blackberry, do anything other than look at the screen.
(Laughter) What I'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer.
This is the reality of diabetes.
I think a lot of times we hear about diabetics, diabetic ulcers, we just don't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment, which is amputation, if you can't heal it.
This is a diabetic ulcer. It's tragic.
The treatment for this is amputation.
This is an older lady. She has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes, and has decided to die with what' s left of her body intact.
And this lady decided, after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer, that she would try this new therapy that Steve invented.
That material contained only natural signals.
And that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it didn't have before.
This is a horse. The horse is not in pain.
If the horse was in pain, I wouldn't show you this slide.
Just a few weeks after treatment -- in this case, taking that material, turning it into a gel, and packing that area, and then repeating the treatment a few times -- and the horse heals up.
Here's a dolphin where the fin's been re-attached.
There are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds.
Could you regenerate a limb?
DARPA just gave Steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question.
And I'll show you the 15 million dollar picture.
This is a 78 year-old man who's lost the end of his fingertip.
This is clinically relevant today.
But could you go a little further?
Could you, say, instead of using material, can I take some cells along with the material, and remove a damaged piece of tissue, put a bio-degradable material on there?
You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish.
This was done by Teruo Okano at Tokyo Women's Hospital.
He can actually grow beating tissue in a dish.
It's the coolest stuff.
And what I'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient.
But this one's kind of cool.
So this is a bypass operation, just like what Al Gore had, with a difference.
In this case, at the end of the bypass operation, you're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient.
You see the cells coming back out.
We need all sorts of new technology, new devices, to get the cells to the right place at the right time.
Just a little bit of data, a tiny bit of data.
This was a randomized trial.
Basically, if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass, they get a little bit better.
If you give them stem cells as well as their bypass, for these particular patients, they became asymptomatic.
This is the same procedure, but now done minimally invasively, with only three holes in the body where they're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure.
Here's another example of stem-cell therapy that isn't quite clinical yet, but I think very soon will be.
This is the work of Kacey Marra from Pittsburgh, along with a number of colleagues around the world.
They've decided that liposuction fluid, which -- in the United States, we have a lot of liposuction fluid.
(Laughter) It's a great source of stem cells.
Stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid.
Out comes the liposuction fluid, and in this case, the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons.
And I think fairly soon, you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived, or adipose-derived, stem cells.
I talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease.
This is equally tragic.
We have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the Institute for Surgical Research in the US Army, who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from Iraq.
Many of those patients are very severely burned.
And if there's anything that's been learned about burn, it's that we don't know how to treat it.
The gun that you see there sprays cells.
That's going to spray cells over that area.
It's a completely different way of doing it.
So let me finish up with some good news, and maybe a little bit of bad news.
The good news is that this is happening today.
A number of governments, and a number of regions, have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease.
The Japanese government were perhaps the first, when they decided to invest first 3 billion, later another 2 billion in this field.
It's no coincidence.
Japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age.
So they're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area.
China, the same thing.
China just launched a national tissue-engineering center.
The first year budget was 250 million US dollars.
In the United States we've had a somewhat different approach.
(Laughter) Oh, for Al Gore to come and be in the real world as president.
We've had a different approach.
And at the end of a very testy meeting, what the NIH director said was, "Your vision is larger than our appetite."
I'd like to close by saying that no one's going to change our vision, but together we can change his appetite.
Thank you.
(Laughter) (Applause) I had a plan, and I never ever thought it would have anything to do with the banjo.
Little did I know what a huge impact it would have on me one night when I was at a party and I heard a sound coming out of a record player in the corner of a room.
And it was Doc Watson singing and playing "Shady Grove."
♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my darlin' ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Going back to Harlan ♫ That sound was just so beautiful, the sound of Doc's voice and the rippling groove of the banjo.
I knew I had to take a banjo with me to China.
So before going to law school in China I bought a banjo, I threw it in my little red truck and I traveled down through Appalachia and I learned a bunch of old American songs, and I ended up in Kentucky at the International Bluegrass Music Association Convention.
And I was sitting in a hallway one night and a couple girls came up to me.
And they said, "Hey, do you want to jam?"
And I was like, "Sure."
So I picked up my banjo and I nervously played four songs that I actually knew with them.
And a record executive walked up to me and invited me to Nashville, Tennessee to make a record.
(Laughter) It's been eight years, and I can tell you that I didn't go to China to become a lawyer.
In fact, I went to Nashville.
And after a few months I was writing songs.
And the first song I wrote was in English, and the second one was in Chinese.
(Music) [Chinese] Outside your door the world is waiting.
Inside your heart a voice is calling.
The four corners of the world are watching, so travel daughter, travel.
Go get it, girl.
(Applause) It's really been eight years since that fated night in Kentucky.
And I've played thousands of shows.
And I've collaborated with so many incredible, inspirational musicians around the world.
I see it when I stand on a stage in a bluegrass festival in east Virginia and I look out at the sea of lawn chairs and I bust out into a song in Chinese.
And they're like, "What's that girl doing?"
And then they come up to me after the show and they all have a story.
They all come up and they're like, "You know, my aunt's sister's babysitter's dog's chicken went to China and adopted a girl."
And I tell you what, it like everybody's got a story.
And I see, even more importantly, the power of music to connect hearts.
Like the time I was in Sichuan Province and I was singing for kids in relocation schools in the earthquake disaster zone.
And this little girl comes up to me.
[Chinese] "Big sister Wong," Washburn, Wong, same difference.
And I sat down, she sat on my lap.
She started singing her song.
And the warmth of her body and the tears rolling down her rosy cheeks, and I started to cry.
And the light that shone off of her eyes was a place I could have stayed forever.
And in that moment, we weren't our American selves, we weren't our Chinese selves, we were just mortals sitting together in that light that keeps us here.
I want to dwell in that light with you and with everyone.
And I know U.S.-China relations doesn't need another lawyer.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I got my start in writing and research as a surgical trainee, as someone who was a long ways away from becoming any kind of an expert at anything.
So the natural question you ask then at that point is, how do I get good at what I'm trying to do?
It's hard enough to learn to get the skills, try to learn all the material you have to absorb at any task you're taking on.
I had to think about how I sew and how I cut, but then also how I pick the right person to come to an operating room.
There's not a country in the world that now is not asking whether we can afford what doctors do.
The political fight that we've developed has become one around whether it's the government that's the problem or is it insurance companies that are the problem.
And the answer is yes and no; it's deeper than all of that.
The cause of our troubles is actually the complexity that science has given us.
I want to take you back to a time when Lewis Thomas was writing in his book, "The Youngest Science."
Lewis Thomas was a physician-writer, one of my favorite writers.
And he wrote this book to explain, among other things, what it was like to be a medical intern at the Boston City Hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937.
And there were a few.
If you had an acute congestive heart failure, they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein, giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent.
If you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions, you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis, in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic -- as long as you didn't overdose them and kill them.
This was a life as a craftsman.
Autonomy was our highest value.
Go a couple generations forward to where we are, though, and it looks like a completely different world.
We can't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life.
But we can make it possible for most.
But what does it take?
Well, we've now discovered 4,000 medical and surgical procedures.
We've discovered 6,000 drugs that I'm now licensed to prescribe.
And we're trying to deploy this capability, town by town, to every person alive -- in our own country, let alone around the world.
And we've reached the point where we've realized, as doctors, we can't know it all.
We can't do it all by ourselves.
By the end of the 20th century, it had become more than 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient -- specialists, physical therapists, the nurses.
But holding onto that structure we built around the daring, independence, self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster.
We have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys.
But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients.
There's evidence all around us: 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care.
60 percent of our asthma, stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care.
Two million people come into hospitals and pick up an infection they didn't have because someone failed to follow the basic practices of hygiene.
Our experience as people who get sick, need help from other people, is that we have amazing clinicians that we can turn to -- hardworking, incredibly well-trained and very smart -- that we have access to incredible technologies that give us great hope, but little sense that it consistently all comes together for you from start to finish in a successful way.
There's another sign that we need pit crews, and that's the unmanageable cost of our care.
When you go from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin, that mostly didn't do the job, to one where, if it gets bad enough, we can do a hip replacement, a knee replacement that gives you years, maybe decades, without disability, a dramatic change, well is it any surprise that that $40,000 hip replacement replacing the 10-cent aspirin is more expensive?
But I think we're ignoring certain facts that tell us something about what we can do.
As we've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased, we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care.
And what that means is there's hope.
Because [if] to have the best results, you really needed the most expensive care in the country, or in the world, well then we really would be talking about rationing who we're going to cut off from Medicare.
That would be really our only choice.
But when we look at the positive deviants -- the ones who are getting the best results at the lowest costs -- we find the ones that look the most like systems are the most successful.
That is to say, they found ways to get all of the different pieces, all of the different components, to come together into a whole.
Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components.
We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together.
It's a terrible design strategy actually.
There's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said, what if you built a car from the very best car parts?
And you put it all together and what do you get?
A very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere.
And that is what medicine can feel like sometimes.
Skill number one is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure.
One of my colleagues is a surgeon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he got interested in the question of, well how many CT scans did they do for their community in Cedar Rapids?
He got interested in this because there had been government reports, newspaper reports, journal articles saying that there had been too many CT scans done.
He didn't see it in his own patients.
and he wanted to get the data.
It took him three months.
No one had asked this question in his community before.
And what he found was that, for the 300,000 people in their community, in the previous year they had done 52,000 CT scans.
They had found a problem.
Skill two is devise solutions.
I got interested in this when the World Health Organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery.
The volume of surgery had spread around the world, but the safety of surgery had not.
Now our usual tactics for tackling problems like these are to do more training, give people more specialization or bring in more technology.
And so we looked at what other high-risk industries do.
We looked at skyscraper construction, we looked at the aviation world, and we found that they have technology, they have training, and then they have one other thing: They have checklists.
I did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists.
Not for the lowest people on the totem pole, but for the folks who were all the way around the chain, the entire team including the surgeons.
And what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than I had understood.
You have to think about things like pause points.
You need to identify the moments in a process when you can actually catch a problem before it's a danger and do something about it.
You have to identify that this is a before-takeoff checklist.
And then you need to focus on the killer items.
An aviation checklist, like this one for a single-engine plane, isn't a recipe for how to fly a plane, it's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they're not checked.
So we did this.
We created a 19-item two-minute checklist for surgical teams.
Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.
And we had items like making sure everyone in the room had introduced themselves by name at the start of the day, because you get half a dozen people or more who are sometimes coming together as a team for the very first time that day that you're coming in.
We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle.
The death rates fell 47 percent.
This was bigger than a drug.
(Applause) And that brings us to skill number three, the ability to implement this, to get colleagues across the entire chain to actually do these things.
And it's been slow to spread.
Just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
This is the opposite of what we were built on: independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy.
I met an actual cowboy, by the way.
And he said, "We have the cowboys stationed at distinct places all around."
They communicate electronically constantly, and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything -- (Laughter) -- from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle.
Even the cowboys are pit crews now.
And it seemed like time that we become that way ourselves.
But I would go further and say that making systems work, whether in health care, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty, is the great task of our generation as a whole.
In every field, knowledge has exploded, but it has brought complexity, it has brought specialization.
And we've come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize, as individualistic as we want to be, complexity requires group success.
We all need to be pit crews now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Last January, my company, Fark.com, was sued along with Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources.
Gooseberry owned a patent for the creation and distribution of news releases via email.
(Laughter) Now it may seem kind of strange that such a thing can actually be patented, but it does happen all the time.
Take something already being done and patent it for an emerging technology -- like phone calls on the internet or video listings for TV shows or radio but for cellphones, and so on.
The problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system is dysfunctional, and as a result, most of these lawsuits end in settlements.
And because these settlements are under a non-disclosure agreement, no one knows what the terms were.
And as a result, the patent troll can claim that they won the case.
In the case of Gooseberry Natural Resources, this patent on emailing news releases had sort of a fatal flaw as it pertained to myself, and that was that in the mainstream media world there is only one definition for news release, and it turns out that is press release -- as in P.R.
Now my company, Fark, deals with news, ostensibly, and as a result we were not in violation of this patent.
One of the major problems with patent law is that, in the case that when you are sued by a patent troll, the burden of proof that you did not infringe on the patent is actually on the defendant, which means you have to prove that you do not infringe on the patent they're suing you on.
And this can take quite a while.
You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win.
That is your best case outcome when you get sued by a patent troll.
Now I had hoped to team up with some of these larger companies in order to defend against this lawsuit, but one-by-one they settled out of the case, even though -- and this is important -- none of these companies infringed on this patent -- not a one of them.
The reason they settled out is because it's cheaper to settle than to fight the lawsuit -- clearly, two million dollars cheaper in some cases, and much worse if you actually lose.
It would also constitute a massive distraction for management of a company, especially a small eight-man shop like my company.
Six months into the lawsuit, we finally reached the discovery phase.
And in discovery phase, we asked the patent troll to please provide screenshots of Fark where the infringement of their patent was actually occurring.
Never mind the fact that the address led to a strip mall somewhere in Northern L.A.
with no employees.
"And we'd like to go ahead and close this out.
(Applause) We didn't have high hopes for that outcome.
No counter offer.
Now, as mentioned before, one of the reasons I can talk to you about this is because there's no non-disclosure agreement on this case.
Now how did that happen?
They're not under NDA either.
Infringement is a lot easier to disprove.
Secondly, make it clear from the beginning that either you have no money at all or that you would rather spend money with your attorney fighting the troll than actually giving them the money.
Now the reason this works is because patent trolls are paid a percentage of what they're able to recover in settlements.
Finally, make sure that you can tell them that you will make this process as annoying and as painful and as difficult as possible for them.
Now this is a tactic that patent trolls are supposed to use on people to get their way.
Don't forget that.
(Applause) Patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history every year.
And what do they do with that money?
Now this is the point in the Talk where I'm supposed to come up with some kind of a solution for the patent system.
And the problem with that is that there are two very large industry groups that have different outcomes in mind for the patent system.
The health care industry would like stronger protections for inventors.
The hi-tech industry would like stronger protections for producers.
And these goals aren't necessarily diametrically opposed, but they are at odds.
And as a result, patent trolls can kind of live in the space in between.
So unfortunately I'm not smart enough to have a solution for the patent troll problem.
However, I did have this idea, and it was kind of good.
(Laughter) Behold, patent infringement via mobile device -- defined as a computer which is not stationary.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is Shivdutt Yadav, and he's from Uttar Pradesh, India.
Now Shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in Uttar Pradesh, and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead.
His land was no longer registered in his name.
Family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead, allowing them to inherit their father's share of the ancestral farmland.
According to the Yadav family, the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001, but a judge has never appeared.
There are several instances in Uttar Pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review.
He was laid to rest in the Ganges River, where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water.
Photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they don't exist, and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life.
Yet, these men remain dead.
This quandary led to the title of the project, which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future.
I was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood, chance or circumstance.
The subjects I documented ranged from feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in India.
In each chapter, you can see the external forces of governance, power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.
On the left are one or more portrait panels in which I systematically order the members of a given bloodline.
This is followed by a text panel, it's designed in scroll form, in which I construct the narrative at stake.
And then on the right is what I refer to as a footnote panel.
It's a space that's more intuitive in which I present fragments of the story, beginnings of other stories, photographic evidence.
And it's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the Internet, in a less linear form.
And this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline.
In this project I wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog, something that I couldn't interrupt, curate or edit by choice.
But the project centers on the collision of order and disorder -- the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters.
He was sent in 1907 to Palestine by the Zionist organization to look at areas for Jewish settlement and acquire land for Jewish settlement.
He oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the Palestine Land Development Company whose work led to the establishment of a Jewish state.
Through my research at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, I wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the Jewish state.
And these are studies commissioned by the Zionist organization for alternative areas for Jewish settlement.
In this, I was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if Israel were in Uganda, which is what these maps demonstrate.
These archives in Jerusalem, they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to Palestine, and later Israel, from 1919 to 1965.
Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits.
But sometimes when his female patients can't afford his services, their families give the women to Jura in exchange for medical treatment.
As a result of these transactions, Jura has nine wives, 32 children and 63 grandchildren.
In his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here.
Two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them, three for evil spirits, one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives Ondijo claims he took for love, paying their families a total of 16 cows.
Polygamy is widely practiced in Kenya.
It's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes.
Instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth, status and power.
You may notice in several of the chapters that I photographed there are empty portraits.
These empty portraits represent individuals, living individuals, who couldn't be present.
And the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel.
They include dengue fever, imprisonment, army service, women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons.
And in this particular chapter, it's children whose mothers wouldn't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it.
Twenty-four European rabbits were brought to Australia in 1859 by a British settler for sporting purposes, for hunting.
The European rabbit has no natural predators in Australia, and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land.
Since the 1950s, Australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth.
These rabbits were bred at a government facility, Biosecurity Queensland, where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them.
During the course of this trial, all of the rabbits died, except for a few, which were euthanized.
Now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that's native to Australia, and actually an animal that is threatened by the European rabbit.
In chapter seven, I focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline.
So over a two-day period, six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
But I only represent those that were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, which is recorded as the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War.
And during this massacre, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed.
So when you look at a detail of this work, you can see, the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him.
Her name is Zumra.
She is followed by her four children, all of whom were killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
Following those four children is Zumra's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well.
During the time I was in Bosnia, the mortal remains of Zumra's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave.
However, the other individuals are represented by these blue slides, which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to DNA evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals.
These are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the Potochari battery factory, which was where the Dutch U.N. soldiers were staying, and also the Serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions.
This is video footage used at the Milosevic trial, which from top to bottom shows a Serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an Orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them.
Chapter 15 is more of a performance piece.
I solicited China's State Council Information Office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent China for this project.
They chose a large family from Beijing for its size, and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice.
This is one of the rare situations where I have no empty portraits.
Everyone showed up.
Previously known as the Department of Foreign Propaganda, the State Council Information Office is responsible for all of China's external publicity operations.
It also monitors the Internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues, including Tibet, ethnic minorities, Human Rights, religion, democracy movements and terrorism.
For the footnote panel in this work, this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in Beijing.
And I also photographed the gift bag they gave me when I left.
These are the descendants of Hans Frank who was Hitler's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied Poland.
Now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits, highlighting a complex relationship to one's family history.
The reasons for these absences include people who declined participation.
There's also parents who participated who wouldn't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves.
Another section of the family presented their clothing, as opposed to their physical presence, because they didn't want to be identified with the past that I was highlighting.
In the footnote panel that accompanies this work I photographed an official Adolph Hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by British Intelligence with Hans Frank's image on it.
It was released in Poland to create friction between Frank and Hitler, so that Hitler would imagine Frank was trying to usurp his power.
These paintings were taken by Hans Frank during the time of the Third Reich.
And I'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time.
They are Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine," Rembrandt's "Landscape With Good Samaritan" and Raphael's "Portrait of a Youth," which has never been found.
And they are in an active blood feud.
Tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power.
But it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors.
Installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of Louis Novaes, who's the head of the Novaes family, are these turret holes, which were used for shooting and looking.
Brazil's northeast state of Pernambuco is one of the nation's most violent regions.
This story, like many of the stories in my chapters, reads almost as an archetypal episode, like something out of Shakespeare, that's happening now and will happen again in the future.
So after I returned home, I received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face.
Chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history.
Children at this Ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16.
In a 12-month period when I was at the orphanage, only one child had been adopted.
Children have to leave the orphanage at age 16, despite the fact that there's often nowhere for them to go.
It's commonly reported in Ukraine that children, when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking, child pornography and prostitution.
Many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival, and high rates of suicide are recorded.
This is a boys' bedroom.
There's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing.
Children bathe infrequently because the hot water isn't turned on until October.
This is a girls' bedroom.
And the director listed the orphanage's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer, four vacuum cleaners, two computers, a video projector, a copy machine, winter shoes and a dentist's drill.
This photograph, which I took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms, shows a sign which I had translated when I got home.
And it reads: "Those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future."
There are many more chapters in this project.
And this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive.
And within this accumulation of images and texts, I'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself.
But archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated.
Something is said in the gaps between all the information that's collected.
And there's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between.
It's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die, and the stories keep coming and coming.
And in this, I'm considering, is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again?
Thank you.
(Applause)
People are living longer and societies are getting grayer.
You read about it in your newspapers.
But make no mistake, longer lives can -- and, I believe, will improve quality of life at all ages.
More years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined.
In the blink of an eye, we nearly doubled the length of time that we're living.
It's brand new.
And because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up, that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population, with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age, is being reshaped into a rectangle.
Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species, the majority of babies born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old.
How did this happen?
This increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture -- the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being.
Now there are problems associated with aging -- diseases, poverty, loss of social status.
But the more we learn about aging, the clearer it becomes that a sweeping downward course is grossly inaccurate.
Aging brings some rather remarkable improvements -- increased knowledge, expertise -- and emotional aspects of life improve.
That's right, older people are happy.
They're happier than middle-aged people, and younger people, certainly.
(Laughter) Study after study is coming to the same conclusion.
The CDC recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week.
And fewer older people answered affirmatively to that question than middle-aged people, and younger people as well.
And a recent Gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day.
And stress, worry, anger all decrease with age.
Now social scientists call this the paradox of aging.
That is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older.
We've asked, well, maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence.
(Laughter) But the more we've tried to disavow this finding, the more evidence we find to support it.
Years ago, my colleagues and I embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period.
Originally, the sample was aged 18 to 94.
"How sad are you right now?"
"How frustrated are you right now?" -- so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives.
And using this intense study of individuals, we find that it's not one particular generation that's doing better than the others, but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience.
But at no point does it return to the levels we see in early adulthood.
Now it's really too simplistic to say that older people are "happy."
But they're also more likely than younger people to experience mixed emotions -- sadness at the same time you experience happiness; you know, that tear in the eye when you're smiling at a friend.
And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly charged emotional conflicts and debates.
Older people can view injustice with compassion, but not despair.
And all things being equal, older people direct their cognitive resources, like attention and memory, to positive information more than negative.
If we show older, middle-aged, younger people images, like the ones you see on the screen, and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can, older people, but not younger people, remember more positive images than negative images.
Older people look toward the smiling faces and away from the frowning, angry faces.
In day-to-day life, this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction.
But as social scientists, we continue to ask about possible alternatives.
We've said, well, maybe older people report more positive emotions because they're cognitively impaired.
(Laughter) We've said, could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions, and so you switch to the positive emotions?
Maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we're unable to process negative emotions anymore.
And under conditions where it really matters, older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information.
Well, in our research, we've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time -- not just clock time and calendar time, but lifetime.
And if there's a paradox of aging, it's that recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways.
(Laughter) We go on blind dates.
(Laughter) You know, after all, if it doesn't work out, there's always tomorrow.
People over 50 don't go on blind dates.
(Laughter) As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change.
We savor life.
We're more appreciative, more open to reconciliation.
We invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better, so we're happier day-to-day.
But that same shift in perspective leads us to have less tolerance than ever for injustice.
By 2015, there will be more people in the United States over the age of 60 than under 15.
What will happen to societies that are top-heavy with older people?
Culture will.
If we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people, then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages.
Societies with millions of talented, emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them, armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues can be better societies than we have ever known.
My father, who is 92, likes to say, "Let's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Probably not, but people like me do.
I'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans.
And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future.
There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine, and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones.
And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations, risk factors and inherited diseases.
But this is only one half of the story.
The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response.
All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved.
And in order to understand these diseases, we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past.
But there are a lot of challenges for this.
And first of all, what do we even study?
Skeletons are ubiquitous; they're found all over the place.
But of course, all of the soft tissue has decomposed, and the skeleton itself has limited health information.
Mummies are a great source of information, except that they're really geographically limited and limited in time as well.
Coprolites are fossilized human feces, and they're actually extremely interesting.
You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease, but they are very rare.
(Laughter) So to address this problem, I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K.
Many of you may know it by the term tartar.
And in a typical dentistry visit, you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed.
But in ancient times before tooth brushing, up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime.
And we even find it in neanderthals and animals.
And so previous studies had only focused on microscopy.
And so what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do, is say, can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins, and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on?
And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth.
We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet.
But what was surprising to us, and also quite exciting, is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems.
So it gives us virtual access to the lungs, which is where many important diseases reside.
So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens.
And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick.
And as a final parting thought, on behalf of future archeologists, I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
A few months ago the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever.
And today, after briefly describing what they found, I'm going to tell you about a highly controversial framework for explaining their discovery, namely the possibility that way beyond the Earth, the Milky Way and other distant galaxies, we may find that our universe is not the only universe, but is instead part of a vast complex of universes that we call the multiverse.
Now the idea of a multiverse is a strange one.
I mean, most of us were raised to believe that the word "universe" means everything.
And last year I was holding her and I said, "Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe."
And she turned to me and said, "Daddy, universe or multiverse?"
(Laughter) But barring such an anomalous upbringing, it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours, most with fundamentally different features, that would rightly be called universes of their own.
And yet, speculative though the idea surely is, I aim to convince you that there's reason for taking it seriously, as it just might be right.
I'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts.
In part one, I'm going to describe those Nobel Prize-winning results and to highlight a profound mystery which those results revealed.
In part two, I'll offer a solution to that mystery.
It's based on an approach called string theory, and that's where the idea of the multiverse will come into the story.
Finally, in part three, I'm going to describe a cosmological theory called inflation, which will pull all the pieces of the story together.
Okay, part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us, establishing that space itself is stretching, it's expanding.
Now this was revolutionary.
But even so, there was one thing that everyone was certain of: The expansion must be slowing down.
That, much as the gravitational pull of the Earth slows the ascent of an apple tossed upward, the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing the expansion of space.
Now let's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers I mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing.
And they did this by painstaking observations of numerous distant galaxies, allowing them to chart how the expansion rate has changed over time.
Here's the surprise: They found that the expansion is not slowing down.
Now if you saw an apple do that, you'd want to know why.
Similarly, the astronomers' results are surely well-deserving of the Nobel Prize, but they raised an analogous question.
What force is driving all galaxies to rush away from every other at an ever-quickening speed?
Well the most promising answer comes from an old idea of Einstein's.
You see, we are all used to gravity being a force that does one thing, pulls objects together.
But in Einstein's theory of gravity, his general theory of relativity, gravity can also push things apart.
How? Well according to Einstein's math, if space is uniformly filled with an invisible energy, sort of like a uniform, invisible mist, then the gravity generated by that mist would be repulsive, repulsive gravity, which is just what we need to explain the observations.
And this explanation represents great progress.
But I promised you a mystery here in part one.
Here it is.
When the astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy must be infusing space to account for the cosmic speed up, look at what they found.
This number is small.
And the mystery is to explain this peculiar number.
Now you might wonder, should you care?
Maybe explaining this number is just a technical issue, a technical detail of interest to experts, but of no relevance to anybody else.
Well it surely is a technical detail, but some details really matter.
So hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as I now go on to tell you three key things about string theory.
First off, what is it?
Well it's an approach to realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory of physics, a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe.
But the theory says that if you could probe smaller, much smaller than we can with existing technology, you'd find something else inside these particles -- a little tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.
And just like the strings on a violin, they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes.
These little fundamental strings, when they vibrate in different patterns, they produce different kinds of particles -- so electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, all other particles would be united into a single framework, as they would all arise from vibrating strings.
It's a compelling picture, a kind of cosmic symphony, where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little, tiny strings can play.
But there's a cost to this elegant unification, because years of research have shown that the math of string theory doesn't quite work.
That is, we all know about the usual three dimensions of space.
And you can think about those as height, width and depth.
But string theory says that, on fantastically small scales, there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them.
But even though the dimensions are hidden, they would have an impact on things that we can observe because the shape of the extra dimensions constrains how the strings can vibrate.
And in string theory, vibration determines everything.
So particle masses, the strengths of forces, and most importantly, the amount of dark energy would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions.
So if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions, we should be able to calculate these features, calculate the amount of dark energy.
The challenge is we don't know the shape of the extra dimensions.
All we have is a list of candidate shapes allowed by the math.
Now when these ideas were first developed, there were only about five different candidate shapes, so you can imagine analyzing them one-by-one to determine if any yield the physical features we observe.
But over time the list grew as researchers found other candidate shapes.
But then the list continued to grow into the millions and the billions, until today.
Well some researchers lost heart, concluding that was so many candidate shapes for the extra dimensions, each giving rise to different physical features, string theory would never make definitive, testable predictions.
But others turned this issue on its head, taking us to the possibility of a multiverse.
Here's the idea.
Maybe each of these shapes is on an equal footing with every other.
Each is as real as every other, in the sense that there are many universes, each with a different shape, for the extra dimensions.
And this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery: the amount of dark energy revealed by the Nobel Prize-winning results.
Because you see, if there are other universes, and if those universes each have, say, a different shape for the extra dimensions, then the physical features of each universe will be different, and in particular, the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different.
Which means that the mystery of explaining the amount of dark energy we've now measured would take on a wholly different character.
In this context, the laws of physics can't explain one number for the dark energy because there isn't just one number, there are many numbers.
Which means we have been asking the wrong question.
It's that the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves in a universe with a particular amount of dark energy we've measured instead of any of the other possibilities that are out there?
Because those universes that have much more dark energy than ours, whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies, the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that it blows the clump apart and galaxies don't form.
And without galaxies, there are no stars, no planets and no chance for our form of life to exist in those other universes.
So we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life.
And that would be that.
Mystery solved, multiverse found.
We're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe.
But the point is, if the feature you're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality, then thinking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided.
An early example comes from the great astronomer Johannes Kepler who was obsessed with understanding a different number -- why the Sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth.
Kepler was asking the wrong question.
We now know that there are many planets at a wide variety of different distances from their host stars.
So hoping that the laws of physics will explain one particular number, 93 million miles, well that is simply wrongheaded.
Instead the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance, instead of any of the other possibilities?
And again, that's a question we can answer.
Those planets which are much closer to a star like the Sun would be so hot that our form of life wouldn't exist.
So we find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance simply because it yields conditions vital to our form of life.
And when it comes to planets and their distances, this clearly is the right kind of reasoning.
The point is, when it comes to universes and the dark energy that they contain, it may also be the right kind of reasoning.
One key difference, of course, is we know that there are other planets out there, but so far I've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes.
So to pull it all together, we need a mechanism that can actually generate other universes.
Because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the Big Bang.
You see, when we speak of the Big Bang, we often have an image of a kind of cosmic explosion that created our universe and set space rushing outward.
But there's a little secret.
The Big Bang leaves out something pretty important, the Bang.
It tells us how the universe evolved after the Bang, but gives us no insight into what would have powered the Bang itself.
And this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the Big Bang theory.
It's called inflationary cosmology, which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space.
The fuel is based on something called a quantum field, but the only detail that matters for us is that this fuel proves to be so efficient that it's virtually impossible to use it all up, which means in the inflationary theory, the Big Bang giving rise to our universe is likely not a one-time event.
Instead the fuel not only generated our Big Bang, but it would also generate countless other Big Bangs, each giving rise to its own separate universe with our universe becoming but one bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes.
Each of these universes has extra dimensions.
The extra dimensions take on a wide variety of different shapes.
The different shapes yield different physical features.
And we find ourselves in one universe instead of another simply because it's only in our universe that the physical features, like the amount of dark energy, are right for our form of life to take hold.
And this is the compelling but highly controversial picture of the wider cosmos that cutting-edge observation and theory have now led us to seriously consider.
One big remaining question, of course, is, could we ever confirm the existence of other universes?
Well let me describe one way that might one day happen.
The inflationary theory already has strong observational support.
Because the theory predicts that the Big Bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded, tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world, yielding a distinctive fingerprint, a pattern of slightly hotter spots and slightly colder spots, across space, which powerful telescopes have now observed.
Going further, if there are other universes, the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide.
And if our universe got hit by another, that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect.
And so exotic as this picture is, it may one day be grounded in observations, establishing the existence of other universes.
You see, we learned that our universe is not static, that space is expanding, that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies.
But because the expansion is speeding up, in the very far future, those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we won't be able to see them -- not because of technological limitations, but because of the laws of physics.
The light those galaxies emit, even traveling at the fastest speed, the speed of light, will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us.
So astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static, inky, black stillness.
And they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit -- a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong.
Now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era, like ours, attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies.
But would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge?
I suspect the latter.
Because today's astronomers, by turning powerful telescopes to the sky, have captured a handful of starkly informative photons -- a kind of cosmic telegram billions of years in transit.
Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Brian, thank you.
The range of ideas you've just spoken about are dizzying, exhilarating, incredible.
How do you think of where cosmology is now, in a sort of historical side?
BG: Well it's hard to say.
When we learn that astronomers of the far future may not have enough information to figure things out, the natural question is, maybe we're already in that position and certain deep, critical features of the universe already have escaped our ability to understand because of how cosmology evolves.
So from that perspective, maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them.
On the other hand, we now can understand how old the universe is.
We can understand how to understand the data from the microwave background radiation that was set down 13.72 billion years ago -- and yet, we can do calculations today to predict how it will look and it matches.
So on the one hand, it's just incredible where we've gotten, but who knows what sort of blocks we may find in the future.
Maybe some of these conversations can continue.
Thank you. Thank you, Brian. (BG: My pleasure.) (Applause)
So I want to talk today about money and happiness, which are two things a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, either trying to earn them or trying to increase them.
And a lot of us resonate with this phrase, we see it in religions and self-help books: money can't buy happiness.
(Laughter) I'm at a business school, so that's what we do.
So that's wrong, and in fact, if you think that, you're just not spending it right.
So instead of spending it the way you usually spend it, maybe if you spent it differently, that might work a little bit better.
So CNN, a little while ago, wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery.
This article's about how their lives get ruined.
What happens when people win the lottery is, one, they spend all the money and go into debt; and two, all of their friends and everyone they've ever met find them and bug them for money.
It ruins their social relationships, in fact.
What was interesting about the article was, people started commenting on the article, readers of the thing.
And instead of talking about how it made them realize that money doesn't lead to happiness, everyone started saying, "You know what I'd do if I won the lottery ...?"
One person wrote, "When I win, I'm going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top."
(Laughter) And another person wrote, "I would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne."
Anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else."
(Laughter) And so many of the comments were exactly of this type, where people got money and, in fact, it made them antisocial.
Also, money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves.
We thought maybe the reason money doesn't make us happy is that we're spending it on the wrong things; in particular, we're always spending it on ourselves.
Let's have some people do what they usually do, spend money on themselves, and let's make some people give money away, and measure their happiness and see if, in fact, they get happier.
The first way we did this was, one Vancouver morning, we went out on the campus at University of British Columbia, approached people and said, "Do you want to be in an experiment?"
They said, "Yes."
One of the envelopes had things in it that said, "By 5pm today, spend this money on yourself."
Also inside the envelope was money.
And we manipulated how much money we gave them; some people got this slip of paper and five dollars, some got this slip of paper and 20 dollars.
We let them go about their day and do whatever they wanted.
How happy do you feel now?"
What did they spend it on?
One woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece.
People gave money to homeless people.
(Laughter) So if you give undergraduates five dollars, it looks like coffee to them, and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can.
Some people bought coffee for themselves, the way they usually would, but others bought coffee for somebody else.
People who spent money on others got happier; people who spent it on themselves, nothing happened.
It didn't make them less happy, it just didn't do much for them.
People thought 20 dollars would be way better than five.
What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself.
We see this again and again when we give people money to spend on others instead of on themselves.
Of course, these are undergraduates in Canada -- not the world's most representative population.
We wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries.
So we went to Uganda and ran a very similar experiment.
Or in Uganda, "Name the last time you spent money on yourself or others and describe that."
Then we asked them how happy they are, again.
So for example, one guy from Uganda says this: "I called a girl I wished to love."
They basically went out on a date, and he says at the end that he didn't "achieve" her up till now.
(Laughter) Here's a guy from Canada.
We went to a movie, we left early, and then went back to her room for ... cake," just cake.
(Laughter) Human universal: you spend money on others, you're being nice.
Maybe you have something in mind, maybe not.
So look at these two.
We say, "Name a time you spent money on somebody else."
She says, "I bought a present for my mom.
I drove to the mall, bought a present, gave it to my mom."
Compare that to this woman from Uganda: "I was walking and met a longtime friend whose son was sick with malaria.
They had no money, they went to a clinic and I gave her this money."
This isn't $10,000, it's the local currency.
But enormously different motivations here.
This is a real medical need, literally a lifesaving donation.
What we see again, though, is that the specific way you spend on other people isn't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy, which is really quite important.
So you don't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy.
These are only two countries.
We got data from the Gallup Organization, which you know from all the political polls happening lately.
They asked people, "Did you donate money to charity recently?"
We can see what the relationship is between those two things.
Are they positively correlated, giving money makes you happy?
And you can see, the world is crazily green.
So in almost every country in the world where we have this data, people who give money to charity are happier people than people who don't give money to charity.
I would be a jerk and not tell you what it is, but it's Central African Republic.
Just below that to the right is Rwanda, though, which is amazingly green.
These are sales teams in Belgium.
They work in teams, go out and sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs.
To other teams we say, "Here's 15 euro. Spend it on one of your teammates.
Buy them something as a gift and give it to them.
Then we can see, we've got teams that spend on themselves and these pro-social teams who we give money to make the team better.
The reason I have a ridiculous pinata there is one team pooled their money and bought a pinata, they smashed the pinata, the candy fell out and things like that.
A silly, trivial thing to do, but think of the difference on a team that didn't do that at all, that got 15 euro, put it in their pocket, maybe bought themselves a coffee, or teams that had this pro-social experience where they bonded together to buy something and do a group activity.
What we see is that the teams that are pro-social sell more stuff than the teams that only got money for themselves.
One way to think of it is: for every 15 euro you give people for themselves, they put it in their pocket and don't do anything different than before.
But when you give them 15 euro to spend on their teammates, they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money.
And if he doesn't show me that it works here, I don't believe anything he said.
I know what you're all thinking about are dodgeball teams.
(Laughter) This was a huge criticism that we got, that if you can't show it with dodgeball teams, this is all stupid.
So we went and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them, and did the exact same thing as before.
Other teams, we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates.
The teams that spend money on themselves have the same winning percentages as before.
Across all of these different contexts -- your personal life, you work life, even things like intramural sports -- we see spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself.
So if you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right.
The implication isn't you should buy this product instead of that product, and that's the way to make yourself happier.
It's that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself, and try giving some of it to other people instead.
DonorsChoose.org is a nonprofit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools.
They post projects like, "I want to teach Huckleberry Finn and we don't have the books," or, "I want a microscope to teach my students science and we don't have a microscope."
You and I can go on and buy it for them.
Ultimately, when you do that, you'll find you benefit yourself much more.
Thank you.
You probably already know everything is made up of little tiny things called atoms or even that each atom is made up of even smaller particles called protons, neutrons and electrons.
And you've probably heard that atoms are small.
But I bet you haven't ever thought about how small atoms really are.
Well, the answer is that they are really, really small.
So you ask, just how small are atoms?
To understand this, let's ask this question: How many atoms are in a grapefruit?
Well, let's assume that the grapefruit is made up of only nitrogen atoms, which isn't at all true, but there are nitrogen atoms in a grapefruit.
And then how big would the grapefruit have to be?
You mean to say that if I filled the Earth with blueberries, I would have the same number of nitrogen atoms as a grapefruit?
So how big is the atom?
Well, it's really, really small!
And you know what? It gets even more crazy.
Let's now look inside of each atom -- and thus the blueberry, right? -- What do you see there?
In the center of the atom is something called the nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons, and on the outside, you'd see electrons.
So how big is the nucleus?
If atoms are like blueberries in the Earth, how big would the nucleus be?
You might remember the old pictures of the atom from science class, where you saw this tiny dot on the page with an arrow pointing to the nucleus.
Well, those pictures, they're not drawn to scale, so they're kind of wrong.
So how big is the nucleus?
So if you popped open the blueberry and were searching for the nucleus ...
It's too small to see!
OK. Let's blow up the atom -- the blueberry -- to the size of a house.
So imagine a ball that is as tall as a two-story house.
Let's look for the nucleus in the center of the atom.
So to get our minds wrapped around how big the nucleus is, we need to blow up the blueberry, up to the size of a football stadium.
It contains protons, neutrons and electrons.
The protons and neutrons live inside of the nucleus, and contain almost all of the mass of the atom.
So if an atom is like a ball the size of a football stadium, with the nucleus in the center, and the electrons on the edge, what is in between the nucleus and the electrons?
Surprisingly, the answer is empty space.
Between the nucleus and the electrons, there are vast regions of empty space.
Now, technically there are some electromagnetic fields, but in terms of stuff, matter, it is empty.
Remember this vast region of empty space is inside the blueberry, which is inside the Earth, which really are the atoms in the grapefruit.
Well, the answer is crazy.
But that's hard to visualize. OK, I'll put it in English units.
OK, here's what I want you to do.
Make a box that is one foot by one foot by one foot.
Now, cars on average weigh two tons.
How many cars' nuclei would you have to put into the box to have your one-foot-box have the same density of the nucleus?
How about 100?
The answer is much bigger.
It is 6.2 billion.
So if everyone in the Earth owned their own car -- and they don't -- (Cars honking) and we put all of those cars into your box ...
So I'm saying that if you took every car in the world and put it into your one-foot box, you would have the density of one nucleus.
OK, let's review.
The atom is really, really, really small.
Think atoms in a grapefruit like blueberries in the Earth.
The atom is made up of vast regions of empty space.
That's weird.
The nucleus has a crazy-high density.
Think of putting all those cars in your one-foot box.
It's a great honor to be here talking about cities, talking about the future of cities.
I really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people's lives.
And it's great to be here as the mayor of Rio.
Rio's a beautiful city, a vibrant place, special place.
Actually, you're looking at a guy who has the best job in the world.
And I really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of Rio.
Jacques Rogge: I have the honor to announce that the games of the 31st Olympiad are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Actually it was a very hard challenge.
This is Juan Carlos, king of Spain.
And actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago that I think fits perfectly to the situation of Rio winning the Olympic bid.
We really showed that, yes, we can.
And really, this is the reason I came here tonight.
I came here tonight to tell you that things can be done, that you don't have always to be rich or powerful to get things on the way, that cities are a great challenge.
But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live.
You probably think about a city full of energy, a vibrant city full of green.
And nobody showed that better than Carlos Saldanha in last year's "Rio."
(Music) (Video) Bird: This is incredible.
(Music) EP: Okay, some parts of Rio are pretty much like that, but it's not like that everywhere.
We're like every big city in the world.
We've got lots of people, pollution, cars, concrete, lots of concrete.
These pictures I'm showing here, they are some pictures from Madureira.
And I want to use an example of Rio that we're doing in Madureira, in this region, to see what we should think as our first commandment.
So every time you see a concrete jungle like that, what you've got to do is find open spaces.
So go inside these open spaces and make it that people can get inside and use those spaces.
This is going to be the third largest park in Rio by June this year.
It's going to be a place where people can meet, where you can put nature.
The temperature's going to drop two, three degrees centigrade.
Every time you think of a city, you've got to think green.
You've got to think green and green.
So moving to our second commandment that I wanted to show you.
Let's think that cities are made of people, lots of people together.
cities are packed with people.
When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities -- by 2050, it's going to be 6 billion people.
But there is a problem.
So what I'm going to show here is something that was already presented in TED by the former mayor of Curitiba who created that, a city in Brazil, Jaime Lerner.
It's the BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit.
So you get a bus. It's a simple bus that everybody knows.
You transform it inside as a train car.
You use separate lanes, dedicated lanes.
This is actually a station that we're doing in Rio.
Again, you don't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that.
This station has the same comfort, the same features as a subway station.
So spending much less money and doing it much faster, you can really change the way people move.
All the lines, the colored lines you see there, it's our high-capacity transportation network.
So remember what I said: You don't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done.
You can find original ways to get things done.
So the second commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to deal with mobility and integration of its people.
Moving to the third commandment.
And this is the most controversial one.
It has to do with the favelas, the slums -- whatever you call it, there are different names all over the world.
But the point we want to make here tonight is, favelas are not always a problem.
I mean, favelas can sometimes really be a solution, if you deal with them, if you put public policy inside the favelas.
Let me just show a map of Rio again.
Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants -- More than 20 percent, 1.4 million, live in the favelas.
All these red parts are favelas.
So you see, they are spread all over the city.
This is a typical view of a favela in Rio.
You see the contrast between the rich and poor.
So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas.
But what you've got to do to get that is you've got to go inside the favelas, bring in the basic services -- mainly education and health -- with high quality.
We call it a family clinic.
So the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality.
This is a place with high technology where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place can go inside and have access to all technology.
We even built a theater there -- 3D movie.
So the third commandment I want to leave here tonight is, a city of the future has to be socially integrated.
We just had last week Carnivale.
It was great. It was lots of fun.
We have problems.
We have problems with the tropical rains.
It's what we call the Operations Center of Rio.
We're going to speak now to the Operations Center.
This is Osorio, he's our secretary of urban affairs.
So how's the weather in Rio now?
Let me get you our weather satellite radar.
EP: Okay, how's the traffic?
We, at this time of year, get lots of traffic jams.
People get mad at the mayor. So how's the traffic tonight?
Osario: Well traffic tonight is fine.
Now it's 11:00 pm in Rio.
We had heavy traffic early in the morning and in the rush hour in the afternoon, but nothing of big concern.
And you can see them working in all parts of the city.
Waste collection on time.
Public services working well.
EP: Okay, Osorio, thank you very much.
It was great to have you here.
(Applause) Okay, so no files, this place, no paperwork, no distance, 24/7 working.
So the fourth commandment I want to share with you here tonight is, a city of the future has to use technology to be present.
I don't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city.
But everything that I said here tonight, or the commandments, are means, are ways, for us to govern cities -- invest in infrastructure, invest in the green, open parks, open spaces, integrate socially, use technology.
But at the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people.
And we cannot see that as a problem.
If there's 3.5 billion now, it's going to be six billion then it's going to be 10 billion.
That is great, that means we're going to have 10 billion minds working together, 10 billion talents together.
So a city of the future, I really do believe that it's a city that cares about its citizens, integrates socially its citizens.
A city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out of this great party, which are cities.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS.
You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, that AIDS is a disease of poverty, and that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well.
If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic.
If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic.
So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic, and I'm actually also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know.
And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy.
I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices.
But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology.
And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea.
So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue.
It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it.
And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand is: how do people respond to the epidemic?
So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you.
So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex.
If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.
That is a huge effect.
And so I think that we really feel like then people should have less sex.
And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s.
So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, they're being asked, "Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?"
Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent.
So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse.
People are learning more things about it.
These are just tiny decreases -- two percentage points -- not significant.
This seems puzzling. But I'm going to argue that you shouldn't be surprised by this, and that to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does -- as an investment.
So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs.
It's also important to think about what the benefit is.
If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine.
Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health.
But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments.
AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS.
People really like to have sex.
But, you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity.
But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places.
I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change.
And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more?
And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria.
It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children.
And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria.
So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.
This shows you -- in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria -- what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence.
If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up.
Areas with medium levels of malaria it decreases some -- it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria -- actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant.
This is not just through malaria.
Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality.
There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.
So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave.
It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa.
But it also tells us something about policy.
Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, in improving maternal mortality rates.
Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own.
But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before.
Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough, at least not alone.
If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior.
So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.
And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past.
The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time.
We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works.
Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003.
So if I asked you, "Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?"
You get on Google, you Google, and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women, which is not a terribly representative group of people.
But even worse -- some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women.
We have no way to figure out what happened over time.
In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population.
But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge.
So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.
So this is a problem for policy. It was a problem for my research.
And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past.
And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past.
To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease.
It kills people in the prime of their lives.
Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here -- this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt.
And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people.
But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt.
But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV.
But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past.
So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population, but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are.
So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa.
You can see, almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates.
UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent.
And these are not trivial differences in mortality rates.
You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group.
But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right.
If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million.
What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower.
So I am going to talk about exports and prices.
And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.
So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade, is really good for developing countries.
It's good for improving people's lives.
On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.
And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit.
The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back.
And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US.
In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people.
By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be -- fortunately, I think -- it seems to be the case that these things are positively related.
More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big.
So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.
So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy.
From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV.
Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.
But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know.
Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development -- it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.
So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention.
It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places.
But now I want to actually also question that.
Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign.
But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.
Coffee is Uganda's major export.
Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s -- and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections.
So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing.
So if you combine the intuition in this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.
Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases.
And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things.
And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data.
And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself.
And I can't wait to hear about what they are.
So thank you very much.
To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos.
I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin.
I can help you with those later.
It might be the only way to communicate with your kids.
(Laughter) The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month, unless she's a girl, then it's closer to 4,000.
Texting has a 100 percent open rate.
Now the parents are really alarmed.
It's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn't respond to you when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner.
And this isn't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon.
I know this because at DoSomething.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging.
We're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that.
We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email.
"I don't want to go to school today.
Or, "He won't stop raping me.
He told me not to tell anyone.
And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline.
Because this isn't what we do.
We do social change.
Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there's nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us.
So think about it, a text hotline; it's pretty powerful.
No one hears you in a stall, you're just texting quietly.
We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals.
That's great.
But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data.
Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals.
There's something in New York City.
The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work.
And then they started crime mapping.
And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things -- charting the future essentially.
And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen.
In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent.
Maybe there's some studies, some longitudinal studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time.
Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence.
Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues.
You could inform school policy.
You could say to a principal, "You're having a problem every Thursday at three o'clock.
What's going on in your school?"
This is really, to me, the power of texting and the power of data.
Thank you.
(Applause)
If we could -- correction, wrong figure -- 13 billion used every year.
If we could reduce the usage of paper towels, one paper towel per person per day, 571,230,000 pounds of paper not used.
We can do that.
Now there are all kinds of paper towel dispensers.
There's the tri-fold. People typically take two or three.
The fact is, you can do it all with one towel.
Let's hear it. Shake. Louder.
Audience: Shake.
Joe Smith: Your word is "fold."
Audience: Fold.
Audience: Fold. JS: Really loud.
Audience: Shake. Fold.
JS: OK. Wet hands.
Shake -- one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12.
Why 12? Twelve apostles, twelve tribes, twelve zodiac signs, twelve months. The one I like the best: It's the biggest number with one syllable.
(Laughter) Tri-fold. Fold ...
Dry.
(Applause) Audience: Shake.
You don't have to remember that part, but trust me.
(Laughter) Audience: Shake. Fold.
Audience: Shake. Fold.
It's way too big a towel.
Let me tell you a secret.
If you're really quick, if you're really quick -- and I can prove this -- this is half a towel from the dispenser in this building.
And you get half a towel.
Audience: Shake. Fold.
JS: Now, let's all say it together. Shake. Fold.
You will for the rest of your life remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel.
And next year, toilet paper.
(Laughter)
When we think of games, there's all kinds of things.
Maybe you're ticked off, or maybe, you're looking forward to a new game.
All these things happen to me.
But when we think about games, a lot of times we think about stuff like this: first-person shooters, or the big, what we would call AAA games, or maybe you're a Facebook game player.
This is one my partner and I worked on.
Maybe you play Facebook games, and that's what we're making right now.
This is a lighter form of game.
Maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in Thanksgiving situations.
Or maybe you're in your living room, playing with the Wii with the kids, and there's this whole range of games, and that's very much what I think about.
I make my living from games, I've been lucky enough to do this since I was 15, which also qualifies as I've never really had a real job.
But we think about games as fun, and that's completely reasonable, but let's just think about this.
So this one here, this is the 1980 Olympics.
Now I don't know where you guys were, but I was in my living room.
It was practically a religious event.
And this is when the Americans beat the Russians, and this was -- yes, it was technically a game.
Hockey is a game.
I mean, people cried.
I've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of Monopoly.
(Laughter) And so this was an amazing experience.
Or, if anybody here is from Boston -- So when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series after I believe, 351 years -- (Laughter) when they won the World Series, it was amazing.
Or the houses, you'd come out, because every game, well, I think almost every game, went into overtime, right?
And kids -- the attendance was down in school, kids weren't going to school, but it's OK, it's the Red Sox, right?
I mean, there's education, and then there's the Red Sox, and we know where they're stacked.
So this was an amazing experience, and again, yes, it was a game, but they didn't write newspaper articles, people didn't say, "You know, really, I can die now, because the Red Sox won."
So now, this is an abrupt transition here.
I was the head of a college department teaching games, so, again, it was sort of a real job, and now I got to talk about making them as opposed to making them.
He's a photographer.
And he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself, and you can see here he's got Zig's Indian Reservation.
And this particular shot -- this is one of the more traditional shots.
And this is one of my favorite shots here.
So you can look at this, and maybe you've even seen things like this.
And this is actually from his Degradation series.
And what was most fascinating to me about this series is just, look at that little boy there, can you imagine?
Now I just want to change that guy's race.
So, "Honey, come here, let's get you a picture with the black guy." Right?
Like, seriously, nobody would do this.
His favorite photograph -- my favorite photograph of his, which I don't have in here -- is Indian taking picture of white people taking pictures of Indians.
(Laughter) So I happen to be at dinner with this photographer, and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred, and it was on an Indian Reservation.
He'd taken his camera up there to photograph it, but when he got there, he discovered he couldn't do it.
He just couldn't capture the picture.
And that was fascinating to me as a game designer, because it never occurs to me, should I make the game about this difficult topic or not?
Because we just make things that are fun or will make you feel fear, that visceral excitement.
So this is my kid.
This is Maezza, and when she was seven years old, she came home from school one day, and like I do every single day, I asked her, "What did you do today?"
Now, this was a big moment. Maezza's dad is black, and I knew this day was coming.
Anyways, so I asked her, "How do you feel about that?"
So she proceeded to tell me, and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here.
"The ships start in England, they come down from England, they go to Africa, they go across the ocean -- that's the Middle Passage part -- they come to America, where the slaves are sold," she's telling me.
But Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and then he passed the Emancipation Proclamation, and now they're free.
Pause for about 10 seconds.
"Can I play a game, Mommy?"
And I thought, that's it? And so, you know, this is the Middle Passage, this is an incredibly significant event, and she's treating it like, basically some black people went on a cruise, this is more or less how it sounds to her.
(Laughter) And so, to me, I wanted more value in this, so when she asked if she could play a game, I said, "Yes."
(Laughter) And so I happened to have all of these little pieces.
I'm a game designer, so I have this stuff sitting around my house.
I said, "Yeah, you can play a game," and I give her a bunch of these, and I tell her to paint them in different families.
So then I grab a bunch of them and I put them on a boat.
And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, "Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things."
And she says, "They want to go."
And I said, "Honey, no, they don't want to go.
Just the look on her face came over -- now mind you this is after a month of -- this is Black History Month, right?
After a month, she says to me, "Did this really happen?"
And I said, "Yes." And so she said -- this is her brother and sister -- "If I came out of the woods, Avalon and Donovan might be gone."
"Yes."
"No."
"Yes."
She was fascinated by this, and she started to cry, I started to cry, her father started to cry, and now we're all crying.
And so, we made this game, and she got it.
She got it because she spent time with these people.
And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience.
This is the game, which I've ended up calling "The New World," because I like the phrase.
I don't think the New World felt too new worldly exciting to the people who were brought over on slave ships.
But when this happened, I saw the whole planet; I was so excited.
I'd been making games for 20-some years, and then I decided to do it again.
My history is Irish.
So this is a game called "Síochán Leat." It's "peace be with you."
It's the entire history of my family in a single game.
I made another game called "Train."
I was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics, and if you're going to cover a difficult topic, this is one you need to cover, and I'll let you figure out what that's about on your own.
And I also made a game about the Trail of Tears.
This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces.
It's the same thing.
I'm hoping that I'll teach culture through these games.
And the one I'm working on right now, which is -- because I'm right in the middle of it, and these for some reason choke me up like crazy -- is a game called "Mexican Kitchen Workers."
And originally, it was a math problem, more or less.
Here's the economics of illegal immigration.
And the more I learned about Mexican culture -- my partner is Mexican — the more I learned that, you know, for all of us, food is a basic need, and it is obviously with Mexicans, too, but it's much more than that.
It's an expression of beauty, it's how they say they love you.
It's how they say they care, and you can't hear somebody talk about their Mexican grandmother without saying "food" in the first sentence.
And so to me, this beautiful culture, this beautiful expression is something that I want to capture through games.
And so games, for a change, it changes how we see topics, it changes our perceptions about those people in topics, and it changes ourselves.
We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so.
We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at protecting our private property and private space.
What translates generic public space into qualitative space?
And we're doing this through some case studies.
A large chunk of our work has been put into transforming this neglected industrial ruin into a viable post-industrial space that looks forward and backward at the same time.
We've been working on democratizing Lincoln Center for a public that doesn't usually have $300 to spend on an opera ticket.
So we've been eating, drinking, thinking, living public space for quite a long time.
And it's taught us really one thing, and that is to truly make good public space, you have to erase the distinctions between architecture, urbanism, landscape, media design and so on.
It really goes beyond distinction.
and we're working on another transformation, and that is for the existing Hirshhorn Museum that's sited on the most revered public space in America, the National Mall.
The Mall is a symbol of American democracy.
It's a space where citizens can voice their discontent and show their power.
It's a place where pivotal moments in American history have taken place.
And they're inscribed in there forever -- like the march on Washington for jobs and freedom and the great speech that Martin Luther King gave there.
The Vietnam protests, the commemoration of all that died in the pandemic of AIDS, the march for women's reproductive rights, right up until almost the present.
And it's synonymous with free speech, even if you're not sure what it is that you have to say.
It may just be a place for civic commiseration.
There is a huge disconnect, we believe, between the communicative and discursive space of the Mall and the museums that line it to either side.
And that is that those museums are usually passive, they have passive relationships between the museum as the presenter and the audience, as the receiver of information.
And so you can see dinosaurs and insects and collections of locomotives and all of that, but you're really not involved; you're being talked to.
When Richard Koshalek took over as director of the Hirshhorn in 2009, he was determined to take advantage of the fact that this museum was sited at the most unique place: at the seat of power in the U.S.
And while art and politics are inherently and implicitly together always and all the time, there could be some very special relationship that could be forged here in its uniqueness.
The question is, is it possible ultimately for art to insert itself into the dialogue of national and world affairs?
And could the museum be an agent of cultural diplomacy?
There are over 180 embassies in Washington D.C.
There are over 500 think tanks.
There should be a way of harnessing all of that intellectual and global energy into, and somehow through, the museum.
There should be some kind of brain trust.
But beyond exhibiting contemporary art, the Hirshhorn will become a public forum, a place of discourse for issues around arts, culture, politics and policy.
And for this new initiative, the Hirshhorn would have to expand or appropriate a site for a contemporary, deployable structure.
This is it. This is the Hirshhorn -- so a 230-foot-diameter concrete doughnut designed in the early '70s by Gordon Bunshaft.
Architects love to hate it.
And around that space, the ring is actually galleries.
Very, very difficult to mount shows in there.
When the Hirshhorn opened, Ada Louise Huxstable, the New York Times critic, had some choice words: "Neo-penitentiary modern."
Almost four decades later, how will this building expand for a new progressive program?
There is no space there.
The Hirshhorn sits among the Mall's monumental institutions.
Most are neoclassical, heavy and opaque, made of stone or concrete.
It has to be something entirely different.
It has to be air.
In our imagination, it has to be light.
And it has to be free.
(Video) So this is the big idea.
It's a giant airbag.
But more poetically, we like to think of the structure as inhaling the democratic air of the Mall, bringing it into itself.
The before and the after.
It was dubbed "the bubble" by the press.
That was the lounge.
It's basically one big volume of air that just oozes out in every direction.
The membrane is translucent.
This is the view from the inside.
So you might have been wondering how in the world did we get this approved by the federal government.
It had to be approved by actually two agencies.
And one is there to preserve the dignity and sanctity of the Mall.
The Congressional Buildings Act of 1910 limits the height of buildings in D.C.
to 130 feet, except for spires, towers, domes and minarets.
This pretty much exempts monuments of the church and state.
And the bubble is 153 ft.
That's the Pantheon next to it.
It's about 1.2 million cubic feet of compressed air.
And so we argued it on the merits of being a dome.
It's a study of some bondage techniques, which are actually very important because it's hit by wind all the time.
There's one permanent steel ring at the top, but it can't be seen from any vantage point on the Mall.
So it comes to the site twice a year.
It's taken off the delivery truck.
It's hoisted.
And then it's ballasted with water at the very bottom.
And we said, well the first erection would take one week.
And they really connected with that idea.
But some of the toughest hurdles have been the technical ones.
This is the warp and weft.
This is a point cloud.
There are extreme pressures.
And this is the space in action.
So flexible interior for discussions, just like this, but in the round -- luminous and reconfigurable.
And the very first program will be one of cultural dialogue and diplomacy organized in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Form and content are together here.
The bubble is an anti-monument.
Art and politics occupy an ambiguous site outside the museum walls, but inside of the museum's core, blending its air with the democratic air of the Mall.
And the bubble will inflate hopefully for the first time at the end of 2013.
Thank you.
(Applause)
America's public energy conversation boils down to this question: Would you rather die of A) oil wars, or B) climate change, or C) nuclear holocaust, or D) all of the above?
Oh, I missed one: or E) none of the above?
Could we reinvent fire?
You see, fire made us human; fossil fuels made us modern.
But now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable.
Let's see how.
Four-fifths of the world's energy still comes from burning each year four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo.
Those fossil fuels have built our civilization.
They've enriched the lives of billions.
But they also have rising costs to our security, economy, health and environment that are starting to erode, if not outweigh their benefits.
So we need a new fire.
And switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity, each of which puts two-fifths of the fossil carbon in the air.
Less than one percent of our electricity is made from oil -- although almost half is made from coal.
Their uses are quite concentrated.
Three-fourths of our oil fuel is transportation.
Three-fourths of our electricity powers buildings.
And the rest of both runs factories.
So very efficient vehicles, buildings and factories save oil and coal, and also natural gas that can displace both of them.
But today's energy system is not just inefficient, it is also disconnected, aging, dirty and insecure.
So it needs refurbishment.
By 2050 though, it could become efficient, connected and distributed with elegantly frugal autos, factories and buildings all relying on a modern, secure and resilient electricity system.
We can eliminate our addiction to oil and coal by 2050 and use one-third less natural gas while switching to efficient use and renewable supply.
Yet this cheaper energy system could support 158 percent bigger U.S. economy all without needing oil or coal, or for that matter nuclear energy.
Moreover, this transition needs no new inventions and no acts of Congress and no new federal taxes, mandate subsidies or laws and running Washington gridlock.
Let me say that again.
I'm going to tell you how to get the United States completely off oil and coal, five trillion dollars cheaper with no act of Congress led by business for profit.
In other words, we're going to use our most effective institutions -- private enterprise co-evolving with civil society and sped by military innovation to go around our least effective institutions.
And whether you care most about profits and jobs and competitive advantage or national security, or environmental stewardship and climate protection and public health, reinventing fire makes sense and makes money.
General Eisenhower reputedly said that enlarging the boundaries of a tough problem makes it soluble by encompassing more options and more synergies.
So in reinventing fire, we integrated all four sectors that use energy -- transportation, buildings, industry and electricity -- and we integrated four kinds of innovation, not just technology and policy, but also design and business strategy.
Those combinations yield very much more than the sum of the parts, especially in creating deeply disruptive business opportunities.
Oil costs our economy two billion dollars a day, plus another four billion dollars a day in hidden economic and military costs, raising its total cost to over a sixth of GDP.
Our mobility fuel goes three-fifths to automobiles.
So let's start by making autos oil free.
Two-thirds of the energy it takes to move a typical car is caused by its weight.
And every unit of energy you save at the wheels, by taking out weight or drag, saves seven units in the tank, because you don't have to waste six units getting the energy to the wheels.
Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, epidemic obesity has made our two-ton steel cars gain weight twice as fast as we have.
But today, ultralight, ultrastrong materials, like carbon fiber composites, can make dramatic weight savings snowball and can make cars simpler and cheaper to build.
Lighter and more slippery autos need less force to move them, so their engines get smaller.
So sticker prices will ultimately fall to about the same as today, while the driving cost, even from the start, is very much lower.
The sales can grow and the prices fall even faster with temporary feebates, that is rebates for efficient new autos paid for by fees on inefficient ones.
And just in the first two years the biggest of Europe's five feebate programs has tripled the speed of improving automotive efficiency.
The resulting shift to electric autos is going to be as game-changing as shifting from typewriters to the gains in computers.
Of course, computers and electronics are now America's biggest industry, while typewriter makers have vanished.
America could lead this next automotive revolution.
Currently the leader is Germany.
Last year, Volkswagen announced that by next year they'll be producing this carbon fiber plugin hybrid getting 230 miles a gallon.
Also last year, BMW announced this carbon fiber electric car, they said that its carbon fiber is paid for by needing fewer batteries.
And they said, "We do not intend to be a typewriter maker."
Seven years ago, an even faster and cheaper American manufacturing technology was used to make this little carbon fiber test part, which doubles as a carbon cap.
(Laughter) In one minute -- and you can tell from the sound how immensely stiff and strong it is.
Tom Friedman actually whacked it as hard as he could with a sledgehammer without even scuffing it.
But such manufacturing techniques can scale to automotive speed and cost with aerospace performance.
They can save four-fifths of the capital needed to make autos.
If we made all of our autos this way, it would save oil equivalent to finding one and a half Saudi Arabias, or half an OPEC, by drilling in the Detroit formation, a very prospective play.
And all those mega-barrels under Detroit cost an average of 18 bucks a barrel.
They are all-American, carbon-free and inexhaustible.
The same physics and the same business logic also apply to big vehicles.
In the five years ending with 2010, Walmart saved 60 percent of the fuel per ton-mile in its giant fleet of heavy trucks through better logistics and design.
But just the technological savings in heavy trucks can get to two-thirds.
As we design and build vehicles better, we can also use them smarter by harnessing four powerful techniques for eliminating needless driving.
Instead of just seeing the travel grow, we can use innovative pricing, charging for road infrastructure by the mile, not by the gallon.
We can use some smart IT to enhance transit and enable car sharing and ride sharing.
And we can use smart IT to make traffic free-flowing.
Together, those things can give us the same or better access with 46 to 84 percent less driving, saving another 0.4 trillion dollars, plus 0.3 trillion dollars from using trucks more productively.
Saving or displacing barrels for 25 bucks rather than buying them for over a hundred, adds up to a $4 trillion net saving counting all the hidden costs at zero.
So to get mobility without oil, to phase out the oil, we can get efficient and then switch fuels.
Those 125 to 240 mile-per-gallon-equivalent autos can use any mixture of hydrogen fuel cells, electricity and advanced biofuels.
The trucks and planes can realistically use hydrogen or advanced biofuels.
The trucks could even use natural gas.
But no vehicles will need oil.
And the most biofuel we might need, just three million barrels a day, can be made two-thirds from waste without displacing any cropland and without harming soil or climate.
Our team speeds up these kinds of oil savings by what we call "institutional acupuncture."
We figure out where the business logic is congested and not flowing properly, we stick little needles in it to get it flowing, working with partners like Ford and Walmart and the Pentagon.
And the long transition is already well under way.
In fact, three years ago mainstream analysts were starting to see peak oil, not in supply, but in demand.
And Deutsche Bank even said world oil use could peak around 2016.
In other words, oil is getting uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices.
But the electrified vehicles don't need to burden the electricity grid.
Rather, when smart autos exchange electricity and information through smart buildings with smart grids, they're adding to the grid valuable flexibility and storage that help the grid integrate varying solar and wind power.
And they also converge the oil story with our second big story, saving electricity and then making it differently.
Changing how we make electricity gets easier if we need less of it.
But as efficiency in buildings and industry starts to grow faster than the economy, America's electricity use could actually shrink, even with the little extra use required for those efficient electrified autos.
And we can do this just by reasonably accelerating existing trends.
Over the next 40 years, buildings, which use three-quarters of the electricity, can triple or quadruple their energy productivity, saving 1.4 trillion dollars, net present value, with a 33 percent internal rate of return or in English, the savings are worth four times what they cost.
And industry can accelerate too, doubling its energy productivity with a 21 percent internal rate of return.
The key is a disruptive innovation that we call integrative design that often makes very big energy savings cost less than small or no savings.
That is how our 2010 retrofit is saving over two-fifths of the energy in the Empire State Building -- remanufacturing those six and a half thousand windows on site into super windows that pass light, but reflect heat.
plus better lights and office equipment and such cut the maximum cooling load by a third.
For example, three-fifths of the world's electricity runs motors.
Half of that runs pumps and fans.
And those can all be made more efficient, and the motors that turn them can have their system efficiency roughly doubled by integrating 35 improvements, paying back in about a year.
But first we ought to be capturing bigger, cheaper savings that are normally ignored and are not in the textbooks.
For example, pumps, the biggest use of motors, move liquid through pipes.
But a standard industrial pumping loop was redesigned to use at least 86 percent less energy, not by getting better pumps, but just by replacing long, thin, crooked pipes with fat, short, straight pipes.
This is not about new technology, it's just rearranging our metal furniture.
Of course, it also shrinks the pumping equipment and its capital costs.
So what do such savings mean for the electricity that is three-fifths used in motors?
Well, from the coal burned at the power plant through all these compounding losses, only a tenth of the fuel energy actually ends up coming out the pipe as flow.
But now let's turn those compounding losses around backwards, and every unit of flow or friction that we save in the pipe saves 10 units of fuel cost, pollution and what Hunter Lovins calls "global weirding" back at the power plant.
And of course, as you go back upstream, the components get smaller and therefore cheaper.
Our team has lately found such snowballing energy savings in more than 30 billion dollars worth of industrial redesigns -- everything from data centers and chip fabs to mines and refineries.
Typically our retrofit designs save about 30 to 60 percent of the energy and pay back in a few years, while the new facility designs save 40 to 90-odd percent with generally lower capital cost.
Now needing less electricity would ease and speed the shift to new sources of electricity, chiefly renewables.
China leads their explosive growth and their plummeting cost.
In fact, these solar power module costs have just fallen off the bottom of the chart.
And Germany now has more solar workers than America has steel workers.
Such unregulated products could ultimately add up to a virtual utility that bypasses your electric company just as your cellphone bypassed your wireline phone company.
Renewables are no longer a fringe activity.
For each of the past four years half of the world's new generating capacity has been renewable, mainly lately in developing countries.
In 2010, renewables other than big hydro, particularly wind and solar cells, got 151 billion dollars of private investment, and they actually surpassed the total installed capacity of nuclear power in the world by adding 60 billion watts in that one year.
That happens to be the same amount of solar cell capacity that the world can now make every year -- a number that goes up 60 or 70 percent a year.
In contrast, the net additions of nuclear capacity and coal capacity and the orders behind those keep fading because they cost too much and they have too much financial risk.
In fact in this country, no new nuclear power plant has been able to raise any private construction capital, despite seven years of 100-plus percent subsidies.
So how else could we replace the coal-fired power plants?
We're often told though that only coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on, because they're 24/7, whereas wind and solar power are variable, and hence supposedly unreliable.
Actually no generator is 24/7. They all break.
That is exactly why we've designed the grid to back up failed plants with working plants.
And in exactly the same way, the grid can handle wind and solar power's forecastable variations.
Hourly simulations show that largely or wholly renewable grids can deliver highly reliable power when they're forecasted, integrated and diversified by both type and location.
And that's true both for continental areas like the U.S. or Europe and for smaller areas embedded within a larger grid.
That is how, for example, four German states in 2010 were 43 to 52 percent wind powered.
Portugal was 45 percent renewable powered, Denmark 36.
And it's how all of Europe can shift to renewable electricity.
In America, our aging, dirty and insecure power system has to be replaced anyway by 2050.
And whatever we replace it with is going to cost about the same, about six trillion dollars at present value -- whether we buy more of what we've got or new nuclear and so-called clean coal, or renewables that are more or less centralized.
But those four futures at the same cost differ profoundly in their risks, around national security, fuel, water, finance, technology, climate and health.
For example, our over-centralized grid is very vulnerable to cascading and potentially economy-shattering blackouts caused by bad space weather or other natural disasters or a terrorist attack.
That is, they can disconnect fractally and then reconnect seamlessly.
That approach is exactly what the Pentagon is adopting for its own power supply.
At about the same cost as business as usual, this would maximize national security, customer choice, entrepreneurial opportunity and innovation.
Traditionally utilities build a lot of giant coal and nuclear plants and a bunch of big gas plants and maybe a little bit of efficiency renewables.
And those utilities were rewarded, as they still are in 34 states, for selling you more electricity.
So our energy future is not fate, but choice, and that choice is very flexible.
In 1976, for example, government and industry insisted that the amount of energy needed to make a dollar of GDP could never go down.
And I heretically suggested it could go down several-fold.
Well that's what's actually happened so far.
But with today's much better technologies, more mature delivery channels and integrative design, we can do far more and even cheaper.
And the results may at first seem incredible, but as Marshall McLuhan said, "Only puny secrets need protection.
Now combine the electricity and oil revolutions, both driven by modern efficiency, and you get the really big story: reinventing fire, where business enabled and sped by smart policies in mindful markets can lead the United States completely off oil and coal by 2050, saving 5 trillion dollars, growing the economy 2.6-fold, strengthening out national security, oh, and by the way, by getting rid of the oil and coal, reducing the fossil carbon emissions by 82 to 86 percent.
Now if you like any of those outcomes, you can support reinventing fire without needing to like all of them and without needing to agree about which of them is most important.
This also turns out to be the best way to cope with global challenges -- climate change, nuclear proliferation, energy insecurity, energy poverty -- all of which make us less safe.
Former oil man Maurice Strong said, "Not all the fossils are in the fuel."
And but for a little transitional tail of natural gas and a bit of biofuel grown in ways that sustain and endure, this new fire is flameless.
Each of you owns a piece of that $5 trillion prize.
And our new book "Reinventing Fire" describes how you can capture it.
So with the conversation just begun at ReinventingFire.com, let me invite you each to engage with us and with each other, with everyone around you, to help make the world richer, fairer, cooler and safer by together reinventing fire.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Usually I like working in my shop, but when it's raining and the driveway outside turns into a river, then I just love it.
This is the "Double Raindrop."
Of all my sculptures, it's the most talkative.
It adds together the interference pattern from two raindrops that land near each other.
All the sculptures move by mechanical means.
Do you see how there's three peaks to the yellow sine wave?
Right here I'm adding a sine wave with four peaks and turning it on.
(Laughter) Four hundred aluminum cans.
Tule is a reed that's native to California, and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious.
A single drop of rain increasing amplitude.
The spiral eddy that trails a paddle on a rafting trip.
This adds together four different waves.
The mechanism that drives it has nine motors and about 3,000 pulleys.
This is very early rehearsal footage, but the finished work's on tour and is actually coming through L.A. in a couple weeks.
Take your finger and draw this line.
Summer, fall, winter, spring, noon, dusk, dark, dawn.
Have you ever seen those stratus clouds that go in parallel stripes across the sky?
Did you know that's a continuous sheet of cloud that's dipping in and out of the condensation layer?
What if every seemingly isolated object was actually just where the continuous wave of that object poked through into our world?
The Earth is neither flat nor round.
It sounds good, but I'll bet you know in your gut that it's not the whole truth, and I'll tell you why.
This tension between the need to look deeper and the beauty and immediacy of the world, where if you even try to look deeper you've already missed what you're looking for, this tension is what makes the sculptures move.
Let me show you one more.
Thank you very much. Thanks.
(Applause) Thanks.
(Applause) June Cohen: Looking at each of your sculptures, they evoke so many different images.
Some of them are like the wind and some are like waves, and sometimes they look alive and sometimes they seem like math.
Are you thinking of something physical or somthing tangible as you design it?
RM: Well some of them definitely have a direct observation -- like literally two raindrops falling, and just watching that pattern is so stunning.
RM: The "Double Raindrop" I worked on for nine months, and when I finally turned it on, I actually hated it.
The very moment I turned it on, I hated it.
And I happened to have a friend who was over, and he said, "Why don't you just wait."
And I waited, and the next day I liked it a bit better, the next day I liked it a bit better, and now I really love it.
And so I guess, one, the gut reactions a little bit wrong sometimes, and two, it does not look like as expected.
JC: The relationship evolves over time.
Well thank you so much. That was a gorgeous treat for us.
I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the Internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world's population can go online to learn, to create and to share.
And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this is also continuing to go grow.
A recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online.
As the parent of a nine-year-old girl, that number seems awfully low.
(Laughter) But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world.
And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy.
Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not.
And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing.
In fact, when I know the data that's being shared and I'm asked explicitly for my consent, I want some sites to understand my habits.
But when I don't know and when I haven't been asked, that's when the problem arises.
It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business.
In fact, there's an entire industry formed around following us through the digital woods and compiling a profile on each of us.
Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe, it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked.
The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you.
The red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that I have not navigated to, but are following me.
All of them are connected, as you can see, to form a picture of me on the Web.
And this is my profile.
So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal.
Now like most of you, I actually start my day going online and checking email.
And in this particular case I happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and I shared it over a social network.
Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table, and I asked her, "Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school?"
And she, of course, naturally as a nine-year-old, looked at me and said quizzically, "What's literacy?"
So I sent her online, of course, to look it up.
I go to work, I check email, I log onto a few more social sites, I blog, I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports, I go look at some videos, pretty typical day -- in this case, actually fairly pedantic -- and at the end of the day, as my day winds down, look at my profile.
All in all, there's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information, most all of them without my consent.
This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web.
And why is this happening?
Pretty simple -- it's huge business.
The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today.
And as adults, we're certainly not alone.
At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter.
And on one single Saturday morning, over two hours on the Internet, here's her Collusion profile.
This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate; this is me being a parent.
Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet.
Our voices matter and our actions matter even more.
Today we've launched Collusion.
You can download it, install it in Firefox, to see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods.
Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard.
Because what we don't know can actually hurt us.
Because the memory of the Internet is forever.
We are being watched.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's something that, since it was invented a year or two ago, has given me untold happiness.
Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts.
Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window.
Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot.
(Laughter) If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.
What we have is exactly the same thing, the same activity, but one of them makes you feel great and the other one, with just a small change of posture, makes you feel terrible.
Why, for example, are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed?
Both of them, after all, are in exactly the same stage of life.
You both have too much time on your hands and not much money.
But pensioners are reportedly very, very happy, whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed.
The reason, I think, is that the pensioners believe they've chosen to be pensioners, whereas the young unemployed feel it's been thrust upon them.
In England, the upper-middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly, because they've re-branded unemployment.
(Laughter) And that's because having a son who's unemployed in Manchester is really quite embarrassing.
But having a son who's unemployed in Thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment.
There's an experiment I think Daniel Pink refers to, where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor.
Every now and then, an electric shock is applied to the floor, which pains the dogs.
The only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box.
The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives.
It's an interesting question.
I'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax.
Or "The bailout of a load of stupid banks which lent to Greece"?
(Laughter) Because they are actually the same thing.
What you call them actually affects how you react to them, viscerally and morally.
I think psychological value is great, to be absolutely honest.
I think that's true, actually.
But what we don't have is a really good model of human psychology -- at least pre-Kahneman, perhaps, we didn't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering, of neoclassical economics.
So people who believed in psychological solutions didn't have a model.
We didn't have a framework.
This is what Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger calls "a latticework on which to hang your ideas."
We merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model.
And what that means is that, in looking at solutions, we've probably given too much priority to what I call technical engineering solutions, Newtonian solutions, and not nearly enough to the psychological ones.
You know my example of the Eurostar: six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between Paris and London by about 40 minutes.
For 0.01 percent of this money, you could have put wi-fi on the trains, which wouldn't have reduced the duration of the journey, but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefulness far more.
For maybe 10 percent of the money, you could have paid all of the world's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Château Pétrus to all the passengers.
(Laughter) Why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically?
I think it's because there's an imbalance, an asymmetry in the way we treat creative, emotionally driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas.
If you're a creative person, I think, quite rightly, you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you.
People who have an existing framework -- an economic framework, an engineering framework -- feel that, actually, logic is its own answer.
What they don't say is, "Well, the numbers all seem to add up, but before I present this idea, I'll show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better."
An example of a great psychological idea: the single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the London Underground, per pound spent, came when they didn't add any extra trains, nor change the frequency of the trains; they put dot matrix display boards on the platforms -- because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality, its duration, but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait.
Waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes, knuckle biting, going, "When's this train going to damn well arrive?"
It's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments.
Why?
The accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights.
This is all I'm asking for, really, in human decision making, is the consideration of these three things.
I'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other.
I'm merely saying that when you solve problems, you should look at all three of these equally, and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle.
If you actually look at a great business, you'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play.
Really successful businesses -- Google is a great, great technological success, but it's also based on a very good psychological insight: people believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else.
It's an innate thing called "goal dilution."
Ayelet Fishbach has written a paper about this.
Yes, there's a search function, but you also have weather, sports scores, bits of news.
Google understood that if you're just a search engine, people assume you're a very, very good search engine.
Google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one.
I propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we didn't even realize were problems at all.
This is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics.
Don't give them 24 white pills; give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first, and then take the blue ones.
The likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle.
One of the great mistakes, I think, of economics is it fails to understand that what something is -- whether it's retirement, unemployment, cost -- is a function, not only of its amount, but also its meaning.
Quite often queues happen at the tolls.
You could apply the same principle, actually, to the security lanes in airports.
What would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge, but go through a lane that's an express lane?
Time means more to some people than others.
If you're waiting trying to get to a job interview, you'd patently pay a couple of pounds more to go through the fast lane.
If you're on the way to visit your mother-in-law, you'd probably prefer -- (Laughter) you'd probably prefer to stay on the left.
because they think you're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue, and, "Why on earth should I pay to subsidize your incompetence?"
On the other hand, change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management, so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company, it goes to charity ...
and the mental willingness to pay completely changes.
So where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money.
And I think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy.
It could revolutionize the public services.
He's an Austrian School economist who was first active in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna.
What was interesting about the Austrian School is they actually grew up alongside Freud.
And so they're predominantly interested in psychology.
Praxeology is the study of human choice, action and decision-making.
I think they're right.
I think the danger we have in today's world is we have the study of economics considers itself to be a prior discipline to the study of human psychology.
But as Charlie Munger says, "If economics isn't behavioral, I don't know what the hell is."
Von Mises, interestingly, believes economics is just a subset of psychology.
I think he just refers to economics as "the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity."
But Von Mises, among many other things, I think uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing, the value of perceived value and the fact that we should treat it as being absolutely equivalent to any other kind of value.
We tend to, all of us, even those of us who work in marketing, think of value in two ways: the real value, which is when you make something in a factory or provide a service, and then there's a dubious value, which you create by changing the way people look at things.
Von Mises completely rejected this distinction.
And he used this following analogy: he referred to strange economists called the French physiocrats, who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land.
So if you're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer, you created true value.
If however, you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat, you weren't actually creating value, you were exploiting the shepherd.
Now, Von Mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing.
He says if you run a restaurant, there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor.
One of them creates, perhaps, the primary product -- the thing we think we're paying for -- the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product.
And the idea that one of them should have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong.
Try this quick thought experiment: imagine a restaurant that serves Michelin-starred food, but where the restaurant smells of sewage and there's human feces on the floor.
(Laughter) The best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further, it's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor.
And it's vital we understand this.
If that seems like a sort of strange, abstruse thing -- in the UK, the post office had a 98 percent success rate at delivering first-class mail the next day.
They decided this wasn't good enough, and they wanted to get it up to 99.
If, at the same time, you'd gone and asked people, "What percentage of first-class mail arrives the next day?"
the average answer, or the modal answer, would have been "50 to 60 percent."
Now, if your perception is much worse than your reality, what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality?
That's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks.
What you need to do is, first of all, tell people that 98 percent of first-class mail gets there the next day.
(Laughter) (Applause) Choose your frame of reference and the perceived value, and therefore, the actual value is completely transformed.
It has to be said of the Germans that the Germans and the French are doing a brilliant job of creating a united Europe.
The only thing they didn't expect is they're uniting Europe through a shared mild hatred of the French and Germans.
But I'm British; that's the way we like it.
(Laughter) What you'll also notice is that, in any case, our perception is leaky.
We can't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it.
All of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted.
Analgesics that are branded are more effective at reducing pain than analgesics that are not branded.
I don't just mean through reported pain reduction -- actual measured pain reduction.
So if you do something that's perceptually bad in one respect, you can damage the other.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Four years ago today, exactly, actually, I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie.
Last September of 2011, I started an online magazine for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com.
My name's Tavi Gevinson, and the title of my talk is "Still Figuring It Out," and the MS Paint quality of my slides was a total creative decision in keeping with today's theme, and has nothing to do with my inability to use PowerPoint. (Laughter) So I edit this site for teenage girls. I'm a feminist.
I am kind of a pop culture nerd, and I think a lot about what makes a strong female character, and, you know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence. My own website.
So I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted, and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that's played up a lot, like a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot, and it's seen as power.
But they're not strong characters who happen to be female.
The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple, when, in actuality, women are complicated, women are multifaceted -- not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people. (Laughter) So the flaws are the key.
I'm not the first person to say this.
What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable.
Lena Dunham, who's on here, her show on HBO that premiers next month, "Girls," she said she wanted to start it because she felt that every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions, and that feels accurate for all people, but you don't see women represented like that as much.
Congrats, guys. (Laughs) But I don't feel that — I still feel that there are some types of women who are not represented that way, and one group that we'll focus on today are teens, because I think teenagers are especially contradictory and still figuring it out, and in the '90s there was "Freaks and Geeks" and "My So-Called Life," and their characters, Lindsay Weir and Angela Chase, I mean, the whole premise of the shows were just them trying to figure themselves out, basically, but those shows only lasted a season each, and I haven't really seen anything like that on TV since.
So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — (Laughter) — around the time when I was, when I started watching those TV shows.
I was ending middle school, starting high school -- I'm a sophomore now — and I was trying to reconcile all of these differences that you're told you can't be when you're growing up as a girl.
You can't be smart and pretty.
You can't be a feminist who's also interested in fashion.
You can't care about clothes if it's not for the sake of what other people, usually men, will think of you.
So I was trying to figure all that out, and I felt a little confused, and I said so on my blog, and I said that I wanted to start a website for teenage girls that was not this kind of one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing because I think one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be a feminist, they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in your beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all of the answers. And this is not true, and, actually, reconciling all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I understood that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process, and this is a spread from a zine that I made last year when I -- I mean, I think I've let myself go a bit on the illustration front since.
But, yeah.
So I said on my blog that I wanted to start this publication for teenage girls and ask people to submit their writing, their photography, whatever, to be a member of our staff.
My editorial director and I went through them and put together a staff of people, and we launched last September.
And this is an excerpt from my first editor's letter, where I say that Rookie, we don't have all the answers, we're still figuring it out too, but the point is not to give girls the answers, and not even give them permission to find the answers themselves, but hopefully inspire them to understand that they can give themselves that permission, they can ask their own questions, find their own answers, all of that, and Rookie, I think we've been trying to make it a nice place for all of that to be figured out.
We also have articles called "How to Look Like You Weren't Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes."
So all of that being said, I still really appreciate those characters in movies and articles like that on our site, that aren't just about being totally powerful, maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those.
So what I you to take away from my talk, the lesson of all of this, is to just be Stevie Nicks.
Like, that's all you have to do. (Laughter) Because my favorite thing about her, other than, like, everything, is that she is very -- has always been unapologetically present on stage, and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them, and yeah, so please be Stevie Nicks.
Thank you. (Applause)
I am an immigrant from Uganda living in the United States while waiting for my asylum application to go through.
Migrants do not enjoy much freedom of movement in our world today.
This certainly applies to those who are desperate enough to navigate choppy and stormy seas in boats.
These are the risks my cousins from West Africa and North Africa face while trying to cross over to Europe.
Indeed, it is a rare but fortunate opportunity for a migrant to address a gathering like this.
But this also signifies what often is missing in the global debate over refugees, migrants and immigrants, voices of the disenfranchised.
Citizens of many host countries, even those that previously welcomed newcomers, are uneasy about the rising numbers of individuals coming into their countries.
The immediate criticism is that the newcomers upend the stability of social welfare and employment in their countries.
Uncertain and skeptical citizens look towards politicians who are competing against each other to see who can claim the prize of the loudest voice of populism and nationalism.
All these restrictions simply address symptoms of the problem, not the causes.
In Dubai, I chronicled injustices and inequalities inflicted regularly on the migrant labor force.
As a result, pressures from the governments of the respective countries led to me being forced out of my career as a journalist in the Middle East.
I was deported to Uganda, where economic deprivation puts everyone at the risk of starvation.
I fled Uganda to come to the United States in the hope of sustaining a voice for my brothers and sisters who experience a more serious plight as migrants.
My father told me he was not happy about me writing a book that risked deportation and unemployment.
He had been diabetic for many years when I still worked in Dubai, and my salary was always sufficient to pay for his treatments.
After I was expelled, I could not afford to sustain his treatment, and even in the last days of his life, I could not afford to take him to a hospital.
The act of speaking up against injustices that are multilayered is never easy, because the problems require more than just rhetoric.
So long as gold mines, oilfields and large farms in Africa continue to be owned by foreign investors and those vital resources are shipped to the West, the stream of African migrants will flow continuously.
Before border controls can be tightened and new visa restrictions imposed, countries that have long received migrants should engage in a more open discussion.
That is the only practical start for reconciling, finally, a legacy of exploitation, slavery, colonialism and imperialism, so that together, we can move forward in creating a more just global economy in the 21st century -- one that benefits all.
So I really consider myself a storyteller.
But I don't really tell stories in the usual way, in the sense that I don't usually tell my own stories.
Instead, I'm really interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories, people all around the world.
I do this because I think that people actually have a lot in common.
I think people are very similar, but I also think that we have trouble seeing that.
You know, as I look around the world I see a lot of gaps, and I think we all see a lot of gaps.
And we define ourselves by our gaps.
You know, we have all these gaps and I think we like our gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something, some smaller community.
But I think that actually, despite our gaps, we really have a lot in common.
And I think one thing we have in common is a very deep need to express ourselves.
I think this is a very old human desire. It's nothing new.
But the thing about self-expression is that there's traditionally been this imbalance between the desire that we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to stand around and listen.
(Laughter) This, also, is nothing new.
Since the dawn of human history, we've tried to rectify this imbalance by making art, writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and sending them in to a newspaper, gossiping with friends. This is nothing new.
What's new is that in the last several years a lot of these very traditional physical human activities, these acts of self-expression, have been moving onto the Internet.
And so what I do is, I write computer programs that study very large sets of these footprints, and then try to draw conclusions about the people who left them -- what they feel, what they think, what's different in the world today than usual, these sorts of questions.
One project that explores these ideas, which was made about a year ago, is a piece called We Feel Fine.
And when it finds one of those phrases, it grabs the sentence up to the period, and then automatically tries to deduce the age, gender and geographical location of the person that wrote that sentence.
All of this information is saved in a database that collects about 20,000 feelings a day.
And I'll show you a glimpse of how this information is then visualized. So this is We Feel Fine.
What you see here is a madly swarming mass of particles, each of which represents a single human feeling that was stated in the last few hours.
The color of each particle corresponds to the type of feeling inside -- so that happy, positive feelings are brightly colored.
And sad, negative feelings are darkly colored.
The diameter of each dot represents the length of the sentence inside, so that the large dots contain large sentences, and the small dots contain small sentences.
Any dot can be clicked and expanded. And we see here, "I would just feel so much better if I could curl up in his arms right now and feel his affection for me in the embrace of his body and the tenderness of his lips."
So it gets pretty hot and steamy sometimes in the world of human emotions.
And all of these are stated by people: "I know that objectively it really doesn't mean much, but after spending so many years as a small fish in a big pond, it's nice to feel bigger again."
The dots exhibit human qualities. They kind of have their own physics, and they swarm wildly around, kind of exploring the world of life.
And then, one by one, in reverse chronological order, they excuse themselves, entering the scrolling list of feelings.
"I feel a bit better now."
(Laughter) "I feel confused and unsure of what the hell I want to do."
"I feel so free; I feel so good."
"I feel like I'm in this fog of depression that I can't get out of."
And you can click any of these to go out and visit the blog from which it was collected. And in that way, you can connect with the authors of these statements if you feel some degree of empathy.
The next movement is called Montage.
This grid is then said to represent the picture of the world's feelings in the last few hours, if you will.
We see, "I just feel like I'm not going to have fun if it's not the both of us." That was from someone in Michigan.
(Laughter) These are automatically constructed using the found objects: "I think I feel a little full."
Mobs provides different statistical breakdowns of the population of the world's feelings in the last few hours.
And we see that women are slightly more prolific talking about their emotions in the last few hours than men.
Finally, location causes the feelings to move to their positions on a world map showing the geographical distribution of feelings.
Metrics provides more numerical views on the data.
We see that the world is feeling "used" at 3.3 times the normal level right now.
Other views are also available.
Here are gender, age, weather, location.
The final movement is called Mounds.
It's a bit different from the others.
Mounds visualizes the entire dataset as large, gelatinous blobs which kind of jiggle.
And then if I go over here, the list begins to scroll, and there are actually thousands of feelings that have been collected.
You can see the little pink cursor moving along, representing our position.
There's also a search capability, if you're interested in finding out about a certain population.
(Laughter) But I'll spare you that.
So here are some of my favorite montages that have been collected: "I feel so much of my dad alive in me that there isn't even room for me."
"I feel invisible to you."
"I feel in love with Carolyn." "I feel so naughty."
"I feel these weirdoes are actually an asset to college life."
(Laughter) "I love how I feel today."
So as you can see, We Feel Fine uses a technique that I call "passive observation."
What I mean by that is that it passively observes people as they live their lives. It scans the world's blogs and looks at what people are writing, and these people don't know they're being watched or interviewed.
And because of that, you end up getting very honest, candid, sincere responses that are often very moving.
And this is a technique that I usually prefer in my work because people don't know they're being interviewed.
They're just living life, and they end up just acting like that.
Another technique is directly questioning people.
And this is a technique that I explored in a different project, the Yahoo! Time Capsule, which was designed to take a fingerprint of the world in 2006.
It was divided into ten very simple themes -- love, anger, sadness and so on -- each of which contained a single, very open-ended question put to the world: What do you love? What makes you angry?
What makes you sad? What do you believe in? And so on.
The time capsule was available for one month online, translated into 10 languages, and this is what it looked like.
It's a spinning globe, the surface of which is entirely composed of the pictures and words and drawings of people that submitted to the time capsule.
The ten themes radiate out and orbit the time capsule.
You can sift through this data and see what people have submitted.
This is in response to, What's beautiful? "Miss World."
There are two modes to the time capsule.
There's One World, which presents the spinning globe, and Many Voices, which splits the data out into film strips and lets you sift through them one by one.
So this project was punctuated by a really amazing event, which was held in the desert outside Albuquerque in New Mexico at the Jemez Pueblo, where for three consecutive nights, the contents of the capsule were projected onto the sides of the ancient Red Rock Canyon walls, which stand about 200 feet tall. It was really incredible.
And we also projected the contents of the time capsule as binary code using a 35-watt laser into outer space.
You can see the orange line leaving the desert floor at about a 45 degree angle there. This was amazing because the first night I looked at all this information and really started seeing the gaps that I talked about earlier -- the differences in age, gender and wealth and so on.
And it was really moving. And this picture here was taken the final night from a distant cliff about two miles away, where the contents of the capsule were being beamed into space.
And there was something very moving about all of this human expression being shot off into the night sky.
And it started to make me think a lot about the night sky, and how humans have always used the night sky to project their great stories.
You know, as a child in Vermont, on a farm where I grew up, I would often look up into the dark sky and see the three star belt of Orion, the Hunter.
You know, Orion facing the roaring bull.
Perseus flying to the rescue of Andromeda.
I mean, these are the great tales of the Greeks.
And it caused me to wonder about our world today.
And it caused me to wonder specifically, if we could make new constellations today, what would those look like? What would those be?
And those are the questions that inspired my new project, which is debuting here today at TED.
Nobody's seen this yet, publicly.
It's called Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology.
And it uses this metaphor of an interactive night sky.
So, Universe will open here.
So you see this kind of -- these stars moving along.
Now, these aren't just little points of light, little pixels.
Each of those stars actually represents a specific event in the real world -- a quote that was stated by somebody, an image, a news story, a person, a company. You know, some kind of heroic personality.
And you might notice that as the cursor begins to touch some of these stars, that shapes begin to emerge.
We see here there's a little man walking along, or maybe a woman.
And we see here a photograph with a head.
And those are the constellations of today.
And I can turn them all on, and you can see them moving across the sky now.
This is the universe of 2007, the last two months.
The data from this is global news coverage from thousands of news sources around the world.
It's using the API of a really great company that I work with in New York, actually, called Daylife.
And it's kind of the zeitgeist view at this level of the world's current mythology over the last couple of months.
So we can see where it's emerging here, like President Ford, Iraq, Bush. And we can actually isolate just the words -- I call them secrets -- and we can cause them to form an alphabetical list. And we see Anna Nicole Smith playing a big role recently.
President Ford -- this is Gerald Ford's funeral.
We can actually click anything in Universe and have it become the center of the universe, and everything else will enter its orbit.
And the things that relate to Ford enter its orbit and swirl around it.
Now the things that relate to it are swirling around.
We can click on this and we see this iconic image of Betty Ford kissing her husband's coffin.
This is a photographic representation, called Snapshots.
And let's see, in the past week, what he's been up to.
We can pull out his secrets, and we see that it has a lot to do with candidates, Hillary, presidential, Barack Obama.
We can see the stories that Bill Clinton is taking part in right now.
So we see Obama and the Clintons meet in Alabama.
We can also see the superstars. These would be the people that are kind of the looming heroes and heroines in the universe of Bill Clinton. So there's Bill Clinton, Hillary, Iraq, George Bush, Barack Obama, Scooter Libby -- these are kind of the people of Bill Clinton.
We can also see a world map, so this shows us the geographic reach of Bill Clinton in the last week or so.
We can see he's been focused in America because he's been campaigning, probably, but a little bit of action over here in the Middle East.
And then we can also see a timeline.
So we see that he was a bit quiet on Saturday, but he was back to work on Sunday morning, and actually been tapering off since then this week.
And it's not limited to just people or dates, but we can actually put in concepts also.
So if I put in climate change for all of 2006, we'll see what that universe looks like.
So we see again, climate change is large: Nairobi, global conference, environmental.
And there are also quotes that you can see, if you're interested in reading about quotes on climate change.
The superstars of climate change in 2006: United States, Britain, China. You know, these are the towering countries that kind of define this concept.
This will be online in several days, probably next Tuesday.
And you'll all be able to use it and kind of explore what your own personal mythology might be.
You'll notice that in Daylife -- rather, in Universe -- it supports both the notion of a global mythology, which is represented by something as broad as, say, 2007, and also a personal mythology.
As you search for the things that are important to you in your world, and then see what the constellations of those might look like.
(Applause)
Well when I was asked to do this TEDTalk, I was really chuckled, because, you see, my father's name was Ted, and much of my life, especially my musical life, is really a talk that I'm still having with him, or the part of me that he continues to be.
Now Ted was a New Yorker, an all-around theater guy, and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician.
Yet, he was my greatest teacher.
Because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids, his understanding of music was profound.
And for him, it wasn't so much the way the music goes as about what it witnesses and where it can take you.
And he did a painting of this experience, which he called "In the Realm of Music."
Now Ted entered this realm every day by improvising in a sort of Tin Pan Alley style like this.
He said, "There are only two things that matter in music: what and how.
That was his passion for the music.
They didn't know all that much about it, but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them.
And how people get this music, how it comes into their lives, really fascinates me.
One day in New York, I was on the street and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants.
And a tough, slouchy kid got up to bat, and he took a swing and really connected.
And he ran around the bases.
How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this New York kid?
Because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years.
Now the raw material of it, of course, is just the music of everyday life.
It's all the anthems and dance crazes and ballads and marches.
But what classical music does is to distill all of these musics down, to condense them to their absolute essence, and from that essence create a new language, a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly about who we really are.
It's a language that's still evolving.
Now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of, like concertos and symphonies, but even the most ambitious masterpiece can have as its central mission to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment -- like this one from the Beethoven Violin Concerto.
It's just a design of pitches and silence and time.
And the pitches, the notes, as you know, are just vibrations.
They're locations in the spectrum of sound.
And whether we call them 440 per second, A, or 3,729, B flat -- trust me, that's right -- they're just phenomena.
But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood.
And the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries, as have our preferences for them.
(Music) And in the 17th century, it was more like this.
(Music) And in the 21st century ...
(Music) Now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord, even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you or sent some of you running from the room.
And the reason you like it is because you've inherited, whether you knew it or not, centuries-worth of changes in musical theory, practice and fashion.
Now the impulse to notate, or, more exactly I should say, encode music has been with us for a very long time.
(Music) And a thousand years later, this impulse to notate took an entirely different form.
And you can see how this happened in these excerpts from the Christmas mass "Puer Natus est nobis," "For Us is Born."
(Music) In the 10th century, little squiggles were used just to indicate the general shape of the tune.
And then in the 13th century, more lines and new shapes of notes locked in the concept of the tune exactly, and that led to the kind of notation we have today.
And from this moment, classical music became what it most essentially is, a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature: instinct and intelligence.
And there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition.
Now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move, but a composer is considering all possible moves, testing them out, prioritizing them out, until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring coolness.
Now some of the greatest composers, like Bach, were combinations of these two things.
Bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master.
Mozart was the same way.
But every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason, instinct and intelligence.
And every musical era had different priorities of these things, different things to pass on, different 'whats' and 'hows'.
So in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition the big 'what' was to praise God.
And by the 1400s, music was being written that tried to mirror God's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky.
The 'how' was a style called polyphony, music of many independently moving voices that suggested the way the planets seemed to move in Ptolemy's geocentric universe.
(Music) This is the kind of music that Leonardo DaVinci would have known.
(Music) Singer: Ah, bitter blow!
Ah, wicked, cruel fate!
MTT: This, of course, was the birth of opera, and its development put music on a radical new course.
And the basic chords were the ones we still have with us, the triads, either the major one, which we think is happy, or the minor one, which we perceive as sad.
It's just these two notes in the middle.
It's either E natural, and 659 vibrations per second, or E flat, at 622.
So the big difference between human happiness and sadness?
And the effects of technology began to be felt also, because printing put music, the scores, the codebooks of music, into the hands of performers everywhere.
And new and improved instruments made the age of the virtuoso possible.
This is when those big forms arose -- the symphonies, the sonatas, the concertos.
And in these big architectures of time, composers like Beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime.
A piece like Beethoven's Fifth basically witnessing how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger, over the course of a half an hour, step by exacting step of his route, to the moment when he could make it across to joy.
(Music) And it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues, like gripping ones of culture, such as nationalism or quest for freedom or the frontiers of sensuality.
Now this moment so fascinates me.
I find it such a profound one.
What happens when the music stops?
And how might that change their lives?
To me this is the intimate, personal side of music.
People could now hear music all the time, even though it wasn't necessary for them to play an instrument, read music or even go to concerts.
And technology democratized music by making everything available.
It spearheaded a cultural revolution in which artists like Caruso and Bessie Smith were on the same footing.
And technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes, using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences.
At the same time technology, by taking over the role that notation had always played, shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side.
The culture in which we live now is awash with music of improvisation that's been sliced, diced, layered and, God knows, distributed and sold.
What's the long-term effect of this on us or on music?
Nobody knows.
The question remains: What happens when the music stops?
Well let me show you a story of what I mean by "really sticking with us."
I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home, and I spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker.
He came over to a piano that was there, and he balanced himself and began playing something like this.
(Music) And he said something like, "Me ... boy ... symphony ... Beethoven."
(Music) And he said, "Yes, yes. I was a little boy.
The symphony: Isaac Stern, the concerto, I heard it."
Well, that's why I take every performance so seriously, why it matters to me so much.
But now I'm excited that there's more chance than ever before possible of sharing this music.
That's what drives my interest in projects like the TV series "Keeping Score" with the San Francisco Symphony that looks at the backstories of music, and working with the young musicians at the New World Symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new performing arts centers for both entertainment and education.
And of course, the New World Symphony led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world.
And the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype.
There's just a role here for so many people -- teachers, parents, performers -- to be explorers together.
Sure, the big events attract a lot of attention, but what really matters is what goes on every single day.
We need your perspectives, your curiosity, your voices.
If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know.
Follow traces. Get lost. Be surprised, amused inspired.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I love my food.
And I love information.
My children usually tell me that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other.
(Laughter) But what I want to do in the next eight minutes or so is to take you through how those passions developed, the point in my life when the two passions merged, the journey of learning that took place from that point.
And one idea I want to leave you with today is what would would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food?
I was born in Calcutta -- a family where my father and his father before him were journalists, and they wrote magazines in the English language.
That was the family business.
And as a result of that, I grew up with books everywhere around the house.
And I mean books everywhere around the house.
In fact, I've got 38,000 of them now and no Kindle in sight.
By the time I was 18, I had a deep passion for books.
I was a South Indian brought up in Bengal.
Now I was growing up in the late '60s and early '70s, and there were a number of other passions I was also interested in, but these two were the ones that differentiated me.
(Laughter) And then life was fine, dandy.
Everything was okay, until I got to about the age of 26, and I went to a movie called "Short Circuit."
Oh, some of you have seen it.
And apparently it's being remade right now and it's going to be coming out next year.
It's the story of this experimental robot which got electrocuted and found a life.
And as it ran, this thing was saying, "Give me input. Give me input."
And I suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing.
Energy came to it in some form or shape, data came to it in some form or shape.
And I began to think, I wonder what it would be like to start imagining myself as if energy and information were the two things I had as input -- as if food and information were similar in some form or shape.
That actually for a given body mass of a primate the metabolic rate was static.
And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue.
It's a lady named Leslie Aiello.
So I looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food and said, So we were hunter-gathers of information.
We moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information.
Does that really explain what we're seeing with the intellectual property battles nowadays?
So there was always going to be a tension within that.
And this is happening here.
The same is again true with information.
But consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable.
Because what I began to see then was there were so many different ways people would consume this.
The analogies were getting crazy -- that information had sell-by dates, that people had misused information that wasn't dated properly and could really make an effect on the stock market, on corporate values, etc.
And by this time I was hooked.
And this is about 23 years into this process.
And I began to start thinking of myself as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction, docu-dramas, mockumentaries, whatever you call it.
I put it to you that information, if viewed from the point of food, is never a production issue; you never speak of food overload.
Fundamentally it's a consumption issue.
In fact, when I saw "Supersize Me," I starting thinking of saying, What would happen if an individual had 31 days nonstop Fox News?
So you start really understanding that you can have diseases, toxins, a need to balance your diet, and once you start looking, and from that point on, everything I have done in terms of the consumption of information, the production of information, the preparation of information, I've looked at from the viewpoint of food.
It has probably not helped my waistline any because I like practicing on both sides.
(Applause)
I'm a very lucky person.
And my passion was inspired at the age of seven, when my parents first took me to Morocco, at the edge of the Sahara Desert.
And it made me want to explore more.
So as a filmmaker, I've been from one end of the Earth to the other trying to get the perfect shot and to capture animal behavior never seen before.
And what's more, I'm really lucky, because I get to share that with millions of people worldwide.
It's enabling us to get fresh, new images and tell brand new stories.
In Nature's Great Events, a series for the BBC that I did with David Attenborough, we wanted to do just that.
But there's a whole side to their lives that we hardly ever see and had never been filmed.
And the only way to film that is a shoot from the air.
(Video) David Attenborough: Throughout Alaska and British Columbia, thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep.
There is nothing to eat up here, but the conditions were ideal for hibernation.
These mountains are dangerous places, but ultimately the fate of these bear families, and indeed that of all bears around the North Pacific, depends on the salmon.
KB: I love that shot.
I always get goosebumps every time I see it.
That was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera.
But technology alone isn't enough.
And that sequence was especially difficult.
We had to go back the following year, all the way back to the remote parts of Alaska.
And we hung around with a helicopter for two whole weeks.
And we managed to get that magic moment.
For a filmmaker, new technology is an amazing tool, but the other thing that really, really excites me is when new species are discovered.
Now, when I heard about one animal, I knew we had to get it for my next series, Untamed Americas, for National Geographic.
In 2005, a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador.
And what was amazing about that discovery is that it also solved the mystery of what pollinated a unique flower.
It depends solely on the bat.
(Video) Narrator: The tube-lipped nectar bat.
A pool of delicious nectar lies at the bottom of each flower's long flute.
Necessity is the mother of evolution.
(Music) This two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue, the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world.
(Applause) KB: What a tongue.
We filmed it by cutting a tiny little hole in the base of the flower and using a camera that could slow the action by 40 times.
Now people often ask me, "Where's your favorite place on the planet?"
And the truth is I just don't have one.
There are so many wonderful places.
And one remote location -- I first went there as a backpacker; I've been back several times for filming, most recently for Untamed Americas -- it's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America, and it's the most otherworldly place I know.
But at 15,000 feet, it's tough.
And that pounding head just feels like a constant hangover.
But the advantage of that wonderful thin atmosphere is that it enables you to see the stars in the heavens with amazing clarity.
(Video) Narrator: Some 1,500 miles south of the tropics, between Chile and Bolivia, the Andes completely change.
It's called the Altiplano, or "high plains" -- a place of extremes and extreme contrasts.
Where deserts freeze and waters boil.
More like Mars than Earth, it seems just as hostile to life.
The stars themselves -- at 12,000 feet, the dry, thin air makes for perfect stargazing.
Some of the world's astronomers have telescopes nearby.
But just looking up with the naked eye, you really don't need one.
(Music) (Applause) KB: Thank you so much for letting me share some images of our magnificent, wonderful Earth.
Thank you for letting me share that with you.
(Applause)
I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.
Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home.
I'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it's made out of.
Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles.
(Laughter) They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door.
They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty, they're bouncing around a lot.
And they crash straight into the front door of your home.
Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places.
Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light.
The light is shining down on Cookie Monster.
Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse.
It's a talking horse.
You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose.
You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth.
In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears.
She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table, and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time."
And then, follow me into your kitchen.
In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road, and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz," hand-in-hand, skipping straight towards you.
I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City.
It's called the United States Memory Championship.
And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist, expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants.
(Laughter) They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once.
They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest.
And I started talking to a few of the competitors.
This is a guy called Ed Cook, who had come over from England, where he had one of the best-trained memories.
And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?"
In fact, I have just an average memory.
We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books."
And I said, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?"
And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist.
Do you know Britney Spears?"
"Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television.
It will prove to the world that anybody can do this."
I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?"
And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me.
And I met a host of really interesting people.
His memory was so bad, that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing.
And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are.
At the other end of the spectrum, I met this guy.
This is Kim Peek, he was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man."
We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating.
(Laughter) And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin, in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle Ages.
And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff.
One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.
Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds.
Over the last few millenia, we've invented a series of technologies -- from the alphabet, to the scroll, to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone -- that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they've also changed us.
They've changed us culturally, and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively.
One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory, is at this totally singular memory contest.
The answer was no.
Are they smarter than the rest of us?
There was, however, one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to.
Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation.
Why?
The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where, every year, somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up.
This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion.
On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered.
(Laughter) Yeah.
And it's well-illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker."
That's his name.
And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker."
Do you remember what it was?"
The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is a baker.
Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird.
Well, the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you.
It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull.
But the common noun "baker" -- we know bakers.
Bakers smell good when they come home from work.
The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests, and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life, is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers -- to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way, so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind.
One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece.
It came to be known as the memory palace.
The story behind its creation goes like this: There was a poet called Simonides, who was attending a banquet.
Kills everybody inside.
Nobody can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were sitting.
Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting.
And he takes the relatives by the hand, and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage.
What Simonides figured out at that moment, is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers, and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.
If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story that I just told you about Simonides, chances are you would have a tough time with it.
The idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye, and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember -- the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it's likely to be.
This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises.
So how does this work?
Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech, and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it, if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.
(Laughter) What you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house.
And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook.
And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell.
And you'd go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you'd have some friends to help you remember that.
This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches -- not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic.
In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" -- that comes from the Greek word "topos," which means "place."
The phrase "in the first place," that's like "in the first place of your memory palace."
And I went to a few more of these memory contests, and I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers.
But there was a problem.
The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event.
(Laughter) Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs -- I mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their temples.
I know that there's incredible stuff happening in these people's minds, but I don't have access to it.
And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit.
And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes every morning, before I sat down with my New York Times, just trying to remember something.
Maybe it was a poem, maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market.
What you're doing, is you're trying to get better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious, and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye.
This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit.
(Laughter) It's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy.
I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier, and I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism.
I won the contest -- (Laughter) which really wasn't supposed to happen.
(Applause) Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point.
These are just tricks.
They work because they're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work.
And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works.
We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case.
Great memories are learned.
At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention.
The memory palace, these memory techniques -- they're just shortcuts.
In fact, they're not even really shortcuts.
They work because they make you work.
They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don't normally walk around exercising.
But there actually are no shortcuts.
This is how stuff is made memorable.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Back in the 1980s, actually, I gave my first talk at TED, and I brought some of the very, very first public demonstrations of virtual reality ever to the TED stage.
And at that time, we knew that we were facing a knife-edge future where the technology we needed, the technology we loved, could also be our undoing.
We knew that if we thought of our technology as a means to ever more power, if it was just a power trip, we'd eventually destroy ourselves.
That's what happens when you're on a power trip and nothing else.
So the idealism of digital culture back then was all about starting with that recognition of the possible darkness and trying to imagine a way to transcend it with beauty and creativity.
We have to create a culture around technology that is so beautiful, so meaningful, so deep, so endlessly creative, so filled with infinite potential that it draws us away from committing mass suicide."
So we talked about extinction as being one and the same as the need to create an alluring, infinitely creative future.
In the case of virtual reality -- well, the way I used to talk about it is that it would be something like what happened when people discovered language.
With language came new adventures, new depth, new meaning, new ways to connect, new ways to coordinate, new ways to imagine, new ways to raise children, and I imagined, with virtual reality, we'd have this new thing that would be like a conversation but also like waking-state intentional dreaming.
We called it post-symbolic communication, because it would be like just directly making the thing you experienced instead of indirectly making symbols to refer to things.
It was a beautiful vision, and it's one I still believe in, and yet, haunting that beautiful vision was the dark side of how it could also turn out.
And I suppose I could mention from one of the very earliest computer scientists, whose name was Norbert Wiener, and he wrote a book back in the '50s, from before I was even born, called "The Human Use of Human Beings."
And in the book, he described the potential to create a computer system that would be gathering data from people and providing feedback to those people in real time in order to put them kind of partially, statistically, in a Skinner box, in a behaviorist system, and he has this amazing line where he says, one could imagine, as a thought experiment -- and I'm paraphrasing, this isn't a quote -- one could imagine a global computer system where everybody has devices on them all the time, and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did, and the whole population is subject to a degree of behavior modification.
And such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems.
And then he says, but this is only a thought experiment, and such a future is technologically infeasible.
So -- (Applause) I believe that we made a very particular mistake, and it happened early on, and by understanding the mistake we made, we can undo it.
It happened in the '90s, and going into the turn of the century, and here's what happened.
Early digital culture, and indeed, digital culture to this day, had a sense of, I would say, lefty, socialist mission about it, that unlike other things that have been done, like the invention of books, everything on the internet must be purely public, must be available for free, because if even one person cannot afford it, then that would create this terrible inequity.
Now of course, there's other ways to deal with that.
If books cost money, you can have public libraries.
But we were thinking, no, no, no, this is an exception.
This must be pure public commons, that's what we want.
And so that spirit lives on.
You can experience it in designs like the Wikipedia, for instance, many others.
But at the same time, we also believed, with equal fervor, in this other thing that was completely incompatible, which is we loved our tech entrepreneurs.
We loved Steve Jobs; we loved this Nietzschean myth of the techie who could dent the universe.
Right?
So you have these two different passions, for making everything free and for the almost supernatural power of the tech entrepreneur.
How do you celebrate entrepreneurship when everything's free?
Well, there was only one solution back then, which was the advertising model.
And so therefore, Google was born free, with ads, Facebook was born free, with ads.
Now in the beginning, it was cute, like with the very earliest Google.
But there's thing called Moore's law that makes the computers more and more efficient and cheaper.
We actually have universities where people study them, and they get better and better.
And what started out as advertising really can't be called advertising anymore.
It turned into behavior modification, just as Norbert Wiener had worried it might.
And so I can't call these things social networks anymore.
I have dear friends at these companies, sold a company to Google, even though I think it's one of these empires.
I don't think this is a matter of bad people who've done a bad thing.
I think this is a matter of a globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake, rather than a wave of evil.
So with behaviorism, you give the creature, whether it's a rat or a dog or a person, little treats and sometimes little punishments as feedback to what they do.
So if you have an animal in a cage, it might be candy and electric shocks.
But if you have a smartphone, it's not those things, it's symbolic punishment and reward.
Pavlov, one of the early behaviorists, demonstrated the famous principle.
You could train a dog to salivate just with the bell, just with the symbol.
So on social networks, social punishment and social reward function as the punishment and reward.
And we all know the feeling of these things.
Or the punishment: "Oh my God, they don't like me, maybe somebody else is more popular, oh my God."
So you have those two very common feelings, and they're doled out in such a way that you get caught in this loop.
As has been publicly acknowledged by many of the founders of the system, everybody knew this is what was going on.
But here's the thing: traditionally, in the academic study of the methods of behaviorism, there have been comparisons of positive and negative stimuli.
In this setting, a commercial setting, there's a new kind of difference that has kind of evaded the academic world for a while, and that difference is that whether positive stimuli are more effective than negative ones in different circumstances, the negative ones are cheaper.
So what I mean by that is it's much easier to lose trust than to build trust.
It takes a long time to build love.
Now the customers of these behavior modification empires are on a very fast loop.
They're almost like high-frequency traders.
They're getting feedbacks from their spends or whatever their activities are if they're not spending, and they see what's working, and then they do more of that.
Those are the ones who get amplified by the system.
And so this is the dilemma we've gotten ourselves into.
The alternative is to turn back the clock, with great difficulty, and remake that decision.
You'd pay for search, you'd pay for social networking.
Around this same time that companies like Google and Facebook were formulating their free idea, a lot of cyber culture also believed that in the future, televisions and movies would be created in the same way, kind of like the Wikipedia.
But then, companies like Netflix, Amazon, HBO, said, "Actually, you know, subscribe. We'll give you give you great TV."
And it worked!
So sometimes when you pay for stuff, things get better.
We can imagine a hypothetical -- (Applause) We can imagine a hypothetical world of "peak social media."
It could mean when you want to get factual information, there's not a bunch of weird, paranoid conspiracy theories.
Ah.
I dream of it. I believe it's possible.
I'm certain it's possible.
And I'm certain that the companies, the Googles and the Facebooks, would actually do better in this world.
I don't believe we need to punish Silicon Valley.
It's Google and Facebook.
(Laughter) And I love you guys.
They're in the same trap as their users, and you can't run a big corporation that way.
So this is ultimately totally in the benefit of the shareholders and other stakeholders of these companies.
It's a win-win solution.
It'll just take some time to figure it out.
(Laughter) I don't believe our species can survive unless we fix this.
We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.
(Applause) (Applause ends) In the meantime, if the companies won't change, delete your accounts, OK?
(Laughter) (Applause) That's enough for now.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
So what I want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it.
But to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is.
The 404 page is that.
It's that broken experience on the Web.
It's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it can't find it.
Because it's the feeling of a broken relationship.
And that's where it's actually also interesting to think about, where does 404 come from?
(Laughter) Yes.
But these things are everywhere.
What a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks.
And that's not a good experience when you're used to experiences like this.
You can get on your Kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone.
A 404 page is not what you're looking for.
Trying to think about how a 404 felt, and it would be like if you went to Starbucks and there's the guy behind the counter and you're over there and there's no skim milk.
And you say, "Hey, could you bring the skim milk?"
And you're like, "Oh, I didn't want to see that."
(Laughter) I mean, I've heard about that.
So where this comes into play and why this is important is I head up a technology incubator, and we had eight startups sitting around there.
And those startups are focused on what they are, not what they're not, until one day Athletepath, which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes, found this video.
(Video) Guy: Joey!
They took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place.
Because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404.
(Laughter) (Applause) So this turned into a contest.
Dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page.
It turned into a 24-hour contest.
At 4:04 the next day, we gave out $404 in cash.
And what they learned was that those little things, done right, actually matter, and that well-designed moments can build brands.
So you take a look out in the real world, and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself.
This is an error page, but what if this error page was also an opportunity?
So it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be.
Because back to the whole relationship issue, what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you're not, or it can remind me of why I should love you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Mosquitoes.
That awful buzzing sound at night around your ears that drives you absolutely crazy?
In fact, there's only one good thing I can think of when it gets to mosquitoes.
When they fly into our bedroom at night, they prefer to bite my wife.
And the answer is smell, the smell of her body.
And since we all smell different and produce chemicals on our skin that either attract or repel mosquitoes, some of us are just more attractive than others.
So my wife smells nicer than I do, or I just stink more than she does.
Either way, mosquitoes find us in the dark by sniffing us out. They smell us.
And during my PhD, I wanted to know exactly what chemicals from our skin African malaria mosquitoes use to track us down at night.
And this was not going to be an easy task.
And therefore we set up various experiments.
Because half the world's population runs the risk of contracting a killer disease like malaria through a simple mosquito bite.
Every 30 seconds, somewhere on this planet, a child dies of malaria, and Paul Levy this morning, he was talking about the metaphor of the 727 crashing into the United States.
Well, in Africa, we have the equivalent of seven jumbo 747s crashing every day.
But perhaps if we can attract these mosquitoes to traps, bait it with our smell, we may be able to stop transmission of disease.
Now, solving this puzzle was not an easy thing, because we produce hundreds of different chemicals on the skin, but we undertook some remarkable experiments that managed us to resolve this puzzle very quickly indeed.
First, we observed that not all mosquito species bite on the same part of the body.
So we set up an experiment where we put a naked volunteer in a large cage, (Laughter) and in that cage, we released mosquitoes to see where they were biting on the body of that person.
On the left here you see the bites by the Dutch malaria mosquito on this person.
They had a very strong preference for biting on the face.
In contrast, the African malaria mosquito had a very strong preference for biting the ankles and feet of this person.
(Applause) And so we started focusing on the smell of feet ...
And this triggered us to do a remarkable experiment.
We tried, with a tiny little piece of Limburger cheese, which smells badly after feet, to attract African malaria mosquitoes.
In fact, it worked so well that now we have a synthetic mixture of the aroma of Limburger cheese that we're using in Tanzania and has been shown there to be two to three times more attractive to mosquitoes than humans.
Limburg, be proud of your cheese, as it is now used in the fight against malaria.
(Applause) That's the cheese, just to show you.
It's about man's best friend. It's about dogs.
And I will show you how we can use dogs in the fight against malaria.
One of the best ways of killing mosquitoes is not to wait until they fly around like adults and bite people and transmit disease.
Why?
They can't escape from that water.
And they're accessible.
You can actually walk up to that pool and you can kill them there, right?
So the problem that we face with this is that, throughout the landscape, all these pools of water with the larvae, they are scattered all over the place, which makes it very hard for an inspector like this to actually find all these breeding sites and treat them with insecticides.
Until we realized that just like us -- we have a unique smell -- mosquito larvae also have a very unique smell.
And then you see the dog. It's called Tweed. It's a border collie.
He's examining these holes and now he's got it already.
He's going back to check the control holes again, but he's coming back to the first one, and now he's locking into that smell, which means that now, we can use dogs with these inspectors to much better find the breeding sites of mosquitoes in the field, and therefore have a much bigger impact on malaria.
This lady is Ellen van der Zweep.
She's one of the best dog trainers in the world, and she believes that we can do a lot more.
Since we also know that people that carry malaria parasites smell different compared to people that are uninfected, she's convinced that we can train dogs to find people that carry the parasite.
That means that in a population where malaria has gone down all the way and there's few people remaining with parasites, that the dogs can find these people, we can treat them with antimalarial drugs and give the final blow to malaria.
Man's best friend in the fight against malaria.
My third story is perhaps even more remarkable ...
(Audience cheers) Yeah.
It's a tablet.
it does miracles.
Thank you.
Here in this box, I have a cage with several hundred hungry female mosquitoes ...
(Laughter) Just kidding, just kidding.
(Laughter) What I'm going to show you is, I'm gonna stick my arm into it and I will show you how quickly they will bite.
Don't worry, I do this all the time in the lab.
I'm sticking in my arm, I'm giving them a big juicy blood meal, I'm shaking them off, and we follow them through time to see these mosquitoes get very, very sick indeed, here shown in fast motion.
And three hours later, what we see at the bottom of the cage is dead mosquitoes ...
very dead mosquitoes.
They don't kill us. We kill them.
(Applause) Now -- (Laughter) Maastricht, be prepared.
We can actually use this to contain outbreaks of mosquito-born diseases, of epidemics, right?
And better still, imagine what would happen if, in a very large area, everyone would take these drugs, for just three weeks.
That would give us an opportunity to actually eliminate malaria as a disease.
So cheese, dogs and a pill to kill mosquitoes.
for the betterment of mankind, but especially for her, so that she can grow up in a world without malaria.
This was the first title I thought of for this talk, "Beethoven as Bill Gates."
Does that make sense?
Maybe not. OK, so think about that.
Being an educator, I am going to tell you the story, and then you'll figure it out for yourselves.
The good news about this is the first 10,000 years just sailed by.
And this goes on for a very long time.
So, by the 18th century, we're still basically doing this.
We have a class of experts, professionals, who play very expensive instruments, for the most part, things like the organ, complicated instruments, and if you wanted to hear music in the 18th century, it was live.
You had to go to a concert.
You had to go to church, you had to go to a civic event, you had to go hear somebody making music live.
So, music always involved social interaction.
There were no headphones you could put on, there was no iPhone, there was no record player.
The piano was a new technology that really starts to happen in the 18th century, and then it becomes something that you could mass-produce cheaply.
So you can now have an instrument that's not too expensive, that everyone can have one, that you can have at home.
Remember Gutenberg and the other kind of printing?
Music is a little more complicated.
It took a little longer to figure out: How do I create a cheap way to distribute sheet music?
In London, at the time of the American Revolution, there are 12 music shops.
By 1800, there are 30.
So the internet wasn't the first time this happened, because think about what happens when, all of a sudden, you go from "If I want to hear music, I've got to go hear Bach, I've got to go hear Mozart."
That meant you had to actually go hear Mozart.
But if you wanted to hear Mozart or Bach, you had to go to Germany and go hear them.
But that's not true for Beethoven.
And Beethoven figures out that, in fact, there's a new market.
Beethoven is an entrepreneur, not unlike our other friend, Bill Gates.
He's an entrepreneur that figures out, "Hey, I don't have to actually go to London.
I can actually just sell sheet music.
And it can be printed and mass-distributed, and I will be famous everywhere, and everybody else will play my music."
So that changes the experience of music for everybody.
It changes the variety, it changes the global pyramid, it changes all sorts of things.
It creates a new class of musicians, of composers and performers -- there's a division of labor.
If you hire Bach to play for your wedding, guess who shows up?
Bach!
(Laughter) That's what he does for a living, right?
He has no way to expand his business.
But Beethoven does.
Then this happens again.
By the turn of the century, it's an interesting time for music delivery; 100 years later, we get the record player, the gramophone, the player piano.
Now you could buy Rachmaninoff sheet music, but if you wanted to hear Rachmaninoff, you had to actually go to the concert hall.
Not anymore.
Now you can buy a record of Rachmaninoff, or you can buy a player piano and a roll that fits into another kind of recording device.
And later, the radio.
So think about this: you're a band in Texas; you're Doc Ross in Texas, and you've got the Texas big band market, you've got it nailed.
And all of a sudden, there's this new thing called "radio."
And now everybody can hear Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.
All of a sudden, the competition has gone global, just like it does a hundred years later, with the iPod, the internet and digital files and Garage Band, that do all of these things all over again.
So now, maybe we can talk about these two guys.
First of all, both of these guys are entrepreneurs.
But second of all, both of these guys are software designers.
That's what Beethoven does.
(Laughter) That's a piece of hardware.
That's a device that you can use if you have my piece of paper.
It's like those floppy disks; they weren't very useful.
But they're not very useful on their own.
So both Beethoven and Bill Gates are software designers.
What's interesting is that they also both live at a time where the hardware is changing very quickly.
Those of you who are old enough to remember, go back to the '90s, go back to Windows whatever, and remember your joy and your love of Bill Gates, as every time a new software package came out, you had to get a new computer.
When Beethoven started writing music, he had this instrument up on top, with five octaves.
This one's bigger, it's got more pedals, it's louder, it can do more stuff.
When Beethoven starts off, he doesn't have a piano that can do this.
He can't go -- (Musical chords) Can't do that.
It's like sending Bill Gates your fastest, latest computer, because you know he'll use up all the memory.
(Laughter) So in 1803, Érard sends Beethoven a new piano.
So the first thing Beethoven does is, he writes a piece that can do that.
So what do you do?
And you've bought the latest Beethoven piano sonata, and you take it home, and you've got a five-octave piano that was the brand-spanking-new, latest technology last year.
You start playing that new Beethoven piano sonata, and what happens?
Not enough notes!
You run out of room.
So, in fact, Beethoven has the same relationship with his audience that Bill Gates does.
He's a software producer, and he has to deal with the hardware.
And what's interesting about this is that Beethoven was actually smarter than Bill Gates.
So when Beethoven gets his new Érard piano, he's writing his third piano concerto, he goes and he gives a concert, and he and uses all those extra notes.
He has to take the piano with him, because it's the only piano he has in Vienna that has those extra notes.
So he plays the concerto on the piano. It's great.
But he realizes, "Oh, wait. Not everybody has one of these latest things.
So he publishes piano sonatas -- He waits; he delays: for the next 10 years, he still publishes piano sonatas that don't use the extra notes.
He actually waits, because -- This idea of Beethoven?
Everything you know about Beethoven -- basically wrong.
Beethoven was a very clever entrepreneur.
So the music he wrote for the popular market -- not the pieces he was going to play himself, but the piano sonatas -- he limits himself to the amount of keys that you have at home in some part of Southern Italy, where you have last year's piano.
So what are the effects of these disruptions in music technology?
We started off with printing and the piano.
The very first thing that happens is: it redefines the product.
So the product becomes sheet music, becomes a piece of paper that you can then take home.
In the 20th century, it becomes a record, something that you then take home.
In the 21st century, it becomes a digital file.
The nature of the product changes.
Second, there's a division of labor.
If you want to listen to Bach, you've got to go listen to Bach; there's no other way to do this.
It changes expectations of quality.
You've now heard ... -- "I want to go listen to Benny Goodman some more."
You have now a global market.
With Beethoven, you can now play Beethoven at home.
You can't play Mozart at home.
But with Beethoven, you can buy the sheet music, you can go home, you can close the door and play the piano.
Now you have headphones that do the same thing.
With each of these disruptions, it changes the amount of social interaction.
It's a new personalized experience each time.
I can play Beethoven the way I want to.
I can actually personalize the experience now.
There's more consumer choice, the marketplace gets bigger.
The number of titles on sale in those music stores goes up.
But there's also less choice, because in a global pyramid, you can't always tell what you want.
And so marketing starts to come in, and "Who is the flavor of the month?"
One of Haydn and Chopin's biggest worries is that people were going to write fake Chopin and put "Chopin" on it.
Do you think Chopin would have been comforted by the thought, "Hey, 20 percent of the people who buy fake Chopin are more likely to go buy real Chopin"?
I mean -- I don't know.
(Laughter) But Chopin, another clever entrepreneur -- you know what he does?
He publishes his music in Italy, France, Germany and England on the same day, because there's no international copyright, so he's got to have everything published on the same day.
So if you're playing Chopin, the additions from different countries are different on purpose, because he wanted to be able to track who was a pirate.
So, the question is ...
This new technology, it makes more choice for more people, it makes it more global, but it also allows more piracy.
It also allows for people to have a marketing filter.
They have some way to interact that's not always direct.
So the next time somebody says, you know, "Nothing like the internet ever happened."
Well, it's true, but these kinds of disruptions in music technology have happened before.
It changes the nature of the product.
Well, you can still sell novels without books.
But journalism isn't dead.
And so schools have got to think about what we're selling.
But I think that the face-to-face interaction is not going to go away.
There's still something of value here, as we've demonstrated today, because we're at this thing called TED, where we still want to get to know each other.
(Applause)
It's a cognitive illusion that we've been studying in my lab for the past few years, and 80 percent of us have it.
It's our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events.
So we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer, being in a car accident.
We overestimate our longevity, our career prospects.
In short, we're more optimistic than realistic, but we are oblivious to the fact.
Take marriage for example.
In the Western world, divorce rates are about 40 percent.
That means that out of five married couples, two will end up splitting their assets.
But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce, they estimate it at zero percent.
And even divorce lawyers, who should really know better, hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce.
So it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce, but they are more likely to remarry.
In the words of Samuel Johnson, "Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience."
(Laughter) So if we're married, we're more likely to have kids.
This, by the way, is my two-year-old nephew, Guy.
And I just want to make it absolutely clear that he's a really bad example of the optimism bias, because he is in fact uniquely talented.
(Laughter) And I'm not alone.
Out of four British people, three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families.
That's 75 percent.
But only 30 percent said that they thought families in general are doing better than a few generations ago.
And this is a really important point, because we're optimistic about ourselves, we're optimistic about our kids, we're optimistic about our families, but we're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us, and we're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country.
But private optimism about our own personal future remains persistent.
And it doesn't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay, but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so.
Now I'm a scientist, I do experiments.
So to show you what I mean, I'm going to do an experiment here with you.
So I'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics, and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population.
Who here believes they're at the bottom 25 percent?
Okay, that's about 10 people out of 1,500.
Who believes they're at the top 25 percent?
Okay, now do the same for your driving ability.
How attractive are you?
How honest are you?
So most of us put ourselves above average on most of these abilities.
Now this is statistically impossible.
(Laughter) But if we believe we're better than the other guy, well that means that we're more likely to get that promotion, to remain married, because we're more social, more interesting.
And it's a global phenomenon.
The optimism bias has been observed in many different countries -- in Western cultures, in non-Western cultures, in females and males, in kids, in the elderly.
It's quite widespread.
But the question is, is it good for us?
So some people say no.
Some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations.
I think the logic goes something like this: If we don't expect greatness, if we don't expect to find love and be healthy and successful, well we're not going to be disappointed when these things don't happen.
And if we're not disappointed when good things don't happen, and we're pleasantly surprised when they do, we will be happy.
So it's a very good theory, but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons.
Number one: Whatever happens, whether you succeed or you fail, people with high expectations always feel better.
Because how we feel when we get dumped or win employee of the month depends on how we interpret that event.
The psychologists Margaret Marshall and John Brown studied students with high and low expectations.
And they found that when people with high expectations succeed, they attribute that success to their own traits.
"I'm a genius, therefore I got an A, therefore I'll get an A again and again in the future."
When they failed, it wasn't because they were dumb, but because the exam just happened to be unfair.
Next time they will do better.
People with low expectations do the opposite.
So when they failed it was because they were dumb, and when they succeeded it was because the exam just happened to be really easy.
Next time reality would catch up with them.
He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately, but to get a kiss in three days.
They were willing to pay extra in order to wait.
Now they weren't willing to wait a year or 10 years; no one wants an aging celebrity.
But three days seemed to be the optimum amount.
Well if you get the kiss now, it's over and done with.
This is, by the way, why people prefer Friday to Sunday.
It's a really curious fact, because Friday is a day of work and Sunday is a day of pleasure, so you'd assume that people will prefer Sunday, but they don't.
It's not because they really, really like being in the office and they can't stand strolling in the park or having a lazy brunch.
We know that, because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week, surprise, surprise, Saturday comes in at first, then Friday, then Sunday.
On Sunday, the only thing you can look forward to is the work week.
So optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future, more strolls in the park.
In fact, without the optimism bias, we would all be slightly depressed.
They're actually more realistic than healthy individuals.
But individuals with severe depression, they have a pessimistic bias.
So they tend to expect the future to be worse than it ends up being.
So optimism changes subjective reality.
The way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it.
But it also changes objective reality.
It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And that is the third reason why lowering your expectations will not make you happy.
Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success.
Optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics.
And maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health.
If we expect the future to be bright, stress and anxiety are reduced.
So all in all, optimism has lots of benefits.
But the question that was really confusing to me was, how do we maintain optimism in the face of reality?
As an neuroscientist, this was especially confusing, because according to all the theories out there, when your expectations are not met, you should alter them.
But this is not what we find.
We asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on.
So, for example, what is your likelihood of suffering from cancer?
And then we told them the average likelihood of someone like them to suffer these misfortunes.
So cancer, for example, is about 30 percent.
And then we asked them again, "How likely are you to suffer from cancer?"
What we wanted to know was whether people will take the information that we gave them to change their beliefs.
And indeed they did -- but mostly when the information we gave them was better than what they expected.
So for example, if someone said, "My likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 50 percent," and we said, "Hey, good news.
The average likelihood is only 30 percent," the next time around they would say, "Well maybe my likelihood is about 35 percent."
So they learned quickly and efficiently.
But if someone started off saying, "My average likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 10 percent," and we said, "Hey, bad news.
The average likelihood is about 30 percent," the next time around they would say, "Yep. Still think it's about 11 percent."
(Laughter) So it's not that they didn't learn at all -- they did -- but much, much less than when we gave them positive information about the future.
And it's not that they didn't remember the numbers that we gave them; everyone remembers that the average likelihood of cancer is about 30 percent and the average likelihood of divorce is about 40 percent.
But they didn't think that those numbers were related to them.
What this means is that warning signs such as these may only have limited impact.
What I wanted to know was what was going on inside the human brain that prevented us from taking these warning signs personally.
But at the same time, when we hear that the housing market is hopeful, we think, "Oh, my house is definitely going to double in price."
To try and figure that out, I asked the participants in the experiment to lie in a brain imaging scanner.
And using a method called functional MRI, we were able to identify regions in the brain that were responding to positive information.
One of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus.
So if someone said, "My likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent," and we said, "Hey, good news.
On the other side of the brain, the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news.
And here's the thing: it wasn't doing a very good job.
The more optimistic you were, the less likely this region was to respond to unexpected negative information.
So we wanted to know, could we change this?
Could we alter people's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions?
And what he's doing is he's passing a small magnetic pulse through the skull of the participant in our study into their inferior frontal gyrus.
After that everything goes back to normal, I assure you.
(Laughter) So let's see what happens.
So if I was to test all of you now, this is the amount that you would learn more from good news relative to bad news.
We made people more biased in the way that they process information.
Then we interfered with the brain region that we found to integrate good news in this task, and the optimism bias disappeared.
And at this point we stopped and we asked ourselves, would we want to shatter the optimism illusion into tiny little bits?
But there are, of course, pitfalls, and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them.
Take for example this email I recieved from a firefighter here in California.
He says, "Fatality investigations for firefighters often include 'We didn't think the fire was going to do that,' even when all of the available information was there to make safe decisions."
This captain is going to use our findings on the optimism bias to try to explain to the firefighters why they think the way they do, to make them acutely aware of this very optimistic bias in humans.
So unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior, to financial collapse, to faulty planning.
The British government, for example, has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects.
So they have adjusted the 2012 Olympic budget for the optimism bias.
And by the way, when I asked him about his own likelihood of divorce, he said he was quite sure it was zero percent.
So what we would really like to do, is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful, benefiting from the many fruits of optimism.
The key here really is knowledge.
These have to be identified by scientific investigation.
But the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion.
And this is good because it means we should be able to strike a balance, to come up with plans and rules to protect ourselves from unrealistic optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful.
Because if you're one of these pessimistic penguins up there who just does not believe they can fly, you certainly never will.
Because to make any kind of progress, we need to be able to imagine a different reality, and then we need to believe that that reality is possible.
But if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best, you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground.
But if you're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly, but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things don't work out exactly as you had planned, you will soar like an eagle, even if you're just a penguin.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So it turns out that mathematics is a very powerful language.
It has generated considerable insight in physics, in biology and economics, but not that much in the humanities and in history.
I think there's a belief that it's just impossible, that you cannot quantify the doings of mankind, that you cannot measure history.
But I don't think that's right.
So my collaborator Erez and I were considering the following fact: that two kings separated by centuries will speak a very different language.
That's a powerful historical force.
So the king of England, Alfred the Great, will use a vocabulary and grammar that is quite different from the king of hip hop, Jay-Z.
So Erez and I wanted to know more about that.
So we paid attention to a particular grammatical rule, past-tense conjugation.
So you just add "ed" to a verb at the end to signify the past.
"Today I walk. Yesterday I walked."
But some verbs are irregular.
"Yesterday I thought."
Now what's interesting about that is irregular verbs between Alfred and Jay-Z have become more regular.
Like the verb "to wed" that you see here has become regular.
So Erez and I followed the fate of over 100 irregular verbs through 12 centuries of English language, and we saw that there's actually a very simple mathematical pattern that captures this complex historical change, namely, if a verb is 100 times more frequent than another, it regularizes 10 times slower.
Now in some cases math can even help explain, or propose explanations for, historical forces.
So here Steve Pinker and I were considering the magnitude of wars during the last two centuries.
There's actually a well-known regularity to them where the number of wars that are 100 times deadlier is 10 times smaller.
So there are 30 wars that are about as deadly as the Six Days War, but there's only four wars that are 100 times deadlier -- like World War I.
So what kind of historical mechanism can produce that?
What's the origin of this?
So Steve and I, through mathematical analysis, propose that there's actually a very simple phenomenon at the root of this, which lies in our brains.
For instance, committing 10,000 soldiers to the next battle sounds like a lot.
It's relatively enormous if you've already committed 1,000 soldiers previously.
So you see that because of the way we perceive quantities, as the war drags on, the number of soldiers committed to it and the casualties will increase not linearly -- like 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 -- but exponentially -- 10,000, later 20,000, later 40,000.
So here mathematics is able to link a well-known feature of the individual mind with a long-term historical pattern that unfolds over centuries and across continents.
So these types of examples, today there are just a few of them, but I think in the next decade they will become commonplace.
The reason for that is that the historical record is becoming digitized at a very fast pace.
So there's about 130 million books that have been written since the dawn of time.
Companies like Google have digitized many of them -- above 20 million actually.
And when the stuff of history is available in digital form, it makes it possible for a mathematical analysis to very quickly and very conveniently review trends in our history and our culture.
So I think in the next decade, the sciences and the humanities will come closer together to be able to answer deep questions about mankind.
And I think that mathematics will be a very powerful language to do that.
It will be able to reveal new trends in our history, sometimes to explain them, and maybe even in the future to predict what's going to happen.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'd like you to imagine, just for a moment, that your eyelashes grew inwards instead of outwards, so that every time you blinked, they would scrape the front of your eyeballs, damaging the corneas, so that slowly and painfully, you went blind.
Well, that's what happens to a person who has trachoma.
Now, this little boy here, Pamelo, from Zambia, he has trachoma.
And if we don't do anything, he's going to go blind.
Trachoma is a curious disease.
It's a bacterial infection that's passed from person to person and by flies.
The repeated infection will scar your eyelids so that they contract and they turn inside out.
It particularly affects women, because they have the contact with children.
So what you'll often see in places like Ethiopia are girls who have tweezers like this around their necks, and they use them to pluck out their eyelashes.
There are around two million people in the world who are blind or visually impaired because of trachoma.
And we believe there may be as many as 200 million people who are at risk.
Now, it's a very old disease.
What you can see is a photo of a wall of a tomb in Northern Sudan.
A colleague and I were traveling in a very remote village, and we asked an old man to take us down into a little tomb.
One is crying, and you can see there are tweezers next to it.
Simon said to me, "My God, do you think that's trachoma?"
So we sent this picture to the British Museum, and they confirmed that, yes, this is trachoma.
So, thousands of years ago, the ancient Nubians were painting pictures of trachoma on the walls of their tomb.
And the tragedy is that disease is still rampant in that area today.
And the crazy thing is, we know how to stop it.
And what's great is that the trachoma community have all come together to pool their efforts.
We don't compete; we collaborate.
I have to tell you, that's not always the case in my experience in the NGO world.
We've created something called the International Coalition for Trachoma Control.
This strategy is called the SAFE strategy, and it's been approved by the World Health Organization.
The "S" stands for "surgery."
It's very straightforward procedure to turn the eyelids back the right way.
We train nurses to do it, and they use local anesthetics.
Then "A" stands for "antibiotics."
These are donated by Pfizer, who also pay for those drugs to be transported to the port in-country.
From there, they're taken to the villages, where hundreds of thousands of community volunteers will distribute those drugs to the people.
It's called a "dose pole."
This one's from Cameroon.
And you can see it's marked different colors, and you can tell how many pills you should give somebody, based on how tall they are.
"F" stands for "face washing."
In fact, President Carter, he talks about how trachoma was a real problem in Georgia when he was a little boy.
And in the UK, the famous eye hospital, Moorfields, was originally a trachoma hospital.
What we do is teach kids like this how important it is to wash their faces.
And finally, "E" stands for "environment," where we help the communities build latrines, and we teach them to separate their animals from their living quarters in order to reduce the fly population.
And we do, because a few years ago, Sightsavers led an incredible program called the Global Trachoma Mapping Project.
And from that, we were able to build a map that showed us where the disease was.
Now, this is a very high-level map that shows you which countries had a problem with trachoma.
And you may ask me, "Well, does this strategy actually work?"
Yes, it does.
This map shows you the progress that we've made to date.
The green countries believe they've already eliminated trachoma, and they have either been through or are in the process of having that validated by the WHO.
Countries in yellow have the money they need, they have the resources to eliminate trachoma.
And we're quite concerned, though, that the progress to date may stall.
So when we were talking to the Audacious ideas guys, we asked ourselves: If we really, really pushed ourselves over the next four or five years and we had the money, what do we think we could achieve?
Well, we believe that we can eliminate trachoma in 12 African countries and across the Americas and all across the Pacific.
And we can make significant progress in two countries which have the highest burden of the disease, which is Ethiopia and Nigeria.
And in doing all of that, we can leverage more than two billion dollars' worth of donated drugs.
And there, you can see progress in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
Now, yes, there are some countries that are still red.
These are mainly countries which are in conflict -- places like Yemen, South Sudan -- where it's very difficult to work.
And we also have the relationships with the governments so that we can make sure that our program is coordinated with other disease-control programs, so that we can be efficient.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we could do this?
But before I finish, I just want to share with you some words from the founder of Sightsavers, a guy called Sir John Wilson.
And he said, "People don't go blind by the million.
They go blind one by one."
And in the excitement of being able to say we've got rid of trachoma for the whole country, let's not forget that, actually, this is a devastating disease that destroys the lives of individual people.
She had had trachoma for as long as she could remember.
And a couple of months before I met her, she'd had the operation.
It's no exaggeration to say that this had totally transformed her life.
We'd saved the sight that she had left, and she was free of pain.
She could work, she could socialize.
And she said to me, "I have my life back."
And it was impossible not to be moved by her story.
But this is not one of them.
This is something that we can solve.
And we can ensure that kids like this can grow up free from the fear of trachoma.
So thank you.
(Applause)
We've got a big problem on our hands with global warming.
When I leave this stage today, I don't want you to have hope.
You're the first audience to hear it.
We are going to launch a rocket.
And on that rocket will be a satellite.
And that satellite will collect data about pollution that is warming the planet.
We will put that data in the hands of people who can make simple fixes that will change the course of global warming in our lifetime.
First, let me introduce myself, I'm Fred, I've been an environmentalist since I was a kid, when I watched the fish and the frogs in my neighborhood pond die from a chemical spill.
That bothered me.
Later, a professor inspired me to think about environmentalism differently.
How the best solutions come from answering people's aspirations for prosperity, things like being safe and healthy and thriving in this world.
So I joined the Environmental Defense Fund to build those kind of solutions.
You see, there's something about climate change that we didn't grasp just a decade ago.
The world was so focused on carbon dioxide that we overlooked another important gas.
We didn't appreciate methane.
Methane pollution causes one quarter of the global warming that we're experiencing right now.
Pound for pound, its immediate impact is far greater than carbon dioxide.
One of the largest sources of methane pollution is the oil and gas industry.
But that's not obvious, because methane is invisible.
Let's take a look at this natural gas storage facility outside of Los Angeles.
Can you see the methane?
We shot this using an infrared camera, at the same spot, exposing one of the worst methane leaks in the history of the United States.
That's a very different picture.
It turns out that natural gas is displacing our dependence on coal, which emits far more carbon dioxide.
But natural gas is mostly methane.
It gets up into the sky and contributes to the disasters that we're now experiencing.
That does not have to happen.
But nobody had paid much attention to it until we launched a nationwide study to understand the problem.
We used drones, planes, helicopters, even Google Street View cars.
It turns out there's far more of this methane pollution than what the government is reporting.
It also turns out that when we find where the gas is being vented and leaked, most of those sources can be fixed easily and inexpensively, saving the gas that would have otherwise been wasted.
And finally, we learn that when you put information like that into people's hands, they act.
Leading companies replaced valves and tightened loose-fitting pipes.
Colorado became the first state in the nation to limit methane pollution; California followed suit, and the public joined in.
Tweets started flying -- #cutmethane.
We're doing this because we can't wait for Washington, especially not now.
In fact, we have to take what we've done so far and go higher, to the sky.
The United Stated represents about 10 percent of this pollution.
Remember that rocket I mentioned?
It will launch a compact satellite, called MethaneSAT, to do what no one has been able to do until now: measure methane pollution from oil and gas facilities worldwide, with exacting precision.
Its data stream will allow us to map that pollution, so that everyone can see it.
Then it's all about turning data into action, just as we did in the United States.
Citizens will be empowered to take action; governments will tighten the regulations.
And because all of our data will be free and public, there will be transparency -- we'll all be able to see how much progress is being made and where.
Which brings me to our goal: to cut this methane pollution by 45 percent by 2025.
(Applause) That will have the same near-term impact as shutting down 1,300 coal-fired power plants.
That's one third of all the coal-fired power plants in the world.
The fact that a single satellite can help us put the brakes on global warming is truly remarkable.
But my time is running short, and I promised you a vision of what a critical piece of the solution would look like.
Can you see it?
Can you see how this satellite leverages the best of science and data and technology?
Can you see we're entering a whole new era of innovation that is supercharging progress?
Can you see that it's in our hands?
We've set an aggressive goal of three years till liftoff, and when that satellite is ready, we'll have a launch party.
A literal launch party.
So imagine a blue-sky day, crowds of people, television cameras, kids staring up toward the sky at a thing that will change their future.
I can't wait.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence.
I'm going to start way back in the third grade at Oakdale School in Barberton, Ohio.
I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project.
He was making a horse out of the clay our teacher kept under the sink.
And he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin.
And I wonder how often that happens, you know?
And I see that opting out that happens in childhood, and it moves in and becomes more ingrained, even, by the time you get to adult life.
So we see a lot of this.
And eventually, these big-shot executives whip out their BlackBerrys and they say they have to make really important phone calls, and they head for the exits.
And they're just so uncomfortable.
When we track them down and ask them what's going on, they say something like, "I'm just not the creative type."
But we know that's not true.
And they surprise themselves at just how innovative they and their teams really are.
So I've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have, that you don't do things, you're afraid you're going to be judged; if you don't say the right creative thing, you're going to be judged.
And I had a major breakthrough, when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura.
I don't know if you know Albert Bandura, but if you go to Wikipedia, it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history -- you know, like Freud, Skinner, somebody and Bandura.
(Laughter) Bandura is 86 and he still works at Stanford.
And he's just a lovely guy.
So I went to see him, because he's just worked on phobias for a long time, which I'm very interested in.
He had developed this way, this, kind of, methodology, that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time, like, in four hours.
And we talked about snakes -- I don't know why -- we talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia.
And it was really enjoyable, really interesting.
He told me that he'd invite the test subject in, and he'd say, "You know, there's a snake in the next room and we're going to go in there."
To which, he reported, most of them replied, "Hell no! I'm not going in there, certainly if there's a snake in there."
But Bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful.
So he'd take people to this two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was.
Then through a series of steps, he'd move them and they'd be standing in the doorway with the door open, and they'd be looking in there.
And then many more steps later, baby steps, they'd be in the room, they'd have a leather glove like a welder's glove on, and they'd eventually touch the snake.
And when they touched the snake, everything was fine. They were cured.
These people who had lifelong fears of snakes were saying things like, "Look how beautiful that snake is."
And they were holding it in their laps.
Bandura calls this process "guided mastery."
I love that term: guided mastery.
And something else happened.
These people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives.
They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure.
They just gained a new confidence.
And Bandura calls that confidence "self-efficacy," the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do.
Well, meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me, because I realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something that we've seen happen for the last 30 years: that we could take people who had the fear that they weren't creative, and we could take them through a series of steps, kind of like a series of small successes, and they turn fear into familiarity.
That transformation is amazing.
We see it at the d.school all the time.
And they're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as a creative person.
So I thought one of the things I'd do today is take you through and show you what this journey looks like.
To me, that journey looks like Doug Dietz.
He designs large medical imaging equipment.
He's worked for GE, and he's had a fantastic career.
He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use, when he saw a young family, and this little girl.
And that little girl was crying and was terrified.
And Doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with his MRI machine.
And this was really disappointing to Doug, because before this time, he was proud of what he did.
He was saving lives with this machine.
But it really hurt him to see the fear that this machine caused in kids.
About that time, he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes.
He was learning about our process, about design thinking, about empathy, about iterative prototyping.
He would redesign the entire experience of being scanned.
And this is what he came up with.
(Laughter) He turned it into an adventure for the kids.
He painted the walls and he painted the machine, and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids, like children's museum people.
And now when the kid comes, it's an experience.
And they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship.
And when they come, they say, "OK, you're going to go into the pirate ship, but be very still, because we don't want the pirates to find you."
And the hospital and GE were happy, too, because you didn't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time, and they could put more kids through the machine in a day.
So the quantitative results were great.
But Doug's results that he cared about were much more qualitative.
He was with one of the mothers waiting for her child to come out of the scan.
And when the little girl came out of her scan, she ran up to her mother and said, "Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?"
Doug's story takes place in a hospital.
I know a thing or two about hospitals.
A few years ago, I felt a lump on the side of my neck.
It was my turn in the MRI machine.
It was cancer, it was the bad kind.
I was told I had a 40 percent chance of survival.
So while you're sitting around with the other patients, in your pajamas, and everybody's pale and thin -- (Laughter) you know? -- and you're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays, you think of a lot of things.
And I thought a lot about: What was my daughter's life going to be like without me?
I thought a lot about: What was I put on Earth to do?
We'd been working in health and wellness, and K-12, and the developing world.
so there were lots of projects that I could work on.
But then I decided and committed at this point, to the thing I most wanted to do, which was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way.
And if I was going to survive, that's what I wanted to do.
I survived, just so you know.
(Laughter) (Applause) I really believe that when people gain this confidence -- and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO -- that they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives.
We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions.
We see them come up with more interesting -- and just more -- ideas, so they can choose from better ideas.
And they just make better decisions.
So I hope you'll join me on my quest, you as, kind of, thought leaders.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I study ants, and that's because I like to think about how organizations work.
And in particular, how the simple parts of organizations interact to create the behavior of the whole organization.
So, ant colonies are a good example of an organization like that, and there are many others. The web is one.
There are many biological systems like that -- brains, cells, developing embryos.
There are about 10,000 species of ants.
They all live in colonies consisting of one or a few queens, and then all the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers.
And all ant colonies have in common that there's no central control.
Nobody tells anybody what to do.
No ant directs the behavior of any other ant.
And I've been working for the past 20 years on a population of seed-eating ants in southeastern Arizona.
And these ants are called harvester ants because they eat seeds.
This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance.
And they forage maybe for about 20 meters away, gather up the seeds and bring them back to the nest, and store them.
This is just a road. And it's not very big: it's about 250 meters on one side, 400 on the other.
And every colony has a name, which is a number, which is painted on a rock. And I go there every year and look for all the colonies that were alive the year before, and figure out which ones have died, and put all the new ones on the map.
So I want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony.
Ants never make more ants; colonies make more colonies.
And they do that by each year sending out the reproductives -- those are the ones with wings -- on a mating flight.
So every year, on the same day -- and it's a mystery exactly how that happens -- each colony sends out its virgin, unmated queens with wings, and the males, and they all fly to a common place. And they mate.
And this shows a recently virgin queen. Here's her wings.
And she's in the process of mating with this male, and there's another male on top waiting his turn.
And after that, the males all die. That's it for them.
And they will live for 15 or 20 years, continuing to lay eggs using the sperm from that original mating.
Then, as soon as the ants -- the first group of ants -- emerge, they're larvae. Then they're pupae. Then they come out as adult ants.
They go out, they get the food, they dig the nest, and the queen never comes out again.
So this is a one-year-old colony -- this happens to be 536.
There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale.
So this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer.
There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale.
This is a five-year-old colony. This is the nest entrance, here's a pencil for scale.
So it starts out with zero ants, just the founding queen, and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five.
And it stays that size until the queen dies and there's nobody to make more ants, when she's about 15 or 20 years old.
That is, to send more winged queens and males to that year's mating flight.
And I know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because I've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants. (Laughter) So that's not the most fun part of this research, although it's interesting.
How is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change?
So, things happen to an ant colony.
When it rains in the summer, it floods in the desert.
When extra food becomes available -- and this is what everybody knows about picnics -- then extra ants are allocated to collect the food.
And in harvester ants, I divide the tasks of the ants I see just outside the nest into these four categories: where an ant is foraging, when it's out along the foraging trail, searching for food or bringing food back.
Then the nest maintenance workers work inside the nest, and I wanted to say that the nests look a lot like Bill Lishman's house.
It also looks very similar to some of the cave dwellings of the Hopi people that are in that area.
So that's what the midden workers do.
And these four groups are just the ants outside the nest.
So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants.
And when we dig up nests we find they're about as deep as the colony is wide, so about a meter deep for the big old nests.
And then there's another long tunnel and a chamber, where we often find the queen, after eight hours of hacking away at the rock with pickaxes.
The queen's in there somewhere; she just lays eggs.
There's the larvae, and they consume most of the food.
And this is true of most ants -- that the ants you see walking around don't do much eating.
There are nest maintenance workers working throughout the nest.
And curiously, and interestingly, it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing.
But in fact, mostly they're just hanging around in there.
And they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside.
So what's happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they're younger.
And once they belong to the ants that work outside, they never go back down.
They have eyes, they can distinguish between light and dark, but they mostly work by smell.
So just to reinforce that what you might have thought about ant queens isn't true -- you know, even if the queen did have the intelligence to send chemical messages through this whole network of chambers to tell the ants outside what to do, there is no way that such messages could make it in time to see the shifts in the allocation of workers that we actually see outside the nest.
So that's one way that we know the queen isn't directing the behavior of the colony.
So when I first set out to work on task allocation, my first question was, "What's the relationship between the ants doing different tasks?
And instead I wanted to ask, "How are the different task groups interdependent?"
So I did experiments where I changed one thing.
This is what it looks like about 20 minutes later.
And the nest maintenance workers just take all the toothpicks to the outer edge of the nest mound and leave them there.
And what I wanted to know was, "OK, here's a situation where extra nest maintenance workers were recruited -- is this going to have any effect on the workers performing other tasks?"
Then we repeated all those experiments with the ants marked.
And we can mark them individually so we know which ant is which.
We started out with model airplane paint and then we found these wonderful little Japanese markers, and they work really well.
And so just to summarize the result, well it turns out that yes, the different tasks are interdependent.
So, if I change the numbers performing one task, it changes the numbers performing another.
So for example, if I make a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up, then I see fewer ants out foraging.
And this was true for all the pair-wise combinations of tasks.
And the second result, which was surprising to a lot of people, was that ants actually switch tasks.
The same ant doesn't do the same task over and over its whole life.
If there's more patrolling to do -- so I created a disturbance, so extra patrollers were needed -- the nest maintenance workers will switch to patrol.
So foraging acts as a sink, and the ants inside the nest act as a source.
And finally, it looks like each ant is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not.
This process changes with colony age, and it changes like this.
When I do these experiments with older colonies -- so ones that are five years or older -- they're much more consistent from one time to another and much more homeostatic. The worse things get, the more I hassle them, the more they act like undisturbed colonies.
Whereas the young, small colonies -- the two-year-old colonies of just 2,000 ants -- are much more variable.
It could be this year, or this year.
So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony.
Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older.
And the obvious thing that's changing is its size.
And it would change as the colony gets larger.
And what I've found out is that ants are using a network of antennal contact.
They smell with their antennae.
When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony-specific odor.
And what we're learning is that an ant uses the pattern of its antennal contacts, the rate at which it meets ants of other tasks, in deciding what to do.
And so what the message is, is not any message that they transmit from one ant to another, but the pattern.
The pattern itself is the message.
And I'll tell you a little bit more about that.
And we've done experiments that show that that's because the longer an ant stays outside, the more these simple hydrocarbons on its surface change, and so they come to smell different by doing different tasks.
And we've just recently demonstrated this by putting extract of hydrocarbons on little glass beads, and dropping the beads gently down into the nest entrance at the right rate.
And it turns out that ants will respond to the right rate of contact with a glass bead with hydrocarbon extract on it, as they would to contact with real ants.
So I want now to show you a bit of film -- and this will start out, first of all, showing you the nest entrance.
So the idea is that ants are coming in and out of the nest entrance.
They've gone out to do different tasks, and the rate at which they meet as they come in and out of the nest entrance determines, or influences, each ant's decision about whether to go out, and which task to perform.
This is taken through a fiber optics microscope. It's down inside the nest.
In the beginning you see the ants just kind of engaging with the fiber optics microscope.
But the idea is that the ants are in there, and each ant is experiencing a certain flow of ants past it -- a stream of contacts with other ants.
You can also see this in the ants just outside the nest entrance like these.
Each ant, then, as it comes back in, is contacting other ants.
And the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip, are contacting the ants coming in.
It's variable. It's noisy. And, in particular, in two ways.
The first is that the experience of the ant -- of each ant -- can't be very predictable.
Because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside.
So, we do a lot of simulation and modeling, and also experimental work, to try to figure out how those two kinds of noise combine to, in the aggregate, produce the predictable behavior of ant colonies.
Again, I don't want to say that this kind of haphazard pattern of interactions produces a factory that works with the precision and efficiency of clockwork.
But it works pretty well.
Ants have been around for several hundred million years.
They cover the earth, except for Antarctica.
Something that they're doing is clearly successful enough that this pattern of haphazard contacts, in the aggregate, produces something that allows ants to make a lot more ants.
And one of the things that we're studying is how natural selection might be acting now to shape this use of interaction patterns -- this network of interaction patterns -- to perhaps increase the foraging efficiency of ant colonies.
So the one thing, though, that I want you to remember about this is that these patterns of interactions are something that you'd expect to be closely connected to colony size.
The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony -- and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like "I expect to meet another forager every three seconds."
But in a small colony, it's likely to meet fewer foragers, just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet.
So this is the kind of rule that, as the colony develops and gets older and larger, will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain.
It's a diagram of the visual system.
Two eyes at the bottom, optic nerve flowing out from the back.
There's a very large nose that doesn't seem to be connected to anything in particular.
And if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system, you'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years.
And that's because today we can see what's inside of the brain, rather than just looking at its overall shape.
Imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard, a mouse, a screen.
You want to be able to open it up, crack it open, look at the wiring inside.
And up until a little more than a century ago, nobody was able to do that with the brain.
Nobody had had a glimpse of the brain's wiring.
And that's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it, put it under even a very powerful microscope, there's nothing there.
It's gray, formless.
There's no structure. It won't tell you anything.
And this all changed in the late 19th century.
Suddenly, new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring.
So what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the Golgi stain.
And it works in a very particular way.
Instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue, it somehow only stains about one percent of them.
If everything had been labeled, nothing would have been visible.
So somehow it shows what's there.
Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience, applied this Golgi stain, which yields data which looks like this, and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell, the neuron.
And if you're thinking of the brain as a computer, this is the transistor.
And very quickly Cajal realized that neurons don't operate alone, but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer.
Today, a century later, when researchers want to visualize neurons, they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them.
And there's several ways of doing this.
But one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein.
Now green fluorescent protein, which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish, is very useful.
Because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell, that cell will glow green -- or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein, you get a cell to glow many different colors.
And so coming back to the brain, this is from a genetically engineered mouse called "Brainbow."
And it's so called, of course, because all of these neurons are glowing different colors.
Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons, molecules, rather than the entire cell.
And there's several ways of doing this, but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies.
But it turns out that they're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules, like, for example, the coat protein of a virus that's invading the body.
And researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain, recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually.
And a lot of the images I've been showing you here are very beautiful, but they're also very powerful.
They have great explanatory power.
This, for example, is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain.
And you've heard of serotonin, of course, in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety.
You've heard of SSRIs, which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases.
And in order to understand how serotonin works, it's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is.
And antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question.
They were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason, or in order to detect the coat protein of an invading virus, for example.
And instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch, there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Twelve years ago, I was in the street writing my name to say, "I exist."
Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say, "They exist."
I asked a question last year: Can art change the world?
Well let me tell you, in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year, because the Arab Spring is still spreading, the Eurozone has collapsed ... what else?
So there has been a lot of change.
So when I had my TED wish last year, I said, look, I'm going to switch my concept.
This is Inside Out.
And we keep sending more every day.
This is the size.
This one was from Haiti.
When I launched my wish last year, hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us.
But I say it has to be under the conditions I've always worked: no credit, no logos, no sponsoring.
A week later, a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world.
These are the people I want to talk about to you today.
Two weeks after my speech, in Tunisia, hundreds of portraits were made.
Boom! This is what happened.
Slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country.
Actually, that photo was pasted in a police station, and what you see on the ground are ID cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police.
Russia. Chad wanted to fight against homophobia in Russia.
He went with his friends in front of every Russian embassy in Europe and stood there with the photos to say, "We have rights."
Karachi, Pakistan.
Sharmeen is actually here.
She organized a TEDx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town.
And I want to thank her today.
North Dakota. Standing Rock Nation, in this Turtle Island, [unclear name] from the Dakota Lakota tribe wanted to show that the Native Americans are still here.
The seventh generation are still fighting for their rights.
He pasted up portraits all over his reservation.
Each time I get a wall in New York, I use his photos to continue spreading the project.
Juarez: You've heard of the border -- one of the most dangerous borders in the world.
Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border.
Do you know what it takes to do this?
People, energy, make the glue, organize the team.
It was amazing.
There are tons of school projects.
Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools.
Education is so essential.
There should be even more schools doing this kind of project.
Of course we wanted to go back to Israel and Palestine.
So we went there with a truck. This is a photobooth truck.
This is march, the 450,000 march -- beginning of September.
They were all holding their photo as a statement.
It's everywhere.
Come on, don't tell me that people aren't ready for peace out there.
These projects took thousands of actions in one year, making hundreds of thousands of people participating, creating millions of views.
This is the biggest global art participatory project that's going on.
So back to the question, "Can art change the world?"
Maybe not in one year. That's the beginning.
But maybe we should change the question.
Can art change people's lives?
From what I've seen this year, yes.
And you know what? It's just the beginning.
Let's turn the world inside out together.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, I'm going to start off with kind of the buzzkill a little bit.
Now, there was nothing particularly special about 2010, because, on average, 31 and a half million people are displaced by natural disasters every single year.
Now, usually when people hear statistics or stats like that, you start thinking about places like Haiti or other kind of exotic or maybe even impoverished areas, but it happens right here in the United States every single year.
Last year alone, 99 federally declared disasters were on file with FEMA, from Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Central Texas wildfires that just happened recently.
So obviously there's a massive housing gap, and this really upset me, because academia tells you after a major disaster, there's typically about an 18-month time frame to -- we kinda recover, start the recovery process, but what most people don't realize is that on average it takes 45 to 60 days or more for the infamous FEMA trailers to even begin to show up.
This actually became my creative obsession.
So I started sketching.
Now, my obsession ended up driving me to create full-size prototypes in my own backyard — (Laughter) — and actually spending my own personal savings on everything from tooling to patents and a variety of other costs, but in the end I ended up with this modular housing system that can react to any situation or disaster.
It can be put up in any environment, from an asphalt parking lot to pastures or fields, because it doesn't require any special setup or specialty tools.
Now, at the foundation and kind of the core of this whole system is the Exo Housing Unit, which is just the individual shelter module.
And though it's light, light enough that you can actually lift it by hand and move it around, and it actually sleeps four people.
And you can arrange these things as kind of more for encampments and more of a city grid type layout, or you can circle the wagons, essentially, and form these circular pods out of them, which give you this semi-private communal area for people to actually spill out into so they're not actually trapped inside these units.
Now this fundamentally changes the way we respond to disasters, because gone are the horrid conditions inside a sports arena or a gymnasium, where people are crammed on these cots inside.
Now we have instant neighborhoods outside.
So the Exo is designed to be simply, basically like a coffee cup. They can actually stack together so we get extremely efficient transportation and storage out of them.
In fact, 15 Exos can fit on a single semi truck by itself.
This means the Exo can actually be transported and set up faster than any other housing option available today.
The doors can actually swap out, so you can actually put on a rigid panel with a window unit in it for climate control, or a connector module that would allow you to actually connect multiple units together, which gives you larger and kind of compartmentalized living spaces, so now this same kit of parts, this same unit can actually serve as a living room, bedroom or bathroom, or an office, a living space and secure storage.
Okay. So maybe I would take this whole idea and go to private corporations that would have this mutually shared benefit to it, but I was quickly told by some corporations that my personal passion project was not a brand fit because they didn't want their logos stamped across the ghettos of Haiti.
And we found through this whole process, we found this great little manufacturer in Virginia, and if his body language is any indication, that's the owner — (Laughter) — of what it's like for a manufacturer to work directly with a designer, you've got to see what happens here. (Laughter) But G.S. Industries was fantastic.
They actually built three prototypes for us by hand.
So now we have prototypes that can show that four people can actually sleep securely and much more comfortably than a tent could ever provide.
Other people started to believe in what we were doing, and actually offered us hangar space, donated hangar space to us. And then the Georgetown Airport Authority was bent over backwards to help us with anything we needed.
So now we had a hangar space to work in, and prototypes to demo with.
So in one year, we've negotiated manufacturing agreements, been awarded one patent, filed our second patent, talked to multiple people, demoed this to FEMA and its consultants to rave reviews, and then started talking to some other people who requested information, this little group called the United Nations.
So, in closing, on this whole thing here is hopefully very soon we will not have to respond to these painful phone calls that we get after disasters where we don't really have anything to sell or give you yet.
Thank you. (Applause)
Recently I visited Beloit, Wisconsin.
And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews.
During his time at the American Museum of Natural History, Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions, like here in the Gobi Desert.
He was quite a figure.
He was later, it's said, the basis of the Indiana Jones character.
And when I was in Beloit, Wisconsin, I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students.
And I'm here to tell you, if there's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED, it'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture.
Don't try that one.
At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions, but there was one that's really stuck with me since then.
There was a young girl who stood up, and she asked the question: "Where should we explore?"
I think there's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over, that for the next generation they're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore.
It sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology.
What he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters.
And he reached the point where he felt that there must be something out there that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known -- bacteria, at the time.
He came up with a name for his mystery agent.
He called it the virus -- Latin for "poison."
We now know that viruses make up the majority of the genetic information on our planet, more than the genetic information of all other forms of life combined.
And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world -- things like the eradication of smallpox, the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer, which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus.
So basically we had automobiles, but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet.
We now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world -- things like deep sequencing, which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species, but to look at entire metagenomes, the communities of teeming microorganisms in, on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species.
We can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between.
In my organization we now do this on a regular basis to identify the causes of outbreaks that are unclear exactly what causes them.
And just to give you a sense of how this works, imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you.
And this is something we commonly do to look for respiratory viruses like influenza.
The first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information.
As we started to look at this information, we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before -- no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria.
And for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data, a few of us have actually begun to call this information biological dark matter.
We know it's not anything that we've seen before; it's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent right within our own genetic information.
If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter, if we looked at your gut, up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter.
And even in the relatively sterile blood, around one to two percent of this information is dark matter -- can't be classified, can't be typed or matched with anything we've seen before.
At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact.
These deep sequencing tools are relatively new.
And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy, there's a very, very exciting possibility that exists: that buried in this life, in this genetic information, are signatures of as of yet unidentified life.
I'm pleased to announce that, along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF, we're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life.
A little over a hundred years ago, people were unaware of viruses, the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet.
It's true, we may have charted all the continents on the planet and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth.
Beijerinck and his kind provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers -- people like that young girl from Beloit, Wisconsin.
There are unknowns all around us and they're just waiting to be discovered.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And therefore I will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality.
It's when the young couple whisper, "Tonight we are going to make a baby."
This is indeed important, because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet.
And there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this -- three billion in 1960, seven billion just last year -- and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies, and it may continue like this.
When I was born there was less than one billion children in the world, and today, 2000, there's almost two billion.
What has happened since, and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century?
This is a quiz. What do you think?
Do you think it will decrease to one billion?
Will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years, or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there?
I will tell you by the end of my speech.
But now, what does religion have to do with it?
When you want to classify religion, it's more difficult than you think.
You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this.
It divides the world into Abrahamic religions and Eastern religion, but that's not detailed enough.
But that subdivides Christianity, Islam and Buddhism into many subgroups, which was too detailed.
Therefore at Gapminder we made our own map, and it looks like this.
The size is the population -- big China, big India here.
And the color now is the majority religion.
It's the religion where more than 50 percent of the people say that they belong.
It's Eastern religion in India and China and neighboring Asian countries.
Islam is the majority religion all the way from the Atlantic Ocean across the Middle East, Southern Europe and through Asia all the way to Indonesia.
And Christian majority religions, we see in these countries. They are blue.
And that is most countries in America and Europe, many countries in Africa and a few in Asia.
The white here are countries which cannot be classified, because one religion does not reach 50 percent or there is doubt about the data or there's some other reason.
This is in 1960.
And now I show the number of babies per woman here: two, four or six -- many babies, few babies.
The reason for that is that many people say you have to get rich first before you get few babies.
So low income here, high income there.
And indeed in 1960, you had to be a rich Christian to have few babies.
The exception was Japan.
Japan here was regarded as an exception.
But there was also many Christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman.
But they were in Latin America or they were in Africa.
And all the Eastern religions except Japan had the same level.
Now let's see what has happened in the world.
Now 1962 -- can you see they're getting a little richer, but the number of babies per woman is falling?
Look at China. They're falling fairly fast.
And by 2010, we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman.
(Applause) It's a quite amazing development which has happened.
(Applause) And these are countries from United States here, with $40,000 per capita, France, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, Algeria, Indonesia, India and all the way to Bangladesh and Vietnam, which has less than five percent of the income per person of the United States and the same amount of babies per woman.
I can tell you that the data on the number of children per woman is surprisingly good in all countries.
So what we can conclude is you don't have to get rich to have few children.
And then when we look at religions, we can see that the Eastern religions, indeed there's not one single country with a majority of that religion that has more than three children.
There's no major difference between these religions.
Most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa.
But there are also countries here like Guatemala, like Papua New Guinea, like Yemen and Afghanistan.
It's the other way around.
In the world today, it's the countries that have the highest mortality rates that have the fastest population growth.
These countries have six children per woman.
They have a sad death rate of one to two children per woman.
But 30 years from now, Afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million.
Congo will go from 60 to 120.
And many think that these countries are stagnant, but they are not.
Let me compare Senegal, a Muslim dominated country, with a Christian dominated country, Ghana.
You need to get out of the deepest poverty so children are not of importance for work in the family.
You need to have access to some family planning.
But let me illustrate that fourth factor by looking at Qatar.
Here we have Qatar today, and there we have Bangladesh today.
If I take these countries back to the years of their independence, which is almost the same year -- '71, '72 -- it's a quite amazing development which had happened.
Look at Bangladesh and Qatar.
With so different incomes, it's almost the same drop in number of babies per woman.
And what is the reason in Qatar?
I went to the statistical authority of Qatar, to their webpage -- It's a very good webpage. I recommend it -- and I looked up -- oh yeah, you can have lots of fun here -- and provided free of charge, I found Qatar's social trends.
Very interesting. Lots to read.
I found fertility at birth, and I looked at total fertility rate per woman.
These are the scholars and experts in the government agency in Qatar, and they say the most important factors are: "Increased age at first marriage, increased educational level of Qatari woman and more women integrated in the labor force."
I couldn't agree more. Science couldn't agree more.
This is a country that indeed has gone through a very, very interesting modernization.
So what it is, is these four: Children should survive, children shouldn't be needed for work, women should get education and join the labor force and family planning should be accessible.
Now look again at this.
The average number of children in the world is like in Colombia -- it's 2.4 today.
And that's where family planning, better child survival is needed.
I strongly recommend Melinda Gates' last TEDTalk.
And here, down, there are many countries which are less than two children per woman.
So when I go back now to give you the answer of the quiz, it's two.
And the world population will stop growing.
The United Nations Population Division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion.
I will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came.
They are quite useful for educational purposes.
Each card box is one billion people.
And there are two billion children in the world.
There are two billion young people between 15 and 30.
These are rounded numbers.
And then it's my box.
We are here on top.
They are not missing because they've died; they were never born.
Because before 1980, there were much fewer people born than there were during the last 30 years.
The old, sadly, we will die.
The rest of you, you will grow older and you will get two billion children.
The rest will grow older and get two billion children.
(Applause) This is the great fill-up.
It's inevitable.
And can you see that this increase took place without life getting longer and without adding children?
Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman.
All the religions in the world are fully capable to maintain their values and adapt to this new world.
And we will be just 10 billion in this world, if the poorest people get out of poverty, their children survive, they get access to family planning.
So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This sound, this smell, this sight all remind me of the campfires of my childhood, when anyone could become a storyteller in front of the dancing flames.
Now my story has a lot to do with dreaming, although I'm known to make my dreams come true.
For an hour and a half I shared with the audience a lifetime of creativity, how I pursue perfection, how I cheat the impossible.
(Laughter) Eighteen minutes, clearly impossible.
But here I am.
One solution was to rehearse a machine gun delivery in which every syllable, every second will have its importance and hope to God the audience will be able to follow me.
No, no, no.
So please join me for a minute of silence.
When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic.
For Christmas I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation.
Somehow I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box.
So I looked in the book for the most difficult move, and it was this.
Now I'm not supposed to share that with you, but I have to show you the card is hidden in the back of the hand.
And let me show you something else.
The cards were bigger than my hands.
And I go to see a famous magician and proudly ask him, "Well what do you think?"
Six years old.
Passion is the motto of all my actions.
As I'm studying magic, juggling is mentioned repeatedly as a great way to acquire dexterity and coordination.
So that's it. I'm 14; I'm becoming a juggler.
I befriend a young juggler in a juggling troupe, and he agrees to sell me three clubs.
But in America you have to explain. What are clubs?
Oh, when I was buying the clubs, somehow the young juggler was hiding from the others.
Well I didn't think much of it at the time.
Anyway, here I was progressing with my new clubs.
But I could not understand.
And I was trying constantly to bring them back to me.
And he was frowning.
So I proudly showed him my clubs.
They are impossible to juggle."
So I went to the circus to see more magicians, more jugglers, and I saw -- oh no, no, no, I didn't see.
It was more interesting; I heard.
I heard about those amazing men and women who walk on thin air -- the high-wire walkers.
Now I have been playing with ropes and climbing all my childhood, so that's it. I'm 16; I'm becoming a wire walker.
I found two trees -- but not any kind of trees, trees with character -- and then a very long rope.
I get a pair of pliers and some coat hangers, and I gather them together in some kind of ropey path.
What did I need? I needed the widest shoes in the world.
So I found some enormous, ridiculous, giant ski boots and then wobbly, wobbly I get on the ropes.
And a few days later, I was practicing on a single tightrope.
Now you can imagine at that time I had to switch the ridiculous boots for some slippers.
So that is how -- in case there are people here in the audience who would like to try -- this is how not to learn wire walking.
(Laughter) Intuition is a tool essential in my life.
On the high wire, within months, I'm able to master all the tricks they do in the circus, except I am not satisfied.
I was starting to invent my own moves and bring them to perfection.
But nobody wanted to hire me.
Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the World Trade Center.
Well nonetheless, on the top of the World Trade Center my first step was terrifying.
All of a sudden the density of the air is no longer the same.
I step over the beam.
On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown we think it's empty.
At my feet, the path to the north tower -- 60 yards of wire rope.
An inner howl assails me, the wild longing to flee.
But it is too late.
The wire is ready.
Faith is what replaces doubt in my dictionary.
Well I didn't have that problem.
In fact, I put my World Trade Center crossing at the same artistic level as some of my smaller walks -- or some completely different type of performance.
Let's see, such as my street juggling, for example.
So each time I draw my circle of chalk on the pavement and enter as the improvising comic silent character I created 45 years ago, I am as happy as when I am in the clouds.
But this here, this is not the street.
So you don't want me to street juggle here, right?
You know that, right?
You don't want me to juggle, right?
(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Each time I street juggle I use improvisation.
Now improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown.
Now I have done the impossible not once, but many times.
And I chose to put my wire between the Arab quarters and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem over the Ben Hinnom Valley.
And I thought it would be incredible if in the middle of the wire I stopped and, like a magician, I produce a dove and send her in the sky as a living symbol of peace.
And in my hotel room, each time I practiced making it appear and throwing her in the air, she would graze the wall and end up on the bed.
So I said, now it's okay. The room is too small.
I mean, a bird needs space to fly.
Now comes the day of the walk.
The mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, comes to wish me the best.
But he seemed nervous.
There was tension in my wire, but I also could feel tension on the ground.
Because all those people were made up of people who, for the most part, considered each other enemies.
People applaud in delight.
And then in the most magnificent gesture, I send the bird of peace into the azure.
(Laughter) And people scream.
(Laughter) You laugh, you laugh. But hey.
What a genius, what a professional.
(Laughter) So I take a bow. I salute with my hand.
And the entire valley goes crazy.
So now I'm like 50 yards from my arrival and I'm exhausted, so my steps are slow.
And something happened.
Somebody somewhere, a group of people, starts clapping in rhythm with my steps.
And within seconds the entire valley is applauding in unison with each of my steps.
But not an applause of delight like before, an applause encouragement.
For a moment, the entire crowd had forgotten their differences.
So let's say I am here and the chair is my arrival.
So I walk, you clap, everybody in unison.
(Clapping) (Applause) So after the walk, Teddy and I become friends.
He didn't know the true story.
Inspiration.
By inspiring ourselves we inspire others.
I will never forget this music, and I hope now neither will you.
And when you see mountains, remember mountains can be moved.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let's begin with a story.
Once upon a time -- well actually less than two years ago -- in a kingdom not so very far away, there was a man who traveled many miles to come to work at the jewel in the kingdom's crown -- an internationally famous company.
Let's call it Island Networks.
Now this kingdom had many resources and mighty ambitions, but the one thing it lacked was people.
And so it invited workers from around the world to come and help it build the nation.
But in order to enter and to stay these migrants had to pass a few tests.
But then something unexpected happened.
He wasn't offered counseling before or after the test, which is best medical practice.
He was never informed of the results of the test.
And yet, a couple of weeks later, he was picked up and taken to prison where he was subjected to a medical exam, including a full-body search in full view of the others in the cell.
He was released, but then a day or two later, he was taken to the airport and he was deported.
What on earth did this man do to merit this treatment?
What was his terrible crime?
He was infected with HIV.
But these laws, when applied to people living with HIV, are a violation of international human rights agreements to which these countries are signatories.
Matters of principle aside, practically speaking, these laws drive HIV underground.
People are less likely to come forth to be tested or treated or to disclose their condition, none of which helps these individuals or the communities these laws purport to protect.
Today we can prevent the transmission of HIV.
And with treatment, it is a manageable condition.
So you tell me why, in our age of science, we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition.
Hands up.
You know better than anyone that HIV brings out the best and the worst in humanity.
And the laws reflect these attitudes.
I'm not just talking about laws on the books, but laws as they are enforced on the streets and laws as they are decided in the courts.
And I'm not just talking about laws as they relate to people living with HIV, but people who are at greatest risk of infection -- people such as those who inject drugs or sex workers or men who have sex with men or transgendered persons or migrants or prisoners.
And in many parts of the world that includes women and children who are especially vulnerable.
Now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature.
These laws treat people touched by HIV with compassion and acceptance.
These laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence.
These laws ensure that people living with HIV and those at greatest risk are protected from violence and discrimination and that they get access to prevention and to treatment.
Unfortunately, these good laws are counter-balanced by a mass of really bad law -- law which is grounded in moral judgement and in fear and in misinformation, laws which specifically punish people living with HIV or those at greatest risk.
These laws fly in the face of science, and they are grounded in prejudice and in ignorance and in a rewriting of tradition and a selective reading of religion.
But you know what? You don't have to take my word for it.
And he was convicted under the U.S. State of Iowa's law on HIV transmission and exposure -- neither of which offense he actually committed.
(Video) Nick Rhoades: If something is against the law then that is telling society that is unacceptable, that's bad behavior.
And I think the severity of that punishment tells you how bad you are as a person.
You're a class B felon, lifetime sex offender.
You are a very, very, very bad person.
And you did a very, very, very bad thing.
And so that's just programmed into you.
And you go through the correctional system and everyone's telling you the same thing.
Some countries have good laws, laws which could stem the tide of HIV.
Because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens.
(Video) Hilma: I found out when I went to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up.
The nurse announced that every pregnant woman must also be tested for HIV that day.
I took the test and the result showed I was positive.
That's the day I found out.
The nurse said to me, "Why should you people bcome pregnant when you know you are HIV positive?
Why are you pregnant when you are living positive?"
Because I am HIV positive.
I just signed.
SE: Hilma and Nick and our man in the kingdom are among the 34 million people living with HIV according to recent estimates.
They're the lucky ones because they're still alive.
According to those same estimates, in 2010 1.8 million people died of AIDS related causes.
But if we look a little more broadly into the statistics, we actually see some reason for hope.
Looking globally, the number of new infections of HIV is declining.
And looking globally as well, deaths are also starting to fall.
There are many reasons for these positive developments, but one of the most remarkable is in the increase in the number of people around the world on anti-retroviral therapy, the medicines they need to keep their HIV in check.
Now there are still many problems.
Only about half of the people who need treatment are currently receiving it.
But for the first time in three decades into this epidemic we have a real chance to come to grips with HIV.
It's for this reason that the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, of which I'm a member, was established by the agencies of the United Nations -- to look at the ways that legal environments are affecting people living with HIV and those at greatest risk, and to recommend what should be done to make the law an ally, not an enemy, of the global response to HIV.
Let me give you just one example of the way a legal environment can make a positive difference.
People who inject drugs are one of those groups I mentioned.
They're at high risk of HIV through contaminated injection equipment and other risk-related behaviors.
In fact, one in every 10 new infections of HIV is among people who inject drugs.
Now drug use or possession is illegal in almost every country.
But some countries take a harder line on this than others.
In Thailand people who use drugs, or are merely suspected of using drugs, are placed in detention centers, like the one you see here, where they are supposed to clean up.
There is absolutely no evidence to show that throwing people into detention cures their drug dependence.
There is, however, ample evidence to show that incarcerating people increases their risk of HIV and other infections.
We know how to reduce HIV transmission and other risks in people who inject drugs.
It's called harm reduction, and it involves, among other things, providing clean needles and syringes, offering opioid substitution therapy and other evidence-based treatments to reduce drug dependence.
It involves providing information and education and condoms to reduce HIV transmission, and also providing HIV testing and counseling and treatment should people become infected.
Where the legal environment allows for harm reduction the results are striking.
Australia and Switzerland were two countries which introduced harm reduction very early on in their HIV epidemics, and they have a very low rate of HIV among injecting drug users.
Thailand and Russia, however, have resisted harm reduction and have stringent laws which punish drug use.
And hey, surprise, very high rates of HIV among people who are injecting drugs.
At the Global Commission we have studied the evidence, and we've heard the experiences of over 700 people from 140 countries.
And the trend? Well the trend is clear.
Where you criminalize people living with HIV or those at greatest risk, you fuel the epidemic.
But changing the law isn't.
And in fact, a number of countries are starting to make progress on a number of points.
To begin, countries need to review their legislation as it touches HIV and vulnerable groups.
On the back of those reviews, governments should repeal laws that punish or discriminate against people living with HIV or those at greatest risk.
Repealing a law isn't easy, and it's particularly difficult when it relates to touchy subjects like drugs and sex.
But there's plenty you can do while that process is underway.
One of the key points is to reform the police so that they have better practices on the ground.
So for example, outreach workers who are distributing condoms to vulnerable populations are not themselves subject to police harassment or abuse or arbitrary arrest.
We can also train judges so that they find flexibilities in the law and so that they rule on the side of tolerance rather than prejudice.
We can retool prisons so that HIV prevention and harm reduction is available to prisoners.
The key to all this is reinforcing civil society.
Because civil society is key to raising awareness among vulnerable groups of their legal rights.
And so we need to ensure that these people who are living with HIV or at greatest risk of HIV have access to legal services and they have equal access to the courts.
And also important is talking to communities so that we change interpretations of religious or customary law, which is too often used to justify punishment and fuel stigma.
For many of us here HIV is not an abstract threat.
Because for those of us who live in democracies, or in aspiring democracies, the law begins with us.
If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) But it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves.
(Laughter) As we face fear in these times, and fear is all around us, we also have anti-fear.
It's hard to imagine or measure.
The background radiation is simply too static to be able to be seen under the normal spectral analysis.
(American accent) But we feel as though there are times when a lot of us -- you know what I'm saying?
It's a song about people and sasquatches -- (Laughter) And other French science stuff.
That's French science.
(Singing) I've been trying inside I know that I'm in trouble (Applause) that I'm in trouble by myself But every time it gets me (Vocalization) (Beatbox) (Singing) And I've been trying to be the one that you believe in And you're the one that I want to be so saucy And you're the one I want to [unclear], baby And you can do anything as long as you don't get hurt along the way back (Beatbox) If I survive, I'm going to tell you what is wrong Because if you were [unclear] And I think that you're looking like a [unclear] I give you what I want to be (Music) (Music ends abruptly) (British accent) And it's like, you could use as many of those things that you want.
Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion.
(Laughter) Tomorrow is another day.
(Laughter) Not just any day, but it is a day.
You can reach out -- things are solid.
You can move objects from one area to another.
You can feel your body.
You can say, "I'd like to go over to this location," and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location, at will.
(Laughter) That's something you live inside of every day.
(Laughter) So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin.
(Laughter) Once we understand that all the spheres in the sky are just large infinite planes, it will be plain to see.
And just remember, everything you are -- it's more important to realize the negative space, as music is only the division of space; it is the space we are listening to divided as such, which gives us the information in comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) This is a fun one.
I hope you guys recognize it.
Okay, that still works. Okay, good.
(Beatbox) Yeah, yo, yo, yo (Gibberish) (Music fades out) Thank you. Enjoy the rest.
(Applause)
I know this is going to sound strange, but I think robots can inspire us to be better humans.
See, I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the home of Bethlehem Steel.
My father was an engineer, and when I was growing up, he would teach me how things worked.
We would build projects together, like model rockets and slot cars.
Here's the go-kart that we built together.
That's me behind the wheel, with my sister and my best friend at the time.
A robot.
Now, I was thrilled about this, because at school, there was a bully named Kevin, and he was picking on me, because I was the only Jewish kid in class.
So I couldn't wait to get started to work on this, so I could introduce Kevin to my robot.
(Laughter) (Robot noises) (Laughter) But that wasn't the kind of robot my dad had in mind.
(Laughter) See, he owned a chromium-plating company, and they had to move heavy steel parts between tanks of chemicals.
And so he needed an industrial robot like this, that could basically do the heavy lifting.
He and I worked on it for several years, but it was the 1970s, and the technology that was available to amateurs just wasn't there yet.
So Dad continued to do this kind of work by hand.
And a few years later, he was diagnosed with cancer.
You see, what the robot we were trying to build was telling him was not about doing the heavy lifting.
It was a warning about his exposure to the toxic chemicals.
He didn't recognize that at the time, and he contracted leukemia.
And he died at the age of 45.
And I never forgot the robot that he and I tried to build.
When I was at college, I decided to study engineering, like him.
And I went to Carnegie Mellon, and I earned my PhD in robotics.
So what I'd like to tell you about are four robot projects, and how they've inspired me to be a better human.
By 1993, I was a young professor at USC, and I was just building up my own robotics lab, and this was the year the World Wide Web came out.
And I remember my students were the ones who told me about it, and we would -- we were just amazed.
We started playing with this, and that afternoon, we realized that we could use this new, universal interface to allow anyone in the world to operate the robot in our lab.
So, rather than have it fight or do industrial work, we decided to build a planter, put the robot into the center of it, and we called it the Telegarden.
And we had put a camera in the gripper of the hand of the robot, and we wrote some special scripts and software, so that anyone in the world could come in, and by clicking on the screen, they could move the robot around and visit the garden.
But we also set up some other software that lets you participate and help us water the garden, remotely.
Now, this was an engineering project, and we published some papers on the system design of it, but we also thought of it as an art installation.
It was invited, after the first year, by the Ars Electronica Museum in Austria, to have it installed in their lobby.
And I'm happy to say, it remained online there, 24 hours a day, for almost nine years.
That robot was operated by more people than any other robot in history.
Now, one day, I got a call out of the blue from a student, who asked a very simple but profound question.
He said, "Is the robot real?"
Now, everyone else had assumed it was, and we knew it was, because we were working with it.
And the more I thought about it, I couldn't think of a good answer for how he could tell the difference.
This was right about the time that I was offered a position here at Berkeley.
And when I got here, I looked up Hubert Dreyfus, who's a world-renowned professor of philosophy, And I talked with him about this and he said, "This is one of the oldest and most central problems in philosophy.
It goes back to the Skeptics and up through Descartes.
It's the issue of epistemology, the study of how do we know that something is true."
So he and I started working together, and we coined a new term: "telepistemology," the study of knowledge at a distance.
We invited leading artists, engineers and philosophers to write essays about this, and the results are collected in this book from MIT Press.
So thanks to this student, who questioned what everyone else had assumed to be true, this project taught me an important lesson about life, which is to always question assumptions.
Now, the second project I'll tell you about grew out of the Telegarden.
As it was operating, my students and I were very interested in how people were interacting with each other, and what they were doing with the garden.
So we started thinking: what if the robot could leave the garden and go out into some other interesting environment?
(Laughter) So, because we were interested more in the system design and the user interface than in the hardware, we decided that, rather than have a robot replace the human to go to the party, we'd have a human replace the robot.
We got a human, someone who's very outgoing and gregarious, and she was outfitted with a helmet with various equipment, cameras and microphones, and then a backpack with wireless Internet connection.
And the idea was that she could go into a remote and interesting environment, and then over the Internet, people could experience what she was experiencing.
So they could see what she was seeing, but then, more importantly, they could participate, by interacting with each other and coming up with ideas about what she should do next and where she should go, and then conveying those to the Tele-Actor.
So we got a chance to take the Tele-Actor to the Webby Awards in San Francisco.
And that year, Sam Donaldson was the host.
Just before the curtain went up, I had about 30 seconds to explain to Mr. Donaldson what we were going to do.
And I said, "The Tele-Actor is going to be joining you onstage.
This is a new experimental project, and people are watching her on their screens, there's cameras involved and there's microphones and she's got an earbud in her ear, and people over the network are giving her advice about what to do next."
(Laughter) So he loved the concept, and when the Tele-Actor walked onstage, she walked right up to him, and she gave him a big kiss right on the lips.
(Laughter) We were totally surprised -- we had no idea that would happen.
And he was great, he just gave her a big hug in return, and it worked out great.
But that night, as we were packing up, I asked the Tele-Actor, how did the Tele-Directors decide that they would give a kiss to Sam Donaldson?
(Laughter) So, the success of the Tele-Actor that night was due to the fact that she was a wonderful actor.
She knew when to trust her instincts.
And so that project taught me another lesson about life, which is that, when in doubt, improvise.
(Laughter) Now, the third project grew out of my experience when my father was in the hospital.
He was undergoing a treatment -- chemotherapy treatments -- and there's a related treatment called brachytherapy, where tiny, radioactive seeds are placed into the body to treat cancerous tumors.
And all these needles are inserted in parallel.
So it's very common that some of the needles penetrate sensitive organs.
And as a result, the needles damage these organs, cause damage, which leads to trauma and side effects.
So my students and I wondered: what if we could modify the system, so that the needles could come in at different angles?
So we simulated this; we developed some optimization algorithms and we simulated this.
And we were able to show that we are able to avoid the delicate organs, and yet still achieve the coverage of the tumors with the radiation.
So now, we're working with doctors at UCSF and engineers at Johns Hopkins, and we're building a robot that has a number of -- it's a specialized design with different joints that can allow the needles to come in at an infinite variety of angles.
And as you can see here, they can avoid delicate organs and still reach the targets they're aiming for.
And the last project also has to do with medical robotics.
And this is something that's grown out of a system called the da Vinci surgical robot.
It's being used in over 2,000 hospitals around the world.
The idea is it allows the surgeon to operate comfortably in his own coordinate frame.
Many of the subtasks in surgery are very routine and tedious, like suturing, and currently, all of these are performed under the specific and immediate control of the surgeon.
So the surgeon becomes fatigued over time.
And we've been wondering, what if we could program the robot to perform some of these subtasks, and thereby free the surgeon to focus on the more complicated parts of the surgery, and also cut down on the time that the surgery would take if we could get the robot to do them a little bit faster?
Now, it's hard to program a robot to do delicate things like this.
But it turns out my colleague Pieter Abbeel, who's here at Berkeley, has developed a new set of techniques for teaching robots from example.
So we got one of these robots.
And we asked a surgeon to perform a task -- with the robot.
So what we're doing is asking the surgeon to perform the task, and we record the motions of the robot.
So here's an example.
So we record all these examples, the data, and then go through a sequence of steps.
First, we use a technique called dynamic time warping from speech recognition.
And then we apply Kalman filtering, a technique from control theory, that allows us to statistically analyze all the noise and extract the desired trajectory that underlies them.
We then execute that on the robot, we observe what happens, then we adjust the controls, using a sequence of techniques called iterative learning.
We observe the results, adjust the controls again, and observe what happens.
And here's the result.
That's the inferred task trajectory, and here's the robot moving at the speed of the human.
Here's four times the speed of the human.
And here's the robot operating at 10 times the speed of the human.
So this project also, because of its involved practicing and learning, doing something over and over again, this project also has a lesson, which is: if you want to do something well, there's no substitute for practice, practice, practice.
So these are four of the lessons that I've learned from robots over the years.
And the field of robotics has gotten much better over time.
Nowadays, high school students can build robots, like the industrial robot my dad and I tried to build.
But, it's very -- now ...
And now, I have a daughter, named Odessa.
And she likes robots, too.
(Laughter) I wish she could meet my dad.
And now I get to teach her how things work, and we get to build projects together.
Robots are the most human of our machines.
They can't solve all of the world's problems, but I think they have something important to teach us.
And think about what they might be telling you.
Because I have a hunch that many of our technological innovations, the devices we dream about, can inspire us to be better humans.
Thank you.
This carbon powered the Industrial Revolution, it put the "Great" in Great Britain, and led to Britain's temporary world domination.
And then, in 1918, coal production in Britain peaked, and has declined ever since.
In due course, Britain started using oil and gas from the North Sea, and in the year 2000, oil and gas production from the North Sea also peaked, and they're now on the decline.
What is life after fossil fuels going to be like?
Shouldn't we be thinking hard about how to get off fossil fuels?"
Another motivation, of course, is climate change.
Let me illustrate this with what physicists call a back-of-envelope calculation.
You ask a question, write down some numbers, and get an answer.
It may not be very accurate, but it may make you say, "Hmm."
We'll use biofuels. Problem solved.
Well, what if we grew the biofuels for a road on the grass verge at the edge of the road?
OK, so let's put in some numbers.
That's the European average for new cars.
Let's say the productivity of biofuel plantations is 1,200 liters of biofuel per hectare per year.
That's true of European biofuels.
And let's imagine the cars are spaced 80 meters apart from each other, and they're perpetually going along this road.
The length of the road doesn't matter, because the longer the road, the more biofuel plantation.
What do we do with these numbers?
Take the first number, divide by the other three, and get eight kilometers.
And that's the answer.
And in this talk, I'd like to talk about land areas, and ask: Is there an issue about areas?
The answer is going to be yes, but it depends which country you are in.
The energy consumption of the United Kingdom, the total energy consumption -- not just transport, but everything -- I like to quantify it in lightbulbs.
It's as if we've all got 125 lightbulbs on all the time, 125 kilowatt-hours per day per person is the energy consumption of the UK.
So there's 40 lightbulbs' worth for transport, 40 lightbulbs' worth for heating, and 40 lightbulbs' worth for making electricity, and other things are relatively small, compared to those three big fish.
It's actually a bigger footprint if we take into account the embodied energy in the stuff we import into our country as well.
And 90 percent of this energy, today, still comes from fossil fuels, and 10 percent, only, from other, greener -- possibly greener -- sources, like nuclear power and renewables.
So.
The population density of the UK is 250 people per square kilometer.
The population density is on the horizontal axis, and we're 250 people per square kilometer.
Let's add European countries in blue, and you can see there's quite a variety.
I should emphasize, both of these axes are logarithmic; as you go from one gray bar to the next gray bar, you're going up a factor of 10.
Next, let's add Asia in red, the Middle East and North Africa in green, sub-Saharan Africa in blue, black is South America, purple is Central America, and then in pukey-yellow, we have North America, Australia and New Zealand.
You can see the great diversity of population densities and of per capita consumptions.
Top left, we have Canada and Australia, with enormous land areas, very high per capita consumption -- 200 or 300 lightbulbs per person -- and very low population densities.
Top right: Bahrain has the same energy consumption per person, roughly, as Canada -- over 300 lightbulbs per person, but their population density is a factor of 300 times greater, 1,000 people per square kilometer.
Bottom right: Bangladesh has the same population density as Bahrain, but consumes 100 times less per person.
Here's another message from this diagram.
I've added on little blue tails behind Sudan, Libya, China, India, Bangladesh.
That's 15 years of progress.
Where were they 15 years ago, and where are they now?
And the message is, most countries are going to the right, and they're going up.
So, we may be off in the top right-hand corner, slightly unusual, the United Kingdom accompanied by Germany, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and a bunch of other slightly odd countries, but many other countries are coming up and to the right to join us.
So we're a picture, if you like, of what the future energy consumption might be looking like in other countries, too.
I've also added in this diagram now some pink lines that go down and to the right.
Those are lines of equal power consumption per unit area, which I measure in watts per square meter.
So, for example, the middle line there, 0.1 watts per square meter, is the energy consumption per unit area of Saudi Arabia, Norway, Mexico in purple, and Bangladesh 15 years ago.
Half of the world's population lives in countries that are already above that line.
The United Kingdom is consuming 1.25 watts per square meter.
So is Germany, and Japan is consuming a bit more.
So, let's now say why this is relevant.
Well, we can measure renewables in the same units and other forms of power production in the same units.
Renewables is one of the leading ideas for how we could get off our 90 percent fossil-fuel habit.
Well, we consume 1.25 watts per square meter.
What this means is, even if you covered the whole of the United Kingdom with energy crops, you couldn't match today's energy consumption.
Wind power produces a bit more -- 2.5 watts per square meter.
But that's only twice as big as 1.25 watts per square meter.
So that means if you wanted, literally, to produce total energy consumption in all forms, on average, from wind farms, you need wind farms half the area of the UK.
I've got data to back up all these assertions, by the way.
Next, let's look at solar power.
Solar panels, when you put them on a roof, deliver about 20 watts per square meter in England.
If you really want to get a lot from solar panels, you need to adopt the traditional Bavarian farming method, where you leap off the roof, and coat the countryside with solar panels, too.
They deliver about 5 watts per square meter of land area.
And here's a solar park in Vermont, with real data, delivering 4.2 watts per square meter.
Remember where we are, 1.25 watts per square meter, wind farms 2.5, solar parks about five.
So whichever of those renewables you pick, the message is, whatever mix of those renewables you're using, if you want to power the UK on them, you're going to need to cover something like 20 percent or 25 percent of the country with those renewables.
(Laughter) Concentrating solar power in deserts delivers larger powers per unit area, because you don't have the problem of clouds.
So, this facility delivers 14 watts per square meter; this one 10 watts per square meter; and this one in Spain, 5 watts per square meter.
(Laughter) So here's a summary so far: All renewables, much as I love them, are diffuse.
There are other options for generating power as well, which don't involve fossil fuels.
So there's nuclear power, and on this ordinance survey map, you can see there's a Sizewell B inside a blue square kilometer.
That's one gigawatt in a square kilometer, which works out to 1,000 watts per square meter.
So by this particular metric, nuclear power isn't as intrusive as renewables.
Of course, other metrics matter, too, and nuclear power has all sorts of popularity problems.
But the same goes for renewables as well.
Here's a photograph of a consultation exercise in full swing in the little town of Penicuik just outside Edinburgh, and you can see the children of Penicuik celebrating the burning of the effigy of the windmill.
What can a country like the UK do on the supply side?
And that's a serious option.
So countries like Australia, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan, could be our best friends for renewable production.
And a third option is nuclear power.
In addition to the supply levers that we can push -- and remember, we need large amounts, because at the moment, we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels -- in addition to those levers, we could talk about other ways of solving this issue.
Namely, we could reduce demand, and that means reducing population -- I'm not sure how to do that -- or reducing per capita consumption.
So let's talk about three more big levers that could really help on the consumption side.
First, transport.
People often say, "Technology can answer everything.
We can make vehicles that are 100 times more efficient."
The energy consumption of this typical tank here is 80 kilowatt hours per hundred person kilometers.
That's the average European car.
Eighty kilowatt hours.
Yes. Here it is. It's the bicycle.
It's 80 times better in energy consumption, and it's powered by biofuel, by Weetabix.
(Laughter) And there are other options in between, because maybe the lady in the tank would say, "No, that's a lifestyle change. Don't change my lifestyle, please."
We could persuade her to take a train, still a lot more efficient than a car, but that might be a lifestyle change.
Or there's the EcoCAR, top-left.
It comfortably accommodates one teenager and it's shorter than a traffic cone, and it's almost as efficient as a bicycle, as long as you drive it at 15 miles per hour.
Next, there's the heating lever.
Heating is a third of our energy consumption in Britain, and quite a lot of that is going into homes and other buildings, doing space heating and water heating.
It's my house, with a Ferrari out front.
Well, the laws of physics are written up there, which describe how the power consumption for heating is driven by the things you can control.
There's this remarkable technology called a thermostat: you grasp it, rotate it to the left, and your energy consumption in the home will decrease.
The sad truth is, this will save you money.
That's not sad, that's good.
You can also deliver heat more efficiently using heat pumps, which use a smaller bit of high-grade energy like electricity to move heat from your garden into your house.
The third demand-side option I want to talk about, the third way to reduce energy consumption is: read your meters.
People talk a lot about smart meters, but you can do it yourself.
Read your meter, and if you're anything like me, it'll change your life.
Here's a graph I made.
I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, "How much energy do you use at home?"
And so I started reading the meter every week.
The old meter readings are shown in the top half of the graph, and then 2007 is shown in green at the bottom.
That was when I was reading the meter every week.
And my life changed, because I started doing experiments and seeing what made a difference.
My gas consumption plummeted, because I started tinkering with the thermostat and the timing on the heating system, and I knocked more than half off my gas bills.
There's a similar story for my electricity consumption, where switching off the DVD players, the stereos, the computer peripherals that were on all the time, and just switching them on when I needed them, knocked another third off my electricity bills, too.
We need big action, because we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels, and so you need to push hard on most, if not all, of these levers.
Most of these levers have popularity problems, and if there is a lever you don't like the use of, well, please do bear in mind that means you need even stronger effort on the other levers.
So I'm a strong advocate of having grown-up conversations that are based on numbers and facts.
So, if you wanted to get 16 lightbulbs -- remember, today our total energy consumption is 125 lightbulbs' worth -- if you wanted 16 from wind, this map visualizes a solution for the UK.
It's got 160 wind farms, each 100 square kilometers in size, and that would be a twentyfold increase over today's amount of wind.
Nuclear power: to get 16 lightbulbs per person, you'd need two gigawatts at each of the purple dots on the map.
That's a fourfold increase over today's levels of nuclear power.
Biomass: to get 16 lightbulbs per person, you'd need a land area something like three and a half Wales' worth, either in our country, or in someone else's country, possibly Ireland, possibly somewhere else.
(Laughter) And a fourth supply-side option: concentrating solar power in other people's deserts.
The total area of those hexagons is two Greater London's worth of someone else's Sahara, and you'll need power lines all the way across Spain and France to bring the power from the Sahara to Surrey.
We need to stop shouting and start talking.
And if we can have a grown-up conversation, make a plan that adds up and get building, maybe this low-carbon revolution will actually be fun.
(Applause)
I teach history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
On February 14, 2018, my school experienced one of the worst mass school shootings in American history.
People want to know what we saw, what I felt.
I don't remember everything, but I do remember I went into crisis mode, mother mode.
There was no emotion.
I lined up the kids, I held up a sign so they could follow me through the hall, just like a fire drill.
Luckily, we were already moving in the opposite direction.
We made it outside.
I called my mother.
"I'm OK."
I called my husband.
"I'm OK."
Then my daughter called, my voice cracked, and I knew I had to pull myself together.
I sat alone in my thoughts, worried about my colleagues and students.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School lost 17 precious lives on that horrible day.
After, students asked us, the adults the hardest question: How can we stop the senseless violence?
I've been teaching in the public schools for 33 years, so I know you have to admit what you don't know before you can share what you do know.
First, listen closely to the person asking you a question.
Third, do your homework.
Fourth, humbly share your knowledge.
I know all about this process.
My students ask really thoughtful questions all the time.
They're eager to learn, and sometimes they're eager to prove their smarts.
And believe me, they know when I have no idea of the answer, so in those instances, I say to them, "That's a great question. Let me research that and get back to you."
So when my students asked, "How do we stop this senseless violence?"
And like I always do when I don't know the answer to one of my questions, I began doing my homework.
And as a history teacher, I knew I needed to start with the Second Amendment and the NRA.
In case it's been a while since you've been sitting in a history class, here is what the Second Amendment actually says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Meaning, the federal government could not infringe on the rights of citizens to participate in well-regulated militias.
The Second Amendment was ratified 226 years ago.
It was written in a time before the federal government's armed forces were among the most powerful in the world and when state militias were viewed as necessary to protect the states.
Fast-forward 80 years, to 1871.
The American Civil War had ended a few years prior, but a couple of Union officers had witnessed some pretty shoddy marksmanship on the battlefield.
So in an attempt to prepare their men for any future conflicts, they founded the National Rifle Association to promote rifle practice.
In short, the Second Amendment was written to ensure that our newly formed and fragile country had access to organized state militias.
And the NRA's original mission was to ensure future soldiers had good aim.
Someone could teach an entire course on how the next 150 years influenced the gun regulation conversations we're having in the United States and our interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Almost every pivotal moment in our nation's history in one way or another influenced how we as a people manufacture, debate, regulate and feel about guns.
A lot of change has occurred.
As a matter of fact, it wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled for the first time the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
This change over time is striking to me, because it reminds us that the interpretation of the Second Amendment and cultural attitudes about guns have changed over time.
Which gives me hope they could change again.
I'm not talking about time, the time that I have here to stand and speak.
According to the CDC, over the last five years, on average, each day 96 people are killed by guns in the United States, and if we don't figure out how to answer my students' question soon, one of us could be next.
Let's start.
It might surprise you to learn that we've actually thought about this before.
In response to this and many other lawsuits, the NRA lobbied for the passage of the PLCAA, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
And so when 17 students and faculty die at my school, no one in this chain will assume responsibility.
Let's take a look at another option, Choice B: this will end when we hold ourselves accountable and regulate the estimated 300 million guns available in America.
Yes, voting is one of the best ways to take personal responsibility for gun violence.
Making sure that our lawmakers are willing to pass commonsense gun reform is one of the most effective ways to get those 300 million guns under control.
And also, gun owners can take personal initiative.
If you own a gun, ask yourself: Do I have an extra gun I don't need?
Could it fall into the wrong hands?
Perhaps as a gun owner, you should also ask whether you have been taking care of your mental health?
When it comes to gun violence, the mental health argument falls flat if we don't acknowledge our own personal vulnerabilities to mental illness.
One in six Americans will struggle with mental illness.
Otherwise, we should seriously ask ourselves whether we really have the time and attention to own a gun.
Many social issues affect why people buy and use guns.
We are creating barriers for people that need help.
Why are we embarrassing each other?
Let's make it easier, not harder, for people to access better mental health care.
What else? Sexism, racism and poverty affect gun ownership and gun-related fatalities.
On average, it's estimated that 50 women were fatally shot each month between 2010 and 2014 due to domestic violence, and women are still dying in their homes.
Let's empower women and give our young boys a chance to learn how to work out their conflicts and emotions with words, not weapons.
And the "Washington Post" reported that last year, nearly 1,000 people were fatally wounded by on-duty police officers.
Talk to Black Lives Matter and the police union about that.
(Applause) At the end of the day, perhaps people won't feel the need to buy and use a gun when they all equally feel safe, healthy, respected and cared for.
All right, discussion time is over.
How do we stop this senseless violence?
You remember that multiple-choice questions almost never end with just three possibilities.
Or maybe "all of the above" is too easy, and this is not an easy problem.
It requires deep analytical thinking by all of us.
So instead, I'm asking you to do your homework, write your own Choice D using supporting detail.
And if you're not sure where to start, look to my students as role models.
They are armed with incredible communication skills and a sense of citizenship that I find so inspiring.
(Applause) These are public school kids engaged in the issue of gun regulation, and their endeavor has moved our hearts.
This isn't a spectator sport.
I don't know. Listen, I'm no gun control expert.
I teach the humanities.
To be human is to learn, and to be part of a civilization is to share your knowledge.
This kind of honest, brave and sincere engagement is what I ask of my students, what I expect of myself as a teacher and what I demand of you now.
And then what?
Humbly share your knowledge with each other.
Teach Congress a lesson.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
The great texts of the ancient world don't survive to us in their original form.
They survive because medieval scribes copied them and copied them and copied them.
And so it is with Archimedes, the great Greek mathematician.
Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician we know about because of just three books, and they're called A, B and C.
And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564.
And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library about a hundred miles north of Rome in Viterbo in 1311.
Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906, and it landed on my desk in Baltimore on the 19th of January, 1999.
And this is Codex C here.
Now Codex C is actually buried in this book.
Because this book is actually a prayer book.
And to make his prayer book he used parchment.
But he didn't use new parchment, he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts, and there were seven of them.
And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven.
He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts.
He erased all of their texts, and then he cut the sheets down in the middle, he shuffled them up, and he rotated them 90 degrees, and he wrote prayers on top of these books.
And essentially these seven manuscripts disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book.
And with just a magnifying glass, he transcribed as much of the text as he could.
And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript that were unique texts.
They weren't in A and B at all; they were completely new texts by Archimedes, and they were called "The Method" and "The Stomachion."
And it became a world famous manuscript.
Now it should be clear by now that this book is in bad condition.
Forgeries were painted over it, and it suffered very badly from mold.
This book is the definition of a write-off.
Why did he buy this book?
And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle.
So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes, and he promised to pay for all the work.
And it was an expensive job, but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think because these people, they didn't come from money, they came from Archimedes.
And they got together to work on this manuscript.
And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with: There was glue on the spine of the book.
And if you look at this photograph carefully, the bottom half of this is rather brown.
The top half is Elmer's wood glue.
And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on.
And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen.
(Laughter) Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax, because this was used in the liturgical services of the Greek Orthodox Church and they'd used candle wax.
And the candle wax was dirty, and we couldn't image through the wax.
Because if you look at something in different wavebands of light, you see different things.
But none of them worked.
So what we did was we processed the images together, and we put two images into one blank screen.
And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript.
And the image on the left is the normal red image.
And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image.
And in the image on the right you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing.
If you merge them together into one digital canvas, the parchment is bright in both images and it comes out bright.
The prayer book is dark in both images and it comes out dark.
The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another.
And that's what it looks like.
Now that's a before and after image, but you don't read the image on the screen like that.
You zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in, and you can just read it now.
(Applause) If you process the same two images in a different way, you can actually get rid of the prayer book text.
Well we took the manuscript, and we decided to image it in X-ray fluorescence imaging.
So an X-ray comes in in the diagram on the left and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom.
And that electron disappears.
And as it disappears, an electron from a shell farther out jumps in and takes its place.
And what we wanted to get was the iron.
Because the ink was written in iron.
And if we can map where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from, we can map all the iron on the page, then theoretically we can read the image.
The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this.
So we took it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in California, which is a particle accelerator.
Electrons go around one way, positrons go around the other.
They meet in the middle, and they create subatomic particles like the charm quark and the tau lepton.
Now we weren't actually going to put Archimedes in that beam.
And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system.
This is called synchrotron radiation, and it's normally used to look at things like proteins and that sort of thing.
But we wanted it to look at atoms, at iron atoms, so that we could read the page from before and after.
It took about 17 minutes to do a single page.
So what did we discover?
Well one of the unique texts in Archimedes is called "The Stomachion."
And we knew that it involved this square.
And this is a perfect square, and it's divided into 14 bits.
But no one knew what Archimedes was doing with these 14 bits.
And now we think we know.
He was trying to work out how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits and still make a perfect square.
Anyone want to guess the answer?
It's 17,152 divided into 536 families.
And the important point about this is that it's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics.
And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics.
The really astonishing thing though about this manuscript is that we looked at the other manuscripts that the palimpsester had made, the scribe had made his book out of, and one of them was a manuscript containing text by Hyperides.
Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C.
He was an exact contemporary of Demosthenes.
And in 338 B.C. he and Demosthenes together decided that they wanted to stand up to the military might of Philip of Macedon.
So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon.
This was a bad idea, because Philip of Macedon had a son called Alexander the Great, and they lost the battle of Chaeronea.
Alexander the Great went on to conquer the known world; Hyperides found himself on trial for treason.
And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial -- and it's a great speech: "Best of all," he says, "is to win.
But if you can't win, then you should fight for a noble cause, because then you'll be remembered.
Consider the Spartans.
They won enumerable victories, but no one remembers what they are because they were all fought for selfish ends.
The one battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers is the the battle of Thermopylae where they were butchered to a man, but fought for the freedom of Greece."
He lived for another 10 years, then the Macedonian faction caught up with him.
They cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory, and no one knows what they did with his body.
So this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity, speaking to us, not from the grave, because his grave doesn't exist, but from the Athenian law courts.
Now I should say at this point that normally when you're looking at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off, you don't find unique texts.
And to find two in one manuscript is really something.
To find three is completely weird.
Aristotle's "Categories" is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy.
And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it, possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry.
(Applause) Why did the owner of the manuscript do this?
He did this because he understands data as well as books.
Now the thing to do with books, if you want to ensure their long-term utility, is to hide them away in closets and let very few people look at them.
And that's what he did.
And institutions can learn from this.
And if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the Web, at the moment you have to go to the National Library of Y's site or the University Library of X's site, which is about the most boring way in which you can deal with digital data.
What you want to do is to aggregate it all together.
Because the Web of the ancient manuscripts of the future isn't going to be built by institutions.
And that is the future of the Web.
And it's an attractive and beautiful future, if only we can make it happen.
Now we at the Walters Art Museum have followed this example, and we have put up all our manuscripts on the Web for people to enjoy -- all the raw data, all the descriptions, all the metadata.
under a Creative Commons license.
Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum and it has beautiful manuscripts, but the data is fantastic.
And the result of this is that if you do a Google search on images right now and you type in "Illuminated manuscript Koran" for example, 24 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution.
(Applause) Now, let's think about this for a minute.
You can talk about the Humanities and that sort of thing, but let's talk about selfish things.
Because what's really in it for the institution is this: Now why do people go to the Louvre?
They go to see the Mona Lisa.
Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa?
Because they already know what she looks like.
And they know what she looks like because they've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere.
And I think that institutions should stand up and release all their data under unrestricted licenses, and it would be a great benefit to everybody.
Why don't we just let everybody have access to this data and curate their own collection of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things and increase the beauty and the cultural significance of the Internet.
Thank you very much indeed.
(Applause)
In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein coauthored "The Bell Curve," an extremely controversial book which claims that on average, some races are smarter and more likely to succeed than others.
In 2012, a writer, journalist and political commentator named John Derbyshire wrote an article that was supposed to be a non-black version of the talk that many black parents feel they have to give their kids today: advice on how to stay safe.
And yet, in 2016, I invited John Derbyshire as well as Charles Murray to speak at my school, knowing full well that I would be giving them a platform and attention for ideas that I despised and rejected.
But this is just a further evolution of a journey of uncomfortable learning throughout my life.
When I was 10 years old, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental illness characterized by mood swings and paranoid delusions.
Throughout my life, my mother's rage would turn our small house into a minefield.
Yet, though I feared her rage on a daily basis, I also learned so much from her.
Our relationship was complicated and challenging, and at the age of 14, it was decided that I needed to live apart from her.
But over the years, I've come to appreciate some of the important lessons my mother taught me about life.
She was the first person who spoke to me about learning from the other side.
And she, like me, was born and raised in a family of committed liberal democrats.
Yet, she encouraged me to see the world and the issues our world faces as complex, controversial and ever-changing.
One day, I came across the phrase "affirmative action" in a book I was reading.
And when I asked her what the term meant, she spent what felt like an hour giving me a thorough and thoughtful explanation that would make sense to a small child.
While affirmative action can increase the presence of minorities at elite educational institutions, she felt that it could also disadvantage hardworking people of different races from more affluent backgrounds.
But life at home with my mom was not the only aspect of my journey that has been formative and uncomfortable.
In fourth grade, she decided that I should attend a private school in order to receive the best education possible.
As a black student attending predominantly white private schools, I've encountered attitudes and behaviors that reflected racial stereotypes.
Several of my friends' parents assumed within minutes of meeting me that my best skill was playing basketball.
And it really upset me to think that my race made it harder for them to see me as a student who loved reading, writing and speaking.
Experiences like this motivated me to work tirelessly to disprove what I knew people had assumed.
To prove that I belonged, I had to show poise and confidence, the ability to speak well and listen closely.
Despite this racial stereotyping and the discomfort I often felt, the learning I gained from other aspects of being at an elite private school were incredibly valuable.
I was encouraged by my teachers to explore my curiosity, to challenge myself in new ways and to deepen my understanding of subjects that fascinated me the most.
And going to college was the next step.
I was excited to take my intellectual drive and interest in the world of ideas to the next level.
While I was fortunate to meet peers and professors who were interested in doing the same thing, my desire to engage with difficult ideas was also met with resistance.
To prepare myself to engage with controversy in the real world, I joined a group that brought controversial speakers to campus.
But many people fiercely opposed this group, and I received significant pushback from students, faculty and my administration.
For many, it was difficult to see how bringing controversial speakers to campus could be valuable, when they caused harm.
And it was disappointing to me facing personal attacks, having my administration cancel speakers and hearing my intentions distorted by those around me.
I also understand that some people have experienced traumatic experiences in their lives.
Yet, tuning out opposing viewpoints doesn't make them go away, because millions of people agree with them.
By engaging with controversial and offensive ideas, I believe that we can find common ground, if not with the speakers themselves, then with the audiences they may attract or indoctrinate.
But soon after I announced that John Derbyshire would be speaking on campus, student backlash erupted on social media.
The tide of resistance, in fact, was so intense, that my college president rescinded the invitation.
I was deeply disappointed by this because, as I saw it, there would be nothing that any of my peers or I could do to silence someone who agreed with him in the office environment of our future employers.
I look out at what's happening on college campuses, and I see the anger.
But what I wish I could tell people is that it's worth the discomfort, it's worth listening, and that we're stronger, not weaker, because of it.
When I think about my experiences with uncomfortable learning, and I reflect upon them, I've found that it's been very difficult to change the values of the intellectual community that I've been a part of.
What I've found is that, while it can be difficult to change the values of a community, we can gain a lot from individual interactions.
I knew the conversation would be difficult.
I found that he, like me, believed in creating a more just society.
The thing is, his understanding of what justice entailed was very different from my own.
The way in which he wanted to understand the issue, the way in which he wanted to approach the issue of inequality also differed from my own.
But I did walk away with a deeper understanding.
It's my belief that to achieve progress in the face of adversity, we need a genuine commitment to gaining a deeper understanding of humanity.
I'd like to see a world with more leaders who are familiar with the depths of the views of those they deeply disagree with, so that they can understand the nuances of everyone they're representing.
Thank you.
(Applause)
She's an actress, she's in her 60s.
And a couple of days before Christmas, she was at the post office.
And out of nowhere, someone moved her out of the way -- just physically put their hands on her and moved her out of the way.
He apparently needed something that she was blocking, so he moved her.
Maybe he had said something to her, maybe he didn't, she didn't hear it ...
Either way, she was focused, she was filling out the form.
She said that she was shocked at first -- yeah.
And she went on to say, "I mean, I wanted to get physical.
I don't know -- I was furious.
And I don't know why.
I mean, he didn't hit me.
He didn't hurt me, he didn't violate me.
He moved me, and I wanted to hurt him, or at the very least, run after him and yell in his face."
I feel like this is the point in the room where all the men are getting a little bit uncomfortable.
(Laughter) It's OK.
Stay with me.
Well, the common thread is the spectrum.
And women have to live with the effects of both and everything in between.
Fellas, can you imagine you're just on your phone, and someone walks up to you and just takes it out of your hand?
And then imagine if someone takes that cell phone out of your hands -- I don't know -- once a day, twice a day, random times.
Men are so used to helping themselves, that it's like ...
they can't help themselves.
And not because men are fundamentally less moral, but because this is a very big blind spot for most men.
When someone helps themselves to a woman, it not only triggers discomfort and distress, but the unspoken experiences of our mothers' lives, sisters' lives and generations of women before us.
And if you add in the history of race -- which is a whole other talk -- it gets exponentially more complicated.
You know what? He probably said something, and I didn't hear him.
I'm totally overreacting."
No.
No.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
Women have been trained to think that we are overreacting or that we're being too sensitive or unreasonable.
We try to put them into some hidden place in our minds, but they don't go away.
"I know --" (Giggling) "Yes, yes, of course," because apparently, women aren't supposed to get angry.
What seems like a benign moment at the post office is actually an anger grenade.
Well, kaboom!
Today, the global collection of women's experiences can no longer be ignored.
It is men's responsibility to change men's bad behavior.
(Applause) Our culture is shifting, and it's time.
So my fellow women and our gentle men, as we are here together within this particular window of this large-scale movement towards women's equality, and as we envision a future that does not yet exist, we both have different invitations.
Men, I call you in as allies, as we work together towards change.
May you be accountable and self-reflective, compassionate and open.
May you ask how you can support a woman and be of service to change.
And women, I encourage you to acknowledge your fury.
Give it language.
It holds lifetimes of wisdom.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: So two months ago, something crazy happened.
(Video) Voices: Five, four, three, two, one.
(Cheering) Woman: Liftoff. Go Falcon Heavy.
GS: So this was such an important moment for SpaceX.
With the Falcon 9 and now the Falcon Heavy, we can launch into orbit any payload that has previously been conceived or is conceived right now.
I was excited.
By the way, there's maybe a thousand people standing around me right there.
And Starman.
CA: (Laughter) CA: There had to be some payload -- why not put a Tesla into space?
GS: Exactly. It was perfect.
CA: Gwynne, let's wind the clock back.
I mean, how did you end up an engineer and President of SpaceX?
GS: I don't think I was nerdy, but I was definitely doing the things that the girls weren't doing.
I asked my mom, who was an artist, when I was in third grade, how a car worked, so she had no idea so she gave me a book, and I read it, and sure enough, my first job out of my mechanical engineering degree was with Chrysler Motors in the automotive industry.
But I actually got into engineering not because of that book but because my mom took me to a Society of Women Engineers event, and I fell in love with the mechanical engineer that spoke.
(Laughter) And that's what a 15-year-old girl connects with.
CA: Sixteen years ago, you became employee number seven at SpaceX, and then over the next years, you somehow built a multi-billion-dollar relationship with NASA, despite the fact that SpaceX's first three launches blew up.
I mean, how on earth did you do that?
GS: So actually, selling rockets is all about relationships and making a connection with these customers.
When you don't have a rocket to sell, what's really important is selling your team, selling the business savvy of your CEO -- that's not really hard to sell these days -- and basically, making sure that any technical issue that they have or any concern, you can address right away.
CA: And currently, a big focus of the company is, I guess, kind of a race with Boeing to be the first to provide the service to NASA of actually putting humans into orbit.
Safety considerations obviously come to the fore, here.
GS: I actually sleep really well. I'm a good sleeper, that's my best thing.
But I think the days leading up to our flying crew will probably be a little sleepless.
But really, fundamentally, safety comes in the design of the system that you're going to fly people on, and so we've been working for years, actually, almost a decade, on this technology.
We're taking the Dragon cargo spaceship and we're upgrading it to be able to carry crew.
And as I said, we've been engineering in these safety systems for quite some time.
GS: That's right. It's called the launch escape system.
GS: We've got a video of a test that we ran in 2015.
So this simulated having a really bad day on the pad.
Basically, you want the capsule to get out of Dodge.
We also will be doing another demonstration later this year on if we have an issue with the rocket during flight.
CA: And those rockets have another potential function as well, eventually.
GS: Yeah, so the launch escape system for Dragon is pretty unique.
It's an integrated launch escape system.
It's basically a pusher, so the propellant system and the thrusters are integrated into the capsule, and so if it detects a rocket problem, it pushes the capsule away.
Capsule safety systems in the past have been like tractor pullers, and the reason we didn't want to do that is that puller needs to come off before you can safely reenter that capsule, so we wanted to eliminate, in design, that possibility of failure.
CA: I mean, SpaceX has made the regular reusability of rockets seem almost routine, which means you've done something that no national space program, for example, has been able to achieve.
How was that possible?
GS: I think there's a couple of things -- there's a million things, actually -- that have allowed SpaceX to be successful.
The first is that we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants. Right?
We got to look at the rocket industry and the developments to date, and we got to pick the best ideas, leverage them.
CA: I mean, there are other programs started from scratch.
That last phrase you said there, you let physics drive the design, what's an example of that?
The tank architecture -- it's a common dome design.
Basically it's like two beer cans stacked together, one full of liquid oxygen, one full of RP, and that basically saved weight.
It allowed us to basically take more payload for the same design.
It is done elsewhere, probably not to the degree that we do it, but it adds a lot of margin to the vehicle, which obviously adds reliability.
CA: Gwynne, you became President of SpaceX 10 years ago, I think.
What's it been like to work so closely with Elon Musk?
GS: So I love working for Elon.
I've been doing it for 16 years this year, actually.
I don't think I'm dumb enough to do something for 16 years that I don't like doing.
He's funny and fundamentally without him saying anything he drives you to do your best work.
He doesn't have to say a word.
You just want to do great work.
CA: You might be the person best placed to answer this question, which has puzzled me, which is to shed light on this strange unit of time called "Elon time."
For example, last year, I asked Elon, you know, when Tesla would auto-drive across America, and he said by last December, which is definitely true, if you take Elon time into account.
So what's the conversion ratio between Elon time and real time?
(Laughter) GS: You put me in a unique position, Chris.
There's no question that Elon is very aggressive on his timelines, but frankly, that drives us to do things better and faster.
I think all the time and all the money in the world does not yield the best solution, and so putting that pressure on the team to move quickly is really important.
I mean, he sets these crazy goals that have their impact, but, in other circumstances, might blow up a team or set impossible expectations.
It feels like you've found a way of saying, "Yes, Elon," and then making it happen in a way that is acceptable both to him and to your company, to your employees.
GS: There is two really important realizations for that.
So I always felt like my job was to take these ideas and kind of turn them into company goals, make them achievable, and kind of roll the company over from this steep slope, get it comfortable.
And I noticed every time I felt like we were there, we were rolling over, people were getting comfortable, Elon would throw something out there, and all of a sudden, we're not comfortable and we're climbing that steep slope again.
But then once I realized that that's his job, and my job is to get the company close to comfortable so he can push again and put us back on that slope, then I started liking my job a lot more, instead of always being frustrated.
CA: So if I estimated that the conversation ratio for Elon time to your time is about 2x, am I a long way out there?
GS: That's not terrible, and you said it, I didn't.
(Laughter) CA: You know, looking ahead, one huge initiative SpaceX is believed to be, rumored to be working on, is a massive network of literally thousands of low earth orbit satellites to provide high-bandwidth, low-cost internet connection to every square foot of planet earth.
GS: We actually don't chat very much about this particular project, not because we're hiding anything, but this is probably one of the most challenging if not the most challenging project we've undertaken.
No one has been successful deploying a huge constellation for internet broadband, or basically for satellite internet, and I don't think physics is the difficulty here.
I think we can come up with the right technology solution, but we need to make a business out of it, and it'll cost the company about 10 billion dollars or more to deploy this system.
And so we're marching steadily along but we're certainly not claiming victory yet.
CA: I mean, the impact of that, obviously, if that happened to the world, of connectivity everywhere, would be pretty radical, and perhaps mainly for good -- I mean, it changes a lot if suddenly everyone can connect cheaply.
GS: Yeah, there's no question it'll change the world.
People worry a lot about this.
This would a huge increase in the total number of satellites in orbit.
GS: So space debris is a concern, there's no question -- not because it's so likely to happen, but the consequences of it happening are pretty devastating.
You could basically spew a bunch of particles in orbit that could take out that orbit from being useful for decades or longer.
CA: So despite the remarkable success there of that Falcon Heavy rocket, you're actually not focusing on that as your future development plan.
GS: It's the Big Falcon Rocket. CA: The Big Falcon Rocket, that's right.
(Laughter) What's the business logic of doing this when you invested all that in that incredible technology, and now you're just going to something much bigger. Why?
GS: Actually, we've learned some lessons over the duration where we've been developing these launch systems.
What we want to do is not introduce a new product before we've been able to convince the customers that this is the product that they should move to, so we're working on the Big Falcon Rocket now, but we're going to continue flying Falcon 9s and Falcon Heavies until there is absolute widespread acceptance of BFR.
But we are working on it right now, we're just not going to cancel Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and just put in place BFR.
GS: That's correct.
CA: But somehow, you've also found other business ideas for this.
GS: Yes. BFR can take the satellites that we're currently taking to orbit to many orbits.
Basically, the width, the diameter of the fairing is eight meters, so you can think about what giant telescopes you can put in that fairing, in that cargo bay, and see really incredible things and discover incredible things in space.
CA: Is that what you call this? Talk about what the heck this is.
That's worth pointing out, by the way.
What a beautiful rocket, and that hangar could just fit the Statue of Liberty in it, so you get a sense of size of that Falcon Heavy Rocket.
CA: And the fact that there are 27 engines there.
We developed the Merlin engine for the Falcon 1 launch vehicle.
We could have tossed that engine and built an entirely new engine for the Falcon 9.
It would have been called something different, because Falcon 9 is nine Merlin engines, but instead of spending a billion dollars on a brand new engine, we put nine of them together on the back end of Falcon 9.
Residual capability: glue three Falcon 9s together and you have the largest operational rocket flying.
And so it was expensive to do, but it was a much more efficient path than starting from scratch.
CA: And the BFR is the equivalent of how much bigger than that, in terms of its power?
GS: BFR is about, I believe, two and half times the size of this.
CA: Right, and so that allows you -- I mean, I still don't really believe this video that we're about to play here.
GS: So it currently is on earth, but this is basically space travel for earthlings.
I can't wait for this residual capability.
Basically, what we're going to do is we're going to fly BFR like an aircraft and do point-to-point travel on earth, so you can take off from New York City or Vancouver and fly halfway across the globe.
(Applause) The longest part of that flight is actually the boat out and back.
(Laughter) CA: I mean. Gwynne, come on, this is awesome, but it's crazy, right?
GS: Oh no, it's definitely going to happen.
This is definitely going to happen.
And let's talk a little bit about the business.
Everyone thinks rockets are really expensive, and to a large degree they are, and how could we possibly compete with airline tickets here?
And yet, a long-haul aircraft can only make one of those flights a day.
So even if my rocket was slightly more expensive and the fuel is a little bit more expensive, I can run 10x at least what they're running in a day, and really make the revenue that I need to out of that system.
GS: Within a decade, for sure.
GS: That's Gwynne time. I'm sure Elon will want us to go faster.
CA: Yeah, well, OK, that is definitely something.
(Laughter) And meanwhile, the other use of BFR is being developed to go a little bit further than Shanghai.
You guys have actually developed quite a detailed, sort of, picture of how humans might fly to Mars, and what that would look like.
But basically, you're going to lift off from a pad, you've got a booster as well as the BFS, the Big Falcon Spaceship.
The booster is going to drop the spaceship off in orbit, low earth orbit, and then return just like we're returning boosters right now.
So it sounds incredible, but we're working on the pieces, and you can see us achieve these pieces.
So booster comes back.
You take a cargo ship full of fuel, or a fuel depot, put it on that booster, get that in orbit, do a docking maneuver, refuel the spaceship, and head on to your destination, and this one is Mars.
CA: So, like, a hundred people go to Mars at one time, taking, what, six months? Two months?
GS: It ends up depending on how big the rocket is.
CA: When do you believe SpaceX will land the first human on Mars?
It will be within a decade -- not this decade.
CA: In real time, again, within a decade.
(Laughter) Why, though? Seriously, why?
There are so many things on earth that need urgent attention.
Why would you have this escape trip off to another planet?
(Applause) GS: So I am glad you asked that, but I think we need to expand our minds a little bit.
I think we're working on one of the most important things we possibly can, and that's to find another place for humans to live and survive and thrive.
If something happened on earth, you need humans living somewhere else.
(Applause) It's the fundamental risk reduction for the human species.
And this does not subvert making our planet here better and doing a better job taking care of it, but I think you need multiple paths to survival, and this is one of them.
That's terrible, actually, that's a terrible reason to go do it.
Fundamentally, it's another place to explore, and that's what makes humans different from animals, it's our sense of exploration and sense of wonderment and learning something new.
And then I also have to say, this is the first step in us moving to other solar systems and potentially other galaxies, and I think this is the only time I ever out-vision Elon, because I want to meet other people in other solar systems.
Mars is fine, but it is a fixer-upper planet.
There's work to do there to make it habitable.
(Laughter) I want to find people, or whatever they call themselves, in another solar system.
CA: That is a big vision.
Gwynne Shotwell, thank you.
You have one of the most amazing jobs on the planet.
GS: Thank you very much. Thanks, Chris.
My talk today is about something maybe a couple of you have already heard about.
It's called the Arab Spring.
Anyone heard of it?
(Applause) So in 2011, power shifted, from the few to the many, from oval offices to central squares, from carefully guarded airwaves to open-source networks.
I study Muslim societies around the world at Gallup.
Since 2001, we've interviewed hundreds of thousands of people -- young and old, men and women, educated and illiterate.
My talk today draws on this research to reveal why Arabs rose up and what they want now.
Now this region's very diverse, and every country is unique.
But those who revolted shared a common set of grievances and have similar demands today.
I'm going to focus a lot of my talk on Egypt.
It has nothing to do with the fact that I was born there, of course.
But it's the largest Arab country and it's also one with a great deal of influence.
If an act of desperation by a Tunisian fruit vendor sparked these revolutions, it was the difference between what Arabs experienced and what they expected that provided the fuel.
To tell you what I mean, consider this trend in Egypt.
On paper the country was doing great.
But under the surface was a very different reality.
Now this is very unusual, because globally we find that, not surprisingly, people feel better as their country gets richer.
And that's because they have better job opportunities and their state offers better social services.
But it was exactly the opposite in Egypt.
As the country got more well-off, unemployment actually rose and people's satisfaction with things like housing and education plummeted.
But it wasn't just anger at economic injustice.
It was also people's deep longing for freedom.
Contrary to the clash of civilizations theory, Arabs didn't despise Western liberty, they desired it.
As early as 2001, we asked Arabs, and Muslims in general around the world, what they admired most about the West.
In their own words to an open-ended question we heard, "Their political system is transparent and it's following democracy in its true sense."
Another said it was "liberty and freedom and being open-minded with each other."
Majorities as high as 90 percent and greater in Egypt, Indonesia and Iran told us in 2005 that if they were to write a new constitution for a theoretical new country that they would guarantee freedom of speech as a fundamental right, especially in Egypt.
Eighty-eight percent said moving toward greater democracy would help Muslims progress -- the highest percentage of any country we surveyed.
But pressed up against these democratic aspirations was a very different day-to-day experience, especially in Egypt.
So while economic development made a few people rich, it left many more worse off.
So now that Egyptians have ended Mubarak's 30-year rule, they potentially could be an example for the region.
If Egypt is to succeed at building a society based on the rule of law, it could be a model.
If, however, the core issues that propelled the revolution aren't addressed, the consequences could be catastrophic -- not just for Egypt, but for the entire region.
Islamists, not the young liberals that sparked the revolution, won the majority in Parliament.
The military council has cracked down on civil society and protests and the country's economy continues to suffer.
Evaluating Egypt on this basis alone, however, ignores the real revolution.
Because Egyptians are more optimistic than they have been in years, far less divided on religious-secular lines than we would think and poised for the demands of democracy.
Whether they support Islamists or liberals, Egyptians' priorities for this government are identical, and they are jobs, stability and education, not moral policing.
But most of all, for the first time in decades, they expect to be active participants, not spectators, in the affairs of their country.
I was meeting with a group of newly-elected parliamentarians from Egypt and Tunisia a couple of weeks ago.
And what really struck me about them was that they weren't only optimistic, but they kind of struck me as nervous, for lack of a better word.
One said to me, "Our people used to gather in cafes to watch football" -- or soccer, as we say in America -- "and now they gather to watch Parliament."
So right before the revolution we said that Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives, but not only that, they thought their future would be no better.
What really changed after the ouster of Mubarak wasn't that life got easier.
It actually got harder.
But people's expectations for their future went up significantly.
And this hope, this optimism, endured a year of turbulent transition.
One reason that there's this optimism is because, contrary to what many people have said, most Egyptians think things really have changed in many ways.
So while Egyptians were known for their single-digit turnout in elections before the revolution, the last election had around 70 percent voter turnout -- men and women.
Where scarcely a quarter believed in the honesty of elections in 2010 -- I'm surprised it was a quarter -- 90 percent thought that this last election was honest.
Now why this matters is because we discovered a link between people's faith in their democratic process and their faith that oppressed people can change their situation through peaceful means alone.
(Applause) Now I know what some of you are thinking.
The Egyptian people, and many other Arabs who've revolted and are in transition, have very high expectations of the government.
But this conclusion would ignore a tectonic shift taking place in Egypt far from the cameras in Tahrir Square.
(Applause) And three-fourths believe they not only have the responsibility, but the power to make change.
And this empowerment also applies to women, whose role in the revolts cannot be underestimated.
They were doctors and dissidents, artists and organizers.
A full third of those who braved tanks and tear gas to ask or to demand liberty and justice in Egypt were women.
(Applause) Now people have raised some real concerns about what the rise of Islamist parties means for women.
What we've found about the role of religion in law and the role of religion in society is that there's no female consensus.
We found that women in one country look more like the men in that country than their female counterparts across the border.
Now what this suggests is that how women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women.
Where women agree, however, is on their own role, and that it must be central and active.
Now how men feel about women's rights matters to the future of this region.
Because we discovered a link between men's support for women's employment and how many women are actually employed in professional fields in that country.
So the question becomes, What drives men's support for women's rights?
What about men's views of religion and law?
[Does] a man's opinion of the role of religion in politics shape their view of women's rights?
The answer is no.
What drives men's support for women's employment is men's employment, their level of education as well as a high score on their country's U.N. Human Development Index.
What this means is that human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East.
And the transformation continues.
From Wall Street to Mohammed Mahmoud Street, it has never been more important to understand the aspirations of ordinary people.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We are today talking about moral persuasion: What is moral and immoral in trying to change people's behaviors by using technology and using design?
I'm not able to tell you what is moral or immoral, because we're living in a pluralist society.
My values can be radically different from your values, which means that what I consider moral or immoral based on that might not necessarily be what you consider moral or immoral.
But I also realized there is one thing that I could give you, and that is what this guy behind me gave the world -- Socrates.
What I can do and what I would like to do with you is give you, like that initial question, a set of questions to figure out for yourselves, layer by layer, like peeling an onion, getting at the core of what you believe is moral or immoral persuasion.
And I'd like to do that with a couple of examples of technologies where people have used game elements to get people to do things.
So it's at first a very simple, very obvious question I would like to give you: What are your intentions if you are designing something?
There are a couple of these kinds of Eco dashboards right now -- dashboards built into cars -- which try to motivate you to drive more fuel-efficiently.
This here is Nissan's MyLeaf, where your driving behavior is compared with the driving behavior of other people, so you can compete for who drives a route the most fuel-efficiently.
And these things are very effective, it turns out -- so effective that they motivate people to engage in unsafe driving behaviors, like not stopping at a red light, because that way you have to stop and restart the engine, and that would use quite some fuel, wouldn't it?
So despite this being a very well-intended application, obviously there was a side effect of that.
Here's another example for one of these side effects.
Commendable: a site that allows parents to give their kids little badges for doing the things that parents want their kids to do, like tying their shoes.
It's better when you care about yourself than how you appear in front of other people.
So that kind of motivational tool that is used actually, in and of itself, has a long-term side effect, in that every time we use a technology that uses something like public recognition or status, we're actually positively endorsing this as a good and normal thing to care about -- that way, possibly having a detrimental effect on the long-term psychological well-being of ourselves as a culture.
Well, there are some technologies which obviously combine both.
Both good long-term and short-term effects and a positive intention like Fred Stutzman's "Freedom," where the whole point of that application is -- well, we're usually so bombarded with constant requests by other people, with this device, you can shut off the Internet connectivity of your PC of choice for a pre-set amount of time, to actually get some work done.
And I think most of us will agree that's something well-intended, and also has good consequences.
It is a technology that empowers the individual to determine its own life course, to shape itself.
As you see in today's modern liberal democracies, the society, the state, not only allows us to determine our self, to shape our self, it also demands it of us.
It demands that we optimize ourselves, that we control ourselves, that we self-manage continuously, because that's the only way in which such a liberal society works.
These technologies want us to stay in the game that society has devised for us.
They want us to fit in even better.
And we can question these values.
We can question: Is it a good thing that all of us continuously self-optimize ourselves to fit better into that society?
Or to give you another example: What about a piece of persuasive technology that convinces Muslim women to wear their headscarves?
Is that a good or a bad technology in its intentions or in its effects?
Well, that basically depends on the kind of values you bring to bear to make these kinds of judgments.
And speaking of values: I've noticed that in the discussion about moral persuasion online and when I'm talking with people, more often than not, there is a weird bias.
Is it "still" permissible?
We're asking things like: Is this Oxfam donation form, where the regular monthly donation is the preset default, and people, maybe without intending it, are encouraged or nudged into giving a regular donation instead of a one-time donation, is that "still' permissible?
Is it "still" ethical?
But in fact, that question, "Is it 'still' ethical?"
is just one way of looking at ethics.
Because if you look at the beginning of ethics in Western culture, you see a very different idea of what ethics also could be.
For Aristotle, ethics was not about the question, "Is that still good, or is it bad?"
Ethics was about the question of how to live life well.
And he put that in the word "arête," which we, from [Ancient Greek], translate as "virtue."
But really, it means "excellence."
It means living up to your own full potential as a human being.
And that is an idea that, I think, Paul Richard Buchanan put nicely in a recent essay, where he said, "Products are vivid arguments about how we should live our lives."
Our designs are not ethical or unethical in that they're using ethical or unethical means of persuading us.
They have a moral component just in the kind of vision and the aspiration of the good life that they present to us.
And if you look into the designed environment around us with that kind of lens, asking, "What is the vision of the good life that our products, our design, present to us?", then you often get the shivers, because of how little we expect of each other, of how little we actually seem to expect of our life, and what the good life looks like.
So that's a fourth question I'd like to leave you with: What vision of the good life do your designs convey?
And speaking of design, you'll notice that I already broadened the discussion, because it's not just persuasive technology that we're talking about here, it's any piece of design that we put out here in the world.
I don't know whether you know the great communication researcher Paul Watzlawick who, back in the '60s, made the argument that we cannot not communicate.
Even if we choose to be silent, we chose to be silent, and we're communicating something by choosing to be silent.
It puts a certain vision of the good life out there in front of us, which is what Peter-Paul Verbeek, the Dutch philosopher of technology, says.
We make certain things harder and easier to do.
We organize the existence of people.
And even something as innocuous as a single-design chair, like this one by Arne Jacobsen, is a persuasive technology, because, again, it communicates an idea of the good life: a good life -- a life that you, as a designer, consent to by saying, "In a good life, goods are produced as sustainably or unsustainably as this chair.
The good life is a life where design is important because somebody obviously took the time and spent the money for that kind of well-designed chair; where tradition is important, because this is a traditional classic and someone cared about this; and where there is something as conspicuous consumption, where it is OK and normal to spend a humongous amount of money on such a chair, to signal to other people what your social status is.
So these are the kinds of layers, the kinds of questions I wanted to lead you through today; the question of: What are the intentions that you bring to bear when you're designing something?
What are the virtues, the aspirations that you're actually expressing in that?
Do we stop there?
I don't think so.
Why, when the question of what the good life is informs everything that we design, should we stop at design and not ask ourselves: How does it apply to our own life?
"Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"
as Michel Foucault puts it.
This is Buster setting up a pull-up machine at the office of his new start-up, Habit Labs, where they're trying to build other applications like "Health Month" for people.
Well, here is the set of axioms that Habit Labs, Buster's start-up, put up for themselves on how they wanted to work together as a team when they're building these applications -- a set of moral principles they set themselves for working together -- one of them being, "We take care of our own health and manage our own burnout."
(Applause)
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Is E.T. out there?
Well, I work at the SETI Institute.
That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face.
Now, a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic, ridiculous, maybe even hopeless, but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think that the job I have is actually a privilege, okay, and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work, if that's what you call it.
Hello, come in, Earth.
This is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968, I was working there collecting data for my thesis.
The observatory had just acquired a new book, written by a Russian cosmologist by the name of Joseph Shklovsky, and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known Cornell astronomer by the name of Carl Sagan.
And I remember reading that book, and at 3 in the morning I was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas I was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate, to send bits of information from one star system to another.
Now, at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're all alone, haven't had much sleep, that was a very romantic idea, but it was that idea -- the fact that you could in fact prove that there's somebody out there just using this same technology -- that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job at the SETI Institute. Now, I have to say that my memory is notoriously porous, and I've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story, or I was just, you know, misremembering something, but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine, and sure enough, there you can see the Shklovsky and Sagan book underneath that analog calculating device.
So it was true.
The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T.
Now, Frank didn't hear anything.
Actually he did, but it turned out to be the U.S. Air Force, which doesn't count as extraterrestrial intelligence.
But Drake's idea here became very popular because it was very appealing — and I'll get back to that — and on the basis of this experiment, which didn't succeed, we have been doing SETI ever since, not continuously, but ever since.
This is the Allen Telescope Array, about 350 miles from whatever seat you're in right now.
This is Frank Drake's electronics in 1960.
This is the Allen Telescope Array electronics today.
Some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960, 100 trillion times better.
In other words, we're looking for a needle in a haystack.
We know how big the haystack is. It's the galaxy.
In fact, those of you who are still conscious and mathematically competent, will note that this is a semi-log plot.
In other words, the rate of increase is exponential.
It's exponentially improving. Now, exponential is an overworked word. You hear it on the media all the time.
They don't really know what exponential means, but this is exponential.
Well, a million star systems, is that interesting?
I mean, how many of those star systems have planets?
And the facts are, we didn't know the answer to that even as recently as 15 years ago, and in fact, we really didn't know it even as recently as six months ago.
But now we do. Recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets, and more than one.
So in fact, this is a pretty accurate estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy, just in our galaxy, by the way, and I remind the non-astronomy majors among you that our galaxy is only one of 100 billion that we can see with our telescopes.
That's a lot of real estate, but of course, most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless, like, you know, Mercury, or Neptune.
Neptune's probably not very big in your life.
So the question is, what fraction of these planets are actually suitable for life?
We don't know the answer to that either, but we will learn that answer this year, thanks to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, and in fact, the smart money, which is to say the people who work on this project, the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand, one in a hundred, something like that.
Well, even taking the pessimistic estimate, that it's one in a thousand, that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the Earth just in our own galaxy.
Okay, now I've given you a lot of numbers here, but they're mostly big numbers, okay, so, you know, keep that in mind. There's plenty of real estate, plenty of real estate in the universe, and if we're the only bit of real estate in which there's some interesting occupants, that makes you a miracle, and I know you like to think you're a miracle, but if you do science, you learn rather quickly that every time you think you're a miracle, you're wrong, so probably not the case.
So that's not so bad. I mean, even with two dozen years, you open up your browser and there's news of a signal, or you get a cup of coffee.
Now, let me tell you about some aspect of this that people don't think about, and that is, what happens? Suppose that what I say is true.
Now, I might be at ground zero for this.
And I kept waiting for the Men in Black to show up. Right?
I kept waiting for -- I kept waiting for my mom to call, somebody to call, the government to call. Nobody called.
Nobody called. I was so nervous that I couldn't sit down. I just wandered around taking photos like this one, just for something to do.
Well, at 9:30 in the morning, with my head down on my desk because I obviously hadn't slept all night, the phone rings and it's The New York Times.
But what about you? What's it going to do to you?
And the answer is that we don't know the answer.
I mean, that would be a bit like asking Chris Columbus in 1491, "Hey Chris, you know, what happens if it turns out that there's a continent between here and Japan, where you're sailing to, what will be the consequences for humanity if that turns out to be the case?"
And I think Chris would probably offer you some answer that you might not have understood, but it probably wouldn't have been right, and I think that to predict what finding E.T.'s going to mean, we can't predict that either.
But here are a couple things I can say.
You're not going to hear from alien Neanderthals.
Now, you might find that a bit hyperbolic, and maybe it is, but nonetheless, it's conceivable that this will happen, and, you know, you could consider this like, I don't know, giving Julius Caesar English lessons and the key to the library of Congress.
We will know that we're not that miracle, right, that we're just another duck in a row, we're not the only kids on the block, and I think that that's philosophically a very profound thing to learn.
We're not a miracle, okay?
The third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague, but I think interesting and important, and that is, if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society, because they will be, that will tell you something about our own possibilities, that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction.
That's interesting to cosmologists.
Now, let me talk a little bit about something that happens even in the meantime, and that is, SETI, I think, is important, because it's exploration, and it's not only exploration, it's comprehensible exploration.
Now, I gotta tell you, I'm always reading books about explorers. I find exploration very interesting, Arctic exploration, you know, people like Magellan, Amundsen, Shackleton, you see Franklin down there, Scott, all these guys. It's really nifty, exploration.
And they're just doing it because they want to explore, and you might say, "Oh, that's kind of a frivolous opportunity," but that's not frivolous. That's not a frivolous activity, because, I mean, think of ants.
You know, most ants are programmed to follow one another along in a long line, but there are a couple of ants, maybe one percent of those ants, that are what they call pioneer ants, and they're the ones that wander off.
But those ants, even though most of them get wiped out, those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive. So exploration is important.
I also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what I think is a critical lack in our society, and that is the lack of science literacy, the lack of the ability to even understand science.
Now, look, a lot has been written about the deplorable state of science literacy in this country.
Well, here's one example, in fact.
Polls taken, this poll was taken 10 years ago.
It shows like roughly one third of the public thinks that aliens are not only out there, we're looking for them out there, but they're here, right?
Well, that would be interesting if it was true, and job security for me, but I don't think the evidence is very good. That's more, you know, sad than significant.
But there are other things that people believe that are significant, like the efficacy of homeopathy, or that evolution is just, you know, sort of a crazy idea by scientists without any legs, or, you know, evolution, all that sort of thing, or global warming.
Now, we've got to solve that problem, because that's a critically important problem, and you might say, "Well, okay, how are we gonna solve that problem with SETI?"
It can address the problem by getting young people interested in science. Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right?
I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?
In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up.
Now, that's not true anymore.
Today, you've got to spend years in grad school and post-doc positions just to figure out what the important questions are.
It's hard. There's no doubt about it.
And in fact, here's an example: the Higgs boson, finding the Higgs boson.
Ask the next 10 people you see on the streets, "Hey, do you think it's worthwhile to spend billions of Swiss francs looking for the Higgs boson?"
And I bet the answer you're going to get, is, "Well, I don't know what the Higgs boson is, and I don't know if it's important."
And yet we're spending billions of Swiss francs on this problem.
SETI, on the other hand, is really simple.
Yes, technologically, it's very sophisticated, but everybody gets the idea.
So that's one thing. The other thing is, it's exciting science.
I mean, this is analogous to our interest in things that have big teeth. Right?
We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching Animal Planet.
You notice they make very few programs about gerbils.
It's mostly about things that have big teeth.
Okay, so we're interested in these sorts of things.
This allows you to pay it forward by using this subject as a hook to science, because SETI involves all kinds of science, obviously biology, obviously astronomy, but also geology, also chemistry, various scientific disciplines all can be presented in the guise of, "We're looking for E.T."
So to me this is interesting and important, and in fact, it's my policy, even though I give a lot of talks to adults, you give talks to adults, and two days later they're back where they were.
They get interested in something.
So, all right, I give talks to adults, that's fine, but I try and make 10 percent of the talks that I give, I try and make those for kids.
I remember when a guy came to our high school, actually, it was actually my junior high school. I was in sixth grade.
All right, so the guy said electronics. I don't remember anything else. In fact, I don't remember anything that my sixth grade teacher said all year, but I remember electronics.
And so I got interested in electronics, and you know, I studied to get my ham license. I was wiring up stuff.
So that's my point, that you can have a big effect on these kids.
In fact, this reminds me, I don't know, a couple years ago I gave a talk at a school in Palo Alto where there were about a dozen 11-year-olds that had come to this talk.
I had been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour.
Eleven-year-olds, they're all sitting in a little semi-circle looking up at me with big eyes, and I started, there was a white board behind me, and I started off by writing a one with 22 zeroes after it, and I said, "All right, now look, this is the number of stars in the visible universe, and this number is so big there's not even a name for it."
And one of these kids shot up his hand, and he said, "Well, actually there is a name for it.
Now, that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude, but there was no doubt about it, these kids were smart.
All they wanted to do was ask questions.
What they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions. (Laughter) Let me just say, look, my job is a privilege because we're in a special time.
Previous generations couldn't do this experiment at all.
So to me, it is a privilege, and when I look in the mirror, the facts are that I really don't see myself.
These are some kids from the Huff School, fourth graders.
(Applause)
So I thought I'd talk about identity.
That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me.
And that's so wrong, that's such a fundamentally, reactionary view of identity, and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble.
That's me, that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting.
And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists.
And he's so good at it, that when he was in prison, everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls, because they were so good.
And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece, and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake, if you see what I mean.
(Laughter) So when we're talking about authenticity, it's a little more fractal than it appears and that's a good example to show it.
I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly.
[Banks and legacies bringing down the system from within] [Offline solutions do not work online] I'm guessing everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right?
So why is that a good example?
That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity subverts the security of a well-constructed system.
That chip and PIN card that's in your pocket has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop, is extremely secure, you can put scanning electron microscopes on it, you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah.
So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it just to sort of speed things up.
Why?
And if you think about it, it's even more insidious and perverse than it seems at first.
You know what your name is, right?
(Laughter) And when you go into a shop and buy something, it's a PIN, he doesn't care what the name is.
(Laughter) So if you drop your card in the street, it means a criminal can pick it up and read it.
So the second example I thought I'd use is chatrooms.
[Chatrooms and Children] I'm very proud of that picture, that's my son playing in his band with his friends for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid.
(Laughter) And I love that picture.
Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person.
The first band on the list of bands that appears at some public music performance of some kind gets the sales from the first 20 tickets, then the next band gets the next 20, and so on.
So they're sitting on Facebook, and they're sending these messages and arranging things and they don't know who anybody is, right?
That's the big problem we're trying to solve.
And so when he says to me, "Oh, I want to go to a chatroom to talk about guitars" or something, I'm like, "oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chatroom to talk about guitars, because they might not all be your friends, and some of the people that are in the chatroom might be perverts and teachers and vicars."
So I want to know who all the people in the chatroom are.
So okay, you can go in the chatroom, but only if everybody in the chatroom is using their real names, and they submit full copies of their police report.
But of course, if anybody in the chatroom asked for his real name, I'd say no. You can't give them your real name.
And so the chatroom thing doesn't work properly, and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity.
So on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about - I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I?
And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story.
This happened a couple of years ago in the U.S.
There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the U.S., and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach, as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time, and somehow the cheerleading coach found out about this.
She was very upset.
And so she went to one of the girls, and said, "you have to give me your Facebook password."
I read this all the time, where even at some universities and places of education, kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords.
So you've got to give them your Facebook password.
She was a kid!
What she should have said is, "my lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning.
It's an outrageous imposition on my 4th Amendment right to privacy, and you're going to be sued for all the money you've got."
That's what she should have said.
But she's a kid, so she hands over the password.
The teacher can't log into Facebook, because the school has blocked access to Facebook.
So the teacher can't log into Facebook until she gets home.
The teacher logged in, she knows.
So the girls just all logged into Facebook on their phones, and deleted their profiles.
And so when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there.
My point is, those identities, they don't think about them the same way.
Identity is, especially when you're a teenager, a fluid thing.
You have lots of identities.
And you can have an identity, you don't like it, because it's subverted in some way, or it's insecure, or it's inappropriate, you just delete it and get another one.
The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone, the government or whatever, and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places, that's absolutely wrong.
And it just doesn't work properly.
And my fourth example is there are some cases where you really want to be - In case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest.
I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest, and I got an email from the bank saying please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters.
(Laughter) So I thought, well, look.
So I went dressed completely in black, you know, with a black balaclava, I had black gloves on, but I've taken them off to sign the visitor's book.
(Laughter) I'm wearing black trousers, black boots, I'm dressed completely in black.
There's my visitor's badge.
(Laughter) So this nonsense about you've got to have real names on Facebook and whatever, that gets you that kind of security.
That gets you security theater, where there's no actual security, but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security.
Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protesters do, because I work for them.
I know that things are actually worse than these guys think.
(Laughter) But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank who was doing something.
Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader, and I want to report it to the boss of the bank.
So I log on to do a little bit of whistleblowing.
That message is meaningless if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank.
There's no point in sending that message.
That message will only happen if I'm anonymous.
And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't, and it might, actually, make some problems worse.
The more times you're forced to use your real identity, certainly in transactional terms, the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted.
I think this is a solvable problem.
Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who.
Because in this, as in so many other walks of life, Doctor Who has already shown us the answer.
So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors, Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England, (Laughter) and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us.
And this is Doctor Who with his psychic paper.
Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper?
Doctor Who's psychic paper is when you hold up the psychic paper, the person, in their brain, sees the thing that they need to see.
I want to get into a party, I hold up the psychic paper, I show you a party invitation.
So what I'm saying is we need to make an electronic version of that, but with one tiny, tiny change, which is that it'll only show you the British passport if I've actually got one.
But nothing else.
Right.
Is that just a pipe dream?
That's a Japanese ATM, the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone.
So when you want to draw money out, you put the mobile phone on the ATM, and touch your finger, your fingerprint goes through to the phone, the phone says yes, that's whoever, and the ATM then gives you some money.
It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere.
All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is, is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub?
And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door, and if I am allowed in, it shows my picture, if I'm not allowed in, it shows a red cross.
That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement, which I agree with completely.
There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions.
My favorite statistic of all time, only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world.
(Laughter) I rely on our futurologists to tell me.
It has to be a utility which is extensible.
Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure, you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever, anyone should be able to write some code to do this.
You know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it.
We're going to do it using phones, and we're going to do it using mobile proximity.
If you've ever been up to the big city, and used an Oyster card at all, does that ring any bells to anybody?
The technology already exists.
The first phones that have the technology built in, the Google Nexus, the S2, the Samsung Wifi 7.9, the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops.
We have the technology to do that.
Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates, these technologies have been around for a while, we've just had no way of packaging them up.
So the technology already exists.
We know it works, There are a few examples of the technology being used in experimental places.
That's London Fashion Week, where we built a system with O2, that's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, you can see the persons walking in with their VIP band, it's just being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band.
They don't need to be special.
So finally, I know that you can do this, because if you saw the episode of Doctor Who, the Easter special of Doctor Who, where he went to Mars in a bus, I should say again for our foreign students, that doesn't happen every episode.
This was a very special case.
So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, I can't show you the clip, due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright by the BBC, but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, Doctor Who is clearly shown getting on to the bus with the Oyster card reader using his psychic paper.
Which proves that psychic paper has an MSE interface.
Thank you very much.
All right. So, like all good stories, this starts a long, long time ago when there was basically nothing.
So here is a complete picture of the universe about 14-odd billion years ago.
All energy is concentrated into a single point of energy.
For some reason it explodes, and you begin to get these things.
And these things expand and expand and expand into these giant galaxies, and you get trillions of them.
And within these galaxies you get these enormous dust clouds.
And what you're looking at is columns of dust where there's so much dust -- by the way, the scale of this is a trillion vertical miles -- and what's happening is there's so much dust, it comes together and it fuses and ignites a thermonuclear reaction.
And so what you're watching is the birth of stars.
When enough stars come out, they create a galaxy.
This one happens to be a particularly important galaxy, because you are here.
(Laughter) And as you take a close-up of this galaxy, you find a relatively normal, not particularly interesting star.
By the way, you're now about two-thirds of the way into this story.
So this star doesn't even appear until about two-thirds of the way into this story.
And then what happens is there's enough dust left over that it doesn't ignite into a star, it becomes a planet.
And this is about a little over four billion years ago.
And soon thereafter there's enough material left over that you get a primordial soup, and that creates life.
And as you're thinking about that, what happens is you get more and more complexity, more and more stuff to build new things with.
So within that context, there's two theories of the case as to why we're all here.
(Laughter) The only question you might want to ask yourself is, could that be just mildly arrogant?
And if it is -- and particularly given the fact that we came very close to extinction.
(Laughter) (Applause) So maybe you have to think about a second theory if the first one isn't good enough.
(Laughter) Well, why would one ask a question like that?
Because there have been at least 29 upgrades so far of humanoids.
We've upgraded time and again and again.
And it turns out that we keep discovering upgrades.
We found another one last month.
And as you're thinking about this, you might also ask the question: So why a single human species?
Wouldn't it be really odd if you went to Africa and Asia and Antarctica and found exactly the same bird -- particularly given that we co-existed at the same time with at least eight other versions of humanoid at the same time on this planet?
And if that is the normal state of affairs, then you might ask yourself, all right, so if we want to create something else, how big does a mutation have to be?
Well Svante Paabo has the answer.
The difference between humans and Neanderthal is 0.004 percent of gene code.
That's how big the difference is one species to another.
This explains most contemporary political debates.
(Laughter) But as you're thinking about this, one of the interesting things is how small these mutations are and where they take place.
Difference human/Neanderthal is sperm and testis, smell and skin.
So very small changes can have a big impact.
And as you're thinking about this, we're continuing to mutate.
So about 10,000 years ago by the Black Sea, we had one mutation in one gene which led to blue eyes.
And this is continuing and continuing and continuing.
And as it continues, one of the things that's going to happen this year is we're going to discover the first 10,000 human genomes, because it's gotten cheap enough to do the gene sequencing.
And by the way, this is not a debate that we're ready for, because we have really misused the science in this.
In the 1920s, we thought there were major differences between people.
That was partly based on Francis Galton's work.
He was Darwin's cousin.
But the U.S., the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, American Neurological Association took this really far.
So since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we're all identical.
We're going to know at year end if that is true.
And as we think about that, we're actually beginning to find things like, do you have an ACE gene?
And if you want to get more specific, how about a 577R genotype?
Well it turns out that every male Olympic power athelete ever tested carries at least one of these variants.
If that is true, it leads to some very complicated questions for the London Olympics.
Three options: Do you want the Olympics to be a showcase for really hardworking mutants?
Version number three: Because this is a naturally occurring gene and you've got it and you didn't pick the right parents, you get the right to upgrade.
Three different options.
If these differences are the difference between an Olympic medal and a non-Olympic medal.
And it turns out that as we discover these things, we human beings really like to change how we look, how we act, what our bodies do.
And we had about 10.2 million plastic surgeries in the United States, except that with the technologies that are coming online today, today's corrections, deletions, augmentations and enhancements are going to seem like child's play.
You already saw the work by Tony Atala on TED, but this ability to start filling things like inkjet cartridges with cells are allowing us to print skin, organs and a whole series of other body parts.
And as these technologies go forward, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing things -- 2000, human genome sequence -- and it seems like nothing's happening, until it does.
And as you're thinking about these two guys sequencing a human genome in 2000 and the Public Project sequencing the human genome in 2000, then you don't hear a lot, until you hear about an experiment last year in China, where they take skin cells from this mouse, put four chemicals on it, turn those skin cells into stem cells, let the stem cells grow and create a full copy of that mouse.
That's a big deal.
Because in essence what it means is you can take a cell, which is a pluripotent stem cell, which is like a skier at the top of a mountain, and those two skiers become two pluripotent stem cells, four, eight, 16, and then it gets so crowded after 16 divisions that those cells have to differentiate.
So they go down one side of the mountain, they go down another.
And as they pick that, these become bone, and then they pick another road and these become platelets, and these become macrophages, and these become T cells.
Unless, of course, if you have a ski lift.
And what those four chemicals do is they take any cell and take it way back up the mountain so it can become any body part.
That turns out to be a big deal because now you can take, not just mouse cells, but you can human skin cells and turn them into human stem cells.
And then what they did in October is they took skin cells, turned them into stem cells and began to turn them into liver cells.
So in theory, you could grow any organ from any one of your cells.
And one of the things you saw at TED about a year and a half ago was this guy.
And he gave a wonderful technical talk.
He's a professor at MIT.
But in essence what he said is you can take retroviruses, which get inside brain cells of mice.
And then you can take a fiber optic cable and light up some of the same things.
And by the way, as you do this, you can image it in two colors, which means you can download this information as binary code directly into a computer.
Well it's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories, maybe into a new body.
And maybe you can upload other people's memories as well.
And this might have just one or two small ethical, political, moral implications.
(Laughter) Just a thought.
Because these technologies are moving really quickly.
And as you think about it, let me close with an example of the brain.
The first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today, both because of the inputs, which are becoming massive, and because of the plasticity of the organ, is the brain.
Do we have any evidence that that is happening?
Well let's take a look at something like autism incidence per thousand.
Here's what it looks like in 2000.
Here's what it looks like in 2002, 2006, 2008.
You've also got people with who are extraordinarily smart, people who can remember everything they've seen in their lives, people who've got synesthesia, people who've got schizophrenia.
But one question you might want to ask is, are we seeing a rapid evolution of the brain and of how we process data?
Because when you think of how much data's coming into our brains, we're trying to take in as much data in a day as people used to take in in a lifetime.
And as you're thinking about this, there's four theories as to why this might be going on, plus a whole series of others.
I don't have a good answer.
There really needs to be more research on this.
One option is the fast food fetish.
A second option is the sexy geek option.
(Laughter) (Applause) But what's beginning to happen is because these geeks are all getting together, because they are highly qualified for computer programming and it is highly remunerated, as well as other very detail-oriented tasks, that they are concentrating geographically and finding like-minded mates.
So this is the assortative mating hypothesis of these genes reinforcing one another in these structures.
Other people get hyper-sensitive to the amount of information.
Other people react with various psychological conditions or reactions to this information.
Or maybe it's chemicals.
What I think we are doing is we're transitioning as a species.
And I didn't think this when Steve Gullans and I started writing together.
And I think that's such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
When I go to parties, it doesn't usually take very long for people to find out that I'm a scientist and I study sex.
And the questions usually have a very particular format.
And most of the time I'm glad to say that I can answer them, but sometimes I have to say, "I'm really sorry, but I don't know because I'm not that kind of a doctor."
That is, I'm not a clinician, I'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy.
And my job is to look at lots of different species of animals and try to figure out how their tissues and organs work when everything's going right, rather than trying to figure out how to fix things when they go wrong, like so many of you.
And what I do is I look for similarities and differences in the solutions that they've evolved for fundamental biological problems.
So today I'm here to argue that this is not at all an esoteric Ivory Tower activity that we find at our universities, but that broad study across species, tissue types and organ systems can produce insights that have direct implications for human health.
And this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain, and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises.
And now you know why I'm fun at parties.
(Laughter) So today I'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one.
Now I'm sure as everyone in the audience already knows -- I did have to explain it to my nine-year-old late last week -- penises are structures that transfer sperm from one individual to another.
There's an enormous amount of anatomical variation.
You find muscular tubes, modified legs, modified fins, as well as the mammalian fleshy, inflatable cylinder that we're all familiar with -- or at least half of you are.
Now the penis isn't actually required for internal fertiliztion, but when internal fertilization evolves, penises often follow.
And the question I get when I start talking about this most often is, "What made you interested in this subject?"
And that's because we tend to think of skeletons as stiff lever systems that produce speed or power.
And my first forays into biological research, doing dinosaur paleontology as an undergraduate, were really squarely in that realm.
But when I went to graduate school to study biomechanics, I really wanted to find a dissertation project that would expand our knowledge of skeletal function.
I tried a bunch of different stuff.
But then one day I started thinking about the mammalian penis.
Before it can be used for internal fertilization, its mechanical behavior has to change in a really dramatic fashion.
Most of the time it's a flexible organ.
And moreover, it has to work.
A reproductive system that fails to function produces an individual that has no offspring, and that individual is then kicked out of the gene pool.
They use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton.
And a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements.
The skeletal support comes from an interaction between a pressurized fluid and a surrounding wall of tissue that's held in tension and reinforced with fibrous proteins.
And the interaction is crucial.
Without both elements you have no support.
When you look at a penis in cross section, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton.
It has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid -- in this case blood -- surrounded by a wall of tissue that's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen.
But at the time when I started this project, the best explanation I could find for penal erection was that the wall surrounded these spongy tissues, and the spongy tissues filled with blood and pressure rose and voila! it became erect.
Because there was no mechanism in this explanation for making this structure hard to bend.
So I thought, wall tissue's important in skeletons.
Because after about six months of me talking about this, I think he finally figured out that I was really serious about the penis thing.
(Laughter) So he sat me down, and he warned me.
He was like, "Be careful going down this path.
I'm not sure this project's going to pan out."
Because he was afraid I was walking into a trap.
And that was because every hydrostatic skeleton that we had found in nature up to that point had the same basic elements.
It had the central fluid, it had the surrounding wall, and the reinforcing fibers in the wall were arranged in crossed helices around the long axis of the skeleton.
The arrow shows you the long axis.
And you can see two layers of fibers, one in blue and one in yellow, arranged in left-handed and right-handed angles.
And if you weren't just looking at a little section of the fibers, those fibers would be going in helices around the long axis of the skeleton -- something like a Chinese finger trap, where you stick your fingers in and they get stuck.
And these skeletons have a particular set of behaviors, which I'm going to demonstrate in a film.
It's a model skeleton that I made out of a piece of cloth that I wrapped around an inflated balloon.
The cloth's cut on the bias.
It lengthens, shortens and bends really easily in response to internal or external forces.
Now my adviser's concern was what if the penile wall tissue is just the same as any other hydrostatic skeleton.
What are you going to contribute?
What new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology?
And I thought, "Yeah, he does have a really good point here."
So I spent a long, long time thinking about it.
(Laughter) So something interesting had to be going on.
So I went ahead, collected wall tissue, prepared it so it was erect, sectioned it, put it on slides and then stuck it under the microscope to have a look, fully expecting to see crossed helices of collagen of some variety.
But instead I saw this.
There's an outer layer and an inner layer.
The arrow shows you the long axis of the skeleton.
I was really surprised at this.
Why was everyone surprised at this?
The thing is, no one had ever seen it before in nature.
Those fibers in that particular orientation give the skeleton a very, very different behavior.
I'm going to show a model made out of exactly the same materials.
So it'll be made of the same cotton cloth, same balloon, same internal pressure.
But the only difference is that the fibers are arranged differently.
And you'll see that, unlike the cross helical model, this model resists extension and contraction and resists bending.
Now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues.
It's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well, but it's also relevant in a broad sense, I think, to the design of prosthetics, soft robots, basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important.
So to sum up: Twenty years ago, I had a college adviser tell me, when I went to the college and said, "I'm kind of interested in anatomy," they said, "Anatomy's a dead science."
He couldn't have been more wrong.
I really believe that we still have a lot to learn about the normal structure and function of our bodies.
We often focus on one disease, one model, one problem, but my experience suggests that we should take the time to apply ideas broadly between systems and just see where it takes us.
After all, if ideas about invertebrate skeletons can give us insights about mammalian reproductive systems, there could be lots of other wild and productive connections lurking out there just waiting to be found.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The question is, Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown?
Now I know we learned that in math class, but now it's everywhere in the culture -- The X prize, the X-Files, Project X, TEDx.
About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language.
That's one of the reasons so much of what we've come to think of as Western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the Common Era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks.
One example among many.
The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe -- which is to say Spain -- in the 11th and 12th centuries.
And when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language.
One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice.
Trust me on that one.
Also, those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in European languages.
Here's one of the culprits.
This is the letter sheen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH -- "sh."
It's also the very first letter of the word shayun, which means "something" just like the the English word "something" -- some undefined, unknown thing.
Now in Arabic, we can make this definite by adding the definite article "al."
So this is al-shayun -- the unknown thing.
And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th-century derivation of roots.
The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter sheen and the word shayun can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that "sh" sound.
So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, "ck" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai.
Later when this material was translated into a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X.
And once that happened, once this material was in Latin, it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years.
But now we have the answer to our question.
X is the unknown because you can't say "sh" in Spanish.
(Laughter) And I thought that was worth sharing.
(Applause)
I'm a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view.
And while these are both wonderful things in their own right -- they both have very wonderful things going for them -- truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date.
(Laughter) These are expressions of truth as awe-full things, by meaning they are things you can worship.
They are ideals that are powerful. They are irreducible.
They are unique. They are useful -- sometimes, often a long time after the fact.
Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences.
They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed.
If you look at the math, E=mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there's an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe -- these are things that are really difficult to understand.
And what I've tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator -- since I was taught animation by my father, who was a sculptor and my visual mentor -- I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation, by using pictures, by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth, and can be taught, and can be understood.
Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them, but the way they're taught is compartmentalized and it's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident.
We don't want to do that to our students.
So we have an opportunity to really open up education.
And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard.
They could have a mental image of the cell as a large, bustling, hugely complicated city that's occupied by micro-machines.
These micro-machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self-directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids.
And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of BioVisions at Harvard, which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will -- in addition to all the textual information, in addition to all the didactic stuff -- put everything together visually, so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty, and be able to study with this view in mind, so that their imaginations would be sparked, so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out, really, how life works.
So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together.
We worked with a theme, which is, you've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary, and they're touching the surface of the capillary wall, and they're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall, and they are given this information that there's an inflammation somewhere outside, where they can't see and sense.
So these molecular motors -- we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved, and figure out what they did.
And so what I'm going to show you is a three-minute Reader's Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced. It's an ongoing project that's going to go another four or five years.
But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing, and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other.
They pass information to each other.
And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly, from information that's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes.
In fact, it would really, in the absence of these machines, have made the attendance here, Chris, really quite sparse.
(Laughter) (Music) This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell.
This little guy is called the kinesin, and he pulls a sack that's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it's needed in the cell -- whether it's to a membrane, whether it's to an organelle, whether it's to build something or repair something.
And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells.
So no matter how lazy you feel, you're not really intrinsically doing nothing.
(Laughter) So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this, and think about how powerful our cells are.
And hopefully we'll be able to use this to discover more truth, and more beauty.
They work together. They make the cell do what it needs to do.
And their working together helps our bodies -- huge entities that they will never see -- function properly.
Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you.
(Applause)
And I'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour.
And this attracts metals from their local environment.
And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria.
One of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water.
We can use it for drinking and agriculture.
Removing the salts from water -- particularly seawater -- through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe.
So seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology.
And this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane.
This takes energy, producing clean water.
But the process is very expensive and it's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe.
And also, the brine that's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea.
So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology.
And Singapore proposes by 2060 to produce [900] million liters per day of desalinated water.
And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play.
And this, in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that I just mentioned, equates to a $4.5 billion mining industry for Singapore -- a place that doesn't have any natural resources.
So I'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn't existed before; imagine a mining industry that doesn't mean defiling the Earth; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) But I'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of Design Within Reach catalogs, so I pretty much know everything there is.
This is known as the Theme Building; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky.
And it is perhaps the best example we have in Los Angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture.
It was first excavated in 1961 as they were building LAX, although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 Before Common Era, when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants.
When it was uncovered, it ushered in a new era of streamlined, archaically futuristic design called Googie, which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age, a misnomer.
After all, the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often, preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls.
(Applause) (Music) Ah yes, a table.
We use these every day.
And on top of it, the juicy salif.
And you can tell it is a Starck design by its precision, its playfulness, its innovation and its promise of imminent violence.
(Laughter) It is a design that challenges your intuition -- it is not what you think it is when you first see it.
It is not a fork designed to grab three hors d'oeuvres at a time, which would be useful out in the lobby, I would say.
And despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism, it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts.
This is affordable and can come home with you and, as such, it can sit on your kitchen counter -- it can't go in your drawers; trust me, I found that out the hard way -- and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design.
One other thing about it, if you do have one at home, let me tell you one of the features you may not know: when you fall asleep, it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep.
(Applause) Okay, what is this object?
I have no idea. I don't know what that thing is.
It looks terrible. Is it a little hot plate?
It's an ... iPhone. iPhone.
Oh yes, that's right, I remember those; I had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days.
I like to read books on it.
It is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life.
Unlike the Theme Building, this is not alien technology.
(Laughter) And you didn't even notice it happened.
So there you go. My name is John Hodgman.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I always wanted to become a walking laboratory of social engagement: to resonate other people's feelings, thoughts, intentions, motivations, in the act of being with them.
We intuit other people's feelings; we know the meaning of their actions even before they happen.
We're always in this stance of being the object of somebody else's subjectivity.
It's so important that the very tools we use to understand ourselves, to understand the world around us, are shaped by that stance.
So my journey in autism really started when I lived in a residential unit for adults with autism.
Most of those individuals had spent most of their lives in long-stay hospitals.
And for them, autism was devastating.
They had profound intellectual disabilities.
They didn't talk.
But most of all, they were extraordinarily isolated from the world around them, from their environment and from the people.
In fact, at the time, if you walked into a school for individuals with autism, you'd hear a lot of noise, plenty of commotion, actions, people doing things.
So they may be looking at a light in the ceiling, or they may be isolated in the corner, or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements, in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere.
Extremely, extremely isolated.
These are survival skills.
These are survival skills that we inherited over many, many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
From the first days and weeks of life, babies prefer to hear human sounds, rather than just sounds in the environment.
They prefer to look at people rather than at things, and even as they're looking at people, they look at people's eyes, because the eye is the window to the other person's experiences, so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away.
And it's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind -- the social mind, the social brain -- depends on.
We always think about autism as something that happens later on in life.
It doesn't; it begins with the beginning of life.
As babies engage with caregivers, they soon realize that, well, there is something between the ears that is very important -- it's invisible, you can't see it, but it's really critical.
And that thing is called attention.
And they learn soon enough, even before they can utter one word, that they can take that attention and move somewhere in order to get things they want.
They also learn to follow other people's gazes, because whatever people are looking at is what they are thinking about.
And soon enough, they start to learn about the meaning of things, because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something, they're not just getting a directional cue.
And soon enough, they start building this body of meanings, but meanings that were acquired within the realm of social interaction.
Those are meanings that are acquired as part of their shared experiences with others.
Well, this is a 15-month-old little girl, and she has autism.
Imagine if I did that to you, came two inches from your face.
We do so, remember, intuitively, effortlessly.
This is our body wisdom; it's not something mediated by our language.
And we've known that for a long time.
And this is not something that happens to humans only.
It happens to some of our phyletic cousins, because if you're a monkey, and you look at another monkey, and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you, and that is considered to be a signal or threat, well, you are not going to be alive for long.
So something that in other species are survival mechanisms, without which they wouldn't basically live, we bring into the context of human beings, and this is what we need to simply act, socially.
Well, a few minutes later, she goes to the corner of the room, and she finds a tiny little piece of candy, an M&M.
Now, most of us make a big dichotomy between the world of things and the world of people.
Now, for this girl, that division line is not so clear, and the world of people is not attracting her as much as we would like.
Now, remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences.
What she is doing right now is that her path of learning is diverging, moment by moment, as she is isolating herself further and further.
But, in fact, the brain also becomes who we are, and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction, this is what's happening with her mind, and this is what's happening with her brain.
There are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled but there are those that are gifted.
Well, this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time.
When I started in this field, we thought there were four individuals with autism per 10,000 -- a very rare condition.
Well, now we know it's more like one in 100.
There are millions of individuals with autism all around us.
The societal cost of this condition is huge, in the US alone, maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars.
Most of those funds are associated with adolescents and particularly adults who are severely disabled, individuals who need wraparound services -- services that are very, very intensive.
And those services can cost in excess of 60,000 to 80,000 dollars a year.
Those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment, because now we know that autism creates itself as individuals diverge in that pathway of learning that I mentioned to you.
Also, we have a window of opportunity, because the brain is malleable for just so long, and that window of opportunity happens in the first three years of life.
And yet, the median age of diagnosis in this country is still about five years, and in disadvantaged populations, the populations that don't have access to clinical services, rural populations, minorities, the age of diagnosis is later still, which is almost as if I were to tell you that we are condemning those communities to have individuals with autism whose condition is going to be more severe.
So I feel that we have a bioethical imperative.
The science is there.
And we feel that those things we can do for these children, for those families, early on, will have lifetime consequences -- for the child, for the family, and for the community at large.
So this is our view of autism.
There are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism.
In fact, we believe there are going to be something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism, and genetic anomalies, much more than just genes.
Because people like myself, when we walk into a playroom, we recognize a child as having autism.
So how do you go from multiple causes to a syndrome that has some homogeneity?
And the answer is what lies in between, which is development.
And in fact, we are very interested in those first two years of life, because those liabilities don't necessarily convert into autism.
Were we to be able to intervene during those years of life, we might attenuate for some, and God knows, maybe even prevent for others.
So how do we do that?
Is she thinking about me? Is she thinking about others?"
Well, it's hard to do that, so we had to create the technologies.
We had to basically step inside a body.
We had to see the world through her eyes.
And so in the past many years, we've been building these new technologies that are based on eye tracking.
This is my colleague, Warren Jones, with whom we've been building these methods, these studies, for the past 12 years.
What we want is to embrace that world and bring it into our laboratory, but in order for us to do that, we had to create these very sophisticated measures, measures of how people, how little babies, how newborns, engage with the world, moment by moment.
What is important and what is not.
You're watching a video -- those frames are separated by about a second -- through the eyes of 35 typically developing two-year-olds.
And we freeze one frame, and this is what the typical children are doing.
What are the children with autism doing?
Well, I can tell you that this divergence that you're seeing here doesn't happen only in our five-minute experiment.
It happens moment by moment in their real lives, and their minds are being formed and their brains are being specialized in something other than what is happening with their typical peers.
What you see here on the x-axis is two, three, four, five, six months and nine, until about the age of 24 months.
This is the percent of their viewing time that they're focusing on people's eyes, and this is their growth chart.
They start over here -- they love people's eyes -- and it remains quite stable.
It's something very different.
It's almost as if that stimulus -- you -- you're not exerting influence on what happens as they navigate their daily lives.
Now, we thought those data were so powerful, in a way, that we wanted to see what happened in the first six months of life, because if you interact with a two- and a three-month-old, you'd be surprised by how social those babies are.
If we measured things that are, evolutionarily, highly conserved, and developmentally very early-emerging -- things that are online from the first weeks of life -- we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months, and that's what we are doing now.
Now, we can create the very best technologies and the very best methods to identify the children, but this would be for naught if we didn't have an impact on what happens in their reality in the community.
Now we want those devices, of course, to be deployed by those who are in the trenches -- our colleagues, the primary care physicians, who see every child -- and we need to transform those technologies into something that is going to add value to their practice, because they have to see so many children.
But this would be immoral if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention, for treatment.
We need to be able to work with the families, support the families, to manage those first years with them.
We need to be able to really go from universal screening to universal access to treatment, because those treatments are going to change these children's and those families' lives.
Now, when we think about what we [can] do in those first years, I can tell you, having been in this field for so long, one feels really rejuvenated.
And the idea is not to cure autism.
What we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times, the profound intellectual disabilities, the lack of language, the profound, profound isolation.
We feel that individuals with autism, in fact, have a very special perspective on the world, and we need diversity.
And there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities.
We want them to be free to do that.
We want that the next generations of individuals with autism will be able not only to express their strengths, but to fulfill their promise.
Well, thank you for listening to me.
Like most journalists, I'm an idealist.
I love unearthing good stories, especially untold stories.
I just didn't think that in 2011, women would still be in that category.
I'm the President of the Journalism and Women Symposium -- JAWS.
That's Sharky.
(Laughter) I joined 10 years ago because I wanted female role models, and I was frustrated by the lagging status of women in our profession and what that meant for our image in the media.
We make up half the population of the world, but we're just 24 percent of the news subjects quoted in news stories.
And we're just 20 percent of the experts quoted in stories.
And now, with today's technology, it's possible to remove women from the picture completely.
This is a picture of President Barack Obama and his advisors, tracking the killing of Osama bin Laden.
You can see Hillary Clinton on the right.
Let's see how the photo ran in an Orthodox Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn.
Hillary's completely gone.
(Laughter) The paper apologized, but said it never runs photos of women; they might be sexually provocative.
(Laughter) This is an extreme case, yes.
But the fact is, women are only 19 percent of the sources in stories on politics, and only 20 percent in stories on the economy.
The news continues to give us a picture where men outnumber women in nearly all occupational categories, except two: students and homemakers.
(Laughter) So we all get a very distorted picture of reality.
The problem is, of course, there aren't enough women in newsrooms.
Even in stories on gender-based violence, men get an overwhelming majority of print space and airtime.
Case in point: This March, the New York Times ran a story by James McKinley about a gang rape of a young girl, 11 years old, in a small Texas town.
McKinley writes that the community is wondering, "How could their boys have been drawn into this?"
"Drawn into this" -- like they were seduced into committing an act of violence.
And the first person he quotes says, "These boys will have to live with this the rest of their lives."
(Groans, laughter) You don't hear much about the 11-year-old victim, except that she wore clothes that were a little old for her and she wore makeup.
The Times was deluged with criticism.
Now, here's a secret you probably know already: Your stories are constructed.
As reporters, we research, we interview.
We also have our own unconscious biases.
This time, it adds another byline to it with McKinley's: Erica Goode.
What emerges is a truly sad, horrific tale of a young girl and her family trapped in poverty.
She was raped numerous times by many men.
She was maturing quickly, physically, but her bed was still covered with stuffed animals.
It's a very different picture.
The Global Media Monitoring Project has found that stories by female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters.
At KUNM here in Albuquerque, Elaine Baumgartel did some graduate research on the coverage of violence against women.
They tend to sensationalize, and they lack context.
So for her graduate work, she did a three-part series on the murder of 11 women, found buried on Albuquerque's West Mesa.
She tried to challenge those patterns and stereotypes in her work and she tried to show the challenges that journalists face from external sources, their own internal biases and cultural norms.
And she worked with an editor at National Public Radio to try to get a story aired nationally.
She's not sure that would have happened if the editor had not been a female.
Stories in the news are more than twice as likely to present women as victims than men, and women are more likely to be defined by their body parts.
Wired magazine, November 2010.
Yes, the issue was about breast-tissue engineering.
(Laughter) Eyes up here.
Oh, there have been some gimmicky ones -- Pam from "The Office," manga girls, a voluptuous model covered in synthetic diamonds.
Texas State University professor Cindy Royal wondered in her blog how are young women like her students supposed to feel about their roles in technology, reading Wired.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, defended his choice and said there aren't enough women, prominent women in technology to sell a cover, to sell an issue.
Part of that is true, there aren't as many prominent women in technology.
Here's my problem with that argument: Media tells us every day what's important, by the stories they choose and where they place them; it's called agenda setting.
How many people knew the founders of Facebook and Google before their faces were on a magazine cover?
Now, Fast Company Magazine embraces that idea.
This is its cover from November 15, 2010.
The issue is about the most prominent and influential women in technology.
Editor Robert Safian told the Poynter Institute, "Silicon Valley is very white and very male.
It would help to have more women in positions of leadership in media.
A recent global survey found that 73 percent of the top media-management jobs are still held by men.
But this is also about something far more complex: our own unconscious biases and blind spots.
Shankar Vedantam is the author of "The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives."
He told the former ombudsman at National Public Radio, who was doing a report on how women fare in NPR coverage, unconscious bias flows throughout most of our lives.
It's really difficult to disentangle those strands.
But he did have one suggestion.
He used to work for two editors who said every story had to have at least one female source.
Now, I don't know if one of the editors was a woman, but that can make the biggest difference.
The Dallas Morning News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a series it did on women around the world, but one of the reporters told me she's convinced it never would have happened if they had not had a female assistant foreign editor, and they would not have gotten some of those stories without female reporters and editors on the ground, particularly one on female genital mutilation -- men would just not be allowed into those situations.
This is an important point to consider, because much of our foreign policy now revolves around countries where the treatment of women is an issue, such as Afghanistan.
Now, I'm sure a male reporter in Kabul can find women to interview.
Not so sure about rural, traditional areas, where I'm guessing women can't talk to strange men.
It's important to keep talking about this, in light of Lara Logan.
She was the CBS News correspondent who was brutally sexually assaulted in Egypt's Tahrir Square, right after this photo was taken.
Almost immediately, pundits weighed in, blaming her and saying things like, "You know, maybe women shouldn't be sent to cover those stories."
I never heard anyone say this about Anderson Cooper and his crew, who were attacked covering the same story.
One way to get more women into leadership is to have other women mentor them.
One of my board members is an editor at a major global media company, but she never thought about this as a career path, until she met female role models at JAWS.
But this is not just a job for super-journalists or my organization.
Analyze your news.
And speak up when there are gaps missing in coverage, like people at The New York Times did.
Suggest female sources to reporters and editors.
Remember -- a complete picture of reality may depend upon it.
And I'll leave you with a video clip that I first saw in [1987] when I was a student in London.
Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression.
Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression.
But it's only when you get the whole picture, you can fully understand what's going on.
Dad talked a lot about bad design when we were growing up, you know, "Bad design is just people not thinking, John," he would say whenever a kid would be injured by a rotary lawn mower or, say, a typewriter ribbon would get tangled or an eggbeater would get jammed in the kitchen.
It's letting stuff happen without thinking about it.
Every object should be about something, John.
It should imagine a user.
It should cast that user in a story starring the user and the object.
Good design," my dad said, "is about supplying intent."
Dad helped design the control panels for the IBM 360 computer.
That was a big deal; that was important. He worked for Kodak for a while; that was important.
He designed chairs and desks and other office equipment for Steelcase; that was important.
I knew design was important in my house because, for heaven's sake, it put food on our table, right?
And design was in everything my dad did.
He had a Dixieland jazz band when we were growing up, and he would always cover Louis Armstrong tunes.
And I would ask him every once in a while, "Dad, do you want it to sound like the record?"
We had lots of old jazz records lying around the house.
And he said, "No, never, John, never.
You gotta make it your own. You gotta design it.
It's where we all belong."
All of us? Designers?
Oh, oh, Dad. Oh, Dad.
It's kind of like this wheelchair I'm in, right?
The original tune? It's a little scary.
He can't walk. Anybody know the story?
All right, exactly 36 years ago this week, that's right, I was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in Pennsylvania, and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car.
My life, at the mercy of good design and bad design.
Think about it. Now, in design terms, a wheelchair is a very difficult object.
The poor kid, you know, has this terrified look on his face, God knows what they think.
And for decades, I'm going, why does this happen? What can I do about it? How can I change this? I mean there must be something.
Or I'd make eye contact with everyone -- that was really creepy; that didn't work at all.
(Laughter) You know anything, I'd try. I wouldn't shower for a week -- nothing worked.
Nothing whatsoever worked until a few years ago, my six-year-old daughters were looking at this wheelchair catalog that I had, and they said, "Oh, Dad! Dad! Look, you gotta get these, these flashy wheels -- you gotta get 'em!"
And of course, they immediately concluded, "Oh, what a bummer, Dad. Journalists aren't allowed to have flashy wheels.
I went, "Wait a minute, all right, right -- I'll get the wheels." Purely out of protest, I got the flashy wheels, and I installed them and -- check this out. Could I have my special light cue please?
So what you are looking at here has completely changed my life, I mean totally changed my life.
(Laughter) And of course there's the occasional person -- usually a middle-aged male who will say, "Oh, those wheels are great!
No, no, no, no, no.
What's the difference here, the wheelchair with no lights and the wheelchair with lights?
The difference is intent.
That's right, that's right; I'm no longer a victim.
I chose to change the situation -- I'm the Commander of the Starship Wheelchair with the phaser wheels in the front. Right?
I choose to enhance this rolling experience with a simple design element.
Acting with intent.
It suggests that someone is driving.
It's reassuring; people are drawn to it.
Covering the tragic tune with something different, something radically different.
Now go with me here. Look at this guy. You know who this is?
Life in prison. Death penalty in the United States, not so much in Norway.
But, if he instead acted out of a delusional fantasy, if he was motivated by some random mental illness, he's in a completely different category.
It's a completely different domain.
As an intentional murderer, Anders Breivik is merely evil.
But as a dysfunctional, as a dysfunctional murderer/psychotic, he's something much more complicated.
He's the breath of some primitive, ancient chaos.
He's the random state of nature we emerged from.
He's something very, very different.
We're supposed to act with intent.
You can probably tell there are two sets of twins, the result of IVF technology, in vitro fertilization technology, due to some physical limitations I won't go into.
Anyway, in vitro technology, IVF, is about as intentional as agriculture.
Let me tell you, some of you may have the experience.
In fact, the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian.
I met the dude. He's a great guy.
He carried this big leather bag full of sperm probes for all of the animals that he'd worked with, all the different animals.
He would say, "You're right between horse and squirrel, John."
(Laughter) But anyway, so when my wife and I decided to upgrade our early middle age -- we had four kids, after all -- with a little different technology that I won't explain in too much detail here -- my urologist assured me I had nothing whatsoever to worry about.
"John, John, I looked at your chart.
From your sperm tests we can confidently say that you're basically a form of birth control."
(Laughter) What a liberating thought! Yes!
And after a couple very liberating weekends, my wife and I, utilizing some cutting-edge erectile technology that is certainly worthy of a TEDTalk someday but I won't get into it now, we noticed some familiar, if unexpected, symptoms.
I wasn't exactly a form of birth control.
Look at that font there. My wife was so pissed.
In fact, maybe that's the problem.
And so, little Ajax was born.
He's like our other children, but the experience is completely different.
It's something like my accident, right?
He came out of nowhere.
But we all had to change, but not just react to the given; we bend to this new experience with intent.
We're five now. Five.
Hey, the name Ajax -- you can't get much more intentional than that, right?
We're really hoping he thanks us for that later on.
(Laughter) But I never became a designer. No, no, no, no. Never attempted. Never even close.
I did love some great designs as I was growing up: The HP 35S calculator -- God, I loved that thing. Oh God, I wish I had one.
I could afford that.
In school, I studied nothing close to design or engineering; I studied useless things like the Classics, but there were some lessons even there -- this guy, Plato, it turns out he's a designer.
Listen to one of the design features of Plato's Government 4.0: "The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst."
But look at that statement; it's all about intent. That's what I love about it.
But consider what Plato is doing here. What is he doing?
It's a grand idea of design -- a huge idea of design, common to all of the voices of religion and philosophy that emerged in the Classical period.
What was going on then?
They were trying to answer the question of what would human beings do now that they were no longer simply trying to survive?
As the human race emerged from a prehistoric chaos, a confrontation with random, brutal nature, they suddenly had a moment to think -- and there was a lot to think about.
All of a sudden, human existence needed an intent.
Human life needed a reason.
Reality itself needed a designer.
The given was replaced by various aspects of intent, by various designs, by various gods.
Gods we're still fighting about. Oh yeah.
Today we don't confront the chaos of nature.
This young discipline called design, I think, is in fact the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question: What shall we do now in the face of the chaos that we have created?
What shall we do?
The consequences of a planet with 7 billion people and counting.
And we can't just imitate the past. No.
Here's my favorite design moment: In the city of Kinshasa in Zaire in the 1990s, I was working for ABC News, and I was reporting on the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator, the brutal dictator in Zaire, who raped and pillaged that country.
There was rioting in the middle of Kinshasa.
People were carrying off vehicles, carrying off pieces of buildings.
In the middle of this chaos, I'm rolling around in a wheelchair, and I was completely invisible. Completely.
I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a journalist, particularly, at least from their perspective.
And I didn't look like a soldier, that's for sure.
I was part of this sort of background noise of the misery of Zaire, completely invisible.
And I looked at him -- he didn't know any other English than that, but we didn't need English, no, no, no, no, no.
We sat there and compared wheels and tires and spokes and tubes.
And I looked at his whacky pedal mechanism; he was full of pride over his design.
His smile, our glow as we talked a universal language of design, invisible to the chaos around us.
His machine: homemade, bolted, rusty, comical.
My machine: American-made, confident, sleek.
Oh, I wish I'd had those sparkly wheels back then to have shown him, man!
He went back to the streets of Kinshasa; I went to my hotel. And I think of him now, now ...
And I pose this question.
An object devoid of intent -- it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away.
This is what we must demand of our lives, of our objects, of our things, of our circumstances: living with intent.
And I have to say that on that score, I have a very unfair advantage over all of you.
And I want to explain it to you now because this is a very special day.
Thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment, a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question, but the nurse was already there with an answer.
I said, "I know all that -- what day is it?"
You see, I knew that the car had gone over the guardrail on the 28th of February, and I knew that 1976 was a leap year.
"Nurse! Is this the 28th or the 29th?"
And she looked at me and said, "It's March 1st."
And I went, "Oh my God.
Intent -- a life with intent -- lived by design, covering the original with something better.
To get back to this, to get back to design, and as my daddy suggested a long time ago, "Make the song your own, John.
Daddy, this one's for you.
So my freshman year of college I signed up for an internship in the housing unit at Greater Boston Legal Services.
And over the course of nine months I had the chance to have dozens of conversations with low-income families in Boston who would come in presenting with housing issues, but always had an underlying health issue.
So I had a client who came in, about to be evicted because he hasn't paid his rent.
But he hasn't paid his rent, of course, because he's paying for his HIV medication and just can't afford both.
We had moms who would come in, daughter has asthma, wakes up covered in cockroaches every morning.
And one of our litigation strategies was actually to send me into the home of these clients with these large glass bottles.
And I would collect the cockroaches, hot glue-gun them to this poster board that we'd bring to court for our cases.
Far more effective, I have to say, than anything I later learned in law school.
And at the end of my freshman year of college, I read an article about the work that Dr. Barry Zuckerman was doing as Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center.
And his first hire was a legal services attorney to represent the patients.
So I called Barry, and with his blessing, in October 1995 walked into the waiting room of the pediatrics clinic at Boston Medical Center.
And the exhaustion of mothers who had taken two, three, sometimes four buses to bring their child to the doctor was just palpable.
The doctors, it seemed, never really had enough time for all the patients, try as they might.
And over the course of six months, I would corner them in the hallway and ask them a sort of naive but fundamental question: "If you had unlimited resources, what's the one thing you would give your patients?"
And I heard the same story again and again, a story we've heard hundreds of times since then.
But the real issue is there's no food at home.
The real issue is that child is living with 12 other people in a two-bedroom apartment.
And I don't even ask about those issues because there's nothing I can do.
I have 13 minutes with each patient.
Patients are piling up in the clinic waiting room.
In that clinic, even today, there are two social workers for 24,000 pediatric patients, which is better than a lot of the clinics out there.
So Health Leads was born of these conversations -- a simple model where doctors and nurses can prescribe nutritious food, heat in the winter and other basic resources for their patients the same way they prescribe medication.
Patients then take their prescriptions to our desk in the clinic waiting room where we have a core of well-trained college student advocates who work side by side with these families to connect them out to the existing landscape of community resources.
So we began with a card table in the clinic waiting room -- totally lemonade stand style.
But today we have a thousand college student advocates who are working to connect nearly 9,000 patients and their families with the resources that they need to be healthy.
So 18 months ago I got this email that changed my life.
And the email was from Dr. Jack Geiger, who had written to congratulate me on Health Leads and to share, as he said, a bit of historical context.
In 1965 Dr. Geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country, in a brutally poor area in the Mississippi Delta.
And they would take these prescriptions to the local supermarket, which would fill them and then charge the pharmacy budget of the clinic.
And when the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. -- which was funding Geiger's clinic -- found out about this, they were furious.
And they sent this bureaucrat down to tell Geiger that he was expected to use their dollars for medical care -- to which Geiger famously and logically responded, "The last time I checked my textbooks, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food."
(Laughter) So when I got this email from Dr. Geiger, I knew I was supposed to be proud to be part of this history.
But the truth is I was devastated.
Here we are, 45 years after Geiger has prescribed food for his patients, and I have doctors telling me, "On those issues, we practice a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy."
Forty-five years after Geiger, Health Leads has to reinvent the prescription for basic resources.
So I have spent hours upon hours trying to make sense of this weird Groundhog Day.
How is it that if for decades we had a pretty straightforward tool for keeping patients, and especially low-income patients, healthy, that we didn't use it?
My belief is that it's almost too painful to articulate our aspirations for our healthcare system, or even admit that we have any at all.
Because if we did, they would be so removed from our current reality.
But that doesn't change my belief that all of us, deep inside, here in this room and across this country, share a similar set of desires.
And the way I think about this is that healthcare is like any other system.
It's just a set of choices that people make.
These things are ours.
So just a few miles from here at Children's National Medical Center, when patients come into the doctor's office, they're asked a few questions.
They're asked, "Are you running out of food at the end of the month?
Do you have safe housing?"
And that not only leads to a better set of clinical choices, but the doctor can also prescribe those resources for the patient, using Health Leads like any other sub-specialty referral.
The problem is, once you get a taste of what it's like to realize your aspiration for healthcare, you want more.
So we thought, if we can get individual doctors to prescribe these basic resources for their patients, could we get an entire healthcare system to shift its presumption?
So now at Harlem Hospital Center when patients come in with an elevated body mass index, the electronic medical record automatically generates a prescription for Health Leads.
And our volunteers can then work with them to connect patients to healthy food and excercise programs in their communities.
We've created a presumption that if you're a patient at that hospital with an elevated BMI, the four walls of the doctor's office probably aren't going to give you everything you need to be healthy.
You need more.
So on the one hand, this is just a basic recoding of the electronic medical record.
And on the other hand, it's a radical transformation of the electronic medical record from a static repository of diagnostic information to a health promotion tool.
In the private sector, when you squeeze that kind of additional value out of a fixed-cost investment, it's called a billion-dollar company.
But in my world, it's called reduced obesity and diabetes.
It's called healthcare -- a system where doctors can prescribe solutions to improve health, not just manage disease.
Same thing in the clinic waiting room.
So every day in this country three million patients pass through about 150,000 clinic waiting rooms in this country.
And what do they do when they're there?
They sit, they watch the goldfish in the fish tank, they read extremely old copies of Good Housekeeping magazine.
But mostly we all just sit there forever, waiting.
What if we had a waiting room where you don't just sit when you're sick, but where you go to get healthy.
If airports can become shopping malls and McDonald's can become playgrounds, surely we can reinvent the clinic waiting room.
And that's what Health Leads has tried to do, to reclaim that real estate and that time and to use it as a gateway to connect patients to the resources they need to be healthy.
But what if instead of waiting for hours anxiously, the waiting room became the place where Health Leads turned your heat back on?
And of course all of this requires a broader workforce.
But if we're creative, we already have that too.
Health just takes more time.
It requires a non-clinical army of community health workers and case managers and many others.
What if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country?
The average NCAA Division I men's basketball player dedicates 39 hours a week to his sport.
And Health Leads is based on the presumption that for too long we have asked too little of our college students when it comes to real impact in vulnerable communities.
And people line up out the door just for the chance to be part of it.
So our feeling is, if it's good enough for the rugby team, it's good enough for health and poverty.
Health Leads too recruits competitively, trains intensively, coaches professionally, demands significant time, builds a cohesive team and measures results -- a kind of Teach for America for healthcare.
with the largest number of Medicaid patients, each of those has at least 20,000 college students.
And this isn't just a sort of short-term workforce to connect patients to basic resources, it's a next generation healthcare leadership pipeline who've spent two, three, four years in the clinic waiting room talking to patients about their most basic health needs.
And they leave with the conviction, the ability and the efficacy to realize our most basic aspirations for health care.
So Mia Lozada is Chief Resident of Internal Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, but for three years as an undergraduate she was a Health Leads volunteer in the clinic waiting room at Boston Medical Center.
Mia says, "When my classmates write a prescription, they think their work is done.
When I write a prescription, I think, can the family read the prescription?
Do they have transportation to the pharmacy?
Those are the questions I learned at Health Leads, not in medical school."
Now none of these solutions -- the prescription pad, the electronic medical record, the waiting room, the army of college students -- are perfect.
But they are ours for the taking -- simple examples of the vast under-utilized healthcare resources that, if we reclaimed and redeployed, could realize our most basic aspiration of healthcare.
So I had been at Legal Services for about nine months when this idea of Health Leads started percolating in my mind.
And I sat down with him and I said, "Jeff, I have this idea that we could mobilize college students to address patients' most basic health needs."
And I'll be honest, all I wanted was for him to not be angry at me.
But he said this, "Rebecca, when you have a vision, you have an obligation to realize that vision.
You must pursue that vision."
That's a lot of pressure."
I believe that we all have a vision for healthcare in this country.
And most of all, I believe that when we measure healthcare, it will be, not by what the system was, but by what we chose it to be.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form.
From mother to daughter, preacher to congregant, teacher to pupil, storyteller to audience.
Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable.
We are inveterate storytellers.
But where, in our increasingly secular and fragmented world, do we offer communality of experience, unmediated by our own furious consumerism?
And what narrative, what history, what identity, what moral code are we imparting to our young?
Cinema is arguably the 20th century's most influential art form.
Its artists told stories across national boundaries, in as many languages, genres and philosophies as one can imagine.
During the last decade we've seen a vast integration of global media, now dominated by a culture of the Hollywood blockbuster.
We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation, not story, is king.
What was common to us all 40 years ago -- the telling of stories between generations -- is now rarified.
As a filmmaker, it worried me.
As a human being, it puts the fear of God in me.
What future could the young build with so little grasp of where they've come from and so few narratives of what's possible?
The irony is palpable; technical access has never been greater, cultural access never weaker.
And so in 2006 we set up FILMCLUB, an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools followed by discussions.
If we could raid the annals of 100 years of film, maybe we could build a narrative that would deliver meaning to the fragmented and restless world of the young.
Given the access to technology, even a school in a tiny rural hamlet could project a DVD onto a white board.
In the first nine months we ran 25 clubs across the U.K., with kids in age groups between five and 18 watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes.
It was an education of the most profound and transformative kind.
In groups as large as 150 and as small as three, these young people discovered new places, new thoughts, new perspectives.
The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, "Miracle in Milan."
It's a remarkable comment on slums, poverty and aspiration.
I had seen the film on the occasion of my father's 50th birthday.
Technology then meant we had to hire a viewing cinema, find and pay for the print and the projectionist.
But for my father, the emotional and artistic importance of De Sica's vision was so great that he chose to celebrate his half-century with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends, "In order," he said, "to pass the baton of concern and hope on to the next generation."
In the last shot of "Miracle in Milan," slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms.
Sixty years after the film was made and 30 years after I first saw it, I see young faces tilt up in awe, their incredulity matching mine.
And the speed with which they associate it with "Slumdog Millionaire" or the favelas in Rio speaks to the enduring nature.
In a FILMCLUB season about democracy and government, we screened "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
Frank Capra's classic values independence and propriety.
Shortly after "Mr. Smith" became a FILMCLUB classic, there was a week of all-night filibustering in the House of Lords.
In choosing "Hotel Rwanda," they explored genocide of the most brutal kind.
It provoked tears as well as incisive questions about unarmed peace-keeping forces and the double-dealing of a Western society that picks its moral fights with commodities in mind.
As they watch more films their lives got palpably richer.
"Pickpocket" started a debate about criminality disenfranchisement.
They celebrated a change in attitude towards non-white Britons, but railed against our restless school system that does not value collective identity, unlike that offered by Sidney Poitier's careful tutelage.
From 25 clubs, we became hundreds, then thousands, until we were nearly a quarter of a million kids in 7,000 clubs right across the country.
And although the numbers were, and continue to be, extraordinary, what became more extraordinary was how the experience of critical and curious questioning translated into life.
Some of our kids started talking with their parents, others with their teachers, or with their friends.
And the stories they held provided a shared experience.
"Persepolis" brought a daughter closer to her Iranian mother, and "Jaws" became the way in which one young boy was able to articulate the fear he'd experienced in flight from violence that killed first his father then his mother, the latter thrown overboard on a boat journey.
Who was right, who wrong?
What would they do under the same conditions?
Was the tale told well?
Was there a hidden message?
How has the world changed? How could it be different?
A tsunami of questions flew out of the mouths of children who the world didn't think were interested.
And they themselves had not known they cared.
And as they wrote and debated, rather than seeing the films as artifacts, they began to see themselves.
I have an aunt who is a wonderful storyteller.
In a moment she can invoke images of running barefoot on Table Mountain and playing cops and robbers.
Quite recently she told me that in 1948, two of her sisters and my father traveled on a boat to Israel without my grandparents.
When the sailors mutinied at sea in a demand for humane conditions, it was these teenagers that fed the crew.
I was past 40 when my father died.
He never mentioned that journey.
My mother's mother left Europe in a hurry without her husband, but with her three-year-old daughter and diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt.
After two years in hiding, my grandfather appeared in London.
He was never right again.
My story started in England with a clean slate and the silence of immigrant parents.
It was Leni Riefenstahl in her elegant Nazi propaganda who gave context to what the family had to endure.
These films held what was too hurtful to say out loud, and they became more useful to me than the whispers of survivors and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo on a maiden aunt's wrist.
Purists may feel that fiction dissipates the quest of real human understanding, that film is too crude to tell a complex and detailed history, or that filmmakers always serve drama over truth.
But within the reels lie purpose and meaning.
As one 12-year-old said after watching "Wizard of Oz," "Every person should watch this, because unless you do you may not know that you too have a heart."
We honor reading, why not honor watching with the same passion?
Consider "Citizen Kane" as valuable as Jane Austen.
Each a piece of memorable art, each a brick in the wall of who we are.
And it's okay if we remember Tom Hanks better than astronaut Jim Lovell or have Ben Kingsley's face superimposed onto that of Gandhi's.
And though not real, Eve Harrington, Howard Beale, Mildred Pierce are an opportunity to discover what it is to be human, and no less helpful to understanding our life and times as Shakespeare is in illuminating the world of Elizabethan England.
We guessed that film, whose stories are a meeting place of drama, music, literature and human experience, would engage and inspire the young people participating in FILMCLUB.
What we could not have foreseen was the measurable improvements in behavior, confidence and academic achievement.
They are, like other young people, negotiating a world with infinite choice, but little culture of how to find meaningful experience.
We appeared surprised at the behaviors of those who define themselves by the size of the tick on their shoes, yet acquisition has been the narrative we have offered.
If we want different values we have to tell a different story, a story that understands that an individual narrative is an essential component of a person's identity, that a collective narrative is an essential component of a cultural identity, and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself as part of a group.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck.
They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see.
However, over time, I got used to looking for them.
I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them.
This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology.
And eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough.
Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile.
For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently.
So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared.
What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians.
What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years.
This area is huge -- it's four miles by three miles in size.
So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape?
Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts.
(Laughter) So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes.
We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow.
So we collaborated with Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here.
When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change, you're looking for layers of human occupation.
And, five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery.
We also found work stone -- carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jeweler's workshop here.
These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used.
We also have evidence of an elite jeweler's workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city.
And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well.
"Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings.
There's nothing like it in the land."
So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was about 16 years old I can remember flipping through channels at home during summer vacation, looking for a movie to watch on HBO -- and how many of you remember "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"?
Oh yeah, great movie, right? -- Well, I saw Matthew Broderick on the screen, and so I thought, "Sweet! Ferris Bueller. I'll watch this!"
It wasn't Ferris Bueller. And forgive me Matthew Broderick, I know you've done other movies besides Ferris Bueller, but that's how I remember you; you're Ferris.
But you weren't doing Ferris-y things at the time; you were doing gay things at the time.
He was in a movie called "Torch Song Trilogy."
And "Torch Song Trilogy" was based on a play about this drag queen who essentially was looking for love.
Love and respect -- that's what the whole film was about.
Not the drag queen part -- I am not shaving my hair for anyone -- but the gay part.
The finding love and respect, the part about trying to find your place in the world.
So as I'm watching this, I see this powerful scene that brought me to tears, and it stuck with me for the past 25 years.
And there's this quote that the main character, Arnold, tells his mother as they're fighting about who he is and the life that he lives.
"There's one thing more -- there's just one more thing you better understand.
There's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect, and anyone who can't give me those two things has no place in my life."
I remember that scene like it was yesterday; I was 16, I was in tears, I was in the closet, and I'm looking at these two people, Ferris Bueller and some guy I'd never seen before, fighting for love.
When I finally got to a place in my life where I came out and accepted who I was, and was really quite happy, to tell you the truth, I was happily gay and I guess that's supposed to be right because gay means happy too.
I realized there were a lot of people who weren't as gay as I was -- gay being happy, not gay being attracted to the same sex.
In fact, I heard that there was a lot of hate and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear about who I was and the gay lifestyle.
Now, I'm sitting here trying to figure out "the gay lifestyle," "the gay lifestyle," and I keep hearing this word over and over and over again: lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle.
I've even heard politicians say that the gay lifestyle is a greater threat to civilization than terrorism.
That's when I got scared.
Because I'm thinking, if I'm gay and I'm doing something that's going to destroy civilization, I need to figure out what this stuff is, and I need to stop doing it right now.
(Laughter) So, I took a look at my life, a hard look at my life, and I saw some things very disturbing.
Not only do I drink coffee, I know other gay people who drink coffee.
I look around, and I go, "My God, look at all these gay people!
I clean up. This is not an actual photograph of my son's room; his is messier.
And because I have a 15-year-old, all I do is cook and cook and cook.
Any parents out there of teenagers? All we do is cook for these people -- they eat two, three, four dinners a night -- it's ridiculous!
This is the gay lifestyle.
And after I'm done cooking and cleaning and standing in line and getting stuck in traffic, my partner and I, we get together and we decide that we're gonna go and have some wild and crazy fun.
(Laughter) We're usually in bed before we find out who's eliminated on "American Idol."
This is the super duper evil gay lifestyle.
(Applause) When my partner, Steve, and I first started dating, he told me this story about penguins.
He was kind of a little bit nervous when he was sharing it with me, but he told me that when a penguin finds a mate that they want to spend the rest of their life with, they present them with a pebble -- the perfect pebble.
And I looked at it, and I was like, this is really cool.
And he says, "I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
So I wear this whenever I have to do something that makes me a little nervous, like, I don't know, a TEDx talk.
I wear this when I am apart from him for a long period of time.
How many people out there are in love? Anyone in love out there?
You might be gay.
(Laughter) Because I, too, am in love, and apparently that's part of the gay lifestyle that I warned you about.
(Applause) You may want to tell your spouse. Who, if they're in love, might be gay as well.
You too might be gay! Because I know some gay people who are also single.
It's really scary, this gay lifestyle thing; it's super duper evil and there's no end to it!
It's really quite silly, isn't it?
That's why I'm so happy to finally hear President Obama come out and say (Applause) that he supports -- (Applause) that he supports marriage equality.
But there's something that's been disturbing me since he made that remark just a short time ago.
And that is, apparently, this is just another move by the gay activists that's on the gay agenda.
And I'm disturbed by this because I've been openly gay now for quite some time.
I've been to all of the functions, I've been to fundraisers, I've written about the topic, and I have yet to receive my copy of this gay agenda.
(Laughter) I've paid my dues on time, (Laughter) I've marched in gay pride flags parades and the whole nine, and I've yet to see a copy of the gay agenda.
It's very, very frustrating, and I was feeling left out, like I wasn't quite gay enough.
But then something wonderful happened: I was out shopping, as I tend to do, and I came across a bootleg copy of the official gay agenda.
And I said to myself, "LZ, for so long, you have been denied this.
When you get in front of this crowd, you're gonna share the news.
You're gonna spread the gay agenda so no one else has to wonder, what exactly is in the gay agenda?
What are these gays up to?
What do they want?"
So, without further ado, I will present to you, ladies and gentlemen -- now be careful, 'cause it's evil -- a copy, the official copy, of the gay agenda.
(Music) The gay agenda, people!
(Applause) There it is!
Did you soak it all in? The gay agenda.
Some of you may be calling it, what, the Constitution of the United States, is that what you call it too?
I was blown away when I saw it. I was like, wait, this is the gay agenda?
Why didn't you just call it the Constitution so I knew what you were talking about?
I wouldn't have been so confused; I wouldn't have been so upset.
But there it is. The gay agenda.
Run for your heterosexual lives.
That's the only reason that a landlord needs to have them removed, because there's no protection from discrimination of GLBT people.
Did you know in the states where there's no shading that you can be fired for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered?
All of which flies in the face of the gay agenda, also known as the U.S. Constitution.
This is the gay agenda: equality. Not special rights, but the rights that were already written by these people -- these elitists, if you will.
The people that, we say, knew what they were doing when they wrote the Constitution -- the gay agenda, if you will.
That is the reason why I felt it was imperative that I presented you with this copy of the gay agenda.
I figured if I was a bit irreverent, you wouldn't find it serious.
But when you see the map, and you see our state of Michigan -- it's legal to fire someone for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, that it's legal to remove someone from their home because they're gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, then you realize that this whole conversation about marriage equality is not about stripping someone's rights away, it's about granting them the rights that [have] already been stated.
There are people living in fear of losing their jobs so they don't show anyone who they really are right here at home. This isn't just about North Carolina; all those states that were clear, it's legal.
If I could brag for a second, I have a 15-year-old son from my marriage.
He has a 4.0.
He is starting a new club at school, Policy Debate.
He's a budding track star; he has almost every single record in middle school for every event that he competed in.
He prays before he eats.
I would like to think, as his father -- and he lives with me primarily -- that I had a little something to do with all of that.
I would like to think that he's a good boy, a respectful young man. I would like to think that I've proven to be a capable father.
But if I were to go to the state of Michigan today, and try to adopt a young person who is in an orphanage, I would be disqualified for only one reason: because I'm gay.
And that's not just about me, that's about so many other Michiganders, U.S. citizens, who don't understand why what they are is so much more significant than who they are.
This story just keeps playing over and over and over again in our country's history.
There was a time in which, I don't know, people who were black couldn't have the same rights.
People who happened to be women didn't have the same rights, couldn't vote.
There was a point in our history in which, if you were considered disabled, that an employer could just fire you, before the Americans with Disabilities Act.
We keep doing this over and over again.
And so here we are, 2012, gay agenda, gay lifestyle, and I'm not a good dad and people don't deserve to be able to protect their families because of what they are, not who they are.
So when you hear the words "gay lifestyle" and "gay agenda" in the future, I encourage you to do two things: One, remember the U.S. Constitution, and then two, if you wouldn't mind looking to your left, please.
Look to your right.
That person next to you is a brother, is a sister.
And they should be treated with love and respect.
Thank you.
(Music) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) So, that's what I've done with my life.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) As a kid, I grew up on a farm in Florida, and I did what most little kids do.
There was no opponent directly across from you.
And I loved that sense, so I started skating when I was about 10 years old, in 1977, and when I did, I picked it up pretty quickly.
In fact, here's some footage from about 1984.
So, as she mentioned, that is overstated for sure, but that's why they called me the godfather of modern street skating.
Now, I was about halfway through my pro career in, I would say, the mid-'80s.
They were using it to get up onto stuff like bleachers and handrails and over stairwells and all kinds of cool stuff.
So it was evolving upwards.
In fact, when someone tells you they're a skater today, they pretty much mean a street skater, because freestyle, it took about five years for it to die, and at that stage, I'd been a "champion" champion for 11 years, which -- Phew!
And suddenly, it was over for me, that's it -- it was gone.
They took my pro model off the shelf, which was essentially pronouncing you dead, publicly.
That's how you make your money, you know?
I had all that stuff, and it's gone.
The crazy thing was, there was a really liberating sense about it, because I no longer had to protect my record as a champion.
"Champion," again.
What drew me to skateboarding, the freedom, was now restored, where I could just create things, because that's where the joy was for me, always, was creating new stuff.
So, as humbling and rotten as it was — And believe me, it was rotten.
And everyone thought I was good, but in this new terrain, I was horrible.
So people would go, "Oh, what happened to Mullen?"
That's, like, the hardest thing I've ever done.
OK, look at that, it's a Darkslide.
Those are super fun, and, actually, not that hard.
You know, at the very root of that, see, Caspers, see how you throw it?
And your front foot, the way it grabs it -- I'd seen someone slide on the back of the board like that, and I was like, "How can I get it over?"
Because that had not yet been done.
I had an infrastructure. I had this deep layer, where it was like, oh my gosh, it's just your foot.
There's something called a Primo slide.
It is the funnest trick ever to do.
It's like skimboarding.
OK, so when you're skating, and you take a fall, the board slips that way or that way; it's kind of predictable.
It's so much fun to do.
In fact, when I started doing them, I remember, because I got hurt.
So there were a couple of weeks where I couldn't skate at all.
I want to start fresh."
And so the night before my surgery, I'd watched, and I was like, "How am I going to do this?"
(Laughter) And so, when it was the crazy thing.
I don't know how many of you guys have had surgery, but -- (Laughter) you are so helpless, right?
What we do as street skaters is, you have these tricks -- Say I'm working on Darkslides, or a Primo, that you guys know this stuff now.
So you drive and drive and drive, and, actually I've got to admit, just because I was struggling with this because I'm here, but I'll just say it, is, I cannot tell you, not only to be here in front of you, but what a privilege it is to be at US campus, because I have been escorted off of this campus so many times.
(Laughter) (Applause) So let me give you another example of how context shapes content.
There's a few tricks, again, how environment changes the nature of your tricks.
Freestyle oriented, manual down -- wheelie down.
Watch, this one? Oh, I love this, it's like surfing, this one, the way you catch it.
Oops -- (Laughter) Mental note right there.
That was called a 360 flip.
Notice how the board flipped and spun this way, both axes.
(Laughter) It's funny, you get to know their rhythms, you know, the guys that cruise around -- (Laughter) Skateboarding is such a humbling thing, man.
No matter how good you are, you've still got to deal with -- So you hit this wall, and when I hit it, the first thing you do is you fall forward, and I'm like, all right, all right.
As you adjust ...
And so this is what I want to emphasize that, as you can imagine, all of these tricks are made of submovements, executive motor functions, more granular to the degree to which I can't quite tell you, but one thing I do know is, every trick is made of combining two or three or four or five movements.
And so, as I'm going up, these things are floating around, and you have to sort of let the cognitive mind rest back, pull it back a little bit, and let your intuition go as you feel these things.
So that's how that works to me, the creative process, the process itself, of street skating.
So, next -- Oh, mind you ...
These are some of the best skaters in the world.
These are my friends -- oh my gosh, they're such good people.
And the beauty of skateboarding is that, no one guy is the best.
In fact, I know this is rotten to say, they're my friends, but a couple of them actually don't look that comfortable on their board.
What makes them great is the degree to which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves.
And skaters, I think they tend to be outsiders who seek a sense of belonging, but belonging on their own terms.
The greater the contribution, the more we express and form our individuality, which is so important to a lot of us who feel like rejects to begin with.
I should say this.
There's some sort of beautiful symmetry that the degree to which we connect to a community is in proportion to our individuality, which we are expressing by what we do.
(Laughter) Notice a couple of these shots from the police department.
It's knowing a technology so well that you can manipulate it and steer it to do things it was never intended to do, right?
More safe, more secure.
You can be an iOS hacker, make your iPhone do stuff it wasn't supposed to.
What they do is very similar to our creative process.
They connect disparate information, and they bring it together in a way that a security analyst doesn't expect.
It doesn't make them good people, but it's at the heart of engineering, at the heart of a creative community, an innovative community, and the open source community, the basic ethos of it is, take what other people do, make it better, give it back so we all rise further.
Very similar communities, very similar.
(Laughter) It's funny, my dad was right.
But I respect what they do, and they respect what I do, because they can do things, it's amazing what they can do.
We've all had some degree of fame.
In fact, I've had so much success that I strangely always feel unworthy of.
I've had a patent, and that was cool, and we started a company, and it grew, and it became the biggest, and then it went down, and then it became the biggest again, which is harder than the first time, and then we sold it, and then we sold it again.
So I've had some success.
Because it's not just the mind.
I've been all around the world, and there will be a thousand kids crying out your name, and it's such a weird, visceral experience.
(Laughter) And it gives you that clarity of perspective of, man, I'm just me, and popularity, what does that really mean again?
I've had over a dozen bones, this guy, over, eight, 10 concussions, to the point where it's comedy, right?
In fact, winning isn't the word, I won it once.
The rest of the time, you're just defending, and you get into this, turtle posture, you know?
Where you're not doing -- it usurped the joy of what I loved to do because I was no longer doing it to create and have fun, and when it died out from under me, that was one of the most liberating things, because I could create.
I'm not here to do that.
It's just that I'm in front of a very privileged audience.
So thank you for your time.
Rodney Mullen: That's a good question. KG: Something tells me it's not the end.
And so that's what I proceeded to do, through a long story, one of desperation, so if I do it, rather than talk about it, if I do it, you'll be the first to know.
KG: All right, we won't ask you any more. RM: You'll get a text.
(Applause)
The punch line?
"On the other hand, I don't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my Labrador."
This is a recent cover of New York Magazine.
Best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment, births, strokes, heart disease, hip replacements, 4 a.m. emergencies.
And this is a song medley I put together -- (Music) Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand?
It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour.
It is four in the morning."
(Laughter) A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits."
They worked until four o'clock in the morning.
This short fiction piece by Martin Amis starts out, "On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland, Maine, and Mohamed Atta's last day began."
Could it be there is something more going on here?
He did it with this famous piece from the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Its title -- "The Palace at Four in the Morning -- (Laughter) 1932.
I call this The Giacometti Code, a TED exclusive.
The top 10 results yield you four hits for Faron Young's song, "It's Four in the Morning," three hits for Judi Dench's film, "Four in the Morning," one hit for Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "Four in the Morning."
(Laughter) In 1996, he shot himself in the head on December ninth -- which incidentally is Judi Dench's birthday.
(Laughter) But he didn't die on Dench's birthday.
He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 -- which incidentally is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died.
Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this?
100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself.
That's like me telling you, "Hey, you know the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, which coincidentally is the same year Alberto Giacometti was born?"
No, not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm, but that does not mean there's not something going on at the highest possible levels.
In fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we're about to see.
(Laughter) Video: Homer Simpson: We have a tennis court, a swimming pool, a screening room -- You mean if I want pork chops, even in the middle of the night, your guy will fry them up?
Herbert Powell: Sure, that's what he's paid for.
HS: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait -- let me see if I got this straight.
It is Christmas Day, 4 a.m.
There's a rumble in my stomach.
Marge Simpson: Homer, please.
Let me see if I got this straight, Matt.
And folks, you can buy a copy of Bill Clinton's "My Life" from the bookstore here at TED.
Or you can go to the Random House website where there is this excerpt.
And how far down into it you figure we'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket?
Would you believe about a dozen paragraphs?
This is page 474 on your paperbacks if you're following along: "Though it was getting better, I still wasn't satisfied with the inaugural address.
And then -- (Laughter) three paragraphs later we get this little beauty: "We went back to Blair House to look at the speech for the last time.
It had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m."
By his own writing, this man was either asleep, at a prayer meeting with Al and Tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase.
What happened to William Jefferson Clinton?
We might not ever know.
(Laughter) It could get awkward, right?
But if he were here -- (Laughter) he might remind us, as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography, that on this day Bill Clinton began a journey -- a journey that saw him go on to become the first Democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades.
The first since this man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election, way back in a simpler time, way back in 1932 -- (Laughter) the year Alberto Giacometti (Laughter) made "The Palace at Four in the Morning."
The year, let's remember, that this voice, now departed, first came a-cryin' into this big old crazy world of ours.
(Music) (Applause)
Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Katya, and we were talking about what I was going to talk about today.
We have an 11-year-old son; his name is Lincoln.
And during a pause in my conversation with Katya, I looked over at Lincoln and I was suddenly thunderstruck by a recollection of a client of mine.
My client was a guy named Will.
He was from North Texas.
And so, he was destined to be raised by a single mom, which might have been all right except that this particular single mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, and when Will was five years old, she tried to kill him with a butcher knife.
She was taken away by authorities and placed in a psychiatric hospital, and so for the next several years Will lived with his older brother, until he committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart.
And after that Will bounced around from one family member to another, until, by the time he was nine years old, he was essentially living on his own.
Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder.
And Will was ultimately executed as punishment for that crime.
But I don't want to talk today about the morality of capital punishment.
I certainly think that my client shouldn't have been executed, but what I would like to do today instead is talk about the death penalty in a way I've never done before, in a way that is entirely noncontroversial.
I think that's possible, because there is a corner of the death penalty debate -- maybe the most important corner -- where everybody agrees, where the most ardent death penalty supporters and the most vociferous abolitionists are on exactly the same page.
That's the corner I want to explore.
Before I do that, though, I want to spend a couple of minutes telling you how a death penalty case unfolds, and then I want to tell you two lessons that I have learned over the last 20 years as a death penalty lawyer from watching well more than a hundred cases unfold in this way.
You can think of a death penalty case as a story that has four chapters.
The first chapter of every case is exactly the same, and it is tragic.
It begins with the murder of an innocent human being, and it's followed by a trial where the murderer is convicted and sent to death row, and that death sentence is ultimately upheld by the state appellate court.
The second chapter consists of a complicated legal proceeding known as a state habeas corpus appeal.
The third chapter is an even more complicated legal proceeding known as a federal habeas corpus proceeding.
But that fourth chapter always ends with an execution.
When I started representing death row inmates more than 20 years ago, people on death row did not have a right to a lawyer in either the second or the fourth chapter of this story.
In fact, it wasn't until the late 1980s that they acquired a right to a lawyer during the third chapter of the story.
So what all of these death row inmates had to do was rely on volunteer lawyers to handle their legal proceedings.
The problem is that there were way more guys on death row than there were lawyers who had both the interest and the expertise to work on these cases.
And so inevitably, lawyers drifted to cases that were already in chapter four -- that makes sense, of course.
Others of them managed to extend the lives of their clients, sometimes by years, sometimes by months.
But the one thing that didn't happen was that there was never a serious and sustained decline in the number of annual executions in Texas.
In fact, as you can see from this graph, from the time that the Texas execution apparatus got efficient in the mid- to late 1990s, there have only been a couple of years where the number of annual executions dipped below 20.
In a typical year in Texas, we're averaging about two people a month.
And yet, at the same time that we continue to execute about the same number of people every year, the number of people who we're sentencing to death on an annual basis has dropped rather steeply.
So we have this paradox, which is that the number of annual executions has remained high but the number of new death sentences has gone down.
Why is that?
What has happened instead is that juries have started to sentence more and more people to prison for the rest of their lives without the possibility of parole, rather than sending them to the execution chamber.
Why has that happened?
Death penalty opponents take great solace in the fact that death penalty support in Texas is at an all-time low.
Do you know what all-time low in Texas means?
It means that it's in the low 60 percent.
Now, that's really good compared to the mid-1980s, when it was in excess of 80 percent, but we can't explain the decline in death sentences and the affinity for life without the possibility of parole by an erosion of support for the death penalty, because people still support the death penalty.
What's happened is that lawyers who represent death row inmates have shifted their focus to earlier and earlier chapters of the death penalty story.
So 25 years ago, they focused on chapter four.
And they went from chapter four 25 years ago to chapter three in the late 1980s.
And they went from chapter three in the late 1980s to chapter two in the mid-1990s.
Now, you might think that this decline in death sentences and the increase in the number of life sentences is a good thing or a bad thing.
I don't want to have a conversation about that today.
All that I want to tell you is that the reason that this has happened is because death penalty lawyers have understood that the earlier you intervene in a case, the greater the likelihood that you're going to save your client's life.
That's the first thing I've learned.
Here's the second thing I learned: My client Will was not the exception to the rule; he was the rule.
I sometimes say, if you tell me the name of a death row inmate -- doesn't matter what state he's in, doesn't matter if I've ever met him before -- I'll write his biography for you.
And the reason for that is that 80 percent of the people on death row are people who came from the same sort of dysfunctional family that Will did.
Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system.
That's the second lesson that I've learned.
People in this room might disagree about whether Will should have been executed, but I think everybody would agree that the best possible version of his story would be a story where no murder ever occurs.
How do we do that?
When our son Lincoln was working on that math problem two weeks ago, it was a big, gnarly problem.
That's what we do for most problems -- in math, in physics, even in social policy -- we slice them into smaller, more manageable problems.
But every once in a while, as Dwight Eisenhower said, the way you solve a problem is to make it bigger.
The way we solve this problem is to make the issue of the death penalty bigger.
We have these four chapters of a death penalty story, but what happens before that story begins?
How can we intervene in the life of a murderer before he's a murderer?
What options do we have to nudge that person off of the path that is going to lead to a result that everybody -- death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents -- still think is a bad result: the murder of an innocent human being?
You know, sometimes people say that something isn't rocket science.
And by that, what they mean is rocket science is really complicated and this problem that we're talking about now is really simple.
Well that's rocket science; that's the mathematical expression for the thrust created by a rocket.
What we're talking about today is just as complicated.
What we're talking about today is also rocket science.
My client Will and 80 percent of the people on death row had five chapters in their lives that came before the four chapters of the death penalty story.
I think of these five chapters as points of intervention, places in their lives when our society could've intervened in their lives and nudged them off of the path that they were on that created a consequence that we all -- death penalty supporters or death penalty opponents -- say was a bad result.
Now, during each of these five chapters: when his mother was pregnant with him; in his early childhood years; when he was in elementary school; when he was in middle school and then high school; and when he was in the juvenile justice system -- during each of those five chapters, there were a wide variety of things that society could have done.
In fact, if we just imagine that there are five different modes of intervention, the way that society could intervene in each of those five chapters, and we could mix and match them any way we want, there are 3,000 -- more than 3,000 -- possible strategies that we could embrace in order to nudge kids like Will off of the path that they're on.
So I'm not standing here today with the solution.
But the fact that we still have a lot to learn, that doesn't mean that we don't know a lot already.
That's probably a topic that is best reserved for a room full of lawyers and judges.
We could be providing early childhood care for economically disadvantaged and otherwise troubled kids, and we could be doing it for free.
There are other states that do that, but we don't.
We could be providing special schools, at both the high school level and the middle school level, but even in K-5, that target economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids, and particularly kids who have had exposure to the juvenile justice system.
There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't.
There's one other thing we can be doing -- well, there are a bunch of other things -- there's one other thing that I'm going to mention, and this is going to be the only controversial thing that I say today.
We could be intervening much more aggressively into dangerously dysfunctional homes, and getting kids out of them before their moms pick up butcher knives and threaten to kill them.
Even if we do all of those things, some kids are going to fall through the cracks and they're going to end up in that last chapter before the murder story begins, they're going to end up in the juvenile justice system.
And even if that happens, it's not yet too late.
There are two professors in the Northeast -- one at Yale and one at Maryland -- they set up a school that is attached to a juvenile prison.
And the kids are in prison, but they go to school from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon.
Now, it was logistically difficult.
People don't come into and out of prison on a semester basis.
(Laughter) But they did all those things.
What all of these things have in common is that they cost money.
Some of the people in the room might be old enough to remember the guy on the old oil filter commercial.
He used to say, "Well, you can pay me now or you can pay me later."
But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road.
Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.
I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will.
It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking.
And we were talking about his life.
And I said to him, "I know the story.
I know that she tried to kill you."
I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that."
I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old.
Maybe you just remember somebody telling you."
And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor.
We're going to devote enormous social resources to punishing the people who commit those crimes, and that's appropriate because we should punish people who do bad things.
But three of those crimes are preventable.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Those of you who have seen the film "Moneyball," or have read the book by Michael Lewis, will be familiar with the story of Billy Beane.
Billy was supposed to be a tremendous ballplayer; all the scouts told him so.
They told his parents that they predicted that he was going to be a star.
But what actually happened when he signed the contract -- and by the way, he didn't want to sign that contract, he wanted to go to college -- which is what my mother, who actually does love me, said that I should do too, and I did -- well, he didn't do very well. He struggled mightily.
He got traded a couple of times, he ended up in the Minors for most of his career, and he actually ended up in management. He ended up as a General Manager of the Oakland A's.
Now for many of you in this room, ending up in management, which is also what I've done, is seen as a success.
I can assure you that for a kid trying to make it in the Bigs, going into management ain't no success story. It's a failure.
One of my favorites is called subclinical acne.
If you look up subclinical acne, you may find a website, which I did, which says that this is the easiest type of acne to treat.
Maybe that's because you don't actually have acne.
We have pre-cancerous lesions, which often don't turn into cancer.
And so is it any wonder, given all of the costs and the side effects of the drugs that we're using to treat these preconditions, that every year we're spending more than two trillion dollars on healthcare and yet 100,000 people a year -- and that's a conservative estimate -- are dying not because of the conditions they have, but because of the treatments that we're giving them and the complications of those treatments?
We've medicalized everything in this country.
Women in the audience, I have some pretty bad news that you already know, and that's that every aspect of your life has been medicalized.
Strike one is when you hit puberty.
You now have something that happens to you once a month that has been medicalized.
It's a condition; it has to be treated. Strike two is if you get pregnant.
You have to have a high-tech experience of pregnancy, otherwise something might go wrong.
Strike three is menopause.
We all know what happened when millions of women were given hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms for decades until all of a sudden we realized, because a study came out, a big one, NIH-funded.
It said, actually, a lot of that hormone replacement therapy may be doing more harm than good for many of those women.
Just in case, I don't want to leave the men out -- I am one, after all -- I have really bad news for all of you in this room, and for everyone listening and watching elsewhere: You all have a universally fatal condition.
We've had HBO here this morning. I'm wondering if Mark Burnett is anywhere in the audience, I'd like to suggest a reality TV show called "Pre-vivor."
We've selected, at every point in this system, to do what we do, and to give everyone a precondition and then eventually a condition, in some cases.
Start with the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors, most of them, are in a fee-for-service system. They are basically incentivized to do more -- procedures, tests, prescribe medications.
Patients come to them, they want to do something. We're Americans, we can't just stand there, we have to do something. And so they want a drug.
They want a treatment. They want to be told, this is what you have and this is how you treat it. If the doctor doesn't give you that, you go somewhere else.
That's not very good for doctors' business.
Or even worse, if you are diagnosed with something eventually, and the doctor didn't order that test, you get sued.
But this isn't actually, despite what journalists typically do, this isn't actually about blaming particular players.
We are all responsible.
I'm responsible.
Thank you.
But everyone is responsible.
I went to medical school, and I didn't have a course called How to Think Skeptically, or How Not to Order Tests.
And it actually took being a journalist to understand all these incentives. You know, economists like to say, there are no bad people, there are just bad incentives.
And that's actually true.
Because what we've created is a sort of Field of Dreams, when it comes to medical technology.
So when you put another MRI in every corner, you put a robot in every hospital saying that everyone has to have robotic surgery.
But you can actually perversely tell people to come, convince them that they have to come.
It was when I became a journalist that I really realized how I was part of this problem, and how we all are part of this problem.
But, you know, there are ways out.
Well, he's right. I've had honest-to-goodness high blood pressure for a dozen years now, same age my father got it, and it's a real disease. It's not pre-hypertension, it's actual hypertension, high blood pressure.
Well, he's right, but he didn't say to me, well, you have pre-obesity or you have pre-diabetes, or anything like that. He didn't say, better start taking this Statin, you need to lower your cholesterol.
No, he said, "Go out and lose some weight. Come back and see me in a bit, or just give me a call and let me know how you're doing."
Billy Beane, by the way, learned the same thing.
As a magician, I'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion.
And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century.
It used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage. Now, I won't use mirrors, but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater.
So let the story begin.
On a dark and stormy night -- really! -- it was the 10th of July, 1856.
Lightning lit the sky, and a baby was born.
His name was Nikola, Nikola Tesla.
Now the baby grew into a very smart guy.
Tesla, what is 236 multiplied by 501?
Nikola Tesla: The result is 118,236.
Marco Tempest: Now Tesla's brain worked in the most extraordinary way.
When a word was mentioned, an image of it instantly appeared in his mind.
They were hallucinations, which vanished the moment he touched them.
Probably a form of synesthesia.
Where other scientists would play in their laboratory, Tesla created his inventions in his mind.
MT: And when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination, he would build them in his workshop.
To sell his idea, he became a showman.
NT: We are at the dawn of a new age, the age of electricity.
I have been able, through careful invention, to transmit, with the mere flick of a switch, electricity across the ether.
It is the magic of science.
(Applause) Tesla has over 700 patents to his name: radio, wireless telegraphy, remote control, robotics.
He even photographed the bones of the human body.
But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream: harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls, and bringing light to the city.
But Tesla's success didn't last.
NT: I had bigger ideas.
Illuminating the city was only the beginning.
A world telegraphy center -- imagine news, messages, sounds, images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly.
MT: It's a great idea; it was a huge project. Expensive, too.
MT: Well, maybe you shouldn't have told them it could be used to contact other planets.
NT: Yes, that was a big mistake.
MT: Tesla's career as an inventor never recovered.
He became a recluse.
MT: Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January, 1943.
His final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
His legacy is with us still.
Tesla became the man who lit the world, but this was only the beginning.
Tesla's insight was profound.
MT: Tesla thought he had the answer.
We are still asking the question.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good evening.
We are in this wonderful open-air amphitheater and we are enjoying ourselves in that mild evening temperature tonight, but when Qatar will host the football World Cup 10 years from now, 2022, we already heard it will be in the hot, very hot and sunny summer months of June and July.
And when Qatar has been assigned to the World Cup all, many people around the world have been wondering, how would it be possible that football players show spectacular football, run around in this desert climate? How would it be possible that spectators sit, enjoy themselves in open-air stadia in this hot environment?
Let me tell you about that, but let me start with comfort.
Let me start with the aspect of comfort, because many people are confusing ambient temperature with thermal comfort.
We are used to looking at charts like that, and you see this red line showing the air temperature in June and July, and yes, that's right, it's picking up to 45 degrees C.
It's actually very hot.
But air temperature is not the full set of climatic parameters which define comfort.
Mexico temperature has been, air temperature has been something between 15, up to 30 degrees C, and people enjoyed themselves.
It was a very comfortable game in Mexico City. Have a look.
Orlando, same kind of stadium, open-air stadium. People have been sitting in the strong sun, in the very high humidity in the afternoon, and they did not enjoy. It was not comfortable.
The air temperature was not too high, but it was not comfortable during these games.
What about Seoul? Seoul, because of broadcast rights, all the games have been in the late afternoon. Sun has already been set, so the games have been perceived as comfortable.
What about Athens? Mediterranean climate, but in the sun it was not comfortable. They didn't perceive comfort.
And we know that from Spain, we know that "sol y sombra."
What about Beijing?
This is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort, which is the sun, the direct sun, the diffuse sun, which is wind, strong wind, mild wind, which is air humidity, which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in.
And this is air temperature.
Which is the driving parameter which gives me a perceived temperature? And these parameters, these climatic parameters are related to the human metabolism.
Because of our metabolism, we as human beings, we produce heat.
I'm excited, I'm talking to you, I'm probably producing 150 watts at the moment. You are sitting, you are relaxed, you're looking at me. It's probably 100 watts each person is producing, and we need to get rid of that energy. I need, with my body, to get rid of the energy, and the harder it is for myself, for my body, to get rid of the energy, the less comfort I feel.
So we sat together with a team which prepared the Bid Book, or goal, that we said, let's aim for perceived temperature, for outdoor comfort in this range, which is perceived with a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius perceived temperature, which is extremely comfortable.
If we just look on what happens, we see, temperature's too high.
If we apply the best architectural design, climate engineering design, we won't get much better.
We need, for instance, to bring in radiant cooling technology, and we need to combine this with so-called soft conditioning.
And how does it look like in a stadium?
So the stadium has a few elements which create that outdoor comfort. First of all, it's shading. It needs to protect where the people are sitting against strong and warm wind.
But that's not all what we need to do. We need to use active systems.
Instead of blowing a hurricane of chilled air through the stadium, we can use radiant cooling technologies, like a floor heating system where water pipes are embedded in the floor.
And just by using cold water going through the water pipes, you can release the heat which is absorbed during the day in the stadium, so you can create that comfort, and then by adding dry air instead of down-chilled air, the spectators and the football players can adjust to their individual comfort needs, to their individual energy balance.
There are 12 stadia probably to come, but there are 32 training pitches where all the individual countries are going to train.
We applied the same concept: shading of the training pitch, using a shelter against wind, then using the grass.
Natural-watered lawn is a very good cooling source stabilizing temperature, and using dehumidified air to create comfort.
But even the best passive design wouldn't help.
We need active system.
And how do we do that?
We are not using fossil energies.
We are not borrowing energy from our neighbors.
And this energy now is harvested throughout the year, sent into the grid, is replacing fossils in the grid, and when I need it for the cooling, I take it back from the grid and I use the solar energy which I have brought to the grid back when I need it for the solar cooling.
And I can do that in the first year and I can balance that in the next 10, and the next 20 years, this energy, which is necessary to condition a World Cup in Qatar, the next 20 years, this energy goes into the grid of Qatar.
So this -- (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) This is not only useful for stadia. We can use that also in open-air places and streets, and we've been working on the City of the Future in Masdar, which is in the United Emirates, Abu Dhabi.
And the same idea to use there, to create outdoor conditions which are perceived as comfortable. People enjoy going there instead of going into a shopping mall, which is chilled down and which is cooled. We wanted to create an outdoor space which is so comfortable that people can go there in the early afternoon, even in these sunny and hot summer months, and they can enjoy and meet there with their families. (Applause) And the same concept: shade against the sun, shade against the wind, and use, use and take advantage of the sun you can harvest on your footprint.
And these beautiful umbrellas.
We uploaded a very simple perceived temperature calculator where you can check out about your outdoor comfort.
And I also hope that you share the idea that if engineers and designers can use all these different climatic parameters, it will be possible to create really good and comfortable outdoor conditions, to change our thermal perception that we feel comfortable in an outdoor environment, and we can do that with the best passive design, but also using the energy source of the site in Qatar which is the sun.
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Shukran. (Applause)
About 75 years ago, my grandfather, a young man, walked into a tent that was converted into a movie theater like that, and he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he saw on the silver screen: none other than Mae West, the heartthrob of the '30s, and he could never forget her.
So when my twin brother Kaesava was born, he decided to tinker with the spelling of Keshava's name.
He said, if Mae West can be M-A-E, why can't Keshava be K-A-E?
He decided to spell, or, rather, misspell Raehan with an A-E.
You know, my grandfather died many years ago when I was little, but his love for Mae West lives on as a misspelling in the DNA of his progeny.
That for me is successful legacy. (Laughs) You know, as for me, my wife and I have our own crazy legacy project.
We actually sit every few years, argue, disagree, fight, and actually come up with our very own 200-year plan.
Our friends think we're mad.
Our parents think we're cuckoo.
Because, you know, we both come from families that really look up to humility and wisdom, but we both like to live larger than life.
So when Netra and I sat down to make our first plan 10 years ago, we said we want the focus of this plan to go way beyond ourselves.
Well 200 years, we calculated, is at the end of our direct contact with the world.
You know, I never really believed in legacy. What am I going to leave behind? I'm an artist.
Until I made a cartoon about 9/11.
I was so upset.
You know, a cartoon that was meant to be a cartoon of the week ended up staying so much longer.
Now I'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me, and I think about what I want to leave behind through those paintings.
You know, the 9/11 cartoon upset me so much that I decided I'll never cartoon again.
You know, sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic.
Perhaps loss of memory is so crucial for our survival as human beings.
One of the most important things in my 200-year plan that Netra and I write is what to forget about ourselves.
You know, we carry so much baggage, from our parents, from our society, from so many people -- fears, insecurities -- and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire.
But like my friends, I can do that really well on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube.
I've started outsourcing my memory to the digital world, you know? But that comes with a problem.
It's so easy to think of technology as a metaphor for memory, but our brains are not perfect storage devices like technology.
We only remember what we want to. At least I do.
And I rather think of our brains as biased curators of our memory, you know? And if technology is not a metaphor for memory, what is it?
Netra and I use our technology as a tool in our 200-year plan to really curate our digital legacy.
That is a picture of my mother, and she recently got a Facebook account.
You know where this is going.
And I've been very supportive until this picture shows up on my Facebook page. (Laughter) And I actually untagged myself first, then I picked up the phone. I said, "Mom, you will never put a picture of me in a bikini ever again."
And she said, "Why? You look so cute, darling." I said, "You just don't understand."
Maybe we are among the first generation that really understands this digital curating of ourselves.
Maybe we are the first to even actively record our lives.
You know, whether you agree with, you know, legacy or not, we are actually leaving behind digital traces all the time.
Well, when I think of the future, I never see myself moving forward in time. I actually see time moving backward towards me.
I can actually visualize my future approaching.
It's like a video game obstacle course. And I've gotten better and better at doing this. Even when I make a painting, I actually imagine I'm behind the painting, it already exists, and someone's looking at it, and I see whether they're feeling it from their gut.
And it really informs my painting.
I remember when I was 19, I did, I wanted to do my first art exhibition, and I wanted the whole world to know about it.
I didn't know TED then, but what I did was I closed my eyes tight, and I started dreaming. I could imagine people coming in, dressed up, looking beautiful, my paintings with all the light, and in my visualization I actually saw a very famous actress launching my show, giving credibility to me.
And I woke up from my visualization and I said, who was that? I couldn't tell if it was Shabana Azmi or Rekha, two very famous Indian actresses, like the Meryl Streeps of India.
As it turned out, next morning I wrote a letter to both of them, and Shabana Azmi replied, and came and launched my very first show 12 years ago.
This is a picture of my family, and that is Netra, my wife.
She's the co-creator of my 200-year plan.
Netra's a high school history teacher. I love Netra, but I hate history.
I keep saying, "Nets, you live in the past while I'll create the future, and when I'm done, you can study about it."
(Laughter) She gave me an indulgent smile, and as punishment, she said, "Tomorrow I'm teaching a class on Indian history, and you are sitting in it, and I'm grading you."
I'm like, "Oh, God." I went.
I actually went and sat in on her class. She started by giving students primary source documents from India, Pakistan, from Britain, and I said, "Wow." Then she asked them to separate fact from bias.
I said, "Wow," again.
Then she said, "Choose your facts and biases and create an image of your own story of dignity."
I went and created my own version of Indian history.
I actually included stories from my grandmother.
She used to work for the telephone exchange, and she used to actually overhear conversations between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten.
And she used to hear all kinds of things she shouldn't have heard. But, you know, I include things like that.
This is my version of Indian history.
You know, if this is so, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the primary objective of our brains is to serve our dignity.
Go tell Facebook to figure that out!
Netra and I don't write our 200-year plan for someone else to come and execute it in 150 years. Imagine receiving a parcel saying, from the past, okay now you're supposed to spend the rest of your life doing all of this. No.
You know, I used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy.
Education is great.
It really teaches us who we are, and helps us contextualize ourselves in the world, but it's really my creativity that's taught me that I can be much more than what my education told me I am.
I'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have.
I like to think -- Thank you.
I like to think of myself as a storyteller, where my past and my future are only stories, my stories, waiting to be told and retold. I hope all of you one day get a chance to share and write your own 200-year story.
Thank you so much.
And you might like to hear some of the principles that I've developed in doing that teaching and counseling.
The world needs you, badly.
There is going to be no turning back.
Knowledge in medical science and science overall is doubling every 15 to 20 years.
So swift is the velocity of the techno-scientific revolution, so startling in its countless twists and turns, that no one can predict its outcome even a decade from the present moment.
There will come a time, of course, when the exponential growth of discovery and knowledge, which actually began in the 1600s, has to peak and level off, but that's not going to matter to you.
The revolution is going to continue for at least several more decades.
It'll render the human condition radically different from what it is today.
Traditional fields of study are going to continue to grow and in so doing, inevitably they will meet and create new disciplines.
That's why you need not just be training in one specialty, but also acquire breadth in other fields, related to and even distant from your own initial choice.
The search for knowledge is in our genes.
In education, medicine, law, diplomacy, government, business and the media that exist today.
Our political leaders need at least a modest degree of scientific literacy, which most badly lack today -- no applause, please.
A metaphor will serve here: Where elite mathematicians and statisticians and theorists often serve as architects in the expanding realm of science, the remaining large majority of basic applied scientists, including a large portion of those who could be said to be of the first rank, are the ones who map the terrain, they scout the frontiers, they cut the pathways, they raise the buildings along the way.
During 41 years of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright students turned away from the possibility of a scientific career or even from taking non-required courses in science because they were afraid of failure.
These math-phobes deprive science and medicine of immeasurable amounts of badly needed talent.
Any person with average quantitative intelligence who learns to read and write mathematics at an elementary level will, as in verbal language, have little difficulty picking up most of the fundamentals if they choose to master the mathspeak of most disciplines of science.
The longer you wait to become at least semi-literate the harder the language of mathematics will be to master, just as again in any verbal language, but it can be done at any age.
I speak as an authority on that subject, because I'm an extreme case.
I didn't take algebra until my freshman year at the University of Alabama.
I finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard, where I sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students, little more than half my age.
A couple of them were students in a course I was giving on evolutionary biology.
I found out that in science and all its applications, what is crucial is not that technical ability, but it is imagination in all of its applications.
The ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition.
I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations.
Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
Of foremost importance is a thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known of the relevant entities and processes that might be involved in that domain you propose to enter.
When something new is discovered, it's logical then that one of the follow-up steps is to find the mathematical and statistical methods to move its analysis forward.
If that step proves too difficult for the person or team that made the discovery, a mathematician can then be added by them as a collaborator.
Consider the following principle, which I will modestly call Wilson's Principle Number One: It is far easier for scientists including medical researchers, to require needed collaboration in mathematics and statistics than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations.
It is important in choosing the direction to take in science to find the subject at your level of competence that interests you deeply, and focus on that.
Keep in mind, then, Wilson's Second Principle: For every scientist, whether researcher, technician, teacher, manager or businessman, working at any level of mathematical competence, there exists a discipline in science or medicine for which that level is enough to achieve excellence.
Now I'm going to offer quickly several more principles that will be useful in organizing your education and career, or if you're teaching, how you might enhance your own teaching and counseling of young scientists.
In selecting a subject in which to conduct original research, or to develop world-class expertise, take a part of the chosen discipline that is sparsely inhabited.
Judge opportunity by how few other students and researchers are on hand.
It is important also to acquire older mentors within these successful programs, and to make friends and colleagues of your age for mutual support.
We have seen this demonstrated already in the talks preceding mine.
You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: March to the sound of the guns.
In science, the exact opposite is the case: March away from the sound of the guns.
So Wilson's Principle Number Three: March away from the sound of the guns.
Observe from a distance, but do not join the fray.
Make a fray of your own.
Once you have settled on a specialty, and the profession you can love, and you've secured opportunity, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become an expert.
There are thousands of professionally delimited subjects sprinkled through physics and chemistry to biology and medicine.
And on then into the social sciences, where it is possible in short time to acquire the status of an authority.
The world needs this kind of expertise, and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it.
The existing information and what you self-discover may at first seem skimpy and difficult to connect to other bodies of knowledge.
Well, if that's the case, good. Why hard instead of easy?
The answer deserves to be stated as Principle Number Four.
In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity, and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.
Scientists, pure mathematicians among them, follow one or the other of two pathways: First through early discoveries, a problem is identified and a solution is sought.
The problem may be relatively small; for example, where exactly in a cruise ship does the norovirus begin to spread?
Or larger, what's the role of dark matter in the expansion of the universe?
As the answer is sought, other phenomena are typically discovered and other questions are asked.
This first of the two strategies is like a hunter, exploring a forest in search of a particular quarry, who finds other quarries along the way.
The two strategies of research, original research, can be stated as follows, in the final principle I'm going to offer you: For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution.
And conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which, those particular objects of research are ideally suited.
Find out what they are.
You'll find your own way to discover, to learn, to teach.
The decades ahead will see dramatic advances in disease prevention, general health, the quality of life.
All of humanity depends on the knowledge and practice of the medicine and the science behind it you will master.
And I thank you for having me here tonight.
(Applause) Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Everyone is both a learner and a teacher.
This is me being inspired by my first tutor, my mom, and this is me teaching Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to 200 students at Stanford University.
Now the students and I enjoyed the class, but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern, the teaching technology isn't.
In fact, I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom.
Note the textbook, the sage on the stage, and the sleeping guy in the back. (Laughter) Just like today.
So my co-teacher, Sebastian Thrun, and I thought, there must be a better way.
We challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our Stanford class, but to bring it to anyone in the world for free.
We announced the class on July 29th, and within two weeks, 50,000 people had signed up for it.
And that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries.
We were thrilled to have that kind of audience, and just a bit terrified that we hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter) So we got to work.
We studied what others had done, what we could copy and what we could change.
Here, an overhead video camera is recording me as I'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper.
A student said, "This class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who's explaining something you haven't grasped, but are about to."
And that's exactly what we were aiming for.
Now, from Khan Academy, we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen.
We decided to go even shorter and more interactive.
Our typical video is two minutes, sometimes shorter, never more than six, and then we pause for a quiz question, to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring.
Students learn best when they're actively practicing.
We mostly avoid questions like, "Here's a formula, now tell me the value of Y when X is equal to two."
We preferred open-ended questions.
One student wrote, "Now I'm seeing Bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere I look."
And I like that kind of response.
We didn't want students to memorize the formulas; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world.
And we succeeded.
Or, I should say, the students succeeded.
Most online classes, the videos are always available.
This motivated the students to keep going, and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time, so if you went into a discussion forum, you could get an answer from a peer within minutes.
From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned the concept of "flipping" the classroom.
Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that.
Of course, we couldn't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students, so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums.
And finally, from Teach For America, I learned that a class is not primarily about information.
More important is motivation and determination.
It was crucial that the students see that we're working hard for them and they're all supporting each other.
Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours.
So what have we learned?
Well, we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together, but there are more ideas to try.
Sebastian's teaching another class now.
I'll do one in the fall.
Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx and others have more classes coming.
It's a really exciting time.
We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come.
And you'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students.
(Applause)
As a kid, I was fascinated with all things air and space.
When I was in elementary school, my next door neighbor, he gave me a book for my birthday.
It was an astronomy book, and I poured over that thing for hours on end, and it was a combination of all these things that inspired me to pursue space exploration as my own personal dream, and part of that dream was, I always wanted to just fly around the solar system and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft.
Well, a number of years later, I graduated from UCLA and I found myself at NASA, working for the jet propulsion laboratory, and there our team was challenged to create a 3D visualization of the solar system, and today I want to show you what we've done so far.
Now, the kicker is, everything I'm about to do here you can do at home, because we built this for the public for you guys to use.
So what you're looking at right now is the Earth.
You can see the United States and California and San Diego, and you can use the mouse or the keyboard to spin things around.
Now, this isn't new. Anyone who's used Google Earth has seen this before, but one thing we like to say in our group is, we do the opposite of Google Earth.
We go from this view out to the stars.
If we did, it would be a complete mess, because there's a lot of stuff out there.
And the cool thing is, we actually created 3D models for a number of these spacecraft, so if you want to visit any of these, all you need to do is double-click on them.
And now you're riding along with the ISS where it is right now.
Well, I can click on this home button over here, and that will take us up to the inner solar system, and now we're looking at the rest of the solar system.
You can see, there's Saturn, there's Jupiter, and while we're here, I want to point out something.
Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory on its way to Mars, just launched last weekend.
Here we have Juno on its cruise to Jupiter, there.
We have Dawn orbiting Vesta, and we have over here New Horizons on a straight shot to Pluto.
And I mention this because there's this strange public perception that NASA's dead, that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there's no more spacecraft out there.
Well, a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration, and we have a lot of spacecraft out there.
Granted, we're not sending humans up at the moment, well at least with our own launch vehicles, but NASA is far from dead, and one of the reasons why we write a program like this is so that people realize that there's so many other things that we're doing.
I'm going to double-click on Uranus, and we can see Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons.
You can see how it's tilted at about 89 degrees.
And just being able to visit different places and go through different times, we have data from 1950 to 2050.
Granted, we don't have everything in between, because some of the data is hard to get.
Just being able to visit places in different times, you can explore this for hours, literally hours on end, but I want to show you one thing in particular, so I'm going to open up the destination tab, spacecraft outer planet missions, Voyager 1, and I'm going to bring up the Titan flyby.
We're now riding along with Voyager 1.
The date here is November 11, 1980.
It's actually running at real rate right now, one second per second, and in fact, Voyager 1 here is flying by Titan at I think it's 38,000 miles per hour.
It only looks like nothing's moving because, well, Saturn here is 700,000 miles away, and Titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away.
It's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing's happening.
But to make it more interesting, I'm going to speed up time, and we can watch as Voyager 1 flies by Titan, which is a hazy moon of Saturn.
There's a point to be made here.
With a 3D visualization like this, we can not only just say Voyager 1 flew by Saturn.
And even better, because it's an interactive application, you can tell the story for yourself.
If you want to pause it, you can pause it.
If you want to keep going, if you want to change the camera angle, you can do that, and because of that, I can show you that Voyager 1 doesn't just fly by Saturn.
Now, what happens is, as it flies underneath Saturn, Saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up and out of the solar system, so if I just keep letting this go, you can see Voyager 1 fly up like that.
And, in fact, I'm going to go back to the solar system.
I'm going to go back to today, now, and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is.
Right there, above, way above the solar system, way beyond our solar system.
Now you know why, and to me, that's the point of this program.
Thank you. (Applause)
Over the last two decades, India has become a global hub for software development and offshoring of back office services, as we call it, and what we were interested in finding out was that because of this huge industry that has started over the last two decades in India, offshoring software development and back office services, there's been a flight of white collar jobs from the developed world to India.
In fact, if you look at polls, they show a declining trend for support for free trade in the West.
Now, the Western elites, however, have said this fear is misplaced.
For example, if you have read — I suspect many of you have done so — read the book by Thomas Friedman called "The World Is Flat," he said, basically, in his book that, you know, this fear for free trade is wrong because it assumes, it's based on a mistaken assumption that everything that can be invented has been invented.
In fact, he says, it's innovation that will keep the West ahead of the developing world, with the more sophisticated, innovative tasks being done in the developed world, and the less sophisticated, shall we say, drudge work being done in the developing world.
Now, what we were trying to understand was, is this true?
Could India become a source, or a global hub, of innovation, just like it's become a global hub for back office services and software development?
Initially, or, you know, as people would say, you know, in fact the more aggressive people who are supporting the Western innovative model, say, "Where are the Indian Googles, iPods and Viagras, if the Indians are so bloody smart?" (Laughter) So initially, when we started our research, we went and met several executives, and we asked them, "What do you think? Will India go from being a favored destination for software services and back office services to a destination for innovation?"
They said, "You know what? Indians don't do innovation."
The more polite ones said, "Well, you know, Indians make good software programmers and accountants, but they can't do the creative stuff."
It's really the rule-based, regimented education system in India that is responsible for killing all creativity."
They said, instead, if you want to see real creativity, go to Silicon Valley, and look at companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel.
So we started examining the R&D and innovation labs of Silicon Valley.
Well, interestingly, what you find there is, usually you are introduced to the head of the innovation lab or the R&D center as they may call it, and more often than not, it's an Indian. (Laughter) So I immediately said, "Well, but you could not have been educated in India, right?
You must have gotten your education here."
So we realized that maybe we had the wrong question, and the right question is, really, can Indians based out of India do innovative work?
So off we went to India. We made, I think, about a dozen trips to Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi, Hyderabad, you name it, to examine what is the level of corporate innovation in these cities.
And what we found was, as we progressed in our research, was, that we were asking really the wrong question.
Instead, innovation, if you remember, some of you may have read the famous economist Schumpeter, he said, "Innovation is novelty in how value is created and distributed."
It could also be novel ways of organizing firms and industries.
And specifically, there are four types of invisible innovation that are coming out of India.
The first type of invisible innovation out of India is what we call innovation for business customers, which is led by the multinational corporations, which have -- in the last two decades, there have been 750 R&D centers set up in India by multinational companies employing more than 400,000 professionals.
Now, when you consider the fact that, historically, the R&D center of a multinational company was always in the headquarters, or in the country of origin of that multinational company, to have 750 R&D centers of multinational corporations in India is truly a remarkable figure.
When we went and talked to the people in those innovation centers and asked them what are they working on, they said, "We are working on global products."
They were not working on localizing global products for India, which is the usual role of a local R&D.
But of course, as an end user, you don't see that, because you only see the name of the company, not where it was developed.
The other thing we were told then was, "Yes, but, you know, the kind of work that is coming out of the Indian R&D center cannot be compared to the kind of work that is coming out of the U.S. R&D centers."
What he did was he looked at those companies that had an R&D center in USA and in India, and then he looked at a patent that was filed out of the U.S. and a similar patent filed out of the same company's subsidiary in India, so he's now comparing the patents of R&D centers in the U.S. with R&D centers in India of the same company to find out what is the quality of the patents filed out of the Indian centers and how do they compare with the quality of the patents filed out of the U.S. centers?
Interestingly, what he finds is — and by the way, the way we look at the quality of a patent is what we call forward citations: How many times does a future patent reference the older patent? — he finds something very interesting.
What we find is that the data says that the number of forward citations of a patent filed out of a U.S. R&D subsidiary is identical to the number of forward citations of a patent filed by an Indian subsidiary of the same company within that company.
So within the company, there's no difference in the forward citation rates of their Indian subsidiaries versus their U.S. subsidiaries.
So that's the first kind of invisible innovation coming out of India.
The second kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call outsourcing innovation to Indian companies, where many companies today are contracting Indian companies to do a major part of their product development work for their global products which are going to be sold to the entire world.
For example, in the pharma industry, a lot of the molecules are being developed, but you see a major part of that work is being sent to India.
For example, XCL Technologies, they developed two of the mission critical systems for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one to avoid collisions in the sky, and another to allow landing in zero visibility.
But of course, when you climb onto the Boeing 787, you are not going to know that this is invisible innovation out of India.
The third kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call process innovations, because of an injection of intelligence by Indian firms.
Process innovation is different from product innovation.
What happens — You know, it's a dead end job in the West, what high school dropouts do.
Very quickly, they get bored, and they start innovating, and they start telling the boss how to do this job better, and out of this process innovation comes product innovations, which are then marketed around the world.
For example, 24/7 Customer, traditional call center company, used to be a traditional call center company. Today they're developing analytical tools to do predictive modeling so that before you pick up the phone, you can guess or predict what this phone call is about.
It's because of an injection of intelligence into a process which was considered dead for a long time in the West.
And the last kind of innovation, invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call management innovation.
It's not a new product or a new process but a new way to organize work, and the most significant management innovation to come out of India, invented by the Indian offshoring industry is what we call the global delivery model.
What the global delivery model allows is, it allows you to take previously geographically core-located tasks, break them up into parts, send them around the world where the expertise and the cost structure exists, and then specify the means for reintegrating them.
Without that, you could not have any of the other invisible innovations today.
So, what I'm trying to say is, what we are finding in our research is, that if products for end users is the visible tip of the innovation iceberg, India is well represented in the invisible, large, submerged portion of the innovation iceberg.
Now, this has, of course, some implications, and so we developed three implications of this research.
Now, of course, when we first, as a multinational company, decide to outsource jobs to India in the R&D, what we are going to do is we are going to outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India, the least sophisticated jobs, just like Tom Friedman would predict.
Now, what happens is, when you outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India for innovation and for R&D work, at some stage in the very near future you are going to have to confront a problem, which is where does the next step of the ladder people come from within your company?
So you have two choices then: Either you bring the people from India into the developed world to take positions in the next step of the ladder — immigration — or you say, there's so many people in the bottom step of the ladder waiting to take the next position in India, why don't we move the next step to India?
What we are trying to say is that once you outsource the bottom end of the ladder, you -- it's a self-perpetuating act, because of the sinking skill ladder, and the sinking skill ladder is simply the point that you can't be an investment banker without having been an analyst once.
You can't be a professor without having been a student.
So, if you outsource the least sophisticated jobs, at some stage, the next step of the ladder has to follow.
If the R&D talent is going to be based out of India and China, and the largest growth markets are going to be based out of India and China, you have to confront the problem that your top management of the future is going to have to come out of India and China, because that's where the product leadership is, that's where the important market leadership is.
Right? And the last thing we point out in this slide, which is, you know, that to this story, there's one caveat.
India has the youngest growing population in the world.
This demographic dividend is incredible, but paradoxically, there's also the mirage of mighty labor pools.
Indian institutes and educational system, with a few exceptions, are incapable of producing students in the quantity and quality needed to keep this innovation engine going, so companies are finding innovative ways to overcome this, but in the end it does not absolve the government of the responsibility for creating this educational structure.
So finally, I want to conclude by showing you the profile of one company, IBM.
As many of you know, IBM has always been considered for the last hundred years to be one of the most innovative companies.
In fact, if you look at the number of patents filed over history, I think they are in the top or the top two or three companies in the world of all patents filed in the USA as a private company.
Here is the profile of employees of IBM over the last decade.
In 2003, they had 300,000 employees, or 330,000 employees, out of which, 135,000 were in America, 9,000 were in India.
Here are my best guesses. Okay? I'm not saying this is the exact number, it's my best guess.
There are 433,000 people now at IBM, out of which 98,000 are remaining in the U.S., and 150,000 are in India.
So you tell me, is IBM an American company, or an Indian company? (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. (Applause)
Allison Hunt: My three minutes hasn't started yet, has it?
Chris Anderson: No, you can't start the three minutes.
Reset the three minutes, that's just not fair.
But I am not as nervous as I was five weeks ago.
Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery.
Electric saw, power drill, totally disgusting unless you're David Bolinsky, in which case it's all truth and beauty.
Anyway, I did have a really big epiphany around the situation, so Chris invited me to tell you about it.
But first you need to know two things about me.
Just two things.
I'm Canadian, and I'm the youngest of seven kids.
Now, in Canada, we have that great healthcare system.
I finally went to the doctor, which was free.
And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, also free.
Finally got to see him after 10 months of waiting -- almost a year.
I met the surgeon, and he took some free X-rays, and I got a good look at them. And you know, even I could tell my hip was bad, and I actually work in marketing.
I'm going to replace your hip -- it's about an 18-month wait."
I'd already waited 10 months, and I had to wait 18 more months.
I wouldn't have my new hip for this TED.
I would not have my new hip for TED2008.
So, I left his office and I was walking through the hospital, and that's when I had my epiphany.
Oh yeah.
Can I tell you how un-Canadian that is?
Hey, are you from Canada? "Oh, me too! Hi!"
Some 70-year-old who wanted his new hip so he could be back golfing, or gardening.
And I saw a sign.
In the window of the hospital's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said, "Volunteers Needed." Hmm.
Well, they signed me up immediately.
No reference checks. None of the usual background stuff, no.
They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75.
Yeah. They needed some young blood.
So, next thing you know, I had my bright blue volunteer vest, I had my photo ID, and I was fully trained by my 89-year-old boss.
I worked alone.
Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop.
Then I'd tell them, "Well, I'm getting my hip replaced -- in 18 months.
My next surgeon's appointment was, coincidentally, right after a shift at the gift shop.
So, naturally, I had my vest and my identification.
And you know, when he walked in, I could just tell that he saw them.
Moments later, I had a surgery date just weeks away, and a big fat prescription for Percocet.
Now, word on the street was that it was actually my volunteering that got me to the front of the line.
And, you know, I'm not even ashamed of that.
Two reasons.
But also I intend to stick with the volunteering, which actually leads me to the biggest epiphany of them all.
Even when a Canadian cheats the system, they do it in a way that benefits society.
And I wondered if I could update that game, not just for modern methods, but for the modern me.
So I tried.
I went to an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and I entered the term "Earth."
You can start anywhere, this time I chose Earth.
And the first rule of the game is pretty simple.
You just have to read the article until you find something you don't know, and preferably something your dad doesn't even know.
And in this case, I quickly found this: The furthest point from the center of the Earth is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought, it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.
The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun, so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle, like some Earthlings.
And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes, it's one degree away from the equator, it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth.
And it is really fun to say.
So I immediately decided, this is going to be the name of the game, or my new exclamation.
You can use it at TED.
Chimborazo, right?
It's like "eureka" and "bingo" had a baby.
Chimborazo!
You just have to find another term and look that up.
Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from.
I can go literally anywhere in the world, I think since I was already in Ecuador, I just decided to click on the word "tropical."
That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the Earth.
They move; they go up, they go down.
In fact, for years, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year, and nobody told me that.
Chimborazo!
Famous for its diversity, human diversity.
There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet.
They're all over the globe, but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests.
The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end.
This is the most successful order on the planet by far.
Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet, including plants, are beetles.
That means the next time you are in the grocery store, take a look at the four people ahead of you in line.
Statistically, one of you is a beetle.
There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums.
There are predator beetles, that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us.
This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri, who renews the ball of the sun every morning, which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom.
Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles.
Like my next link: The chemical language of pheromones.
Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex.
Yeah.
(Laughter) And the link to aphrodisiac.
There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac.
But as the article mentions, because of enzyme breakdown, it's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally.
So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment.
But not when they're together like that.
I do like sympathy. I do like magic.
This is the boy in me getting lucky again.
If you imitate something, maybe you can have an effect on it.
That's the idea behind voodoo dolls, and possibly also cave paintings.
The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind.
I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves.
We've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork.
Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands, usually the left hand.
We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia, so even though I don't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube, I can easily picture how he did it.
And I really don't think it's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that I'm going to use now to click on the term for "hand," go to the page for "hand," where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia I've found in a long time. It's simply this: The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar.
Now that's embarrassing, because up until now, every time I've said, "I know it like the back of my hand," I've really been saying, "I'm totally familiar with that, I just don't know it's freaking name, right?"
And the link I clicked on here, well, lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar.
Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means "cave dweller."
He lives in rainforests and savannas.
It's just that we're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us, evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us, and in some cases, he gets places before us.
I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact.
He's born in Cameroon, which is smack in the middle of my tropics map, and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles.
In between those two landmarks in Ham's life, he flew into space.
When I click on Yuri Gagarin's page, I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature, huge in heroism.
Top estimates, Soviet estimates, put this guy at 1.65 meters, that is less than five and a half feet tall max, possibly because he was malnourished as a child.
Germans occupied Russia.
A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household, and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut.
Years later, the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space, the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet.
And he didn't just leave it, he circled it once.
Fifty years later, as a tribute, the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight, synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit, at the exact same time of day, and filmed it, so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride, possibly a lonely one, the first person to ever see such a thing.
You can come back to Earth.
You return to where you started.
You can finish your game.
You just need to find one more fact that you didn't know.
And for me, I quickly landed on this one: The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid, which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls.
I found it myself.
What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls, fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea, you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball, it would be as smooth as a billiard ball, presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle.
I didn't know that.
Chimborazo!
Thank you.
(Applause)
So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave this toy car to his 8-year-old son.
But instead of going into a store and buying one, like we do normally, he went to this website and he downloaded a file, and then he printed it on this printer.
So this idea that you can manufacture objects digitally using these machines is something that The Economist magazine defined as the Third Industrial Revolution.
Actually, I argue that there is another revolution going on, and it's the one that has to do with open-source hardware and the maker's movement, because the printer that my friend used to print the toy is actually open-source.
So you go to the same website, you can download all the files that you need in order to make that printer: the construction files, the hardware, the software, all the instruction is there.
And also this is part of a large community where there are thousands of people around the world that are actually making these kinds of printers, and there's a lot of innovation happening because it's all open-source.
You don't need anybody's permission to create something great.
And that space is like the personal computer in 1976, like the Apples with the other companies are fighting, and we will see in a few years, there will be the Apple of this kind of market come out.
I said the electronics are open-source, because at the heart of this printer there is something I'm really attached to: these Arduino boards, the motherboard that sort of powers this printer, is a project I've been working on for the past seven years.
It's an open-source project.
So the five of us, two Americans, two Italians and a Spaniard, we — (Laughter) You know, it's a worldwide project. (Laughter) So we came together in this design institute called the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which was teaching interaction design, this idea that you can take design from the simple shape of an object and you can move it forward to design the way you interact with things.
Well, when you design an object that's supposed to interact with a human being, if you make a foam model of a mobile phone, it doesn't make any sense.
You have to have something that actually interacts with people.
So how do I make something that even a kid can use?
And actually, with Arduino, we have kids like Sylvia that you see here, that actually make projects with Arduino.
I have 11-year-old kids stop me and show me stuff they built for Arduino that's really scary to see the capabilities that kids have when you give them the tools.
The gentleman who made this project had two cats.
One was sick and the other one was healthy, so he had to make sure they ate the proper food.
So he made this thing that recognizes the cat from a chip mounted inside on the collar of the cat, and opens the door and the cat can eat the food.
This is made by recycling an old CD player that you can get from an old computer, some cardboard, tape, couple of sensors, a few blinking LEDs, and then suddenly you have a tool. You build something that you cannot find on the market.
And I like this phrase: "Scratch your own itch."
This is the equivalent of sketching on paper done with electronics.
So one of the features that I think is important about our work is that our hardware, on top of being made with love in Italy — as you can see from the back of the circuit — (Laughter) is that it's open, so we publish all the design files for the circuit online, so you can download it and you can actually use it to make something, or to modify, to learn.
You know, when I was learning about programming, I learned by looking at other people's code, or looking at other people's circuits in magazines.
And this is a good way to learn, by looking at other people's work.
So the different elements of the project are all open, so the hardware is released with a Creative Commons license.
So, you know, I like this idea that hardware becomes like a piece of culture that you share and you build upon, like it was a song or a poem with Creative Commons.
Or, the software is GPL, so it's open-source as well.
The documentation and the hands-on teaching methodology is also open-source and released as the Creative Commons.
Now, Arduino itself is made of a lot of different open-source components that maybe individually are hard to use for a 12-year-old kid, so Arduino wraps everything together into a mashup of open-source technologies where we try to give them the best user experience to get something done quickly.
So you have situations like this, where some people in Chile decided to make their own boards instead of buying them, to organize a workshop and to save money. Or there are companies that make their own variations of Arduino that fit in a certain market, and there's probably, maybe like a 150 of them or something at the moment.
This one is made by a company called Adafruit, which is run by this woman called Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada, who is one of the heroes of the open-source hardware movement and the maker movement.
So, this idea that you have a new, sort of turbo-charged DIY community that believes in open-source, in collaboration, collaborates online, collaborates in different spaces.
There is this magazine called Make that sort of gathered all these people and sort of put them together as a community, and you see a very technical project explained in a very simple language, beautifully typeset.
Or you have websites, like this one, like Instructables, where people actually teach each other about anything.
So this one is about Arduino projects, the page you see on the screen, but effectively here you can learn how to make a cake and everything else.
So let's look at some projects.
So this one is a quadcopter.
It's a small model helicopter.
In a way, it's a toy, no?
And so this one was military technology a few years ago, and now it's open-source, easy to use, you can buy it online.
DIY Drones is the community; they do this thing called ArduCopter.
But then somebody actually launched this start-up called Matternet, where they figured out that you could use this to actually transport things from one village to another in Africa, and the fact that this was easy to find, open-source, easy to hack, enabled them to prototype their company really quickly.
Or, other projects. Matt Richardson: I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the same people on TV over and over and over again, so I decided to do something about it.
MR: Our producers caught up with Kim Kardashian earlier today to find out what she was planning on wearing to her — MB: Eh? (Laughter) MR: It should do a pretty good job of protecting our ears from having to hear about the details of Kim Kardashian's wedding.
MB: Okay. So, you know, again, what is interesting here is that Matt found this module that lets Arduino process TV signals, he found some code written by somebody else that generates infrared signals for the TV, put it together and then created this great project.
It's also used, Arduino's used, in serious places like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider.
There's some Arduino balls collecting data and sort of measuring some parameters.
This is a glove that understands the sign language and transforms the gestures you make into sounds and writes the words that you're signing on a display And again, this is made of all different parts you can find on all the websites that sell Arduino-compatible parts, and you assemble it into a project.
Or this is a project from the ITP part of NYU, where they met with this boy who has a severe disability, cannot play with the PS3, so they built this device that allows the kid to play baseball although he has limited movement capability.
Or you can find it in arts projects.
So this is the txtBomber.
So you put a message into this device and then you roll it on the wall, and it basically has all these solenoids pressing the buttons on spray cans, so you just pull it over a wall and it just writes on the wall all the political messages.
So, yeah. (Applause) Then we have this plant here.
He has 280,000 followers.
Or somebody made a chair that twitters when somebody farts. (Laughter) It's interesting how, in 2009, Gizmodo basically defined, said that this project actually gives a meaning to Twitter, so it was — a lot changed in between. (Laughter) So very serious project.
When the Fukushima disaster happened, a bunch of people in Japan, they realized that the information that the government was giving wasn't really open and really reliable, so they built this Geiger counter, plus Arduino, plus network interface. They made 100 of them and gave them to people around Japan, and essentially the data that they gathered gets published on this website called Cosm, another website they built, so you can actually get reliable real-time information from the field, and you can get unbiased information.
Or this machine here, it's from the DIY bio movement, and it's one of the steps that you need in order to process DNA, and again, it's completely open-source from the ground up.
This is a pH probe.
Or you get kids, like these kids, they're from Spain.
They learned how to program and to make robots when they were probably, like, 11, and then they started to use Arduino to make these robots that play football. They became world champions by making an Arduino-based robot.
And so when we had to make our own educational robot, we just went to them and said, you know, "You design it, because you know exactly what is needed to make a great robot that excites kids."
So the Accessory Development Kit from Google is open-source and based on Arduino, as opposed to the one from Apple which is closed-source, NDA, sign your life to Apple. Here you are.
There's a giant maze, and Joey's sitting there, and the maze is moving when you tilt the tablet.
So we worked with a design studio called Habits, in Milan, to make this mirror, which is completely open-source.
This doubles also as an iPod speaker.
So the idea is that the hardware, the software, the design of the object, the fabrication, everything about this project is open-source and you can make it yourself.
So we want other designers to pick this up and learn how to make great devices, to learn how to make interactive products by starting from something real.
But when you have this idea, you know, what happens to all these ideas?
But let's start from this example: So, the group of people that started this company called Pebble, they prototyped a watch that communicates via Bluetooth with your phone, and you can display information on it. And they prototyped with an old LCD screen from a Nokia mobile phone and an Arduino.
And then, when they had a final project, they actually went to Kickstarter and they were asking for 100,000 dollars to make a few of them to sell.
They got 10 million dollars.
The last project I want to show you is this: It's called ArduSat. It's currently on Kickstarter, so if you want to contribute, please do it.
It's a satellite that goes into space, which is probably the least open-source thing you can imagine, and it contains an Arduino connected to a bunch of sensors. So if you know how to use Arduino, you can actually upload your experiments into this satellite and run them.
So imagine, if you as a high school can have the satellite for a week and do satellite space experiments like that.
So, as I said, there's lots of examples, and I'm going to stop here. And I just want to thank the Arduino community for being the best, and just every day making lots of projects.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) And thanks to the community.
Chris Anderson: Massimo, you told me earlier today that you had no idea, of course, that it would take off like this.
MB: No.
CA: I mean, how must you feel when you read this stuff and you see what you've unlocked?
MB: Well, it's the work of a lot of people, so we as a community are enabling people to make great stuff, and I just feel overwhelmed.
Every morning, I wake up and I look at all the stuff that Google Alerts sends me, and it's just amazing. It's just going into every field that you can imagine.
CA: Thank you so much. (Applause) (Applause)
Openness. It's a word that denotes opportunity and possibilities.
Open-ended, open hearth, open source, open door policy, open bar. (Laughter) And everywhere the world is opening up, and it's a good thing.
The technology revolution is opening the world.
Yesterday's Internet was a platform for the presentation of content.
The Internet is becoming a giant global computer, and every time you go on it, you upload a video, you do a Google search, you remix something, you're programming this big global computer that we all share.
Humanity is building a machine, and this enables us to collaborate in new ways.
Collaboration can occur on an astronomical basis.
Now a new generation is opening up the world as well.
So I've started working with a few hundred kids, and I came to the conclusion that this is the first generation to come of age in the digital age, to be bathed in bits.
I call them the Net Generation.
I said, these kids are different.
It's like the air.
And — (Laughter) And there's no more powerful force to change every institution than the first generation of digital natives.
I'm a digital immigrant.
I had to learn the language.
The global economic crisis is opening up the world as well.
I mean, think about Wall Street.
Now, you know the idea of a burning platform, that you're somewhere where the costs of staying where you are become greater than the costs of moving to something different, perhaps something radically different.
And we need to change and open up all of our institutions.
So this technology push, a demographic kick from a new generation and a demand pull from a new economic global environment is causing the world to open up.
Now, I think, in fact, we're at a turning point in human history, where we can finally now rebuild many of the institutions of the Industrial Age around a new set of principles.
Now, what is openness?
Well, as it turns out, openness has a number of different meanings, and for each there's a corresponding principle for the transformation of civilization.
The first is collaboration.
His name is Rob McEwen.
The reason I know this story is because he's my neighbor. (Laughter) He actually moved across the street from us, and he held a cocktail party to meet the neighbors, and he says, "You're Don Tapscott.
I've read some of your books."
And he says, "Well I used to be a banker and now I'm a gold miner."
He takes over this gold mine, and his geologists can't tell him where the gold is.
He gives them more money for geological data, they come back, they can't tell him where to go into production.
He wonders, "If my geologists don't know where the gold is, maybe somebody else does."
So he does a "radical" thing.
He takes his geological data, he publishes it and he holds a contest on the Internet called the Goldcorp Challenge.
They use techniques that he's never heard of, and for his half a million dollars in prize money, Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold.
The market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars, and I can tell you, because he's my neighbor, he's a happy camper. (Laughter) You know, conventional wisdom says talent is inside, right?
Your most precious asset goes out the elevator every night.
He viewed talent differently.
You know, some of the best submissions didn't come from geologists.
They came from computer scientists, engineers.
The winner was a computer graphics company that built a three dimensional model of the mine where you can helicopter underground and see where the gold is.
He helped us understand that social media's becoming social production.
This is a new means of production in the making.
And this Ideagora that he created, an open market, agora, for uniquely qualified minds, was part of a change, a profound change in the deep structure and architecture of our organizations, and how we sort of orchestrate capability to innovate, to create goods and services, to engage with the rest of the world, in terms of government, how we create public value.
Openness is about collaboration.
Now secondly, openness is about transparency.
This is different. Here, we're talking about the communication of pertinent information to stakeholders of organizations: employees, customers, business partners, shareholders, and so on.
Institutions are becoming naked, and if you're going to be naked, well, there's some corollaries that flow from that.
I mean, one is, fitness is no longer optional. (Laughter) You know? Or if you're going to be naked, you'd better get buff.
You say you have good products.
You need to have integrity as part of your bones and your DNA as an organization, because if you don't, you'll be unable to build trust, and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world.
So this is good. It's not bad.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And we need a lot of sunlight in this troubled world.
Now, the third meaning and corresponding principle of openness is about sharing.
Now this is different than transparency.
Transparency is about the communication of information.
Sharing is about giving up assets, intellectual property.
And there are all kinds of famous stories about this.
IBM gave away 400 million dollars of software to the Linux movement, and that gave them a multi-billion dollar payoff.
Now, conventional wisdom says, "Well, hey, our intellectual property belongs to us, and if someone tries to infringe it, we're going to get out our lawyers and we're going to sue them."
Well, it didn't work so well for the record labels, did it?
I mean, they took — They had a technology disruption, and rather than taking a business model innovation to correspond to that, they took and sought a legal solution and the industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles is now suing children and is in danger of collapse.
So we need to think differently about intellectual property.
The pharmaceutical industry is in deep trouble.
First of all, there aren't a lot of big inventions in the pipeline, and this is a big problem for human health, and the pharmaceutical industry has got a bigger problem, that they're about to fall off something called the patent cliff.
Do you know about this?
They're going to lose 20 to 35 percent of their revenue in the next 12 months.
And what are you going to do, like, cut back on paper clips or something? No.
We need to reinvent the whole model of scientific research.
The pharmaceutical industry needs to place assets in a commons. They need to start sharing precompetitive research.
They need to start sharing clinical trial data, and in doing so, create a rising tide that could lift all boats, not just for the industry but for humanity.
Now, the fourth meaning of openness, and corresponding principle, is about empowerment.
And I'm not talking about the motherhood sense here.
Knowledge and intelligence is power, and as it becomes more distributed, there's a concomitant distribution and decentralization and disaggregation of power that's underway in the world today.
The open world is bringing freedom.
Now, take the Arab Spring.
The debate about the role of social media and social change has been settled.
And then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too.
But in the Tunisian revolution, the new media didn't cause the revolution; it was caused by injustice.
Social media didn't create the revolution; it was created by a new generation of young people who wanted jobs and hope and who didn't want to be treated as subjects anymore.
But just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection in ways that people didn't understand.
You know, during the Tunisian revolution, snipers associated with the regime were killing unarmed students in the street.
So the students would take their mobile devices, take a picture, triangulate the location, send that picture to friendly military units, who'd come in and take out the snipers.
For these kids, it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers.
It was a tool of self-defense.
You know, as we speak today, young people are being killed in Syria, and up until three months ago, if you were injured on the street, an ambulance would pick you up, take you to the hospital, you'd go in, say, with a broken leg, and you'd come out with a bullet in your head.
So these 20-somethings created an alternative health care system, where what they did is they used Twitter and basic publicly available tools that when someone's injured, a car would show up, it would pick them up, take them to a makeshift medical clinic, where you'd get medical treatment, as opposed to being executed.
Up until two years ago, all revolutions in human history had a leadership, and when the old regime fell, the leadership and the organization would take power.
Well, these wiki revolutions happen so fast they create a vacuum, and politics abhors a vacuum, and unsavory forces can fill that, typically the old regime, or extremists, or fundamentalist forces.
But that doesn't matter, because this is moving forward.
The train has left the station. The cat is out of the bag.
The horse is out of the barn. Help me out here, okay?
(Laughter) The toothpaste is out of the tube.
I think, at the end of these four days, that you'll come to conclude that the arc of history is a positive one, and it's towards openness.
If you go back a few hundred years, all around the world it was a very closed society.
It was agrarian, and the means of production and political system was called feudalism, and knowledge was concentrated in the church and the nobility.
People didn't know about things.
There was no concept of progress.
You were born, you lived your life and you died.
But then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his great invention, and, over time, the society opened up.
People started to learn about things, and when they did, the institutions of feudal society appeared to be stalled, or frozen, or failing.
It didn't make sense for the church to be responsible for medicine when people had knowledge.
So we saw the Protestant Reformation.
Martin Luther called the printing press "God's highest act of grace."
The creation of a corporation, science, the university, eventually the Industrial Revolution, and it was all good.
But it came with a cost.
And now, once again, the technology genie is out of the bottle, but this time it's different.
The printing press gave us access to the written word.
The Internet enables each of us to be a producer.
The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge.
The Internet gives us access, not just to information and knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people on a global basis.
To me, this is not an information age, it's an age of networked intelligence.
You know, bees come in swarms and fish come in schools.
And scientists that have studied this have said they've never seen an accident.
It protects the birds.
You can see on the right here, there's a predator being chased away by the collective power of the birds, and apparently this is a frightening thing if you're a predator of starlings.
Now, is this some kind of fanciful analogy, or could we actually learn something from this?
This is a huge collaboration.
It's an openness, it's a sharing of all kinds of information, not just about location and trajectory and danger and so on, but about food sources.
And there's a real sense of interdependence, that the individual birds somehow understand that their interests are in the interest of the collective.
Perhaps like we should understand that business can't succeed in a world that's failing.
Think about the kids today in the Arab Spring, and you see something like this that's underway.
And imagine, just consider this idea, if you would: What if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass?
Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge?
Could we start to share our intelligence?
Could we create some kind of collective intelligence that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team to create, perhaps, some kind of consciousness on a global basis?
And I look at this thing, and, I don't know, I get a lot of hope that maybe this smaller, networked, open world that our kids inherit might be a better one, and that this new age of networked intelligence could be an age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited.
Let's do this. Thank you.
(Applause)
So I'm a woman with chronic schizophrenia.
I've spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals.
I might have ended up spending most of my life on the back ward of a hospital, but that isn't how my life turned out.
White had been enormously helpful to me, and the thought of his leaving shattered me.
My best friend Steve, sensing that something was terribly wrong, flew out to New Haven to be with me.
Steve would later tell me that, for all the times he had seen me psychotic, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw that day.
My face looked and felt like a mask.
'Hi,' I said, and then I returned to the couch, where I sat in silence for several moments.
'Thank you for coming, Steve.
Crumbling world, word, voice.
Time is. Time has come.' 'White is leaving,' Steve said somberly.
'I'm being pushed into a grave. The situation is grave,' I moan.
'Gravity is pulling me down.
Instead, I'm a chaired Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry at the USC Gould School of Law, I have many close friends and I have a beloved husband, Will, who's here with us today.
(Applause) Thank you.
He's definitely the star of my show.
I hasten to add that it's my experience, because everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own way.
Let's start with the definition of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a brain disease.
Its defining feature is psychosis, or being out of touch with reality.
Delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness.
Delusions are fixed and false beliefs that aren't responsive to evidence, and hallucinations are false sensory experiences.
For example, when I'm psychotic I often have the delusion that I've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts.
I sometimes have the idea that nuclear explosions are about to be set off in my brain.
Occasionally, I have hallucinations, like one time I turned around and saw a man with a raised knife.
Imagine having a nightmare while you're awake.
Loose associations involves putting together words that may sound a lot alike but don't make sense, and if the words get jumbled up enough, it's called "word salad."
Contrary to what many people think, schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder or split personality.
The schizophrenic mind is not split, but shattered.
This person is likely to have some form of schizophrenia.
But schizophrenia presents itself across a wide array of socioeconomic status, and there are people with the illness who are full-time professionals with major responsibilities.
Several years ago, I decided to write down my experiences and my personal journey, and I want to share some more of that story with you today to convey the inside view.
So the following episode happened the seventh week of my first semester of my first year at Yale Law School.
Quoting from my writings: "My two classmates, Rebel and Val, and I had made the date to meet in the law school library on Friday night to work on our memo assignment together.
Pat used to say that. Have you killed you anyone?' Rebel and Val looked at me as if they or I had been splashed in the face with cold water.
It's a flat surface. It's safe.' Rebel and Val followed and they asked what had gotten into me.
'This is the real me,' I announced, waving my arms above my head.
And then, late on a Friday night, on the roof of the Yale Law School, I began to sing, and not quietly either.
'Come to the Florida sunshine bush.
Come to the Florida sunshine bush, where there are lemons, where they make demons.' 'You're frightening me,' one of them said, and Rebel and Val headed back into the library.
I shrugged and followed them.
My head was too full of noise, too full of orange trees and law memos I could not write and mass murders I knew I would be responsible for.
Sitting on my bed, I rocked back and forth, moaning in fear and isolation."
This episode led to my first hospitalization in America.
Continuing with the writings: "The next morning I went to my professor's office to ask for an extension on the memo assignment, and I began gibbering unintelligably as I had the night before, and he eventually brought me to the emergency room.
Once there, someone I'll just call 'The Doctor' and his whole team of goons swooped down, lifted me high into the air, and slammed me down on a metal bed with such force that I saw stars.
Then they strapped my legs and arms to the metal bed with thick leather straps.
A sound came out of my mouth that I'd never heard before: half groan, half scream, barely human and pure terror.
Then the sound came again, forced from somewhere deep inside my belly and scraping my throat raw."
One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was "gravely disabled."
I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.
(Laughter) During the next year, I would spend five months in a psychiatric hospital.
At times, I spent up to 20 hours in mechanical restraints, arms tied, arms and legs tied down, arms and legs tied down with a net tied tightly across my chest.
I never struck anyone.
I never harmed anyone. I never made any direct threats.
It's unclear whether using mechanical restraints is actually saving lives or costing lives.
While I was preparing to write my student note for the Yale Law Journal on mechanical restraints, I consulted an eminent law professor who was also a psychiatrist, and said surely he would agree that restraints must be degrading, painful and frightening.
They're different from me and you.
I didn't have the courage to tell him in that moment that, no, we're not that different from him.
In fact, until very recently, and I'm sure some people still hold it as a view, that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe.
I don't think force is effective as treatment, and I think using force is a terrible thing to do to another person with a terrible illness.
Eventually, I came to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California Law School.
For years, I had resisted medication, making many, many efforts to get off.
I felt that if I could manage without medication, I could prove that, after all, I wasn't really mentally ill, it was some terrible mistake.
My motto was the less medicine, the less defective.
Quoting from the text: "I started the reduction of my meds, and within a short time I began feeling the effects.
After returning from a trip to Oxford, I marched into Kaplan's office, headed straight for the corner, crouched down, covered my face, and began shaking.
They'd slice me up in thin slices or make me swallow hot coals.
Kaplan would later describe me as 'writhing in agony.' Even in this state, what he accurately described as acutely and forwardly psychotic, I refused to take more medication.
The mission is not yet complete.
Immediately after the appointment with Kaplan, I went to see Dr. Marder, a schizophrenia expert who was following me for medication side effects.
He was under the impression that I had a mild psychotic illness.
Hospitals are bad, they're mad, they're sad.
One must stay away. I'm God, or I used to be.'" At that point in the text, where I said "I'm God, or I used to be," my husband made a marginal note.
He said, "Did you quit or were you fired?"
I could no longer deny the truth, and I could not change it.
Everything about this illness says I shouldn't be here, but I am. And I am, I think, for three reasons: First, I've had excellent treatment.
Four- to five-day-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy for decades and continuing, and excellent psychopharmacology.
Second, I have many close family members and friends who know me and know my illness.
These relationships have given my life a meaning and a depth, and they also helped me navigate my life in the face of symptoms.
Third, I work at an enormously supportive workplace at USC Law School.
This is a place that not only accommodates my needs but actually embraces them.
It's also a very intellectually stimulating place, and occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.
Even with all that — excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment — I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing.
There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker.
We need to invest more resources into research and treatment of mental illness.
Also, we must stop criminalizing mental illness.
It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.
American prisons and jails are filled with people who suffer from severe mental illness, and many of them are there because they never received adequate treatment.
I could have easily ended up there or on the streets myself.
A message to the entertainment industry and to the press: On the whole, you've done a wonderful job fighting stigma and prejudice of many kinds.
Please, continue to let us see characters in your movies, your plays, your columns, who suffer with severe mental illness.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was offered psychoanalysis.
My psychosis, on the other hand, is a waking nightmare in which my devils are so terrifying that all my angels have already fled.
That said, I don't wish to be seen as regretting the life I could have had if I'd not been mentally ill, nor am I asking anyone for their pity.
What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not.
What those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, "to work and to love."
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. You're very kind. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
The phenomenon you saw here for a brief moment is called quantum levitation and quantum locking.
And the object that was levitating here is called a superconductor.
Superconductivity is a quantum state of matter, and it occurs only below a certain critical temperature.
Now, it's quite an old phenomenon; it was discovered 100 years ago.
However, only recently, due to several technological advancements, we are now able to demonstrate to you quantum levitation and quantum locking.
So, a superconductor is defined by two properties.
The first is zero electrical resistance, and the second is the expulsion of a magnetic field from the interior of the superconductor.
That sounds complicated, right?
But what is electrical resistance?
So, electricity is the flow of electrons inside a material.
And these electrons, while flowing, they collide with the atoms, and in these collisions they lose a certain amount of energy.
However, inside a superconductor there are no collisions, so there is no energy dissipation.
In classical physics, there is always some friction, some energy loss.
But not here, because it is a quantum effect.
But that's not all, because superconductors don't like magnetic fields.
So a superconductor will try to expel magnetic field from the inside, and it has the means to do that by circulating currents.
Now, the combination of both effects -- the expulsion of magnetic fields and zero electrical resistance -- is exactly a superconductor.
Now, under proper conditions, which we have here, these strands of magnetic field can be trapped inside the superconductor.
Why? Because it is a quantum phenomenon. It's quantum physics.
And it turns out that they behave like quantum particles.
In this movie here, you can see how they flow one by one discretely.
This is strands of magnetic field. These are not particles, but they behave like particles.
So, this is why we call this effect quantum levitation and quantum locking.
But what happens to the superconductor when we put it inside a magnetic field?
Well, first there are strands of magnetic field left inside, but now the superconductor doesn't like them moving around, because their movements dissipate energy, which breaks the superconductivity state.
So what it actually does, it locks these strands, which are called fluxons, and it locks these fluxons in place.
And by doing that, what it actually does is locking itself in place.
Why? Because any movement of the superconductor will change their place, will change their configuration.
So we get quantum locking. And let me show you how this works.
(Applause) Now, this is not just levitation. It's not just repulsion.
So, this is quantum locking -- actually locking -- three-dimensional locking of the superconductor.
You won't be surprised to hear that if I take this circular magnet, in which the magnetic field is the same all around, the superconductor will be able to freely rotate around the axis of the magnet.
Why? Because as long as it rotates, the locking is maintained.
You see? I can adjust and I can rotate the superconductor.
So, we have quantum locking and we can levitate it on top of this magnet.
But how many fluxons, how many magnetic strands are there in a single disk like this?
One hundred billion strands of magnetic field inside this three-inch disk.
And, yeah, the amazing part is that this superconductor that you see here is only half a micron thick. It's extremely thin.
And this extremely thin layer is able to levitate more than 70,000 times its own weight.
Now, I can extend this circular magnet, and make whatever track I want.
For example, I can make a large circular rail here.
And when I place the superconducting disk on top of this rail, it moves freely.
(Applause) And again, that's not all. I can adjust its position like this, and rotate, and it freely moves in this new position.
And I can even try a new thing; let's try it for the first time.
(Applause) You see, it's quantum locking, not levitation.
Now -- (Laughter) -- So we now know that we are able to transfer enormous amount of currents inside superconductors, so we can use them to produce strong magnetic fields, such as needed in MRI machines, particle accelerators and so on.
But we can also store energy using superconductors, because we have no dissipation.
And we could also produce power cables, to transfer enormous amounts of current between power stations.
Imagine you could back up a single power station with a single superconducting cable.
But what is the future of quantum levitation and quantum locking?
Well, let me answer this simple question by giving you an example.
Imagine you would have a disk similar to the one I have here in my hand, three-inch diameter, with a single difference.
The superconducting layer, instead of being half a micron thin, being two millimeters thin, quite thin.
This two-millimeter-thin superconducting layer could hold 1,000 kilograms, a small car, in my hand.
(Applause)
I study the future of crime and terrorism, and frankly, I'm afraid.
I sincerely want to believe that technology can bring us the techno-utopia that we've been promised, but, you see, I've spent a career in law enforcement, and that's informed my perspective on things.
I've been a street police officer, an undercover investigator, a counter-terrorism strategist, and I've worked in more than 70 countries around the world.
My work with criminals and terrorists has actually been highly educational.
They have taught me a lot, and I'd like to be able to share some of these observations with you.
In the hands of the TED community, these are awesome tools which will bring about great change for our world, but in the hands of suicide bombers, the future can look quite different.
I started observing technology and how criminals were using it as a young patrol officer.
In those days, this was the height of technology.
Laugh though you will, all the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had one of these long before any police officer I knew did.
Twenty years later, criminals are still using mobile phones, but they're also building their own mobile phone networks, like this one, which has been deployed in all 31 states of Mexico by the narcos.
They have a national encrypted radio communications system.
Think about that.
Think about the infrastructure to build it.
And then think about this: Why can't I get a cell phone signal in San Francisco? (Laughter) How is this possible? (Laughter) It makes no sense. (Applause) We consistently underestimate what criminals and terrorists can do.
Technology has made our world increasingly open, and for the most part, that's great, but all of this openness may have unintended consequences.
Consider the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai.
The men that carried that attack out were armed with AK-47s, explosives and hand grenades.
They threw these hand grenades at innocent people as they sat eating in cafes and waited to catch trains on their way home from work.
But heavy artillery is nothing new in terrorist operations.
Guns and bombs are nothing new.
What was different this time is the way that the terrorists used modern information communications technologies to locate additional victims and slaughter them.
They were armed with mobile phones.
They had access to satellite imagery.
They had satellite phones, and they even had night vision goggles.
But perhaps their greatest innovation was this.
We've all seen pictures like this on television and in the news. This is an operations center.
They also monitored the Internet and social media to monitor the progress of their attacks and how many people they had killed.
They did all of this in real time.
The innovation of the terrorist operations center gave terrorists unparalleled situational awareness and tactical advantage over the police and over the government.
What did they do with this?
They used it to great effect.
At one point during the 60-hour siege, the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims.
They came upon a suite on the top floor of the hotel, and they kicked down the door and they found a man hiding by his bed.
And they said to him, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
And the man replied, "I'm just an innocent schoolteacher."
They picked up his identification, and they phoned his name in to the terrorist war room, where the terrorist war room Googled him, and found a picture and called their operatives on the ground and said, "Your hostage, is he heavyset?
"Yes, yes, yes," came the answers.
He was not a schoolteacher.
("Kill him.") We all worry about our privacy settings on Facebook, but the fact of the matter is, our openness can be used against us.
Terrorists are doing this.
This is the world that we live in.
During the Mumbai siege, terrorists were so dependent on technology that several witnesses reported that as the terrorists were shooting hostages with one hand, they were checking their mobile phone messages in the very other hand.
In the end, 300 people were gravely wounded and over 172 men, women and children lost their lives that day.
During this 60-hour siege on Mumbai, 10 men armed not just with weapons, but with technology, were able to bring a city of 20 million people to a standstill.
This was done nearly four years ago.
What could terrorists do today with the technologies available that we have?
What will they do tomorrow?
There's also been a big paradigm shift in crime.
You see, you can now commit more crime as well.
Then criminals moved to robbing trains.
You could rob 200 people on a train, a great innovation.
In fact, many of you will remember the recent Sony PlayStation hack.
In that incident, over 100 million people were robbed.
Think about that.
Of course, it's not just about stealing things.
There are other avenues of technology that criminals can exploit.
Many of you will remember this super cute video from the last TED, but not all quadcopter swarms are so nice and cute.
Some can be armed with HD cameras and do countersurveillance on protesters, or, as in this little bit of movie magic, quadcopters can be loaded with firearms and automatic weapons.
Of course, criminals and terrorists weren't the first to give guns to robots. We know where that started.
But they're adapting quickly.
Recently, the FBI arrested an al Qaeda affiliate in the United States, who was planning on using these remote-controlled drone aircraft to fly C4 explosives into government buildings in the United States.
By the way, these travel at over 600 miles an hour.
Every time a new technology is being introduced, criminals are there to exploit it.
We've all seen 3D printers.
We know with them that you can print in many materials ranging from plastic to chocolate to metal and even concrete.
With great precision I actually was able to make this just the other day, a very cute little ducky.
But I wonder to myself, for those people that strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up, how might they use 3D printers?
You see, if you can print in metal, you can print one of these, and in fact you can also print one of these too.
The UK I know has some very strict firearms laws.
You just bring the 3D printer and print the gun while you're here, and, of course, the magazines for your bullets.
But as these get bigger in the future, what other items will you be able to print?
The technologies are allowing bigger printers.
As we move forward, we'll see new technologies also, like the Internet of Things.
Every day we're connecting more and more of our lives to the Internet, which means that the Internet of Things will soon be the Internet of Things To Be Hacked.
All of the physical objects in our space are being transformed into information technologies, and that has a radical implication for our security, because more connections to more devices means more vulnerabilities.
Criminals understand this.
Terrorists understand this. Hackers understand this.
If you control the code, you control the world.
This is the future that awaits us.
That's troubling, since the human body itself is now becoming an information technology.
As we've seen here, we're transforming ourselves into cyborgs.
Every year, thousands of cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators are being implanted in people.
In the United States, there are 60,000 people who have a pacemaker that connects to the Internet.
The defibrillators allow a physician at a distance to give a shock to a heart in case a patient needs it.
But if you don't need it, and somebody else gives you the shock, it's not a good thing.
Up until this point, all the technologies I've been talking about have been silicon-based, ones and zeroes, but there's another operating system out there: the original operating system, DNA.
And to hackers, DNA is just another operating system waiting to be hacked.
There are people already working on hacking the software of life, and while most of them are doing this to great good and to help us all, some won't be.
Well, with synthetic biology you can do some pretty neat things.
You can just take the DNA code from marijuana or poppies or coca leaves and cut and past that gene and put it into yeast, and you can take those yeast and make them make the cocaine for you, or the marijuana, or any other drug.
So how we use yeast in the future is going to be really interesting.
In fact, we may have some really interesting bread and beer as we go into this next century.
The cost of sequencing the human genome is dropping precipitously.
It was proceeding at Moore's Law pace, but then in 2008, something changed.
The technologies got better, and now DNA sequencing is proceeding at a pace five times that of Moore's Law.
It took us 30 years to get from the introduction of the personal computer to the level of cybercrime we have today, but looking at how biology is proceeding so rapidly, and knowing criminals and terrorists as I do, we may get there a lot faster with biocrime in the future.
It will be easy for anybody to go ahead and print their own bio-virus, enhanced versions of ebola or anthrax, weaponized flu.
We recently saw a case where some researchers made the H5N1 avian influenza virus more potent.
You see, you can go ahead and create new pandemics, and the researchers who did this were so proud of their accomplishments, they wanted to publish it openly so that everybody could see this and get access to this information.
But it goes deeper than that.
Personalized cancer treatments are the flip side of personalized bioweapons, which means you can attack any one individual, including all the people in this picture.
How will we protect them in the future?
For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I will be tweeting out the answer later on today. (Laughter) Actually, it's a bit more complex than that, and there are no magic bullets.
I don't have all the answers, but I know a few things.
In the wake of 9/11, the best security minds put together all their innovation and this is what they created for security.
If you're expecting the people who built this to protect you from the coming robopocalypse — (Laughter) — uh, you may want to have a backup plan. (Laughter) Just saying. Just think about that. (Applause) Law enforcement is currently a closed system.
Policing doesn't scale globally. At least, it hasn't, and our current system of guns, border guards, big gates and fences are outdated in the new world into which we're moving.
So how might we prepare for some of these specific threats, like attacking a president or a prime minister?
This would be the natural government response, to hide away all our government leaders in hermetically sealed bubbles.
So maybe there's a more radical way that we can look at this.
What happens if we were to take the President's DNA, or a king or queen's, and put it out to a group of a few hundred trusted researchers so they could study that DNA and do penetration testing against it as a means of helping our leaders?
Or, controversially, and not without its risks, what happens if we just gave it to the whole public?
We've already seen examples of this working well.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is staffed by journalists and citizens where they are crowd-sourcing what dictators and terrorists are doing with public funds around the world, and, in a more dramatic case, we've seen in Mexico, a country that has been racked by 50,000 narcotics-related murders in the past six years.
They're killing so many people they can't even afford to bury them all in anything but these unmarked graves like this one outside of Ciudad Juarez.
What can we do about this? The government has proven ineffective.
So in Mexico, citizens, at great risk to themselves, are fighting back to build an effective solution.
Whether or not you realize it, we are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill.
The threat is serious, and the time to prepare for it is now.
My personal belief is that, rather than having a small, elite force of highly trained government agents here to protect us all, we're much better off having average and ordinary citizens approaching this problem as a group and seeing what we can do.
The tools to change the world are in everybody's hands.
How we use them is not just up to me, it's up to all of us.
This was a technology I would frequently deploy as a police officer.
This technology has become outdated in our current world.
It doesn't scale, it doesn't work globally, and it surely doesn't work virtually.
We've seen paradigm shifts in crime and terrorism.
They call for a shift to a more open form and a more participatory form of law enforcement.
After all, public safety is too important to leave to the professionals.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I'd like to talk about my dad.
My dad has Alzheimer's disease.
Now he's really pretty sick. He needs help eating, he needs help getting dressed, he doesn't really know where he is or when it is, and it's been really, really hard.
My dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life, and I've spent the last decade watching him disappear.
My dad's not alone. There's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia, and by 2030 they're expecting that to double to 70 million.
That's a lot of people.
Dementia scares us. The confused faces and shaky hands of people who have dementia, the big numbers of people who get it, they frighten us.
And because of that fear, we tend to do one of two things: We go into denial: "It's not me, it has nothing to do with me, it's never going to happen to me."
Or, we decide that we're going to prevent dementia, and it will never happen to us because we're going to do everything right and it won't come and get us.
Prevention is good, and I'm doing the things that you can do to prevent Alzheimer's.
I'm eating right, I'm exercising every day, I'm keeping my mind active, that's what the research says you should do.
But the research also shows that there's nothing that will 100 percent protect you.
If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you.
That's what happened with my dad.
My dad was a bilingual college professor. His hobbies were chess, bridge and writing op-eds.
(Laughter) He got dementia anyway.
If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you.
Especially if you're me, 'cause Alzheimer's tends to run in families.
So I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease.
Based on what I've learned from taking care of my father, and researching what it's like to live with dementia, I'm focusing on three things in my preparation: I'm changing what I do for fun, I'm working to build my physical strength, and -- this is the hard one -- I'm trying to become a better person.
Let's start with the hobbies. When you get dementia, it gets harder and harder to enjoy yourself.
It's confusing to watch television, and often very frightening.
When you care for someone with dementia, and you get training, they train you to engage them in activities that are familiar, hands-on, open-ended.
He was a college professor at a state school; he knows what paperwork looks like.
He'll sign his name on every line, he'll check all the boxes, he'll put numbers in where he thinks there should be numbers.
But it got me thinking, what would my caregivers do with me?
I'm my father's daughter. I read, I write, I think about global health a lot.
I am learning some basic origami. I can make a really great box.
(Laughter) And I'm teaching myself to knit, which so far I can knit a blob.
But, you know, it doesn't matter if I'm actually good at it. What matters is that my hands know how to do it.
Because the more things that are familiar, the more things my hands know how to do, the more things that I can be happy and busy doing when my brain's not running the show anymore.
They say that people who are engaged in activities are happier, easier for their caregivers to look after, and it may even slow the progress of the disease.
That all seems like win to me.
I want to be as happy as I can for as long as I can.
A lot of people don't know that Alzheimer's actually has physical symptoms, as well as cognitive symptoms. You lose your sense of balance, you get muscle tremors, and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile.
They get scared to walk around. They get scared to move.
So I'm doing activities that will build my sense of balance.
I'm doing weight-bearing exercise, so that I have the muscle strength so that when I start to wither, I have more time that I can still move around.
My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer's, and he's kind and loving now.
I've seen him lose his intellect, his sense of humor, his language skills, but I've also seen this: He loves me, he loves my sons, he loves my brother and my mom and his caregivers.
even when it's so hard.
When you take away everything that he ever learned in this world, his naked heart still shines.
And what I need now is to learn to be like that.
I don't want to get Alzheimer's disease.
What I want is a cure in the next 20 years, soon enough to protect me.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In the ocean, what is the common point between oil, plastic and radioactivity?
On the top line, this is the BP oil spill: billions of barrels of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico.
The middle line is millions of tons of plastic debris accumulating in our ocean, and the third line is radioactive material leaking from Fukushima nuclear power plant in the Pacific Ocean.
Well, the three big problems have in common that they are man-made problems but they are controlled by natural forces.
Well, that's exactly what I want to talk about today, is how we can use these natural forces to remediate these man-made problems.
When the BP oil spill happened, I was working at MIT, and I was in charge of developing an oil spill-cleaning technology.
And I had a chance to go in the Gulf of Mexico and meet some fishermen and see the terrible conditions in which they were working.
I was working on a very interesting technology at MIT, but it was a very long-term view of how to develop technology, and it was going to be a very expensive technology, and also it would be patented.
So I wanted to develop something that we could develop very fast, that would be cheap, and that would be open-source, so, because oil spills are not only happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and that would be using renewable energy.
So I quit my dream job, and I moved to New Orleans, and I kept on studying how the oil spill was happening.
If you're using the exact same amount of surface of oil absorbent, but you're just paying attention to natural patterns, and if you're going up the winds, you can collect a lot more material.
But it's extremely difficult to move oil absorbent against the winds, the surface currents and the waves.
These are enormous forces.
So the very simple idea was to use the ancient technique of sailing and tacking of the wind to capture or intercept the oil that is drifting down the wind.
So this didn't require any invention.
We just took a simple sailing boat and we tried to pull something long and heavy, but as we tacked back and forth, what we lost was two things: we were losing pulling power and direction.
So I built this small sailing robot with the rudder at the front, and I was trying to pull something very long and heavy, so that's a four-meter-long object just to pull, and I was surprised with just a 14-centimeter rudder, I could control four meters of absorbent.
Then I was so happy that I kept playing with the robot, and so you see the robot has a front rudder here.
What if the entire boat becomes a point of control?
So — (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) And so that's the beginning of Protei, and that's the first boat in history that completely changed the shape of the hull in order to control it, and the properties of sailing that we get are very superior compared to a normal boat.
When we're turning, we have the feeling of surfing, and the way it's going up-wind, it's very efficient.
This is low speed, low wind speed, and the maneuverability is very increased, and here I'm going to do a small jibe, and look at the position of the sail.
What's happening is that, because the boat changes shape, the position of the front sail and the main sail are different to the wind.
And this is exactly what we're looking [for] if we want to pull something long and heavy.
So, I wanted to know if this was possible to put this at an industrial level, so we made a large boat with a large sail, and with a very light hull, inflatable, very small footprint, so we have a very big size and power ratio.
So this is happening in the Netherlands.
We tried in the water without any skin or ballast just to see how it works.
Our small prototype has given us good insight that it's working very well, but we still need to work a lot more on this.
So what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology.
We went from a back rudder to a front rudder to two rudders to multiple rudders to the whole boat changing shape, and the more we are moving forward, and the more the design looks simple and cute. (Laughter) But I wanted to show you a fish because -- In fact, it's very different from a fish.
A fish will move because -- by changing like this, but our boat is propelled by the wind still, and the hull controls the trajectory.
So if you're looking at the boat from this side, this might remind you of an airplane profile.
Now, if you're taking the same system, and you're putting vertical, you're bending, and if you're moving this way forward, your instinct will tell you that you might go this way, but if you're moving fast enough, you might create what we call lateral lift, so we could get further or closer to the wind.
The other thing is, most boats, when they reach a certain speed, and they are going on waves, they start to hit and slap on the surface of the water, and a lot of the energy moving forward is lost.
But if we're going with the flow, if we pay attention to natural patterns instead of trying to be strong, but if you're going with the flow, we may absorb a lot of environmental noises, so the wave energy, to actually save some energy to move forward.
So we may have developed the technology which is very efficient for pulling something long and heavy, but the idea is, what is the purpose of technology if it doesn't reach the right hands?
Normal technology or innovation happens like this: Somebody has an interesting idea, some other scientist or engineer, they take it to the next level, they make a theory about it and maybe they patent it, and then some industry will make a contract of exclusivity to manufacture and sell it, and then, eventually, a buyer will buy it, and we hope that they are going to use [it] for a good purpose.
What you really want is not a sequential, not parallel development.
You want to have a network of innovation.
You want everybody, like we're doing now, to work at the same time, and that can only happen if these people all together decide to share the information, and that's exactly what open hardware is about.
It's to replace competition by collaboration.
It's to transform any new product into a new market.
So what is open hardware?
Essentially, open hardware is a license.
It's just an intellectual property setup.
It means that everybody is free to use, modify and distribute, and in exchange we only ask for two things: The name is credited -- the name of the project -- and also the people who make improvement, they share back with the community.
So it's a very simple condition.
And I started this project alone in a garage in New Orleans, but quickly after I wanted to publish and share this information, so I made a Kickstarter, which is a crowd-fundraising platform, and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars.
With this money, I hired a team of young engineers from all over the world, and we rented a factory in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
We were peer-learning, we were engineering, we were making things, prototyping, but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible, to fail as quickly as possible, to learn from.
This is a proud member of Protei from Korea, and on the right side, this is a multiple-masts design proposed by a team in Mexico.
This idea really appealed to Gabriella Levine in New York, and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw, and she documented every step of the process, and she published it on Instructables, which is a website for sharing inventions.
They made it, but they eventually published a simplified design.
They also made it into an Instructable, and in less than one week, they had almost 10,000 views, and they got many new friends.
We're working on also simpler technology, not that complex, with younger people and also older people, like this dinosaur is from Mexico. (Laughter) So Protei is now an international network of innovation for selling technology using this shape-shifting hull.
And what puts us together is that we have a common, at least, global understanding of what the word "business" is, or what it should be.
This is how most work today.
What we're trying to do, or what we believe, because this is how we believe the world really works, is that without the environment you have nothing.
We have the people so we need to protect each other, yes, and we're a technology company, and profit is necessary to make this happen. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) If we have the courage to understand or accept that this actually how the world really works, and this is the order of priority that we need to choose, then it makes obvious why we need to choose open hardware for developing environmental technology, because we need to share information.
So, this small machine that you've seen, we're hoping to make small toys like one-meter remote control Protei that you can upgrade -- so replace the remote control parts by Androids, so the mobile phone, and Arduino micro-controller, so you could be controlling this from your mobile phone, your tablet.
Then what we want to do is create six-meter versions so we can test the maximum performance of these machines, so we can go at very, very high speed.
So imagine yourself.
You are laying down in a flexible torpedo, sailing at high speed, controlling the shape of the hull with your legs and controlling the sail with your arms.
So that's what we're looking for developing. (Applause) And we replace the human being -- to go, for example, for measuring radioactivity, you don't want a human to be sailing those robots -- with batteries, motors, micro-controllers and sensors.
This is what our teammates, we dream of at night.
We hope that we can sometime clean up oil spills, or we can gather or collect plastic in the ocean, or we can have swarms of our machines controlled by multi-player video game engines to control many of these machines, to monitor coral reefs or to monitor fisheries.
Our hope is that we can use open hardware technology to better understand and protect our oceans.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
(Music) (Applause) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Chris Anderson: You guys were amazing.
That's amazing.
(Applause) You just don't hear that every day.
(Laughter) Usman, the official story is that you learned to play the guitar by watching Jimmy Page on YouTube.
Usman Riaz: Yes, that was the first one. And then I -- That was the first thing I learned, and then I started progressing to other things.
And I started watching Kaki King a lot, and she would always cite Preston Reed as a big influence, so then I started watching his videos, and it's very surreal right now to be -- (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Was that piece just now, that was one of his songs that you learned, or how did that happen?
And it finally happened, so ...
(Laughter) CA: Preston, from your point of view, I mean, you invented this like 20 years ago, right?
How does it feel to see someone like this come along taking your art and doing so much with it?
And he's a wonderful musician, so it's cool.
Can you? Do you jam? Do you have anything else?
And if it goes horribly wrong, no worries.
(Applause) (Laughter) (Music) (Applause)
I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals.
I like special missions and secret objectives.
So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes.
Literally, you will live seven and a half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.
That's okay, because check it out -- I have math to prove that it is possible.
I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: +7.68245837 minutes.
That will be my gift to you if I'm successful in my mission.
Now, you have a secret mission too.
Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes.
Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games.
Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games.
For example, in my first TED Talk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week, as a planet, playing video games.
Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time.
(Laughter) This idea is so pervasive -- that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret -- that I hear it literally everywhere I go.
For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developers' conference, turned around and said -- and I quote -- "I hate games. Waste of life.
Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time."
Now, I want to take this problem seriously.
I want games to be a force for good in the world.
I don't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend.
So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately.
When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games?
Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question.
It's true.
Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds.
And that's what I want to share with you today -- the top five regrets of the dying.
Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier.
Number four: I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self.
And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me.
Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, "I wish I'd spent more time playing video games," but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill.
Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits.
A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family Life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them.
"I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends."
Hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family.
A recent study from the University of Michigan showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools.
They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together.
"I wish I'd let myself be happier."
Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression.
Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become.
You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar.
"I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me."
I'm not sure, so I've left a Super Mario question mark.
But in the meantime, perhaps you're wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets?
And it's true, I've never worked in a hospice, I've never been on my deathbed.
But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die.
It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion.
The concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days, I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog.
My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it.
So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms.
For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine.
(Laughter) Of course it's meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite common with traumatic brain injuries.
It happens to one in three, and it happened to me.
My brain started telling me, "Jane, you want to die."
And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days -- and I will never forget this moment -- I said, "I am either going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game."
Now, why a game?
I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game -- and this is in the scientific literature -- we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help.
I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer.
Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister -- I have an identical twin sister named Kelly -- and tell her, "I'm playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me."
This was an easier way to ask for help.
She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys.
Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces.
Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups.
But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away.
Now it wasn't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms.
That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far.
But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering.
Now what happened next with the game surprised me.
I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play.
But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be "the slayer," so I renamed the game SuperBetter.
And soon, I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting "super better," facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn's disease.
And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me.
They talked about feeling stronger and braver.
They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family.
I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances?
I mean, if it hadn't worked for me, there's no way I would have believed it was possible.
Well, it turns out there's some science here, too.
The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about.
We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder.
Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: "My priorities have changed."
"I feel closer to my friends and family."
"I understand myself better. I know who I really am now."
"I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life."
Now, does this sound familiar?
It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying.
It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets.
But how does it work?
How do you get from trauma to growth?
Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place?
I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here's what I learned.
This is where you earn the seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier.
All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests.
And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you.
Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds, go!
(Laughter) Well done, everyone.
That is worth +1 physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster.
We know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still.
Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains.
Go!
(Snapping) Don't give up.
(Snapping) (Laughter) Nice. Wow. That's the first time I've ever seen that.
Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone.
Now that's worth +1 mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower.
We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle.
Pick one: Because of the room, fate's really determined this for you, but here are the two options.
If you're inside, find a window and look out of it.
If you're outside, find a window and look in.
Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for "baby [your favorite animal.]" Do it on your phones, or just shout out some baby animals, and I'll put them on the screen.
So, what do we want to see?
Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let's see what we got.
Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look.
Okay, one more. Baby elephant.
We're clapping for that?
That's amazing.
(Laughter) All right, what we're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel looking at baby animals, when you need them most.
If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing.
It's my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up.
All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone's hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go!
Nice, nice.
All right, everybody, that is +1 social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community.
Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude.
Touch is even better.
Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone.
That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other.
(Laughter) Well, you have successfully completed your four quests, let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life.
It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience -- physical, mental, emotional and social -- live 10 years longer than everyone else.
So this is true.
If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in.
So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life by boosting your four types of resilience.
So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience, like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life.
Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours.
You totally earned them.
Yeah!
Wait, wait, wait.
You still have your special mission, your secret mission.
How are you going to spend these minutes of bonus life?
Well, here's my suggestion.
These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie's wishes.
You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes.
So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you're going to boost your resilience, so you're going to earn more minutes.
And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams.
And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, I grew up in this neighborhood. When I was 15 years old, I went from being what I think was a strapping young athlete, over four months, slowly wasting away until I was basically a famine victim with an unquenchable thirst.
And this all came to a head when I was on a backpacking trip, my first one ever actually, on Old Rag Mountain in West Virginia, and was putting my face into puddles of water and drinking like a dog.
That night, I was taken into the emergency room and diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in full-blown ketoacidosis.
And I recovered, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, insulin and other things, and gained all my weight back and more.
And this is what I thought for a long period of time, and that's in fact what medicine and people have focused on quite a bit, the microbes that do bad things.
And that's where I need my assistant here now.
You may recognize her.
So, I went yesterday, I apologize, I skipped a few of the talks, and I went over to the National Academy of Sciences building, and they sell toys, giant microbes.
I gotta get back out my baseball ability here.
(Laughter) So, unfortunately or not surprisingly, most of the microbes they sell at the National Academy building are pathogens.
Everybody focuses on the things that kill us, and that's what I was focusing on.
And it turns out that we are covered in a cloud of microbes, and those microbes actually do us good much of the time, rather than killing us.
And so, we've known about this for some period of time.
People have used microscopes to look at the microbes that cover us, I know you're not paying attention to me, but ...
(Laughter) The microbes that cover us.
And if you look at them in the microscope, you can see that we actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells.
There's more mass in the microbes than the mass of our brain.
We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms.
And unfortunately, if you want to learn about the microorganisms, just looking at them in a microscope is not sufficient.
And so we just heard about the DNA sequencing.
It turns out that one of the best ways to look at microbes and to understand them is to look at their DNA.
And what's amazing, when you use this technology, for example, looking at humans, we're not just covered in a sea of microbes.
There are thousands upon thousands of different kinds of microbes on us.
We have millions of genes of microbes in our human microbiome covering us.
And so this microbial diversity differs between people, and what people have been thinking about in the last 10, maybe 15 years is, maybe these microbes, this microbial cloud in and on us, and the variation between us, may be responsible for some of the health and illness differences between us.
And that comes back to the diabetes story I was telling you.
It turns out that people now think that one of the triggers for type 1 diabetes is not fighting a pathogen, but is in fact trying to -- miscommunicating with the microbes that live in and on you.
And somehow maybe the microbial community that's in and on me got off, and then this triggered some sort of immune response and led to me killing the cells that make insulin in my body.
And they wanted to look at the microbes after the transplants.
And so I started a collaboration with this person, Michael Zasloff and Thomas Fishbein, to look at the microbes that colonized these ilea after they were transplanted into a recipient.
And I can tell you all the details about the microbial study that we did there, but the reason I want to tell you this story is something really striking that they did at the beginning of this project.
They take the donor ileum, which is filled with microbes from a donor and they have a recipient who might have a problem with their microbial community, say Crohn's disease, and they sterilized the donor ileum.
They did this because this was common practice in medicine, even though it was obvious that this was not a good idea.
And fortunately, in the course of this project, the transplant surgeons and the other people decided, forget common practice. We have to switch.
So they actually switched to leaving some of the microbial community in the ileum. They leave the microbes with the donor, and theoretically that might help the people who are receiving this ileal transplant.
In the last few years there's been a great expansion in using DNA technology to study the microbes in and on people.
There's something called the Human Microbiome Project that's going on in the United States, and MetaHIT going on in Europe, and a lot of other projects.
And a variety of other studies have shown that the microbial community that lives in and on us helps in development of the immune system, helps in fighting off pathogens, helps in our metabolism, and determining our metabolic rate, probably determines our odor, and may even shape our behavior in a variety of ways.
And so, these studies have documented or suggested out of a variety of important functions for the microbial community, this cloud, the non-pathogens that live in and on us.
And one area that I think is very interesting, which many of you may have now that we've thrown microbes into the crowd, is something that I would call "germophobia."
We have antibiotics in our kitchen counters, people are washing every part of them all of the time, we pump antibiotics into our food, into our communities, we take antibiotics excessively.
And killing pathogens is a good thing if you're sick, but we should understand that when we pump chemicals and antibiotics into our world, that we're also killing the cloud of microbes that live in and on us.
And excessive use of antibiotics, in particular in children, has been shown to be associated with, again, risk factors for obesity, for autoimmune diseases, for a variety of problems that are probably due to disruption of the microbial community.
I'm sure many people here have heard about probiotics.
Probiotics are one thing that you can try and do to restore the microbial community that is in and on you.
There's a project going on at UC Davis where people are using probiotics to try and treat, prevent, necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants.
Premature infants have real problems with their microbial community.
And it may be that probiotics can help prevent the development of this horrible necrotizing enterocolitis in these premature infants.
But probiotics are sort of a very, very simple solution.
Most of the pills that you can take or the yogurts that you can eat have one or two species in them, maybe five species in them, and the human community is thousands upon thousands of species.
So what can we do to restore our microbial community when we have thousands and thousands of species on us?
Well, one thing that animals seem to do is, they eat poo -- coprophagia.
And it turns out that many veterinarians, old school veterinarians in particular, have been doing something called "poo tea," not booty, but poo tea, to treat colic and other ailments in horses and cows and things like that, where you make tea from the poo from a healthy individual animal and you feed it to a sick animal.
Although, unless you have a fistulated cow with a big hole in its side, and you can put your hand into its rumen, it's hard to imagine that the delivery of microbes directly into the mouth and through the entire top of the digestive tract is the best delivery system, so you may have heard in people they are now doing fecal transplants, where rather than delivering a couple of probiotic microbes through the mouth, they are delivering a community of probiotics, a community of microbes from a healthy donor, through the other end.
And this has turned out to be very effective in fighting certain intransigent infectious diseases like Clostridium difficile infections that can stay with people for years and years and years.
Transplants of the feces, of the microbes from the feces, from a healthy donor has actually been shown to cure systemic C. dif infections in some people.
Now what these transplants, these fecal transplants, or the poo tea suggest to me, and many other people have come up with this same idea, is that the microbial community in and on us, it's an organ.
We should view it as a functioning organ, part of ourselves.
We should treat it carefully and with respect, and we do not want to mess with it, say by C-sections or by antibiotics or excessive cleanliness, without some real good justification.
And what the DNA sequencing technologies are allowing people to do now is do detailed studies of, say, 100 patients who have Crohn's disease and 100 people who don't have Crohn's disease.
Or 100 people who took antibiotics when they were little, and 100 people who did not take antibiotics.
And we can now start to compare the community of microbes and their genes and see if there are differences.
Studies in model systems like mouse and other animals are also helping do this, but people are now using these technologies because they've gotten very cheap, to study the microbes in and on a variety of people.
It turns out that my father was an M.D., actually studied hormones. I told him many times that I was tired, thirsty, not feeling very good.
And he shrugged it off, I think he either thought I was just complaining a lot, or it was the typical M.D. "nothing can be wrong with my children."
We even went to the International Society of Endocrinology meeting as family in Quebec.
And I was getting up every five minutes to pee, and drinking everybody's water at the table, and I think they all thought I was a druggie.
(Laughter) But the reason I'm telling you this is that the medical community, my father as an example, sometimes doesn't see what's right in front of their eyes.
The microbial cloud, it is right in front of us.
We can't see it most of the time. It's invisible.
But we can see them through their DNA, we can see them through the effects that they have on people.
And what we need now is to start thinking about this microbial community in the context of everything in human medicine.
It doesn't mean that it affects every part of us, but it might.
What we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people, so that we can understand what they're doing to our lives.
We are them. They are us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My passions are music, technology and making things.
And it's the combination of these things that has led me to the hobby of sound visualization, and, on occasion, has led me to play with fire.
This is a Rubens' tube. It's one of many I've made over the years, and I have one here tonight.
It's about an 8-foot-long tube of metal, it's got a hundred or so holes on top, on that side is the speaker, and here is some lab tubing, and it's connected to this tank of propane.
So let's play a 550-herz frequency and watch what happens.
So let's change the frequency of the sound, and watch what happens to the fire.
So let's turn that off. We're indoors.
Thank you. (Applause) I also have with me a flame table.
It's very similar to a Rubens' tube, and it's also used for visualizing the physical properties of sound, such as eigenmodes, so let's fire it up and see what it does.
Ooh. (Laughter) Okay. Now, while the table comes up to pressure, let me note here that the sound is not traveling in perfect lines. It's actually traveling in all directions, and the Rubens' tube's a little like bisecting those waves with a line, and the flame table's a little like bisecting those waves with a plane, and it can show a little more subtle complexity, which is why I like to use it to watch Geoff Farina play guitar.
(Music) All right, so it's a delicate dance.
If you watch closely — (Applause) If you watch closely, you may have seen some of the eigenmodes, but also you may have seen that jazz music is better with fire.
Actually, a lot of things are better with fire in my world, but the fire's just a foundation.
It shows very well that eyes can hear, and this is interesting to me because technology allows us to present sound to the eyes in ways that accentuate the strength of the eyes for seeing sound, such as the removal of time.
So here, I'm using a rendering algorithm to paint the frequencies of the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in a way that the eyes can take them in as a single visual impression, and the technique will also show the strengths of the visual cortex for pattern recognition.
So if I show you another song off this album, and another, your eyes will easily pick out the use of repetition by the band Nirvana, and in the frequency distribution, the colors, you can see the clean-dirty-clean sound that they are famous for, and here is the entire album as a single visual impression, and I think this impression is pretty powerful.
The songs are a little similar, but mostly I'm just interested in the idea that someday maybe we'll buy a song because we like the way it looks.
This is data from a skate park, and this is Mabel Davis skate park in Austin, Texas. (Skateboard sounds) And the sounds you're hearing came from eight microphones attached to obstacles around the park, and it sounds like chaos, but actually all the tricks start with a very distinct slap, but successful tricks end with a pop, whereas unsuccessful tricks more of a scratch and a tumble, and tricks on the rail will ring out like a gong, and voices occupy very unique frequencies in the skate park.
So if we were to render these sounds visually, we might end up with something like this.
You see the skaters often trick in this direction. The obstacles are easier.
And in the middle of the recording, the mics pick this up, but later in the recording, this kid shows up, and he starts using a line at the top of the park to do some very advanced tricks on something called the tall rail.
I'm a big fan of Stephen Hawking, and I wanted to use all eight hours of his Cambridge lecture series to create an homage.
Now, in this series he's speaking with the aid of a computer, which actually makes identifying the ends of sentences fairly easy. So I wrote a steering algorithm.
And these trend lines, you can see, there's more questions than answers in the laws of physics, and when we reach the end of a sentence, we place a star at that location.
(Applause) It's all eight hours of the Cambridge lecture series taken in as a single visual impression, and I really like this image, but a lot of people think it's fake.
So I made a more interactive version, and the way I did that is I used their position in time in the lecture to place these stars into 3D space, and with some custom software and a Kinect, I can walk right into the lecture.
Stephen Hawking: There is one, and only one, arrangement in which the pieces make a complete picture.
Jared Ficklin: Thank you. (Applause) There are 1,400 stars.
It's a really fun way to explore the lecture, and, I hope, a fitting homage.
I think, after 30 years, the opportunity exists to create an enhanced version of closed captioning.
There's no closed captioning for the TED theme song, and we're missing it, but if you've watched enough of these, you hear it in your mind's ear, and then applause starts.
All right, so let's watch this clip again.
So watch closely and see what your eyes can hear.
This is fairly amazing to me.
Even on the first view, your eyes will successfully pick out patterns, but on repeated views, your brain actually gets better at turning these patterns into information.
You can get the tone and the timbre and the pace of the speech, things that you can't get out of closed captioning.
I don't know. It's a theory right now.
Actually, it's all just an idea.
And let me end by saying that sound moves in all directions, and so do ideas.
Thank you. (Applause)
So, how many of you have ever gotten behind the wheel of a car when you really shouldn't have been driving?
You were tired, but you felt you could drive a few more miles.
Or maybe your mind was just entirely elsewhere.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Now, in those situations, wouldn't it be great if there was a button on your dashboard that you could push, and the car would get you home safely?
Now, that's been the promise of the self-driving car, the autonomous vehicle, and it's been the dream since at least 1939, when General Motors showcased this idea at their Futurama booth at the World's Fair.
Now, it's been one of those dreams that's always seemed about 20 years in the future.
Now, two weeks ago, that dream took a step forward, when the state of Nevada granted Google's self-driving car the very first license for an autonomous vehicle, clearly establishing that it's legal for them to test it on the roads in Nevada.
(Laughter) Now, in my lab at Stanford, we've been working on autonomous cars too, but with a slightly different spin on things. You see, we've been developing robotic race cars, cars that can actually push themselves to the very limits of physical performance.
Well, there's two really good reasons for this.
Now, if you're like me, and the other 70 percent of the population who know that we are above-average drivers, you understand that's a very high bar.
There's another reason as well.
Just like race car drivers can use all of the friction between the tire and the road, all of the car's capabilities to go as fast as possible, we want to use all of those capabilities to avoid any accident we can.
Now, you may push the car to the limits not because you're driving too fast, but because you've hit an icy patch of road, conditions have changed.
In those situations, we want a car that is capable enough to avoid any accident that can physically be avoided.
I must confess, there's kind of a third motivation as well.
You see, I have a passion for racing.
In the past, I've been a race car owner, a crew chief and a driving coach, although maybe not at the level that you're currently expecting.
One of the things that we've developed in the lab -- we've developed several vehicles -- is what we believe is the world's first autonomously drifting car.
(Laughter) But this is P1. It's an entirely student-built electric vehicle, which through using its rear-wheel drive and front-wheel steer-by-wire can drift around corners.
It can get sideways like a rally car driver, always able to take the tightest curve, even on slippery, changing surfaces, never spinning out.
(Laughter) (Applause) I guess it goes without saying that we've had a lot of fun doing this.
We have developed a tremendous appreciation for the capabilities of human race car drivers.
As we've looked at the question of how well do these cars perform, we wanted to compare them to our human counterparts.
And we discovered their human counterparts are amazing.
Now, we can take a map of a race track, we can take a mathematical model of a car, and with some iteration, we can actually find the fastest way around that track.
Not only that, they're able to do it lap after lap after lap.
You put them in a new car, and after a few laps, they've found the fastest line in that car, and they're off to the races.
It really makes you think, we'd love to know what's going on inside their brain.
So as researchers, that's what we decided to find out.
Now, this is Dr. Lene Harbott applying electrodes to the head of John Morton.
John Morton is a former Can-Am and IMSA driver, who's also a class champion at Le Mans.
She's putting electrodes on his head so that we can monitor the electrical activity in John's brain as he races around the track.
Now, clearly we're not going to put a couple of electrodes on his head and understand exactly what all of his thoughts are on the track.
However, neuroscientists have identified certain patterns that let us tease out some very important aspects of this.
For instance, the resting brain tends to generate a lot of alpha waves.
In contrast, theta waves are associated with a lot of cognitive activity, like visual processing, things where the driver is thinking quite a bit.
Now, we can measure this, and we can look at the relative power between the theta waves and the alpha waves.
This gives us a measure of mental workload, how much the driver is actually challenged cognitively at any point along the track.
Now, we wanted to see if we could actually record this on the track, so we headed down south to Laguna Seca.
Laguna Seca is a legendary raceway about halfway between Salinas and Monterey.
It has a curve there called the Corkscrew.
Now, the strategy for driving this as explained to me was, you aim for the bush in the distance, and as the road falls away, you realize it was actually the top of a tree.
All right, so thanks to the Revs Program at Stanford, we were able to take John there and put him behind the wheel of a 1960 Porsche Abarth Carrera.
Life is way too short for boring cars.
Now watch, he has to downshift.
And then he has to turn left.
You can see his mental workload spike as he goes through this, as you would expect with something that requires this level of complexity.
But what's really interesting is to look at areas of the track where his mental workload doesn't increase.
I'm going to take you around now to the other side of the track.
Turn three. And John's going to go into that corner and the rear end of the car is going to begin to slide out.
He's going to have to correct for that with steering.
So watch as John does this here.
In fact, entirely reflexive.
Now, our data processing on this is still preliminary, but it really seems that these phenomenal feats that the race car drivers are performing are instinctive.
They are things that they have simply learned to do.
It requires very little mental workload for them to perform these amazing feats.
This is exactly what you want to do on the steering wheel to catch the car in this situation.
Can we take this reflexive action that we see from the very best race car drivers, introduce it to our cars, and maybe even into a system that could get onto your car in the future?
Do we want our car to perhaps be a partner, a coach, someone that can use their understanding of the situation to help us reach our potential?
Can, in fact, the technology not simply replace humans, but allow us to reach the level of reflex and intuition that we're all capable of?
So, as we move forward into this technological future, I want you to just pause and think of that for a moment.
What is the ideal balance of human and machine?
And as we think about that, let's take inspiration from the absolutely amazing capabilities of the human body and the human mind.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Something happened in the early morning hours of May 2nd, 2000, that had a profound effect on the way our society operates.
Ironically, hardly anyone noticed at the time.
The change was silent, imperceptible, unless you knew exactly what to look for.
On that morning, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System.
Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room.
Before this switch was thrown, we didn't have in-car navigation systems giving turn-by-turn directions, because back then, GPS couldn't tell you what block you were on, let alone what street.
For geolocation, accuracy matters, and things have only improved over the last 10 years.
With more base stations, more ground stations, better receivers and better algorithms, GPS can now not only tell you what street you are on, but what part of the street.
This level of accuracy has unleashed a firestorm of innovation.
Paper maps are becoming obsolete.
But we now stand on the verge of another revolution in geolocation accuracy.
What if I told you that the two-meter positioning that our current cell phones and our TomToms give us is pathetic compared to what we could be getting?
For some time now, it's been known that if you pay attention to the carrier phase of the GPS signal, and if you have an Internet connection, then you can go from meter level to centimeter level, even millimeter-level positioning.
Manufacturers haven't built this carrier phase technique into their cheap GPS chips because they're not sure what the general public would do with geolocation so accurate that you could pinpoint the wrinkles in the palm of your hand.
But you and I and other innovators, we can see the potential in this next leap in accuracy.
Imagine, for example, an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on top of the physical world.
So this level of positioning, this is what we're looking for, and I believe that, within the next few years, I predict, that this kind of hyper-precise, carrier phase-based positioning will become cheap and ubiquitous, and the consequences will be fantastic.
The Holy Grail, of course, is the GPS dot.
Do you remember the movie "The Da Vinci Code?"
Here's Professor Langdon examining a GPS dot, which his accomplice tells him is a tracking device accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe, but we know that in the world of nonfiction, the GPS dot is impossible, right?
For one thing, GPS doesn't work indoors, and for another, they don't make devices quite this small, especially when those devices have to relay their measurements back over a network.
Well, these objections were perfectly reasonable a few years ago, but things have changed.
There's been a strong trend toward miniaturization, better sensitivity, so much so that, a few years ago, a GPS tracking device looked like this clunky box to the left of the keys.
Compare that with the device released just months ago that's now packaged into something the size of a key fob, and if you take a look at the state of the art for a complete GPS receiver, which is only a centimeter on a side and more sensitive than ever, you realize that the GPS dot will soon move from fiction to nonfiction.
Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots.
You'll buy GPS dots in bulk, and you'll stick them on everything you own worth more than a few tens of dollars.
I couldn't find my shoes one recent morning, and, as usual, had to ask my wife if she had seen them.
(Laughter) Those of you who have made the switch to Gmail, remember how refreshing it was to go from organizing all of your email to simply searching it.
Now, of course, there is a flip side to the GPS dot.
I was in my office some months back and got a telephone call.
The woman on the other end of the line, we'll call her Carol, was panicked.
Apparently, an ex-boyfriend of Carol's from California had found her in Texas and was following her around.
So you might ask at this point why she's calling you.
Well, so did I.
"Well, you should go to a good mechanic and have him look at your car," I said.
"I already have," she told me.
"He didn't see anything obvious, and he said he'd have to take the car apart piece by piece."
"Well then, you'd better go to the police," I said.
"I already have," she replied.
"They're not sure this rises to the level of harassment, and they're not set up technically to find the device."
"Okay, what about the FBI?"
So, there we were.
Carol isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, to find herself in this kind of fearsome environment, worrisome situation caused by GPS tracking.
In fact, as I looked into her case, I discovered to my surprise that it's not clearly illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone else's car.
The Supreme Court ruled last month that a policeman has to get a warrant if he wants to do prolonged tracking, but the law isn't clear about civilians doing this to one another, so it's not just Big Brother we have to worry about, but Big Neighbor. (Laughter) There is one alternative that Carol could have taken, very effective. It's called the Wave Bubble.
They get drowned out by the bubble.
And Limor designed this, in part, because, like Carol, she felt threatened by GPS tracking.
Chinese manufacturers now sell thousands of nearly identical devices on the Internet.
So you might be thinking, the Wave Bubble sounds great.
I should have one. Might come in handy if somebody ever puts a tracking device on my car.
But you should be aware that its use is very much illegal in the United States.
Well, because it's not a bubble at all.
Its jamming signals don't stop at the edge of your personal space or at the edge of your car.
They go on to jam innocent GPS receivers for miles around you. (Laughter) Now, if you're Carol or Limor, or someone who feels threatened by GPS tracking, it might not feel wrong to turn on a Wave Bubble, but in fact, the results can be disastrous.
Imagine, for example, you're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a Wave Bubble.
All of a sudden your GPS readout goes blank, and now it's just you and the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar system if you remember how to work it.
They -- in fact, they don't update or upkeep lighthouses anymore, and LORAN, the only backup to GPS, was discontinued last year.
Our modern society has a special relationship with GPS.
We're almost blindly reliant on it.
It's built deeply into our systems and infrastructure.
Some call it "the invisible utility."
So, turning on a Wave Bubble might not just cause inconvenience.
But as it turns out, for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general GPS reliability, there's something even more potent and more subversive than a Wave Bubble, and that is a GPS spoofer.
The idea behind the GPS spoofer is simple.
You imitate them, and if you do it right, the device you're attacking doesn't even know it's being spoofed.
These three red dots represent the tracking points that try to keep themselves centered on that peak.
But if you send in a fake GPS signal, another peak pops up, and if you can get these two peaks perfectly aligned, the tracking points can't tell the difference, and they get hijacked by the stronger counterfeit signal, with the authentic peak getting forced off.
At this point, the game is over.
So is this really possible?
Can someone really manipulate the timing and positioning of a GPS receiver just like that, with a spoofer?
Well, the short answer is yes.
The key is that civil GPS signals are completely open.
They're wide open, vulnerable to a kind of spoofing attack.
Even so, up until very recently, nobody worried about GPS spoofers.
People figured that it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one.
We knew it wasn't going to be so hard, and we wanted to be the first to build one so we could get out in front of the problem and help protect against GPS spoofing.
I remember vividly the week it all came together.
Here's Ramon — (Laughter) — looking for a little attention from Dad that week.
At first, the spoofer was just a jumble of cables and computers, though we eventually got it packaged into a small box.
Now, the Dr. Frankenstein moment, when the spoofer finally came alive and I glimpsed its awful potential, came late one night when I tested the spoofer against my iPhone.
Let me show you some actual footage from that very first experiment.
I had come to completely trust this little blue dot and its reassuring blue halo.
So something felt very wrong about the world.
It was a sense, almost, of betrayal, when this little blue dot started at my house, and went running off toward the north leaving me behind. I wasn't moving.
What I then saw in this little moving blue dot was the potential for chaos.
I saw airplanes and ships veering off course, with the captain learning only too late that something was wrong.
I saw the GPS-derived timing of the New York Stock Exchange being manipulated by hackers.
You can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a GPS spoofer.
There is, though, one redeeming feature of the GPS spoofer.
It's the ultimate weapon against an invasion of GPS dots.
Imagine, for example, you're being tracked.
Well, you can play the tracker for a fool, pretending to be at work when you're really on vacation.
Or, if you're Carol, you could lure your ex-boyfriend into some empty parking lot where the police are waiting for him.
We simply cannot tolerate GPS jammers and spoofers, and yet, given the lack of effective legal means for protecting our privacy from the GPS dot, can you really blame people for wanting to turn them on, for wanting to use them?
I hold out hope that we'll be able to reconcile this conflict with some sort of, some yet uninvented technology.
But meanwhile, grab some popcorn, because things are going to get interesting.
Within the next few years, many of you will be the proud owner of a GPS dot.
The GPS dot will fundamentally reorder your life.
Or will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a GPS spoofer or a Wave Bubble to protect your own privacy?
So, as usual, what we see just beyond the horizon is full of promise and peril.
It'll be fascinating to see how this all turns out.
Thanks. (Applause)
I love to collect things.
Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I've captured and put in jars.
Now, it's no secret, because I like collecting things, that I love the Natural History Museum and the collections of animals at the Natural History Museum in dioramas.
These, to me, are like living sculptures, right, that you can go and look at, and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal's life.
So I was thinking about my own life, and how I'd like to memorialize my life, you know, for the ages, and also — (Laughter) — the lives of my friends, but the problem with this is that my friends aren't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them. (Laughter) So instead, I turned to video, and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time.
So what I did was, I filmed six of my friends and then, using video mapping and video projection, I created a video sculpture, which was these six friends projected into jars. (Laughter) So now I have this collection of my friends I can take around with me whenever I go, and this is called Animalia Chordata, from the Latin nomenclature for human being, classification system.
So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars, and they actually move around. (Laughter) So, this is interesting to me, but it lacked a certain human element. (Laughter) It's a digital sculpture, so I wanted to add an interaction system. So what I did was, I added a proximity sensor, so that when you get close to the people in jars, they react to you in different ways.
You know, just like people on the street when you get too close to them.
So this was really interesting to me, this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life, and also adding interactivity to sculpture.
So I wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something, and the way I did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender. (Laughter) This is a piece called Blend, and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art.
You can walk away, you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you, or you can actually choose to interact with it.
So if you do choose to interact with the piece, and you press the blender button, it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment.
You, like the people that are trapped in my work — (Blender noises, laughter) — have become part of my work as well. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) But, but this seems a bit unfair, right?
But I'd never done anything about myself.
So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece.
This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called A Point Just Passed, in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock, and it's up to you.
So I start as a baby, and then if you punch the clock, you'll actually transform the baby into a toddler, and then from a toddler I'm transformed into a teenager.
And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day, the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day.
So, in doing so, you're erasing time.
So I like this about interactive video sculpture, that you can actually interact with it, that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves, and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)
Now, I don't usually like cartoons, I don't think many of them are funny, I find them weird. But I love this cartoon from the New Yorker.
(Text: Never, ever think outside the box.) (Laughter) So, the guy is telling the cat, don't you dare think outside the box.
Well, I'm afraid I used to be the cat.
I always wanted to be outside the box.
And it's partly because I came to this field from a different background, chemist and a bacterial geneticist.
So, what people were saying to me about the cause of cancer, sources of cancer, or, for that matter, why you are who you are, didn't make sense.
So, to begin with, however, I have to give you a very, very quick lesson in developmental biology, with apologies to those of you who know some biology.
So, when your mom and dad met, there is a fertilized egg, that round thing with that little blip.
It grows and then it grows, and then it makes this handsome man.
(Applause) So, this guy, with all the cells in his body, all have the same genetic information.
So how did his nose become his nose, his elbow his elbow, and why doesn't he get up one morning and have his nose turn into his foot?
You all remember, dolly, it came from a single mammary cell.
So, have a guess of how many cells he has in his body.
Somewhere between 10 trillion to 70 trillion cells in his body.
Trillion!
Now, how did these cells, all with the same genetic material, make all those tissues?
And so, the question I raised before becomes even more interesting if you thought about the enormity of this in every one of your bodies.
Now, the dominant cancer theory would say that there is a single oncogene in a single cancer cell, and it would make you a cancer victim.
Well, this did not make sense to me.
Do you even know how a trillion looks?
Why not?
So, I decided over the years, because of a series of experiments that this is because of context and architecture.
Rous discovered this in 1911.
It was the first cancer virus discovered, and when I call it "oncogene," meaning "cancer gene."
So, he made a filtrate, he took this filter which was the liquid after he passed the tumor through a filter, and he injected it to another chicken, and he got another tumor.
So, scientists were very excited, and they said, a single oncogene can do it.
All you need is a single oncogene.
So, they put the cells in cultures, chicken cells, dumped the virus on it, and it would pile up, and they would say, this is malignant and this is normal.
And again this didn't make sense to me.
So for various reasons, we took this oncogene, attached it to a blue marker, and we injected it into the embryos.
So, when we dissociated the feather and put it in a dish, we got a mass of blue cells.
So, in the chicken you get a tumor, in the embryo you don't, you dissociate, you put it in a dish, you get another tumor.
Now, let's take a normal example.
The normal example, let's take the human mammary gland.
I work on breast cancer.
So, here is a lovely human breast.
And we said, wonderful! Look at this pretty structure.
We want to make this a structure, and ask the question, how do the cells do that?
So, we took the red cells -- you see the red cells are surrounded by blue, other cells that squeeze them, and behind it is material that people thought was mainly inert, and it was just having a structure to keep the shape, and so we first photographed it with the electron microscope years and years ago, and you see this cell is actually quite pretty.
It has a bottom, it has a top, it is secreting gobs and gobs of milk, because it just came from an early pregnant mouse.
They completely forget.
For example, here is a lovely yellow droplet of milk on the left, there is nothing on the right.
Look at the nuclei. The nuclei in the cell on the left is in the animal, the one on the right is in a dish.
They are completely different from each other.
In different contexts, cells do different things.
But how does context signal?
So, Einstein said that "For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope."
So, we made a section of the mammary gland of the mouse, and all those lovely acini are there, every one of those with the red around them are an acinus, and we said okay, we are going to try and make this, and I said, maybe that red stuff around the acinus that people think there's just a structural scaffold, maybe it has information, maybe it tells the cells what to do, maybe it tells the nucleus what to do.
So I said, extracellular matrix, which is this stuff called ECM, signals and actually tells the cells what to do.
On the left is what's inside the animal, we call it in vivo, and the one in culture was full of milk, the lovely red there is full of milk.
I said, if it's true that architecture is dominant, architecture restored to a cancer cell should make the cancer cell think it's normal.
Could this be done?
In order to do that, however, we needed to have a method of distinguishing normal from malignant, and on the left is the single normal cell, human breast, put in three-dimensional gooey gel that has extracellular matrix, it makes all these beautiful structures.
On the right, you see it looks very ugly, the cells continue to grow, the normal ones stop.
And you see here in higher magnification the normal acinus and the ugly tumor.
So we said, what is on the surface of these ugly tumors?
Could we calm them down -- they were signaling like crazy and they have pathways all messed up -- and make them to the level of the normal?
This is what we got.
(Applause) And in order to show you that the malignant phenotype I didn't just choose one, here are little movies, sort of fuzzy, but you see that on the left are the malignant cells, all of them are malignant, we add one single inhibitor in the beginning, and look what happens, they all look like that.
So, it's a new way of thinking about cancer, it's a hopeful way of thinking about cancer.
We should be able to be dealing with these things at this level, and these conclusions say that growth and malignant behavior is regulated at the level of tissue organization and that the tissue organization is dependent on the extracellular matrix and the microenvironment.
And here is another five seconds of repose, is my mantra. Form and function.
And of course, we now ask, where do we go now?
We'd like to take this kind of thinking into the clinic.
But before we do that, I'd like you to think that at any given time when you're sitting there, in your 70 trillion cells, the extracellular matrix signaling to your nucleus, the nucleus is signaling to your extracellular matrix and this is how your balance is kept and restored.
We have made a lot of discoveries, we have shown that extracellular matrix talks to chromatin.
We have shown that there's little pieces of DNA on the specific genes of the mammary gland that actually respond to extracellular matrix.
It has taken many years, but it has been very rewarding.
And before I get to the next slide, I have to tell you that there are so many additional discoveries to be made.
There is so much mystery we don't know.
And I always say to the students and post-docs I lecture to, don't be arrogant, because arrogance kills curiosity.
Curiosity and passion.
You need to always think, what else needs to be discovered?
This is a single human breast cell in three dimensions.
You put the cancer cells there, and they do go all over, they do this. They don't do this.
So I'd like to finish with a poem.
And unfortunately or fortunately, chemistry won.
But here is a poem from Yeats. I'll just read you the last two lines.
It's called "Among the School Children."
"O body swayed to music / O brightening glance / How [can we know] the dancer from the dance?"
And here is Merce Cunningham, I was fortunate to dance with him when I was younger, and here he is a dancer, and while he is dancing, he is both the dancer and the dance.
The minute he stops, we have neither.
So it's like form and function.
Now, I'd like to show you a current picture of my group.
I have been fortunate to have had these magnificant students and post-docs who have taught me so much, and I have had many of these groups come and go.
On the left is water coming through the shore, taken from a NASA satellite.
On the right, there is a coral.
Now if you take the mammary gland and spread it and take the fat away, on a dish it looks like that.
Do they look the same? Do they have the same patterns?
(Applause)
Well, first of all, let me thank Emeka -- as a matter of fact, TED Global -- for putting this conference together.
This conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century.
Even before they do that they will ask for foreign aid.
I would also like to pay homage and honor to the TED Fellows June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew, and the other TED Fellows.
I call them the Cheetah Generation.
They understand what accountability and democracy is.
That's the Cheetah Generation, and Africa's salvation rests on the backs of these Cheetahs.
In contrast, of course, we have the Hippo Generation.
(Laughter) The Hippo Generation are the ruling elites.
They are stuck in their intellectual patch.
If you ask them to reform the economies, they're not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo.
Now, there are a lot of Africans who are very angry, angry at the condition of Africa.
Now, we're talking about a continent that is not poor.
It is rich in mineral resources, natural mineral resources.
That's what makes a lot of Africans very angry.
And in a way, Africa is more than a tragedy, in more ways than one.
There's another enduring tragedy, and that tragedy is that there are so many people, so many governments, so many organizations who want to help the people in Africa.
They don't understand.
Now, we're not saying don't help Africa.
Helping Africa is noble.
It's like the blind leading the clueless.
(Laughter) There are certain things that we need to recognize.
Did you know that 40 percent of the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa?
That's what the World Bank says.
It leaks horribly.
There are people who think that we should pour more money, more aid into this bowl which leaks.
Corruption alone costs Africa 148 billion dollars a year.
Capital flight out of Africa, 80 billion a year.
Put that aside.
Let's take food imports.
Every year Africa spends 20 billion dollars to import food.
That's far more than the 50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa.
Now, back in the 1960s Africa not only fed itself, it also exported food.
Not anymore.
We know that something has gone fundamentally wrong.
Let's move on, and flip over to the next chapter, and that's what this conference is all about -- the next chapter.
The next chapter begins with first of all, asking ourselves this fundamental question, "Whom do we want to help in Africa?"
That characterization, in my view, is even more charitable.
(Laughter) I belong to an Internet discussion forum, an African Internet discussion forum, and I asked them, I said, "Since 1960, we've had exactly 204 African heads of state, since 1960."
Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course.
(Laughter) My point is, they couldn't go beyond 15.
Even if they had been able to name me 20, what does that tell you?
20 out of 204 means that the vast majority of the African leaders failed their people.
And if you look at them, the slate of the post-colonial leaders -- an assortment of military fufu heads, Swiss-bank socialists, crocodile liberators, vampire elites, quack revolutionaries.
(Applause) Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that Africans have known for centuries.
The second false premise that we make when we're trying to help Africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in Africa that cares about its people, serves the interests of the people, and represents the people.
There is one particular quote -- a Lesotho chief once said that "Here in Lesotho, we've got two problems: rats and the government."
(Laughter) What you and I understand as a government doesn't exist in many African countries.
In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states.
Vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people.
Government is the problem in Africa.
A vampire state is the government -- (Applause) -- which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies, and tribesmen and exclude everybody else.
The richest people in Africa are heads-of-state and ministers, and quite often the chief bandit is the head-of-state himself.
By creating wealth?
No.
That's not wealth creation. It's wealth redistribution.
The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people, we must know where the African people are.
An African economy can be broken up into three sectors.
There is the modern sector, there is the informal sector and the traditional sector.
The modern sector is the abode of the elites.
It's the seat of government.
In many African countries the modern sector is lost.
It's dysfunctional.
That is the source of many of Africa's problems where the struggles for political power emanate and then spill over onto the informal and the traditional sector, claiming innocent lives.
More than 80 percent of Ivory Coast's development went into the modern sector.
The other sectors, the informal and the traditional sectors, are where you find the majority of the African people, the real people in Africa. That's where you find them.
Now, obviously it makes common sense that if you want to help the people, you go where the people are.
But that's not what we did.
As a matter of fact, we neglected the informal and the traditional sectors.
Now, traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture, which is one of the reasons why Africa can't feed itself, and that's why it must import food.
All right, you cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and the traditional sectors.
And you can't develop the informal and the traditional sectors without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work.
First one is the political system.
Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny.
If you look into their traditional systems, Africans organize their states in two types.
These societies are the Ibo, the Somali, the Kikuyus, for example. They have no chiefs.
The other ethnic groups, which did have chiefs, made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power.
In Ashanti tradition, for example, the chief cannot make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders.
Without the council the chief can't pass any law, and if the chief doesn't govern according to the will of the people he will be removed.
This is part of Africa's indigenous political heritage.
Now, compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established on Africa.
In the economic system in traditional Africa, the means of production is privately owned.
You see, in the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual.
The accent is on the "I."
In Africa, the Africans say, "I am, because we are."
The "we" connotes community -- the extended family system.
The extended family system pools its resources together.
They own farms. They decide what to do, what to produce.
They decide what to do.
And when they produce their crops, they sell the surplus on marketplaces.
So, in a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free-market system.
There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent.
Timbuktu was one great big market town.
Kano, Salaga -- they were all there.
Even if you go to West Africa, you notice that market activity in West Africa has always been dominated by women.
So, it's quite appropriate that this section is called a marketplace.
The market is not alien to Africa.
What Africans practiced was a different form of capitalism, but then after independence, all of a sudden, markets, capitalism became a western institution, and the leaders said Africans were ready for socialism.
Nonsense.
And even then, what kind of socialism did they practice?
The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of Swiss-bank socialism, which allowed the heads of states and the ministers to rape and plunder Africa's treasuries for deposit in Switzerland.
That is not the kind of system Africans had known for centuries.
Go back to Africa's indigenous institutions, and this is where we charge the Cheetahs to go into the informal sectors, the traditional sectors.
And I'd like to show you a quick little video about the informal sector, about the boat-building that I, myself, tried to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora to invest in.
The men are going fishing in these small boats.
This is by a local Ghanaian entrepreneur, using his own capital.
A bigger boat will mean more fish will be caught and landed.
It means that he will be able to employ more Ghanaians.
It also means that he will be able to generate wealth.
And then it will have what economists call external effects on a local economy.
All that you need to do, all that the elites need to do, is to move this operation into something that is enclosed so that the operation can be made more efficient.
Now, it is not just this informal sector.
There is also traditional medicine.
80 percent of Africans still rely on traditional medicine.
The modern healthcare sector has totally collapsed.
Now, this is an area -- I mean, there is a treasure trove of wealth in the traditional medicine area.
This is where we need to mobilize Africans, in the Diaspora especially, to invest in this.
We also need to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors, but to go into agriculture and also to instigate change from within.
We were able to mobilize Ghanaians in the Diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana.
And I know that with the Cheetahs, we can take Africa back one village at a time.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Well, amazingly, for once, our world leaders actually lived up to that millennium moment and back in 2000 agreed to some pretty extraordinary stuff: visionary, measurable, long-term targets called the Millennium Development Goals.
Well, we're approaching 2015, so we'd better assess, how are we doing on these goals?
But we've also got to decide, do we like such global goals?
Some people don't. And if we like them, we've got to decide what we want to do on these goals going forward.
We've got to decide a process by which we decide.
Incredible partnerships between the private sector, political leaders, philanthropists and amazing grassroots activists across the developing world, but also 250,000 people marched in the streets of Edinburgh outside this very building for Make Poverty History.
All together, they achieved these results: increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals, life-saving anti-AIDS drugs; nearly halved deaths from malaria; vaccinated so many that 5.4 million lives will be saved.
And combined, this is going to result in two million fewer children dying every year, last year, than in the year 2000.
That's 5,000 fewer kids dying every day, ten times you lot not dead every day, because of all of these partnerships.
So I think this is amazing living proof of progress that more people should know about, but the challenge of communicating this kind of good news is probably the subject of a different TEDTalk.
Anyway, for now, anyone involved in getting these results, thank you. I think this proved these goals are worth it.
But there's still a lot of unfinished business.
Still, 7.6 million children die every year of preventable, treatable diseases, and 178 million kids are malnourished to the point of stunting, a horrible term which means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment.
But then, a lot of people think there are things that should have been in the original package that weren't agreed back then that should now be included, like sustainable development targets, natural resource governance targets, access to opportunity, to knowledge, equity, fighting corruption.
All of this is measurable and could be in the new goals.
But the key thing here is, what do you think should be in the new goals?
What do you want?
Are you annoyed that I didn't talk about gender equality or education?
And quite frankly, that's a good question, but there's going to be some tough tradeoffs and choices here, so you want to hope that the process by which the world decides these new goals is going to be legitimate, right?
Well, as we gather here in Edinburgh, technocrats appointed by the U.N. and certain governments, with the best intentions, are busying themselves designing a new package of goals, and currently they're doing that through pretty much the same old late-20th-century, top-down, elite, closed process.
But, of course, since then, the Web and mobile telephony, along with ubiquitous reality TV formats have spread all around the world.
So what we'd like to propose is that we use them to involve people from all around the world in an historic first: the world's first truly global poll and consultation, where everyone everywhere has an equal voice for the very first time.
There's hundreds of billions of your aid dollars at stake, tens of millions of lives, or deaths, at stake, and, I'd argue, the security and future of you and your family is also at stake.
So, if you're with me, I'd say there's three essential steps in this crowdsourcing campaign: collecting, connecting and committing.
Could they come together and help the Millennium Development Goals get rebranded into the Millennial Generation's Goals?
And if just five percent of the five billion plus who are currently connected made a comment, and that comment turned into a commitment, we could crowdsource a force of 300 million people around the world to help see these goals through.
If we have this collected data, and this connected crowd, based upon our experience of campaigning and getting world leaders to commit, I think world leaders will commit to most of the crowdsourced recommendations.
But the question really is, through this process will we all have become committed?
Well, there's some fantastic examples here to scale up, mostly piloted within Africa, actually.
There's Open Data Kenya, which geocodes and crowdsources information about where projects are, are they delivering results.
Often, they're not in the right place.
And Ushahidi, which means "witness" in Swahili, which geocodes and crowdsources information in complex emergencies to help target responses.
This openness, this forcing openness, is key, and if it wasn't entirely transparent already, I should be open: I've got a completely transparent agenda.
Long-term trends suggest that this century is going to be a tough place to live, with population increases, consumption patterns increasing, and conflict over scarce natural resources.
And look at the state of global politics today.
Look at the Rio Earth Summit that happened just last week, or the Mexican G20, also last week.
They need our help. They need the cavalry, and the cavalry's not going to come from Mars.
It's got to come from us, and I see this process of deciding democratically in a bottom-up fashion what the world wants to work on together as one vital means by which we can crowdsource the force to really build that constituency that's going to reinvigorate global governance in the 21st century.
Many people made fun of a big campaign a few years ago we had called Make Poverty History.
It was a naive thought in many people's minds, and it's true, it was just a t-shirt slogan that worked for the moment. But look.
Now sure, progress in China and India and poverty reduction there was key to that, but recently also in Africa, poverty rates are being reduced.
It will get harder as we get towards zero, as the poor will be increasingly located in post-conflict, fragile states, or maybe in middle income states where they don't really care about the marginalized.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Jamie, here's the puzzle to me.
If there was an incident today where a hundred kids died in some tragedy or where, say, a hundred kids were kidnapped and then rescued by special forces, I mean, it would be all over the news for a week, right?
You just put up, just as one of your numbers there, that 5,000 -- is that the number?
This must drive you crazy.
JD: It does, and we're having a huge debate in this country about aid levels, for example, and aid alone is not the whole solution. Nobody thinks it is.
I wish the 250,000 people who really did march outside this very building knew these results.
Right now they don't, and it would be great to find a way to better communicate it, because we have not.
But these conferences are going on, and I know people get skeptical and cynical about the big global summits and the promises and their never being kept, but actually, the bits that are, are making a difference, and what the politicians need is more permission from the public.
I mean, if the people here who've had experience using open platforms, you're interested to talk with them this week and try to take this forward.
JD: Absolutely. CA: All right, well I must say, if this conference led in some way to advancing that idea, that's a huge idea, and if you carry that forward, that is really awesome, so thank you. JD: I'd love your help.
CA: Thank you, thank you.
(Applause)
To me, the sky is always gray, flowers are always gray, and television is still in black and white.
But, since the age of 21, instead of seeing color, I can hear color.
In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon, and the result, with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona, is this electronic eye.
It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction.
(Frequency sounds) So, for example, if I have, like — This is the sound of purple. (Frequency sounds) For example, this is the sound of grass. (Frequency sounds) This is red, like TED. (Frequency sounds) This is the sound of a dirty sock. (Laughter) Which is like yellow, this one.
So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years, since 2004, so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time.
At the start, though, I had to memorize the names you give for each color, so I had to memorize the notes, but after some time, all this information became a perception.
I didn't have to think about the notes.
So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software, so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg.
It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device.
It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses, and after some time, it even became a part of my official image.
This is my passport from 2004.
So, life has changed dramatically since I hear color, because color is almost everywhere, so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery, I can listen to a Picasso, for example. So it's like I'm going to a concert hall, because I can listen to the paintings.
And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking, it's very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket.
Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. (Laughter) (Applause) So today I'm dressed in C major, so it's quite a happy chord. (Laughter) If I had to go to a funeral, though, I would dress in B minor, which would be turquoise, purple and orange. (Laughter) Also, food, the way I look at food has changed, because now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song. (Laughter) So depending on how I display it, I can hear and I can compose music with food.
So imagine a restaurant where we can have, like, Lady Gaga salads as starters. (Laughter) I mean, this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably.
Also, the way I perceive beauty has changed, because when I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible.
(Laughter) And it might happen the opposite, the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like, sound portraits of people.
Instead of drawing someone's face, like drawing the shape, I point at them with the eye and I write down the different notes I hear, and then I create sound portraits.
Here's some faces.
Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman.
So you relate people that you wouldn't relate, and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces.
So I connect the eye, and then I play the audience's faces.
The good thing about this is, if the concert doesn't sound good, it's their fault.
It's not my fault, because — (Laughter) And so another thing that happens is that I started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color.
The BBC beeps, they sound turquoise, and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience, so I started to paint music and paint people's voices, because people's voices have frequencies that I relate to color.
And here's some music translated into color.
For example, Mozart, "Queen of the Night," looks like this.
(Music) Very yellow and very colorful, because there's many different frequencies.
(Music) And this is a completely different song.
(Music) It's Justin Bieber's "Baby." (Laughter) (Music) It is very pink and very yellow.
So, also voices, I can transform speeches into color, for example, these are two very well-known speeches.
One of them is Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream," and the other one is Hitler.
And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels, and then I ask people, "Which one do you prefer?"
And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King.
So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors, just like human vision.
But then, I just thought that this human vision wasn't good enough.
There's many, many more colors around us that we cannot perceive, but that electronic eyes can perceive.
So I decided to continue extending my color senses, and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale, so now I can hear colors that the human eye cannot perceive.
For example, perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there's movement detectors in a room.
I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control.
That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body.
We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses, so if we extend our senses, we will consequently extend our knowledge.
I think this will be a big, big change that we will see during this century.
So I do encourage you all to think about which senses you'd like to extend.
I would encourage you to become a cyborg.
You won't be alone. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I'm gonna talk a little bit about open-source security, because we've got to get better at security in this 21st century.
Let me start by saying, let's look back to the 20th century, and kind of get a sense of how that style of security worked for us.
This is Verdun, a battlefield in France just north of the NATO headquarters in Belgium.
At Verdun, in 1916, over a 300-day period, 700,000 people were killed, so about 2,000 a day.
If you roll it forward -- 20th-century security -- into the Second World War, you see the Battle of Stalingrad, 300 days, 2 million people killed.
We go into the Cold War, and we continue to try and build walls.
Walls don't work.
My thesis for us today is, instead of building walls to create security, we need to build bridges.
This is a famous bridge in Europe.
It's in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
It's the bridge over the Drina River, the subject of a novel by Ivo Andrić, and it talks about how, in that very troubled part of Europe and the Balkans, over time there's been enormous building of walls.
More recently, in the last decade, we begin to see these communities start, hesitatingly, to come together.
I would argue, again, open-source security is about connecting the international, the interagency, the private-public, and lashing it together with strategic communication, largely in social networks.
So let me talk a little bit about why we need to do that, because our global commons is under attack in a variety of ways, and none of the sources of threat to the global commons will be solved by building walls.
Now, I'm a sailor, obviously.
This is a ship, a liner, clipping through the Indian Ocean.
What's wrong with this picture?
Piracy is a very active threat today around the world. This is in the Indian Ocean.
Piracy is also very active in the Strait of Malacca.
It's active in the Gulf of Guinea.
We see it in the Caribbean.
Last year, at this time, there were 20 vessels, 500 mariners held hostage.
This is an attack on the global commons.
We need to think about how to address it.
Let's shift to a different kind of sea, the cyber sea.
Here are photographs of two young men.
They conducted a credit card fraud that netted them over 10 billion dollars.
This is part of cybercrime which is a $2-trillion-a-year discontinuity in the global economy.
Two trillion a year.
So this cyber sea, which we know endlessly is the fundamental piece of radical openness, is very much under threat as well.
Another thing I worry about in the global commons is the threat posed by trafficking, by the movement of narcotics, opium, here coming out of Afghanistan through Europe over to the United States.
We worry about cocaine coming from the Andean Ridge north.
We worry about the movement of illegal weapons and trafficking. Above all, perhaps, we worry about human trafficking, and the awful cost of it.
This is a photograph, and I wish I could tell you that this is a very high-tech piece of US Navy gear that we're using to stop the trafficking.
The bad news is, this is a semi-submersible run by drug cartels.
It was built in the jungles of South America.
We caught it with that low-tech raft — (Laughter) — and it was carrying six tons of cocaine.
Crew of four. Sophisticated communications sweep.
This kind of trafficking, in narcotics, in humans, in weapons, God forbid, in weapons of mass destruction, is part of the threat to the global commons.
This is a field of poppies in Afghanistan.
Eighty to 90 percent of the world's poppy, opium and heroin, comes out of Afghanistan.
We also see there, of course, terrorism.
So this terrorism concern is also part of the global commons, and what we must address.
So here we are, 21st century.
We know our 20th-century tools are not going to work.
What should we do?
We will need the application of military force.
When we do it, we must do it well, and competently.
But my thesis is, open-source security is about international, interagency, private-public connection pulled together by this idea of strategic communication on the Internet.
Let me give you a couple of examples of how this works in a positive way.
This is Afghanistan. These are Afghan soldiers.
You should say, "That's odd. I thought I read that this demographic, young men and women in their 20s and 30s, is largely illiterate in Afghanistan."
You would be correct.
Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read.
So the question is, so, why are they all standing there holding books?
The answer is, we are teaching them to read in literacy courses by NATO in partnership with private sector entities, in partnership with development agencies.
We've taught well over 200,000 Afghan Security Forces to read and write at a basic level.
When you can read and write in Afghanistan, you will typically put a pen in your pocket.
At the ceremonies, when these young men and women graduate, they take that pen with great pride, and put it in their pocket.
This is bringing together international — there are 50 nations involved in this mission — interagency — these development agencies — and private-public, to take on this kind of security.
Now, we are also teaching them combat skills, of course, but I would argue, open-source security means connecting in ways that create longer lasting security effect.
Here's another example.
This is a US Navy warship.
It's called the Comfort.
There's a sister ship called the Mercy.
They are hospital ships.
This one, the Comfort, operates throughout the Caribbean and the coast of South America conducting patient treatments.
On a typical cruise, they'll do 400,000 patient treatments.
Other organizations send volunteers.
They're all part of this.
To give you one example of the impact this can have, this little boy, eight years old, walked with his mother two days to come to the eye clinic put on by the Comfort.
Multiply this by 400,000 patient treatments, this private-public collaboration with security forces, and you begin to see the power of creating security in a very different way.
Can you pick out the two US Army soldiers in this photograph?
They are the two young men on either side of these young boys. This is part of a series of baseball clinics, where we have explored collaboration between Major League Baseball, the Department of State, who sets up the diplomatic piece of this, military baseball players, who are real soldiers with real skills but participate in this mission, and they put on clinics throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, in Honduras, in Nicaragua, in all of the Central American and Caribbean nations where baseball is so popular, and it creates security.
Another aspect of this partnership is in disaster relief.
This is a US Air Force helicopter participating after the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people.
In each of these major disasters — the tsunami in 2004, 250,000 dead, the Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, 2005, 85,000 dead, the Haitian earthquake, about 300,000 dead, more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combination which struck Japan and its nuclear industry — in all of these instances, we see partnerships between international actors, interagency, private-public working with security forces to respond to this kind of natural disaster.
So these are examples of this idea of open-source security.
Now, you're looking at this thinking, "Ah, Admiral, these must be sea lanes of communication, or these might be fiber optic cables."
No. This is a graphic of the world according to Twitter.
Purple are tweets. Green are geolocation.
It's a perfect evocation of that great population survey, the six largest nations in the world in descending order: China, India, Facebook, the United States, Twitter and Indonesia. (Laughter) Why do we want to get in these nets?
Why do we want to be involved?
Got a little laugh from the audience.
Got picked up in two places in the world: Finland and Indonesia.
The headline was: NATO Admiral Needs Friends.
(Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) Which I do. (Laughter) And the story was a catalyst, and the next morning I had hundreds of Facebook friend requests from Indonesians and Finns, mostly saying, "Admiral, we heard you need a friend, and oh, by the way, what is NATO?" (Laughter) So ... (Laughter) Yeah, we laugh, but this is how we move the message, and moving that message is how we connect international, interagency, private-public, and these social nets to help create security.
This is a photograph of a brave British soldier.
I put him here to remind us, I would not want anyone to leave the room thinking that we do not need capable, competent militaries who can create real military effect.
That is the core of who we are and what we do, and we do it to protect freedom, freedom of speech, all the things we treasure in our societies.
But, you know, life is not an on-and-off switch.
I would argue life is a rheostat.
You have to dial it in, and as I think about how we create security in this 21st century, there will be times when we will apply hard power in true war and crisis, but there will be many instances, as we've talked about today, where our militaries can be part of creating 21st-century security, international, interagency, private-public, connected with competent communication.
The vision statement of Wikipedia is very simple: a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
Two thousand and seven, five years ago, my wife gets diagnosed with breast cancer.
Stage IIB.
Now, looking back, the most harrowing part of that experience was not just the hospital visits -- these were very painful for my wife, understandably so.
The most horrifying and agonizing part of the whole experience was we were making decisions after decisions after decisions that were being thrust upon us.
Should it be a mastectomy? Should it be a lumpectomy?
Should it be a more aggressive form of treatment, given that it was stage IIB?
Or should it be a less aggressive form of treatment?
Now you could ask this question, why were the doctors doing this?
A simplistic answer would be, the doctors are doing this because they want to protect themselves legally.
I think that is too simplistic.
These are well-meaning doctors, some of them have gone on to become very good friends.
And we were certainly in the driver's seat, making all these decisions.
And let me tell you -- if some of you have been there, it was a most agonizing and harrowing experience.
Which got me thinking.
I said, is there any validity to this whole adage that when you're making decisions, it's best to take the driver's seat, be in charge, be in control?
Or are there contexts where we're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive?
For example, a trusted financial advisor, could be a trusted doctor, etc.
And since I study human decision making, I said, I'm going to run some studies to find some answers.
And I'm going to share one of these studies with you today.
So, imagine that all of you are participants in the study.
If you're wondering why, I'll tell you why in a few seconds from now.
And the more puzzles you solve, the greater the chances that you'll win some prizes.
Why? Because it makes a lot of sense: In order to solve these puzzles effectively, if you think about it, your mind needs to be in two states simultaneously, right?
Now comes the between-subjects design, the AB design, the AB testing.
So what I'm going to do is randomly assign you to one of two groups.
So imagine that there is an imaginary line out here, so everyone here will be group A, everyone out here will be group B.
Now, for you folks, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you these two teas, and I'll go ahead and ask you to choose your tea.
You can decide, what is your mental state: OK, I choose the caffeinated tea, I choose the chamomile tea.
You folks, I'm going to show you these two teas, but you don't have a choice.
I'm going to give you one of these two teas, and keep in mind, I'm going to pick one of these two teas at random for you.
And you know that.
So if you think about it, this is an extreme-case scenario, because in the real world, whenever you are taking passenger's seat, very often the driver is going to be someone you trust, an expert, etc.
So imagine that you're taking the tea now, we'll wait for you to finish the tea.
Here's an example of the puzzle you're going to solve.
Audience member: Pulpit! Baba Shiv: Whoa! OK.
That's cool.
Yeah, so what we'd do if we had you who gave the answer as a participant, we would have calibrated the difficulty level of the puzzles to your expertise.
Because we want these puzzles to be difficult.
These are tricky puzzles, because your first instinct is to say "tulip."
Right?
Now, here's another example.
Audience member: Embark. BS: Yeah. Wow! OK.
So, yeah, so this is, again, difficult.
Now, the question we're asking here is, in terms of the outcome -- and it comes in the number of puzzles solved -- will you in the driver's seat end up solving more puzzles because you are in control, you could decide which tea you would choose, or would you be better off, in terms of the number of puzzles solved?
We also observe another thing, and that is, you folks not only are solving fewer puzzles, you're also putting less juice into the task -- less effort, you're less persistent, and so on.
How do we know that?
Well, we have two objective measures.
One is, what is the time, on average, you're taking in attempting to solve these puzzles?
And under what situations -- when -- would we see this pattern of results where the passenger is going to show better, more favorable outcomes, compared to the driver?
It's an acronym that stands for the nature of the feedback you're getting after you made the decision.
So if you think about it, in this particular puzzle task -- it could happen in investing in the stock market, very volatile out there, it could be the medical situation -- the feedback here is immediate.
Right? Second, it is negative.
And this can happen in the medical domain.
For example, very early on in the treatment, things are negative, the feedback, before things become positive.
Right? It can happen in the stock market.
Volatile stock market, getting negative feedback, it is also immediate.
You were responsible for your decision.
So what do you do?
(Laughter) That casts your decision in doubt, reduces the confidence you have in the decision, the confidence you have in the performance, the performance in terms of solving the puzzles.
A patient in the driver's seat, for example.
And therefore, there are times when you're facing the INCA, when the feedback is going to be immediate, negative, concrete and you have the sense of agency, where you're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive.
It has now been five years, slightly more than five years, and the good news, thank God, is that the cancer is still in remission.
So it all ends well.
But one thing I didn't mention was that very early on into her treatment, my wife and I decided that we would take the passenger's seat.
And that made so much of a difference in terms of the peace of mind that came with that; we could focus on her recovery.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Throughout the United States, there is growing social awareness that sexual violence and harassment are far too common occurrences within our various institutions -- occurrences often without any accountability.
As a result, the Me Too movement is upon us, and survivors everywhere are speaking out to demand change.
Students have rallied against sexual assault on campus.
Service members have demanded Congress reform the military, and workers ranging from Hollywood stars to janitorial staff have called out sexual harassment in the workplace.
This is a tipping point.
This is when a social movement can create lasting legal change.
But only if we switch tactics.
Instead of going institution by institution, fighting for reform, it's time to go to the Constitution.
As it stands, the US Constitution denies fundamental protections to victims of gender violence such as sexual assault, intimate partner violence and stalking.
Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits state governments from abusing its citizens, does not require state governments to intervene when private parties abuse its citizens.
So what does that mean in real life?
That means that when a woman calls the police from her home, afraid that an intruder may attack her, she is not entitled to the state's protection.
Not only can the police fail to respond, but she will be left without any legal remedy if preventable harm occurs as a result.
It is because the state, theoretically, acts on behalf of all citizens collectively, not any one citizen individually.
The resulting constitutional flaw directly contradicts international law, which requires nation-states to intervene and protect citizens against gender violence by private parties as a human right.
Instead of requiring intervention, our Constitution leaves discretion -- discretion that states have used to discriminate systemically to deny countless victims any remedy.
Unlike what you may have seen on "Law & Order: SVU," justice is rare for victims of gender violence.
And even in those rare cases where law enforcement has chosen to act, victims have no rights during the resulting criminal process.
Rather, they are witnesses; their bodies, evidence.
The prosecution does not represent the interests of a victim.
Rather, the prosecution represents the interests of the state.
And the state has the discretion to dismiss criminal charges, enter lax plea deals and otherwise remove a victim's voice from the process, because again, a state theoretically represents the interests of all citizens collectively and not any one citizen individually.
Despite this constitutional flaw, some victims of gender violence have found protections under federal Civil Rights statutes, such as Title IX.
Title IX is not just about sports.
Rather, it prohibits all forms of sex discrimination, including sexual violence and harassment within educational programs that accept federal funding.
While initially targeting sex discrimination within admissions, Title IX has actually evolved over time to require educational institutions to intervene and address gender violence when committed by certain parties, such as when teachers, students or campus visitors commit sexual assault or harassment.
So what this means is that through Title IX, those who seek access to education are protected against gender violence in a way that otherwise does not exist under the law.
It is Title IX that requires educational institutions to take reports of gender violence seriously, or to suffer liability.
And through campus-level proceedings, Title IX goes so far as to give victims equitable rights during the campus process, which means that victims can represent their own interests during proceedings, rather than relying on educational institutions to do so.
And that's really important, because educational institutions have historically swept gender violence under the rug, much like our criminal justice system does today.
So while Civil Rights protects some victims, we should want to protect all victims.
Rather than going institution by institution, fighting for reform on campus, in the military, in the workplace, it's time to go to the Constitution and pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
Originally proposed in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment would guarantee gender equality under the law, and much like Title IX on campus, that constitutional amendment could require states to intervene and address gender violence as a prohibitive form of sex discrimination.
And within the last year, at least one of those states has ratified the amendment, because we live in different political times.
From the Women's March to the Me Too movement, we have the growing political will of the people necessary to create lasting, legal change.
So as a victims' rights attorney fighting to increase the prospect of justice for survivors across the country and as a survivor myself, I'm not here to say, "Time's Up."
I'm here to say, "It's time."
It's time for accountability to become the norm after gender violence.
It's time to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, so that our legal system can become a system of justice, and #MeToo can finally become "no more."
Thank you.
(Applause)
So wouldn't it be amazing if our phones could see the world in the same way that we do, as we're walking around being able to point a phone at anything, and then have it actually recognize images and objects like the human brain, and then be able to pull in information from an almost infinite library of knowledge and experiences and ideas.
Well, traditionally that was seen as science fiction, but now we've moved to a world where actually this has become possible.
(Laughter) (Bagpipes) (Bagpipes) (Applause) (Bagpipes) Voice: Now simmer blinks on flowery braes ...
And what's great about this is the technology's actually allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does.
Not only that, but as I move the object around, it's going to track it and overlay that content seamlessly.
Again, the thing that's incredible about this is this is how advanced these devices have become.
All the processing to do that was actually done on the device itself.
Now, this has applications everywhere, whether in things like art in museums, like you just saw, or in the world of, say, advertising, or print journalism.
So a newspaper becomes out of date as soon as it's printed.
And here is this morning's newspaper, and we have some Wimbledon news, which is great.
Voice: ... To the grass, and it's very important that you adapt and you, you have to be flexible, you have to be willing to change direction at a split second, and she does all that. She's won this title.
MM: And that linking of the digital content to something that's physical is what we call an aura, and I'll be using that term a little bit as we go through the talk.
So, what's great about this is it isn't just a faster, more convenient way to get information in the real world, but there are times when actually using this medium allows you to be able to display information in a way that was never before possible.
So what I have here is a wireless router.
My American colleagues have told me I've got to call it a router, so that everyone here understands — (Laughter) — but nonetheless, here is the device.
So now what I can do is, rather than getting the instructions for the device online, I can simply point at it, the device is recognized, and then -- Voice: Begin by plugging in the grey ADSL cable.
Then connect the power. Finally, the yellow ethernet cable.
(Applause) The incredible work that made that possible was done here in the U.K. by scientists at Cambridge, and they work in our offices, and I've got a lovely picture of them here.
They couldn't all be on stage, but we're going to bring their aura to the stage, so here they are.
They're not very animated. (Laughter) This was the fourth take, I'm told. (Laughter) Okay. So, as we're talking about Cambridge, let's now move on to technical advancements, because since we started putting this technology on mobile phones less than 12 months ago, the speed and the processing in these devices has grown at a really phenomenal rate, and that means that I can now take cinema-quality 3D models and place them in the world around me, so I have one over here.
(Music) (Dinosaur roaring) (Laughter) MM: I should leap in.
(Music) (Dinosaur roaring) (Applause) So then, after the fun, comes the more emotional side of what we do, because effectively, this technology allows you to see the world through someone's eyes, and for that person to be able to take a moment in time and effectively store it and tag it to something physical that exists in the real world.
What's great about this is, the tools to do this are free.
So we have teachers who've tagged up textbooks, teachers who've tagged up school classrooms, and a great example of this is a school in the U.K.
Teacher: See what happens. (Children talking) Keep going.
Child: TV. (Children react) Child: Oh my God.
Teacher: Now move it either side. See what happens.
Move away from it and come back to it.
Child: Oh, that is so cool.
Second child: It's magic.
(Laughter) MM: (Laughs) So, it's not magic.
So, as sort of — I'm told it's called a stadium wave, so we're going to start from this side of the room on the count of three, and go over to here.
Tamara, are you recording?
One, two, three. Go!
Now, we have lots of people who are doing this already, and we've talked a little bit about the educational side.
On the emotional side, we have people who've done things like send postcards and Christmas cards back to their family with little messages on them.
We have people who have, for example, taken the inside of the engine bay of an old car and tagged up different components within an engine, so that if you're stuck and you want to find out more, you can point and discover the information.
We're all very, very familiar with the Internet.
In the last 20 years, it's really changed the way that we live and work, and the way that we see the world, and what's great is, we sort of think this is the next paradigm shift, because now we can literally take the content that we share, we discover, and that we enjoy and make it a part of the world around us.
It's completely free to download this application.
If you have a good Wi-Fi connection or 3G, this process is very, very quick.
It's just going to do a tiny bit of processing to convert that image that we just took into a sort of digital fingerprint, and the great thing is, if you're a professional user, -- so, a newspaper -- the tools are pretty much identical to what we've just used to create this demonstration.
The only difference is that you've got the ability to add in links and slightly more content. Are you now ready?
MM: Okay. So, I'm told we're ready, which means we can now point at the image, and there you all are.
MM on video: One, two, three. Go!
MM: Well done. We've been Aurasma. Thank you.
(Applause)
Frugal Digital is essentially a small research group at C.I.D.
where we are looking to find alternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society.
That's what we're after.
And we do this because we actually believe that silicon technology today is mostly about a culture of excess.
It's about the fastest and the most efficient and the most dazzling gadget you can have, while about two-thirds of the world can hardly reach the most basic of this technology to even address fundamental needs in life, including health care, education and all these kinds of very fundamental issues.
So before I start, I want to talk about a little anecdote, a little story about a man I met once in Mumbai.
So this man, his name is Sathi Shri.
He is an outstanding person, because he's a small entrepreneur.
He runs a little shop in one of the back streets of Mumbai.
It's incredible, because I couldn't believe my eyes when I once just happened to bump into him.
Basically, what he does is, he has all these services for micro-payments and booking tickets and all kinds of basic things that you would go online for, but he does it for people offline and connects to the digital world.
More importantly, he makes his money by selling these mobile recharge coupons, you know, for the prepaid subscriptions.
But then, in the backside, he's got this little nook with a few of his employees where they can fix almost anything.
And it's pretty incredible because I took my iPhone there, and he was like, "Yeah, do you want an upgrade?"
"Yes." (Laughter) I was a bit skeptical, but then, I decided to give him a Nokia instead. (Laughter) But what I was amazed about is this reverse engineering and know-how that's built into this little two meters of space.
They have figured out everything that's required to dismantle, take things apart, rewrite the circuitry, re-flash the firmware, do whatever you want to with the phone, and they can fix anything so quickly.
But then we were wondering whether this is a local phenomenon, or is truly global?
And, over time, we started understanding and systematically researching what this tinkering ecosystem is about, because that is something that's happening not just in one street corner in Mumbai.
It's even happening in Africa, like, for example, in Cape Town we did extensive research on this.
Even here in Doha I found this little nook where you can get alarm clocks and watches fixed, and it's a lot of tiny little parts. It's not easy.
You've got to try it on your own to believe it.
It's this entire ecosystem of low-cost parts and supplies that are produced all over the world, literally, and then redistributed to basically service this industry, and you can even buy salvaged parts.
But what does this new, sort of, approach give us?
But there's an interesting paradigm.
There's the traditional crafts, and then there's the technology crafts.
We call it the technology crafts because these are emerging.
It's not something that's institutionalized.
So we said, "What can we get out of this?
The main thing is a fix-it-locally culture, which is fantastic because it means that your product or your service doesn't have to go through a huge bureaucratic system to get it fixed.
So it means that you can actually embed pretty clever algorithms and lots of other kinds of extendable ideas into really simple devices.
So, what we call this is a silicon cottage industry.
It's basically what was the system or the paradigm before the industrial revolution is now re-happening in a whole new way in small digital shops across the planet in most developing countries.
So, we kind of toyed around with this idea, and we said, "What can we do with this?
Can we make a little product or a service out of it?"
So one of the first things we did is this thing called a multimedia platform. We call it a lunch box.
Basically one of the contexts that we studied was schools in very remote parts of India.
So there is this amazing concept called the one-teacher school, which is basically a single teacher who is a multitasker who teaches this amazing little social setting.
It's an informal school, but it's really about holistic education.
The only thing that they don't have is access to resources. They don't even have a textbook sometimes, and they don't even have a proper curriculum.
So we said, "What can we do to empower this teacher to do more?" How to access the digital world?
Instead of being the sole guardian of information, be a facilitator to all this information.
So we said, "What are the steps required to empower the teacher?"
How do you make this teacher into a digital gateway, and how do you design an inexpensive multimedia platform that can be constructed locally and serviced locally?"
So we walked around.
So the thing that we got was a little mobile phone with a little pico projector that comes for about 60 dollars.
We went a bought a flashlight with a very big battery, and a bunch of small speakers.
So essentially, the mobile phone gives us a connected multimedia platform.
It allows us to get online and allows us to load up files of different formats and play them.
Believe me, those little classrooms are really noisy.
We dismantle the whole thing, we reassemble it in a new configuration, and we do this hardware mashup, systematically training the guy how to do this.
(Applause) And we systematically field tested, because in the field testing we learned some important lessons, and we went through many iterations.
One of the key issues was battery consumption and charging.
Often the roofs are broken, so you don't have enough darkness in the classroom to do these things.
We extended this idea. We tested it many times over, and the next version we came up with was a box that kind of could trickle charge on solar energy, but most importantly connect to a car battery, because a car battery is a ubiquitous source of power in places where there's not enough electricity or erratic electricity.
And the other key thing that we did was make this box run off a USB key, because we realized that even though there was GPRS and all that on paper, at least, in theory, it was much more efficient to send the data on a little USB key by surface mail.
It might take a few days to get there, but at least it gets there in high definition and in a reliable quality.
So we made this box, and we tested it again and again and again, and we're going through multiple iterations to do these things.
But it's not limited to just education.
It's about this little device called a medi-meter.
It's basically a little health care screening tool that we developed.
In India, there is a context of these amazing people, the health care workers called ASHA workers.
They are essentially foot soldiers for the health care system who live in the local community and are trained with basic tools and basic concepts of health care, and the main purpose is basically to inform people to basically, how to lead a better life, but also to divert or sort of make recommendations of what kind of health care should they approach?
They are basically referral services, essentially.
But the problem with that is that we realized after a bunch of research that they are amazing at referring people to the nearest clinic or the public health care system, but what happens at the public health care system is this: these incredibly long lines and too many people who overload the system simply because there's not enough doctors and facilities for the population that's being referred.
So everything from a common cold to a serious case of malaria gets almost the same level of attention, and there's no priorities.
So we said, "Come on, there's got to be a better way of doing this for sure."
So the real key question was, how do we empower this woman?
And that'll make such a huge difference on the system, because the amount of waiting time and the amount of distances that people need to travel, often sometimes seven to 15 kilometers, sometimes by foot, to get a simple health check done, is very, very detrimental in the sense that it really dissuades people from getting access to health care.
So what we did was that we converted this device into a medical device.
Bruno, do you want to join us? (Cheers) Come along. (Applause) So, what we're going to do is that we're going to measure a few basic parameters on you, including your pulse rate and the amount of oxygen that's there in your blood.
So you're going to put your thumb on top of this.
Bruno Giussani: Like this, works?
Vinay Venkatraman: Yeah. That's right. BG: Okay.
(Beeps) It even beeps, because it's an alarm clock, after all.
So ... (Laughter) So I take it into the start position, and then I press the read button. (Beeps) So it's taking a little reading from you. (Beeps) And then the pointer goes and points to three different options.
Let's see what happens here.
(Beeps) Oh Bruno, you can go home, actually.
BG: Great. Good news. (Applause) VV: So ... (Applause) So the thing about this is that if the pointer, unfortunately, had pointed to the red spot, we would have to rush you to a hospital.
So that was a very simple three-step screening process that could basically change the equation of how public health care works in so many different ways.
BG: Thank you for the good news. VV: Yeah.
(Applause) So, very briefly, I'll just explain to you how this is done, because that's the more interesting part.
So essentially, the three things that are required to make this conversion from this guy to this guy is a cheap remote control for a television that you can almost find in every home today, some parts from a computer mouse, basically, something that you can scavenge for very low cost, and a few parts that have to be pre-programmed.
We are going through some reference tests to compare it against professional equipment to see if there's a degree of change in efficacy and if it actually makes an impact in people's lives. But most importantly, what we are trying to do right now is we are trying to scale this up, because there are over 250,000 ASHA workers on the ground who are these amazing foot soldiers, and if we can give at least a fraction of them the access to these things, it just changes the way the economics of public health care works, and it changes the way systems actually function, not just on a systematic planning level, but also in a very grassroots, bottom-up level.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
It was a machine that was never built, and yet, it will be built.
It was a machine that was designed long before anyone thought about computers.
If you know anything about the history of computers, you will know that in the '30s and the '40s, simple computers were created that started the computer revolution we have today, and you would be correct, except for you'd have the wrong century.
The first computer was really designed in the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s.
It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped, and the bits of it that were built are here in South Kensington.
That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage.
Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbage because his hair is always completely unkempt like this in every single picture. (Laughter) He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of, part of the aristocracy of Britain, and on a Saturday night in Marylebone, were you part of the intelligentsia of that period, you would have been invited round to his house for a soiree — and he invited everybody: kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people — and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines.
I really miss that era, you know, where you could go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer get demonstrated to you. (Laughter) But Babbage, Babbage himself was born at the end of the 18th century, and was a fairly famous mathematician.
He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge, and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking.
He's less well known than either of them because he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices and never made any of them.
The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd.
Every time he had a good idea, he'd think, "That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one.
I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one."
He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street, and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying, "I bid you good day, sir." (Laughter) The thing he designed was this monstrosity here, the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this, this is a view from above.
And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine — that's why it's computer architecture — and tell you about this machine, which is a computer.
It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal.
So he's got memory.
This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like.
Of course, it's this big.
Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical.
This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU which is in the Science Museum.
The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic -- so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division -- which already is a bit of a feat in metal, but it could also do something that a computer does and a calculator doesn't: this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision.
Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute, and we think about chips today, we can't look inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny.
All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does, but of course you need to program this thing, and of course, Babbage used the technology of the day and the technology that would reappear in the '50s, '60s and '70s, which is punch cards. This thing over here is one of three punch card readers in here, and this is a program in the Science Museum, just not far from here, created by Charles Babbage, that is sitting there — you can go see it — waiting for the machine to be built.
And there's not just one of these, there's many of them.
Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard, in France, had created the Jacquard loom, which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards, so he was just repurposing the technology of the day, and like everything else he did, he's using the technology of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam, mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same year as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday, who would completely revolutionize everything with the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things.
Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology, so steam and things.
Obviously, you've got a computer now.
You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory.
You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises, this thing, "Click, clack click click click," steam engine, "Ding," right? (Laughter) You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer.
This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for another machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2, which he never built, but which the Science Museum did build in the '80s and '90s.
You also need graphics, right?
I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics, so he said, "Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paper and an ink pen and I'll make it plot."
So he designed a plotter as well, and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty much a pretty good machine.
Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace.
Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along.
This lady is the daughter of the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, and her mother, being a bit worried that she might have inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness, thought, "I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution.
We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down."
(Laughter) Because of course, there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy, so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter) Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training, and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother, and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine.
The Duke of Wellington is there, you know, get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it, and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really, who said, "I understand what this does, and I understand the future of this machine."
And we owe to her an enormous amount because we know a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build because of her.
Now, some people call her the first programmer.
This is actually from one of -- the paper that she translated.
This is a program written in a particular style.
It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer, and actually, she did something more amazing.
Rather than just being a programmer, she saw something that Babbage didn't.
Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics.
He was building a machine to do mathematics, and Lovelace said, "You could do more than mathematics on this machine." And just as you do, everyone in this room already's got a computer on them right now, because they've got a phone.
If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phone or computer or any other computing device is mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom.
So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap.
When you say she's a programmer, she did do some, but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be much, much more than this.
Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along, Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again.
Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical.
Turing's machine was entirely theoretical.
Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective, but Turing told us something very important.
He laid down the mathematical foundations for computer science, and said, "It doesn't matter how you make a computer."
We could go back to Babbage's machine and just make it tiny. All those things are computers.
There is in a sense a computing essence.
And so suddenly, you get this link where you say this thing Babbage had built really was a computer.
It used punch cards, which were being fed in, and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81.
Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives, there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages of notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine.
One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28, and that is also the name of a charity that I started with Doron Swade, who was the curator of computing at the Science Museum, and also the person who drove the project to build a difference engine, and our plan is to build it.
The project has a number of parts to it.
One was the scanning of Babbage's archive.
That's been done. The second is now the study of all of those plans to determine what to build.
The third part is a computer simulation of that machine, and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum.
When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works, because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you, you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, "Ah, I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating, I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating." (Laughter) But in between that we're going to do a simulation.
Babbage himself wrote, he said, as soon as the analytical engine exists, it will surely guide the future course of science.
Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddling with new plans, but when it did get built, of course, in the 1940s, everything changed.
Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like in motion with a video which shows just one part of the CPU mechanism working.
So, give me five years.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Hi. This is my mobile phone.
A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom.
With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt.
And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous.
All this is possible with your mobile phone.
I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin.
Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change.
This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket.
Who in the room has a mobile phone with you?
That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.
But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life.
These are 35,830 lines of information.
Raw data.
And why are these informations there?
This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive.
This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users.
Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email?
And if you use your mobile phone, where you are.
All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider.
And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this."
They said, we don't want this data retention.
We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us.
They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "We don't want this."
And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear."
And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0.
Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.
Can they really store all this information about us?
So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me.
So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information.
But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information.
Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional.
But then after a while I realized, this is my life.
This is six months of my life, into this file.
But then I said, I want to go out with this information.
Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean.
So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this.
This is a visualization of six months of my life.
You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward.
You can see every step I take.
And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between.
That's a little bit scary.
First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times.
And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other.
And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network.
You can see all of this.
If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing.
If you have access to this information, you can control your society.
This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran.
This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information.
And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years.
Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket.
And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened.
Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline.
They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time.
But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction.
But you have to fight for your self-determination today.
You have to fight for it every day.
So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated.
And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you.
So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As an architect, I often ask myself, what is the origin of the forms that we design?
If we could free ourselves from our education?
What would these unseen forms look like?
I propose we look to nature.
Nature has been called the greatest architect of forms.
And I'm not saying that we should copy nature, I'm not saying we should mimic biology, instead I propose that we can borrow nature's processes.
Nature's main process of creation, morphogenesis, is the splitting of one cell into two cells.
And these cells can either be identical, or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division.
A simple volume, the cube.
If we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again, then after 16 iterations, 16 steps, we end up with 400,000 surfaces and a shape that looks, for instance, like this.
We can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape, or this shape.
So we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we're making the fold, but essentially you're looking at a folded cube.
We can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions.
So that means that surfaces can intersect themselves, they can become impossibly small.
Surfaces can become porous.
The forms that I showed before were made actually through very long trial and error.
A far more effective way to create forms, I have found, is to use information that is already contained in forms.
So, for instance, we can plot the length of the edges.
White surfaces have long edges, black ones have short ones.
So now I'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it, but instead I'm establishing a rule, I'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded.
These forms look elaborate, but the process is a very minimal one.
So let's bring this process to architecture.
I chose to design a column.
Columns are architectural archetypes.
They've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty, about technology.
A challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column.
I started using four cylinders.
Through a lot of experimentation, these cylinders eventually evolved into this.
The closer one gets, the more new features one discovers.
An architect who's drawing them with a pen and a paper would probably take months, or it would take even a year to draw all the sections, all of the elevations, you can only create something like this through an algorithm.
The more interesting question, perhaps, is, are these forms imaginable?
Usually, an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing.
So this leads to a new role for the architect.
One needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there.
And to go back to the analogy with nature, one can begin to think in terms of populations, one can talk about permutations, about generations, about crossing and breeding to come up with a design.
And the architect is really, he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes.
But enough of the theory.
There's been a lot of talk now about 3D printing.
For me, or for my purpose at this moment, there's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale, on the one hand, and resolution and speed, on the other.
But it was very labor intensive.
There's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual and the physical.
The physical model, on the other hand, is 2,700 layers, one millimeter thick, it weighs 700 kilos, it's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium.
And the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again.
Machines are getting faster, it's getting less expensive, and there's some promising technological developments just on the horizon.
These are images from the Gwangju Biennale.
Each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns.
So where does this leave us?
I think this project gives us a glimpse of the unseen objects that await us if we as architects begin to think about designing not the object, but a process to generate objects.
I've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature; there's countless other ones.
And, if I may add, at one point we will build them.
Thank you. (Applause)
It's very, very difficult to speak at the end of a conference like this, because everyone has spoken. Everything has been said.
So I thought that what may be useful is to remind us of some of the things that have gone on here, and then maybe offer some ideas which we can take away, and take forward and work on.
That's what I'd like to try and do.
We came here saying we want to talk about "Africa: the Next Chapter."
What we want to look at is "Africa: the Next Chapter," and that's this: a healthy, smiling, beautiful African.
And I think it's worth remembering what we've heard through the conference right from the first day, where I heard that all the important statistics have been given -- about where we are now, about how the continent is doing much better.
And the importance of that is that we have a platform to build on.
So I'm not going to spend too much time -- just to show you, refresh your memories that we are here for "Africa: the Next Chapter" because for the first time there really is a platform to build on.
And inflation has come down.
Now this is a huge achievement.
You know, we've built up reserves. Why is that important?
It's because it shows off our economies, shows off our currencies and gives a platform on which people can plan and build, including businesses.
We've also seen some evidence that all this is making a difference because private investment flows have increased.
And in many other countries this is happening.
Why is this important? Because it shows confidence.
People are now confident to bring -- if your people in the diaspora bring their money back, it shows other people that, look, there is emerging confidence in your country.
And instead of an outflow, you are now getting a net inflow.
It's important that we build this platform, that we have the president, Kikwete, and others of our leaders who are saying, "Look, we must do something different."
Because we are confronted with a challenge.
62 percent of our population is below the age of 24.
What does this mean?
This means that we have to focus on how our youth are going to be engaged in productive endeavor in their lives.
You have to focus on how to create jobs, make sure they don't fall into disease, and that they get an education.
But most of all that they are productively engaged in life, and that they are creating the kind of productive environment in our countries that will make things happen.
There is no way you can know what people want.
And to say that for me, the next stage of building this platform that now enables us to move forward -- and we mustn't make light of it.
It was only 5, 6, 7 years ago we couldn't even talk about the next chapter, because we were in the old chapter.
The economies were not growing.
We were having negative per capita growth.
So let's not forget that it's taken a lot to build this, including all those things that we tried to do in Nigeria that Dele referred to.
And it brings us to the debate that has been going on here: aid versus private sector, aid versus trade, etc.
The issue here is how do we get a partnership that involves government donors, the private sector and ordinary African people taking charge of their own lives?
To move our continent forward, to do the things that need doing that I talked about -- getting young people employed.
For me, the issue about aid -- I don't think that Africans need to now go all the way over to the other side and feel bad about aid.
Africa has been giving the other countries aid.
Mo Ibrahim said at a debate we were at that he dreams one day when Africa will be giving aid.
And I said, "Mo, you're right. We have -- no, but we've already been doing it!
The U.K. and the U.S. could not have been built today without Africa's aid."
(Applause) It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today!
So when they try to give back, we shouldn't be on the defensive.
Is it being directed effectively?
From 1967 to '70, Nigeria fought a war -- the Nigeria-Biafra war.
And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old.
We spent much of our time with my mother cooking.
For the army -- my father joined the army as a brigadier -- the Biafran army.
We were on the Biafran side.
And we were down to eating one meal a day, running from place to place, but wherever we could help we did.
At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad.
People, children were dying of kwashiorkor.
I'm sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures.
Well, I was in the middle of it.
In the midst of all this, my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days.
We thought she was going to die.
My father was not there.
He was in the army.
My sister fell very ill with malaria.
She was three years old and I was 15.
And she had such a high fever. We tried everything.
Until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor, who was looking at people and giving them meds.
Now I put my sister on my back -- burning -- and I walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back.
It was really hot. I was very hungry.
I was scared because I knew her life depended on my getting to this woman.
I walked 10 kilometers, putting one foot in front of the other.
I got there and I saw huge crowds.
Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door.
She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in?
I had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back, find a way to a window.
And while they were trying to break down the door, I climbed in through the window, and jumped in.
In about two to three hours, she started to move.
And then they toweled her down because she started sweating, which was a good sign.
And then my sister woke up.
And about five or six hours later, she said we could go home.
I walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk I ever had.
I was so happy -- (Applause) -- that my sister was alive!
Today she's 41 years old, a mother of three, and she's a physician saving other lives.
And now let me become less sentimental, and say that saving lives -- which some of the aid we get does on this continent -- when you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
And as an economist, we can also look at that side of the story.
So if we save people from HIV/AIDS, if we save them from malaria, it means they can form the base of production for our economy.
And by the same token -- as someone said yesterday -- if we don't and they die, their children will become a burden on the economy.
So even from an economic standpoint, if we leave the social and the humanitarian, we need to save lives now.
However, I will also tell you that I'm one of those who doesn't believe that this is the sole answer.
What has happened in Europe?
Do you all know that Spain -- part of the EU -- got 10 billion dollars in aid from the rest of the EU?
Resources that were transferred to them -- and were the Spanish ashamed of this? No!
The EU transferred 10 billion. Where did they use it?
Have you been to southern Spain lately? There are roads everywhere.
Infrastructure everywhere.
Did you know that Ireland got 3 billion dollars in aid?
Ireland is one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union today.
For which many people, even from other parts of the world, are going there to find jobs.
What did they do with the 3 billion dollars in aid?
They used it to build an information superhighway, gain infrastructure that enables them to participate in the information technology revolution, and to create jobs in their economy.
Today, the European Union is busy transferring aid.
My frustration is if they can build infrastructure in Spain -- which is roads, highways, other things that they can build -- I say then, why do they refuse to use the same aid to build the same infrastructure in our countries? (Applause) When we ask them and tell them what we need, one of my worries today is that we have many foundations now.
Now we talk about the World Bank, IMF, and accountability, all that and the EU.
And one day, these foundations have so much money, they will overtake the official aid that is being given.
And they're also going from country to country, and many times trying to find what to do.
And many of them are not really familiar with the continent.
They are just discovering.
And many times I don't see Africans working with them.
They are just going alone! (Applause) And many times I get the impression that they are not really even interested in hearing from Africans who might know.
They want to visit us, see what's happening on the ground and make a decision.
And now I'm maybe being harsh.
But I worry because this money is so important.
Are we on their boards when they make decisions about where to channel money? Are we there?
Will we make the same mistake that we made before?
Have our presidents and our leaders -- everyone is talking about -- have they ever called these people together and said, "Look, your foundation and your foundation -- you have so much money, we are grateful.
Let's sit down and really tell you where the money should be channeled and where this aid should go."
Have we done that? The answer is no.
And each one is making their own individual effort.
And then 10 years from now, billions will again have gone into Africa, and we would still have the same problems.
This is what gives us the hopeless image.
As a continent, here are our priorities.
Ten years from now we will have the same story, and we will be repeating the same things.
That health that you're working on cannot be sustainable without infrastructure.
That education will work better if we've got electricity and railroads, and so on.
That agriculture will work better if there are railroads to get the goods to market.
Invest some of your resources in that, too."
And then we can see that this is one combination of private, international, multilateral money, private sector and the African that we can put together as a partnership, so that aid can be a facilitator.
One of the reasons why China is a bit popular with Africans now -- one of the reasons is not only just that, you know, these people are stupid and China is coming to take resources.
It's because there's a little more leverage in terms of the Chinese.
If you tell them, "We need a road here," they will help you build it.
They don't shy away from infrastructure.
He said, "There are two things you need only.
Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline.
It's the same. We need infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline.
Second thing, for the private sector, people are afraid to take risks on the continent.
Why can't some of this aid be used as a kind of guarantee mechanisms, to enable people to take risk?
(Applause) And finally, because they are both standing at my -- I'm out of time.
But there are people -- women -- creating jobs.
They'll come back home and get disgruntled, and it will result in difficulties we don't want.
But I want you to realize that resources in the hands of African women is a powerful tool.
Beatrice Gakuba has created 200 jobs from her flower business in Rwanda.
She wants to expand.
She needs another 20 million.
She will create another 100, 200 more jobs.
And lastly, what are you going to do to be part of this partnership of aid, government, private sector and the African as an individual?
Thank you. (Applause)
Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second.
But now, 50 years later, we can go a million times faster and see the world not at a million or a billion, but one trillion frames per second.
I present to you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion.
And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight, or see inside our body without an x-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera.
Now if I take a laser pointer and turn it on and off in one trillionth of a second -- which is several femtoseconds -- I'll create a packet of photons barely a millimeter wide.
And that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet.
Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle?
How does light look in slow motion?
[Light in Slow Motion ... 10 Billion x Slow] Now, the whole event -- (Applause) Now remember, the whole event is effectively taking place in less than a nanosecond -- that's how much time it takes for light to travel.
But I'm slowing down in this video by a factor of 10 billion, so you can see the light in motion.
(Laughter) But Coca-Cola did not sponsor this research.
(Laughter) Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on.
So the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside.
Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves.
Many of the photons eventually reach the cap and then they explode in various directions.
As you can see, there's a bubble of air and it's bouncing around inside.
Meanwhile, the ripples are traveling on the table, and because of the reflections at the top, you see at the back of the bottle, after several frames, the reflections are focused.
(Laughter) A day, a week? Actually, a whole year.
It'll be a very boring movie -- (Laughter) of a slow, ordinary bullet in motion.
And what about some still-life photography?
You can watch the ripples, again, washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back.
It's like throwing a stone in a pond of water.
I thought: this is how nature paints a photo, one femto frame at a time, but of course our eye sees an integral composite.
But if you look at this tomato one more time, you will notice, as the light washes over the tomato, it continues to glow.
It doesn't become dark. Why is that?
Because the tomato is actually ripe, and the light is bouncing around inside the tomato, and it comes out after several trillionths of a second.
So in the future, when this femto-camera is in your camera phone, you might be able to go to a supermarket and check if the fruit is ripe without actually touching it.
(Laughter) So how did my team at MIT create this camera?
Now, as photographers, you know, if you take a short exposure photo, you get very little light.
So what we do is we send that bullet -- that packet of photons -- millions of times, and record again and again with very clever synchronization, and from the gigabytes of data, we computationally weave together to create those femto-videos I showed you.
And we can take all that raw data and treat it in very interesting ways.
So, Superman can fly.
Some other heroes can become invisible.
The idea is that we could shine some light on the door, it's going to bounce, go inside the room, some of that is going to reflect back on the door, and then back to the camera.
On the left, you see our femto-camera.
So after our paper was published in Nature Communications, it was highlighted by Nature.com, and they created this animation.
(Music) [A laser pulse is fired] (Music) Ramesh Raskar: We're going to fire those bullets of light, and they're going to hit this wall, and because of the packet of the photons, they will scatter in all the directions, and some of them will reach our hidden mannequin, which in turn will again scatter that light, and again in turn, the door will reflect some of that scattered light.
And a tiny fraction of the photons will actually come back to the camera, but most interestingly, they will all arrive at a slightly different time slot.
(Music) And because we have a camera that can run so fast -- our femto-camera -- it has some unique abilities.
It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light.
And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance.
Can we see it in full 3D?
So this is our reconstruction.
(Music) (Applause) Now, we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend.
Or we can look for survivors in hazardous conditions by looking at light reflected through open windows.
But of course, because of tissue and blood, this is quite challenging, so this is really a call for scientists to start thinking about femto-photography as really a new imaging modality to solve the next generation of health-imaging problems.
Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art -- an art of ultra-fast photography.
And I realized that all the gigabytes of data that we're collecting every time, are not just for scientific imaging.
But we can also do a new form of computational photography, with time-lapse and color coding.
And we look at those ripples.
Remember: The time between each of those ripples is only a few trillionths of a second.
When you look at the ripples under the cap, the ripples are moving away from us.
The ripples should be moving towards us.
It turns out, because we're recording nearly at the speed of light, we have strange effects, and Einstein would have loved to see this picture.
(Laughter) The order at which events take place in the world appears in the camera sometimes in reversed order.
So by applying the corresponding space and time warp, we can correct for this distortion.
(Applause)
When I'm walking around an art gallery, rooms and rooms full of paintings, after about 15 or 20 minutes, I realize I'm not thinking about the paintings.
Instead, I'm thinking about that cup of coffee I desperately need to wake me up.
I'm suffering from gallery fatigue.
And I leave feeling actually unhappy.
And that's not a good experience, to leave a gallery like that.
(Laughter) The thing is, I think we should give ourselves a break.
If you think about going into a restaurant, when you look at the menu, are you expected to order every single thing on the menu?
Well I'm trying to take a different approach.
I choose a painting. It might just be one painting in 50.
And then the second thing I do is I stand in front of that painting, and I tell myself a story about it.
Why a story? Well, I think that we are wired, our DNA tells us to tell stories.
We tell stories all the time about everything, and I think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy, chaotic place, and sometimes stories, we're trying to make sense of the world a little bit, trying to bring some order to it.
There are three paintings I'm going to show you now that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks and want to tell stories about them.
The first one needs little introduction -- "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer, 17th-century Dutch painter.
I first saw it when I was 19, and I immediately went out and got a poster of it, and in fact I still have that poster. 30 years later it's hanging in my house.
One day, 16 years after I had this poster on my wall, I lay in bed and looked at her, and I suddenly thought, I wonder what the painter did to her to make her look like that.
And it was the first time I'd ever thought that the expression on her face is actually reflecting how she feels about him.
Now I began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship.
So I went to find out. I did some research and discovered, we have no idea who she is.
In fact, we don't know who any of the models in any of Vermeer's paintings are, and we know very little about Vermeer himself.
I can do whatever I want, I can come up with whatever story I want to.
So here's how I came up with the story.
How does Vermeer know her?
Well, there've been suggestions that she is his 12-year-old daughter.
The daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting.
And I thought, no, it's a very intimate look, but it's not a look a daughter gives her father.
For one thing, in Dutch painting of the time, if a woman's mouth was open, it was indicating sexual availability.
It would have been inappropriate for Vermeer to paint his daughter like that.
So it's not his daughter, but it's somebody close to him, physically close to him.
A servant, a lovely servant.
So, she's in the house.
How do we get her into the studio?
We don't know very much about Vermeer, but the little bits that we do know, one thing we know is that he married a Catholic woman, they lived with her mother in a house where he had his own room where he -- his studio. He also had 11 children.
It would have been a chaotic, noisy household.
And if you've seen Vermeer's paintings before, you know that they're incredibly calm and quiet.
How does a painter paint such calm, quiet paintings with 11 kids around?
Well, he compartmentalizes his life.
Not the wife, not the kids. Okay, the maid can come in and clean."
Now, all of the women, or most of the women in Vermeer's other paintings wore velvet, silk, fur, very sumptuous materials.
So those are not her pearl earrings. Whose are they?
Amongst them a yellow coat with white fur, a yellow and black bodice, and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings, different women in the paintings, Vermeer's paintings.
She's in the studio with him for a long time.
These paintings took a long time to make.
She's wearing his wife's pearl earring.
And does the wife know? Maybe not.
(Laughter) The next painting I'm going to talk about is called "Boy Building a House of Cards" by Chardin.
He's an 18th-century French painter best known for his still lifes, but he did occasionally paint people.
And in fact, he painted four versions of this painting, different boys building houses of cards, all concentrated.
I like this version the best, because some of the boys are older and some are younger, and to me, this one, like Goldilocks's porridge, is just right.
He's not quite a child, and he's not quite a man.
And I looked at his face. It's like a Vermeer painting a bit.
And he didn't look at me. He was still looking at his cards, and that's one of the seductive elements of this painting is, he's so focused on what he's doing that he doesn't look at us.
And that is, to me, the sign of a masterpiece, of a painting when there's a lack of resolution.
Not the painter, I don't want to think about the painter.
He's a man, a servant, an older servant looking at this younger servant, saying, "Look at me. I want to warn you about what you're about to go through. Please look at me."
And he never does.
I've written an entire novel about her, and I still don't know if she's happy or sad.
And we may make a story, and it satisfies us momentarily, but not really, and we come back again and again.
The last painting I'm going to talk about is called "Anonymous" by anonymous. (Laughter) This is a Tudor portrait bought by the National Portrait Gallery.
They thought it was a man named Sir Thomas Overbury, and then they discovered that it wasn't him, and they have no idea who it is.
Now, in the National Portrait Gallery, if you don't know the biography of the painting, it's kind of useless to you.
He's not happy, and why isn't he happy?
The second thing that really attracted me were his bright red cheeks.
This must be a guy who blushes all the time.
Silk, gray, those beautiful buttons.
And you know what it makes me think of, is it's sort of snug and puffy; it's like a duvet spread over a bed.
I kept thinking of beds and red cheeks, and of course I kept thinking of sex when I looked at him, and I thought, is that what he's thinking about?
And I thought, well, Henry VIII, okay.
Who is going to inherit his name and his fortune?
You put all those together, and you've got your story to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back.
Now, here's the story.
It's short.
"Rosy" I am still wearing the white brocade doublet Caroline gave me.
It has a plain high collar, detachable sleeves and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread, set close together so that the fit is snug.
The doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed.
Perhaps that was the intention.
I first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor.
I knew even before I stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed.
As a boy, I was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys, but not by George.
When I made the announcement, George did not turn rosy, but went pale as my doublet.
He should not have been surprised.
It has been a common assumption that I would one day marry his cousin.
But it is difficult to hear the words aloud.
Afterwards, I found George on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden.
Despite drinking steadily all afternoon, he was still pale.
We stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces.
"What do you think of my doublet?" I asked.
He glanced at me. "That collar looks to be strangling you."
"We can still hunt and play cards and attend court.
George did not speak.
"I am 23 years old. It is time for me to marry and produce an heir. It is expected of me."
George drained another glass of claret and turned to me.
"Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, James.
He never used my nickname again.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi.
I'm a digital creator, I make things specifically for the internet.
Like, a few years ago, I made a video series called "Every Single Word" where I edited down popular films to only the words spoken by people of color, as a way to empirically and accessibly talk about the issue of representation in Hollywood.
Then, later, as transphobic bathroom bill started gaining media attention around the United States, I hosted and produced an interview series called "Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People" where I did exactly that.
(Applause) Thank you.
And then, are you familiar with those unboxing videos on YouTube where YouTubers open up the latest electronic gadgets?
Great, so I satirized those in a weekly series, where instead I unboxed intangible ideologies like police brutality, masculinity and the mistreatment of Native Americans.
(Laughter) My work -- Thanks.
(Laughter) Mom, hi.
(Laughter) So, my work became popular.
Very popular.
I got millions of views, a ton of great press and a slew of new followers.
But the flip side of success on the internet is internet hate.
From "beta" to "snowflake" and, of course, the ever-popular "cuck."
(Laughter) So, "beta," for those of you unfamiliar, is shorthand online lingo for "beta male."
But let's be real, I wear pearl earrings and my fashion aesthetic is rich-white-woman-running-errands, so I'm not angling to be an alpha.
(Laughter) Now, "snowflake" is a put-down for people who are sensitive and believe themselves to be unique, and I'm a millennial and an only child, so, duh!
(Laughter) But my favorite, favorite, favorite is "cuck."
But friends, I am so gay, that if I had a wife, I would encourage her to cheat on me.
(Laughter) Thank you.
Like Marcos, who wrote, "You're everything I hate in a human being."
Thank you, Marcos.
Others are more concise.
Like Donovan, who wrote, "gaywad fagggggg."
Now, I do need to point out, Donovan is not wrong, OK?
In fact, he's right on both counts, so credit where credit is due.
Thank you, Donovan.
But my favorite thing about this is that once Brian was done typing, his finger must have slipped because then he sent me the thumbs-up emoji.
(Laughter) It's fun to talk about these messages now.
Right?
And it's cathartic to laugh at them.
But I can tell you that it really does not feel good to receive them.
At first, I would screenshot their comments and make fun of their typos, but this soon felt elitist and ultimately unhelpful.
So over time, I developed an unexpected coping mechanism.
Because most of these messages I received were through social media, I could often click on the profile picture of the person who sent them and learn everything about them.
Not to justify what they wrote, right?
So, I called some of them -- only the ones I felt safe talking to -- with a simple opening question: "Why did you write that?"
The first person I spoke to was Josh.
I was so nervous for our first conversation.
So I couldn't use tools like muting or blocking.
Of course, I guess, I could have hung up on him.
But I didn't want to.
Because I liked talking to him.
Because I liked him.
Here's a clip of one of our conversations.
(Audio) Dylan Marron: Josh, you said you're about to graduate high school, right?
Josh: Mmm-hmm.
DM: How is high school for you?
Josh: Am I allowed to use the H-E-double-hockey-stick word?
Josh: It was hell.
DM: Really?
Josh: And it's still hell right now, even though it's only two weeks left.
I'm a little bit bigger -- I don't like to use the word "fat," but I am a little bit bigger than a lot of my classmates and they seem to judge me before they even got to know me.
DM: That's awful.
I mean, I also just want to let you know, Josh, I was bullied in high school, too.
So did our common ground of being bullied in high school erase what he wrote me?
No.
And did our single phone conversation radically heal a politically divided country and cure systemic injustice?
No, absolutely not, right?
Absolutely.
Because some of the hate I received was from "my side."
So when Matthew, a queer liberal artist like me publicly wrote that I represented some of the worst aspects of liberalism, I wanted to ask him this.
DM: You tagged me in this post.
Matthew (Laughing): I honestly didn't think that you would.
Matthew: I have been.
And I just said, "No, I don't care."
DM: And did you not care?
Matthew: But it was hard.
DM: At the end of these conversations, there's often a moment of reflection.
A reconsideration.
And that's exactly what happened at the end of my call with a guy named Doug who had written that I was a talentless propaganda hack.
(Audio) Did the conversation we just had -- does it, like, make you feel differently about how you write online?
I didn't really know anything really about you.
And I think that a lot of times, that's what the comment sections really are, it's really a way to get your anger at the world out on random profiles of strangers, pretty much.
DM (Laughing): Yeah, right.
Doug: But it definitely has made me rethink the way that I interact with people online.
DM: So I've collected these conversations and many others for my podcast "Conversations with People Who Hate Me."
(Laughter) Before I started this project, I thought that the real way to bring about change was to shut down opposing viewpoints through epically worded video essays and comments and posts, but I soon learned those were only cheered on by the people who already agreed with me.
Now in every one of my calls, I always ask my guests to tell me about themselves.
And empathy, it turns out, is a key ingredient in getting these conversations off the ground, but it can feel very vulnerable to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with.
So I established a helpful mantra for myself.
Empathy is not endorsement.
Empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with does not suddenly compromise your own deeply held beliefs and endorse theirs.
Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right?
It just means that I'm acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me.
I also want to be super clear about something.
You know, I've reached out to a lot of people for this podcast.
And some have politely declined, others have read my message and ignored it, some have blocked me automatically when I sent the invitation and one guy actually agreed to do it and then, five minutes into the call, hung up on me.
And with the internet comes comment sections, and with comment sections inevitably comes hate.
So as you are watching this talk, you can feel free to call me whatever you'd like.
You can call me a "gaywad," a "snowflake," a "cuck," a "beta," or "everything wrong with liberalism."
And if you refuse or block me automatically or agree and hang up on me, then maybe, babe, the snowflake is you.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause)
This man is wearing what we call a bee beard. (Laughter) A beard full of bees.
He probably has a queen bee tied to his chin, and the other bees are attracted to it.
We're very co-evolved, because we depend on bees for pollination and, even more recently, as an economic commodity.
This is called colony collapse disorder, and it's bizarre. Researchers around the globe still do not know what's causing it, but what we do know is that, with the declining numbers of bees, the costs of over 130 fruit and vegetable crops that we rely on for food is going up in price.
Here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs, or urban agriculture.
We're familiar with the image on the left that shows a local neighborhood garden in the South End.
That's where I call home. I have a beehive in the backyard.
Check out this image above the orange line in Boston.
Try to spot the beehive. It's there.
The way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden, and it's not because they need to be.
It's just because people are uncomfortable with the idea, and that's why I want you today to try to think about this, think about the benefits of bees in cities and why they really are a terrific thing.
Let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works.
So we know flowers, we know fruits and vegetables, even some alfalfa in hay that the livestock for the meats that we eat, rely on pollinators, but you've got male and female parts to a plant here, and basically pollinators are attracted to plants for their nectar, and in the process, a bee will visit some flowers and pick up some pollen, or that male kind of sperm counterpart, along the way, and then travel to different flowers, and eventually an apple, in this case, will be produced.
The blossom end has fallen off by the time we eat it, but that's a basic overview of how pollination works.
We have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change, no doubt.
What about in 100 years, if we have green rooftops everywhere, and gardening, and we create our own crops right in the cities? We save on the costs of transportation, we save on a healthier diet, and we also educate and create new jobs locally.
We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living.
Here's some data that we collected through our company with Best Bees, where we deliver, install and manage honeybee hives for anybody who wants them, in the city, in the countryside, and we introduce honeybees, and the idea of beekeeping in your own backyard or rooftop or fire escape, for even that matter, and seeing how simple it is and how possible it is.
Now this has been a huge problem for many years, basically since the late 1980s, when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses, bacteria and fungal diseases with it.
Overwintering success is hard, and that's when most of the colonies are lost, and we found that in the cities, bees are surviving better than they are in the country.
A bit counterintuitive, right?
We think, oh, bees, countryside, agriculture, but that's not what the bees are showing.
The bees like it in the city. (Laughter) Furthermore, they also produce more honey.
The urban honey is delicious.
The bees in Boston on the rooftop of the Seaport Hotel, where we have hundreds of thousands of bees flying overheard right now that I'm sure none of you noticed when we walked by, are going to all of the local community gardens and making delicious, healthy honey that just tastes like the flowers in our city.
So the yield for urban hives, in terms of honey production, is higher as well as the overwintering survival, compared to rural areas.
Again, a bit counterintuitive.
So the problems of bees today isn't necessarily something new. It has been happening since over a thousand years ago, but what we don't really notice are these problems in cities.
So one thing I want to encourage you to think about is the idea of what an urban island is.
You think in the city maybe the temperature's warmer.
Why are bees doing better in the city?
This is a big question now to help us understand why they should be in the city.
Perhaps there's more pollen in the city.
With the trains coming in to urban hubs, they can carry pollen with them, very light pollen, and it's just a big supermarket in the city.
A lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks.
Perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in [rural] areas.
Perhaps there are other things that we're just not thinking about yet, but that's one idea to think about, urban islands.
What you can see up here is a map of the world, and we're tracking the spread of this varroa mite.
Now, the varroa mite is what changed the game in beekeeping, and you can see, at the top right, the years are changing, we're coming up to modern times, and you can see the spread of the varroa mite from the early 1900s through now.
It's 1968, and we're pretty much covering Asia.
Think of the kids today. Their childhood's a bit different.
They don't experience this.
So we need bees and they're disappearing and it's a big problem.
What can we do here?
And it worked out that way.
So my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier.
I'm not one of the many researchers around the world who's looking at the effects of pesticides or diseases or habitat loss and poor nutrition on bees.
We're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines, through yogurt, like probiotics, and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees, and this process is so easy, even a 7-year-old can do it.
You just mix up some pollen, sugar and water, and whatever active ingredient you want to put in, and you just give it right to the bees. No chemicals involved, just immune boosters.
We exercise, we eat healthy, we take vitamins.
Bring them to areas where they're thriving and try to make them healthier before they get sick.
I spent many years in grad school trying to poke bees and do vaccines with needles. (Laughter) Like, years, years at the bench, "Oh my gosh, it's 3 a.m.
It's like, "Ugh," so that's what we do. (Laughter) I'd love to share with you some images of urban beehives, because they can be anything.
You can paint a hive to match your home.
These are three hives on the rooftop of the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, and they're beautiful here. I mean, we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets, and these bees are terrific, and they also will use herbs that are growing in the garden.
Honey is a great nutritional substitute for regular sugar because there are different types of sugars in there.
We also have a classroom hives project, where -- this is a nonprofit venture -- we're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting, behind glass, and used as an educational tool.
The bees fly right into the outfield of Fenway Park.
Nobody notices it. If you're not a flower, these bees do not care about you. (Laughter) They don't. They don't. They'll say, "S'cuse me, flying around." (Laughter) Some other images here in telling a part of the story that really made urban beekeeping terrific is in New York City, beekeeping was illegal until 2010.
So this is important.
We have also some images of honey from Brooklyn.
Now, this was a mystery in the New York Times where the honey was very red, and the New York State forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street. (Laughter) So you can tailor your honey to taste however you want by planting bee-friendly flowers.
Paris has been a terrific model for urban beekeeping.
They've had hives on the rooftop of their opera house for many years now, and that's what really got people started, thinking, "Wow, we can do this, and we should do this."
Also in London, and in Europe across the board, they're very advanced in their use of green rooftops and integrating beehives, and I'll show you an ending note here.
What can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think of sustainable cities in the future?
Well, really, just change your perspective.
Try to understand that bees are very important.
You could even get your own hive if you want.
Thank you. (Applause)
In the past several days, I heard people talking about China.
And also, I talked to friends about China and Chinese Internet.
Something is very challenging to me.
I want to make my friends understand: China is complicated.
You can't just tell a one sided story.
I'll give an example. China is a BRIC country.
BRIC country means Brazil, Russia, India and China.
This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy.
But at the same time, on the other hand, China is a SICK country, the terminology coined by Facebook IPO papers -- file.
He said the SICK country means Syria, Iran, China and North Korea.
(Laughter) Another project was built up to watch China and Chinese Internet.
And now, today I want to tell you my personal observation in the past several years, from that wall.
So, if you are a fan of the Game of Thrones, you definitely know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom.
It prevents weird things from the north.
Same was true for China.
But China also has a great firewall.
It's not only to defend the Chinese regime from overseas, from the universal values, but also to prevent China's own citizens to access the global free Internet, and even separate themselves into blocks, not united.
So, basically the "Internet" has two Internets.
One is the Internet, the other is the Chinanet.
But if you think the Chinanet is something like a deadland, wasteland, I think it's wrong.
But we also use a very simple metaphor, the cat and the mouse game, to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between Chinese censorship, government censorship, the cat, and the Chinese Internet users. That means us, the mouse.
But sometimes this kind of a metaphor is too simple.
So today I want to upgrade it to 2.0 version.
In China, we have 500 million Internet users.
That's the biggest population of Netizens, Internet users, in the whole world.
So even though China's is a totally censored Internet, but still, Chinese Internet society is really booming.
You have Google, we have Baidu.
You have Twitter, we have Weibo.
You have Facebook, we have Renren.
You have YouTube, we have Youku and Tudou.
(Laughter) So, that's the kind of the thing I call smart censorship.
That's not only to censor you.
On the one hand, he wants to satisfy people's need of a social network, which is very important; people really love social networking.
That's also the reason Google was pulled out from China, because they can't accept the fact that Chinese government wants to keep the server.
Sometimes the Arab dictators didn't understand these two hands.
For example, Mubarak, he shut down the Internet.
He wanted to prevent the Netizens [from criticizing] him.
We all know Mubarak is technically dead.
But also, Ben Ali, Tunisian president, didn't follow the second rule.
He allowed Facebook, a U.S.-based service, to continue to stay on inside of Tunisia.
The same thing happend. He was the first to topple during the Arab Spring.
But those two very smart international censorship policies didn't prevent Chinese social media [from] becoming a really public sphere, a pathway of public opinion and the nightmare of Chinese officials.
Because we have 300 million microbloggers in China.
It's the entire population of the United States.
So when these 300 million people, microbloggers, even they block the tweet in our censored platform.
But itself -- the Chinanet -- but itself can create very powerful energy, which has never happened in the Chinese history.
2011, in July, two [unclear] trains crashed, in Wenzhou, a southern city.
Right after the train crash, authorities literally wanted to cover up the train, bury the train.
So it angered the Chinese Netizens.
The first five days after the train crash, there were 10 million criticisms of the posting on social media, which never happened in Chinese history.
So, the up is the Embassy data, the PM 2.5.
He showed 148, they showed it's dangerous for the sensitive group.
So a suggestion, it's not good to go outside.
He says it's good. It's good to go outside.
But 99 percent of Chinese microbloggers stand firmly on the Embassy's side.
I live in Beijing. Every day, I just watch the American Embassy's data to decide whether I should open my window.
Why is Chinese social networking, even within the censorship, so booming? Part of the reason is Chinese languages.
You know, Twitter and Twitter clones have a kind of a limitation of 140 characters.
But in English it's 20 words or a sentence with a short link.
(Laughter) But in Chinese language, it's really about 140 characters, means a paragraph, a story.
For example, this is Hamlet, of Shakespeare.
It's the same content. One, you can see exactly one Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets.
Chinese is always cheating, right?
So because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media.
It even has its own name, with Weibo.
"Weibo" is the Chinese translation for "microblog".
It has its own innovation.
At the commenting area, [it makes] the Chinese Weibo more like Facebook, rather than the original Twitter.
So these innovations and clones, as the Weibo and microblogging, when it came to China in 2009, it immediately became a media platform itself.
It became the media platform of 300 million readers.
It became the media.
But also, Chinese social media is really changing Chinese mindsets and Chinese life.
For example, they give the voiceless people a channel to make your voice heard.
We had a petition system. It's a remedy outside the judicial system, because the Chinese central government wants to keep a myth: The emperor is good. The old local officials are thugs.
So that's why the petitioner, the victims, the peasants, want to take the train to Beijing to petition to the central government, they want the emperor to settle the problem.
But when more and more people go to Beijing, they also cause the risk of a revolution.
So they send them back in recent years.
And even some of them were put into black jails.
But now we have Weibo, so I call it the Weibo petition.
People just use their cell phones to tweet.
So your sad stories, by some chance your story will be picked up by reporters, professors or celebrities.
One of them is Yao Chen, she is the most popular microblogger in China, who has about 21 million followers.
They're almost like a national TV station.
If you -- so a sad story will be picked up by her.
So this Weibo social media, even in the censorship, still gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together, talking together.
It's like a big TED, right?
But also, it is like the first time a public sphere happened in China.
Chinese people start to learn how to negotiate and talk to people.
But also, the cat, the censorship, is not sleeping.
It's so hard to post some sensitive words on the Chinese Weibo.
For example, you can't post the name of the president, Hu Jintao, and also you can't post the city of Chongqing, the name, and until recently, you can't search the surname of top leaders.
So, the Chinese are very good at these puns and alternative wording and even memes.
They even name themselves -- you know, use the name of this world-changing battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab.
River crab is héxiè, is the phonogram for harmonization, for censorship.
So, when some very political, exciting moments happened, you can see on Weibo, you see a lot of very weird stories happened.
Weird phrases and words, even if you have a PhD of Chinese language, you can't understand them.
But you can't even expand more, no, because Chinese Sina Weibo, when it was founded was exactly one month after the official blocking of Twitter.com.
For example, anything you want to post, like "get together" or "meet up" or "walk," it is automatically recorded and data mined and reported to a poll for further political analyzing.
Why? Because they have the data.
They have everything in their hands.
So they can use the 1984 scenario data mining of the dissident.
So the crackdown is very serious.
The cat is the censorship, but Chinese is not only one cat, but also has local cats. Central cat and local cats.
(Laughter) You know, the server is in the [central] cats' hands, so even that -- when the Netizens criticize the local government, the local government has not any access to the data in Beijing.
So these three years, in the past three years, social movements about microblogging really changed local government, became more and more transparent, because they can't access the data.
The server is in Beijing.
The story about the train crash, maybe the question is not about why 10 million criticisms in five days, but why the Chinese central government allowed the five days of freedom of speech online.
It's never happened before.
And so it's very simple, because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy, this independent kingdom.
So they want an excuse -- public opinion is a very good excuse to punish him.
But also, the Bo Xilai case recently, very big news, he's a princeling.
But from February to April this year, Weibo really became a marketplace of rumors.
But if you dare to retweet or mention any fake coup about Beijing, you definitely will be arrested.
So this kind of freedom is a targeted and precise window.
So Chinese in China, censorship is normal.
Something you find is, freedom is weird.
Because he was a very popular Leftist leader, so the central government wanted to purge him, and he was very cute, he convinced all the Chinese people, why he is so bad.
So Weibo, the 300 million public sphere, became a very good, convenient tool for a political fight.
But this technology is very new, but technically is very old.
It was made famous by Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, because he mobilized millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution to destroy every local government.
It's very simple, because Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead the public opinion.
They just give them a target window to not censor people.
Not censoring in China has become a political tool.
So that's the update about this game, cat-and-mouse.
Social media changed Chinese mindset.
More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege.
But also, it gave the Chinese a national public sphere for people to, it's like a training of their citizenship, preparing for future democracy.
But it didn't change the Chinese political system, and also the Chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions.
So, what's the future?
Whatever the future is, we should fight against the [cat].
There is not only in China, but also in the United States there are some very small, cute but bad cats.
(Laughter) SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP and ITU.
And also, like Facebook and Google, they claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see them dating the cats.
So my conclusion is very simple.
We Chinese fight for our freedom, you just watch your bad cats.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
It changes what we see. It changes what we remember.
And as an experiment, because I dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a Saturn V launch for this particular movie, because I put it out there, I felt a little nervous about it, so I need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage, and when I played this stock footage, I simply wanted to find out what people remembered, what was memorable about it?
And what I discovered is, because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we're doing this film, there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things.
They had all kinds of things. Shots were combined, and I was just really curious, I mean, what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come, how'd you come up with this sort of description?
And what I discovered is, what I should do is not actually replicate what they saw, is replicate what they remembered.
So this is what we created for "Apollo 13."
I basically shot everything with short lenses, which means that you're very close to the action, but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance, so I was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you haven't really quite seen before. (Music) And then I'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it.
(Music) Tom Hanks: Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey.
And in this particular case, this is the climax of the movie, and, you know, the weight of achieving it was simply take a model, throw it out of a helicopter, and shoot it.
And that's simply what I did.
We had a NASA consultant who was actually an astronaut, who was actually on some of the missions, of Apollo 15, and he was there to basically double check my science.
And, I guess somebody thought they needed to do that.
(Laughter) I don't know why, but they thought they did.
So we were, he's a hero, he's an astronaut, and we're all sort of excited, and, you know, I gave myself the liberty of saying, you know, some of the shots I did didn't really suck that bad.
And so maybe, you know, we were feeling kind of a little good about it, so I brought him in here, and he needed to really check and see what we were doing, and basically give us our A plus report card, and so I showed him some shots we were working on, and waiting for the reaction that you hope for, which is what I got. (Music) (Launch noises) So I showed him these two shots, and then he basically told me what he thought.
(Laughter) So what I got from him is, he turned to me and said, "You would never, ever design a rocket like that.
You would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out. Can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that?
And he was looking at me. It's like, Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of America's finest moments with fire extinguishers.
(Laughter) And I'm not going to argue with you. You're an astronaut, a hero, and I'm from New Jersey, so -- (Laughter) I'm just going to show you some footage.
I'm just going to show you some footage, and tell me what you think.
So I showed him this, and this is actual footage that he was on. This is Apollo 15. This was his mission.
So I showed him this, and the reaction I got was interesting.
("That's wrong too.") (Laughter) So, and what happened was, I mean, what I sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently.
He remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system, perfectly safe rocket launch, because he's sitting in a rocket that has, like, a hundred thousand pounds of thrust, built by the lowest bidder.
(Laughter) (Applause) So he twisted his memory around.
Now, Ron Howard ran into Buzz Aldrin, who was not on the movie, so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage, and he just responded as he would respond, and I'll run this.
Ron Howard: Buzz Aldrin came up to me and said, "Hey, that launch footage, I saw some shots I'd never seen before. Did you guys, what vault did you find that stuff in?" And I said, "Well, no vault, Buzz, we generated all that from scratch."
And he said, "Huh, that's pretty good. Can we use it?"
(Explosion) ("Sure") (Laughter) RL: I think he's a great American.
(Laughter) So, "Titanic" was, if you don't know the story, doesn't end well.
(Laughter) Jim Cameron actually photographed the real Titanic.
So this is the footage he photographed, and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring.
I automatically wanted to see this ship, this magnificent ship, basically in all its glory, and conversely, I wanted to see it not in all its glory, basically go back to what it looks like.
Jim went three miles went down, and I went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage.
And so, but what you're emoting to, or what you're looking at, had the same feeling, the same haunting quality, that Jim's footage had, so I found it so fascinating that our brains sort of, once you believe something's real, you transfer everything that you feel about it, this quality you have, and it's totally artificial.
And the very next shot, right after this -- So you can see what I was doing.
And when Jim shot it, it was only one sub, because he was photographing from the other, and I don't remember if I did this or Jim did this.
Gloria Stuart: That was the last time Titanic ever saw daylight.
RL: So, what I did is basically I had another screening room experience where I was basically tracking where I was looking, or where we were looking, and of course you're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship, and then at some point, I'm changing the periphery of the shot, I'm changing, it's becoming the rusted wreck, and then I would run it every day, and then I would find exactly the moment that I stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it, and the moment my eye shifted, we just marked it to the frame.
(Music) And it's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us, which is, as soon as you shift your attention, something changes, and then I left the little scarf going, because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot, really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck, essentially. That's where they were buried forever.
Or something like that. I just made that up.
(Laughter) It was, incidentally, the last time I ever saw daylight.
It was a long film to work on. (Laughter) Now, "Hugo" was another interesting movie, because the movie itself is about film illusions.
Very dangerous, very impossible to do, and particularly on our stage, because there literally is no way to actually move this train, because it fits so snugly into our set.
So let me show you the scene, and then I basically used the trick that was identified by Sergei Eisenstein, which is, if you have a camera that's moving with a moving object, what is not moving appears to be moving, and what is moving appears to be stopped, so what you're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all, and what is actually moving is the floor.
So this is the shot. That's a little video of what you're looking at there, which is our little test, so that's actually what you're seeing, and I thought it was sort of an interesting thing, because it was, part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which I can't take credit for.
(Laughter) (Applause) "And the thing without the wheels, that moves."
Precisely. (Laughter) Brings me to the next, and final -- Marty's not going to see this, is he? (Laughter) This isn't viewed outside of -- (Laughter) The next illustration is something that, there's like all one shot theory. It's a very elegant way of telling a story, especially if you're following somebody on a journey, and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way, and what we wanted to do based on the shot in "Goodfellas," which is one of the great shots ever, a Martin Scorsese film, of basically following Henry Hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk going through the Copacabana and being treated in a special way.
He was the master of his universe, and we wanted Hugo to feel the same way, so we created this shot.
(Music) That's Hugo. (Music) And we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him, we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe, and his universe is, you know, behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way, and we had to make it feel that this is his normal, everyday sort of life, so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important, and of course, in shooting in 3D, which is basically it's a huge camera that's hanging off of a giant stick, so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task, and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the "Goodfellas" shot.
It's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys.
So I was kind of proud of it, and I went to a friend of mine, and said, "You know, this is, you know, kind of the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on.
What do you think was the reason?"
And he said, "Because no one knows you had anything to do with it."
(Laughter) So, all I can say is, thank you, and that's my presentation for you. (Applause) (Applause)
I thought if I skipped it might help my nerves, but I'm actually having a paradoxical reaction to that, so that was a bad idea. (Laughter) Anyway, I was really delighted to receive the invitation to present to you some of my music and some of my work as a composer, presumably because it appeals to my well-known and abundant narcissism. (Laughter) And I'm not kidding, I just think we should just say that and move forward. (Laughter) So, but the thing is, a dilemma quickly arose, and that is that I'm really bored with music, and I'm really bored with the role of the composer, and so I decided to put that idea, boredom, as the focus of my presentation to you today.
And I'm going to share my music with you, but I hope that I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story, tells a story about how I used boredom as a catalyst for creativity and invention, and how boredom actually forced me to change the fundamental question that I was asking in my discipline, and how boredom also, in a sense, pushed me towards taking on roles beyond the sort of most traditional, narrow definition of a composer.
What I'd like to do today is to start with an excerpt of a piece of music at the piano.
(Music) Okay, I wrote that. (Laughter) No, it's not — (Applause) Oh, why thank you.
No, no, I didn't write that.
But we can ask the question, "But is it music?"
It's going to be a kind of a refrain as we go through the presentation.
So here we have this piece of music by Beethoven, and my problem with it is, it's boring.
I mean, you — I'm just like, a hush, huh -- It's like -- (Laughter) It's Beethoven, how can you say that?
No, well, I don't know, it's very familiar to me.
I had to practice it as a kid, and I'm really sick of it. So -- (Laughter) I would, so what I might like to try to do is to change it, to transform it in some ways, to personalize it, so I might take the opening, like this idea -- (Music) and then I might substitute -- (Music) and then I might improvise on that melody that goes forward from there -- (Music) (Music) So that might be the kind of thing -- Why thank you.
In fact, I think it's not better than it. The thing is -- (Laughter) -- it's more interesting to me. It's less boring for me.
It gets a little bit boring, and so pretty soon I go through other instruments, they become familiar, and eventually I find myself designing and constructing my own instrument, and I brought one with me today, and I thought I would play a little bit on it for you so you can hear what it sounds like.
So this gives you a little bit of an idea of the sound world of this instrument, which I think is quite interesting and it puts me in the role of the inventor, and the nice thing about — This instrument is called the Mouseketeer ... (Laughter) and the cool thing about it is I'm the world's greatest Mouseketeer player. (Laughter) Okay? (Applause) So in that regard, this is one of the things, this is one of the privileges of being, and here's another role, the inventor, and by the way, when I told you that I'm the world's greatest, if you're keeping score, we've had narcissism and solipsism and now a healthy dose of egocentricism.
I know some of you are just, you know, bingo! Or, I don't know. (Laughter) Anyway, so this is also a really enjoyable role.
I should concede also that I'm the world's worst Mouseketeer player, and it was this distinction that I was most worried about when I was on that prior side of the tenure divide.
I'm crying on the inside. There are still scars.
I get to write, sometimes for soloists and I get to work with one person, sometimes full orchestras, and I work with a lot of people, and this is probably the capacity, the role creatively for which I'm probably best known professionally.
Now, some of my scores as a composer look like this, and others look like this, and some look like this, and I make all of these by hand, and it's really tedious.
It takes a long, long time to make these scores, and right now I'm working on a piece that's 180 pages in length, and it's just a big chunk of my life, and I'm just pulling out hair.
I have a lot of it, and that's a good thing I suppose. (Laughter) So this gets really boring and really tiresome for me, so after a while the process of notating is not only boring, but I actually want the notation to be more interesting, and so that's pushed me to do other projects like this one.
This is an excerpt from a score called "The Metaphysics of Notation."
The full score is 72 feet wide.
It was gratifying musically, but I think the more important thing is it was exciting because I got to take on another role, especially given that it appeared in a museum, and that is as visual artist. (Laughter) We're going to fill up the whole thing, don't worry. (Laughter) I am multitudes. (Laughter) So one of the things is that, I mean, some people would say, like, "Oh, you're being a dilettante," and maybe that's true. I can understand how, I mean, because I don't have a pedigree in visual art and I don't have any training, but it's just something that I wanted to do as an extension of my composition, as an extension of a kind of creative impulse.
I can understand the question, though. "But is it music?"
I mean, there's not any traditional notation.
I took the Copenhagen subway map and I renamed all the stations to abstract musical provocations, and the players, who are synchronized with stopwatches, follow the timetables, which are listed in minutes past the hour.
They follow the second hands, and as they pass over the various symbols, the players respond musically.
And once again, this is, for me, interesting.
Another role that I like to take on is that of the performance artist.
(Music) Okay, I hear you were laughing nervously because you too could hear that the drill was a little bit sharp, the intonation was a little questionable. (Laughter) Let's watch just another clip.
(Music) You can see the mayhem continues, and there's, you know, there were no clarinets and trumpets and flutes and violins. Here's a piece that has an even more unusual, more peculiar instrumentation.
So, yeah, I get it, with, like, the weird appliances and then the total absence of conventional instruments and this glut of conductors, people might, you know, wonder, yeah, "Is this music?"
You're going to notice a lot of conventional instruments in this clip. (Music) (Music) This, in fact, is not the title of this piece.
I was a bit mischievous. In fact, to make it more interesting, I put a space right in here, and this is the actual title of the piece.
Let's continue with that same excerpt.
This is going to be a piece called "Aphasia," and it's for hand gestures synchronized to sound, and this invites yet another role, and final one I'll share with you, which is that of the choreographer.
And the score for the piece looks like this, and it instructs me, the performer, to make various hand gestures at very specific times synchronized with an audio tape, and that audio tape is made up exclusively of vocal samples.
I recorded an awesome singer, and I took the sound of his voice in my computer, and I warped it in countless ways to come up with the soundtrack that you're about to hear.
(Music) So that gives you a little taste of that piece. (Applause) Yeah, okay, that's kind of weird stuff.
Is it music? Here's how I want to conclude.
The important question is, "Is it interesting?"
And with that, I thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
As you might imagine, I'm absolutely passionate about dance. I'm passionate about making it, about watching it, about encouraging others to participate in it, and I'm also really passionate about creativity.
Creativity for me is something that's absolutely critical, and I think it's something that you can teach.
I was born in the 1970s, and John Travolta was big in those days: "Grease," "Saturday Night Fever," and he provided a fantastic kind of male role model for me to start dancing. My parents were very up for me going.
They absolutely encouraged me to take risks, to go, to try, to try. I had an opportunity, an access to a local dance studio, and I had an enlightened teacher who allowed me to make up my own and invent my own dances, so what she did was let me make up my own ballroom and Latin American dances to teach to my peers.
And that was the very first time that I found an opportunity to feel that I was able to express my own voice, and that's what's fueled me, then, to become a choreographer.
I feel like I've got something to say and something to share.
And I guess what's interesting is, is that I am now obsessed with the technology of the body.
So for me, choreography is very much a process of physical thinking. It's very much in mind, as well as in body, and it's a collaborative process.
You know, it's a distributed cognitive process in a way.
I work often with designers and visual artists, obviously dancers and other choreographers, but also, more and more, with economists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, people really who come from very different domains of expertise, where they bring their intelligence to bear on a different kind of creative process.
What I thought we would do today a little bit is explore this idea of physical thinking, and we're all experts in physical thinking.
And we all know what that body is like in the real world, so one of the aspects of physical thinking that we think about a lot is this notion of proprioception, the sense of my own body in the space in the real world.
So we're experts in physical thinking already.
We just don't think about our bodies very much.
But how is it that we can start to think about using choreographic thinking, kinesthetic intelligence, to arm the ways in which we think about things more generally?
I thought what I'd do is, I'd use three versions of physical thinking to make something.
Usually, dance has a stimulus or stimuli, and I thought I'd take something simple, TED logo, we can all see it, it's quite easy to work with, and I'm going to do something very simply, where you take one idea from a body, and it happens to be my body, and translate that into somebody else's body, so it's a direct transfer, transformation of energy.
And I'm going to imagine this, you can do this too if you like, that I'm going to just take the letter "T" and I'm going to imagine it in mind, and I'm going to place that outside in the real world. So I absolutely see a letter "T" in front of me.
Yeah? It's absolutely there.
So all I did was take my hand and then I move my hand.
It gives me something to do, something to work towards.
If I were to take that letter "T" and flatten it down on the floor, here, maybe just off the floor, all of a sudden I could do maybe something with my knee, yeah? Whoa. So If I put the knee and the arms together, I've got something physical, yeah? And I can start to build something.
So what I'm going to do just for one and a half minutes or so is I'm going to take that concept, I'm going to make something, and the dancers behind me are going to interpret it, they're going to snapshot it, they're going to take aspects of it, and it's almost like I'm offloading memory and they're holding onto memory? Yeah?
So just have a little watch about how they're, how they're accessing this and what they're doing, and I'm just going to take this letter "T," the letter "E," and the letter "D," to make something. Okay. Here goes.
So I have to get myself in the zone. Right.
I'm not remembering what I'm doing.
Strike moment.
That's it.
So we're starting to build a phrase.
So what they're doing, let's see, something like that, so what they're doing is grasping aspects of that movement and they're generating it into a phrase.
I'm not asking them to copy exactly.
They're using the information that they receive to generate the beginnings of a phrase.
So I've taken this aspect of TED and translated it into something that's physical.
Some dancers, when they're watching action, take the overall shape, the arc of the movement, the kinetic sense of the movement, and use that for memory.
So they're solving this problem for me, having a little -- They're constructing that phrase.
They have something and they're going to hold on to it, yeah? One way of making.
That's going to be my beginning in this world premiere.
Okay. From there I'm going to do a very different thing.
So basically I'm going to make a duet.
Can you rotate?
Here we go, ready? And ... bam, bake ... (clicks metronome) Great. Okay, from there, you're both getting up.
Underneath. Jump. Paolo, kick. Don't care where. Kick.
Imagine that there's a circle in front of you, yeah?
Avoid it. Avoid it. Whoom. Kick it out of the way.
Kick it out of the way. Throw it into the audience. Whoom.
Throw it into the audience again.
Ready and go ... um. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) The duet starts. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) So yeah, okay, good. Okay, nice, very nice. (Applause) So good. So -- (Applause) Okay. So that was -- (Applause) Well done. (Applause) That was the second way of working.
The second one, which is using them as objects to think with their architectural objects, I do a series of provocations, I say, "If this happens, then that.
They're starting it already, and this is a task-based method, where they have the autonomy to make all of the decisions for themselves.
So I'd like us just to do, we're going to do a little mental dance, a little, in this little one minute, so what I'd love you to do is imagine, you can do this with your eyes closed, or open, and if you don't want to do it you can watch them, it's up to you.
Just for a second, think about that word "TED" in front of you, so it's in mind, and it's there right in front of your mind.
What I'd like you to do is transplant that outside into the real world, so just imagine that word "TED" in the real world.
I now decide where I'm going to be in that space, so I'm down on this small part of the bottom rib of the letter "E," and I'm thinking about it, and I'm imagining this space that's really high and above. If I asked you to reach out — you don't have to literally do it, but in mind — reach out to the top of the "E," where would you reach?
If I already then said about that space that you're in, let's infuse it with the color red, what does that do to the body? If I then said to you, what happens if that whole wall on the side of "E" collapses and you have to use your weight to put it back up, what would you be able to do with it?
Okay, you can open your eyes if you had them closed.
So the dancers have been working on them.
So, you're going to do the first solo that we made, yeah blah blah blah blah, we go into the duet, yeah, blah blah blah blah. The next solo, blah blah blah blah, yeah, and both at the same time, you do the last solutions.
The one you made. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) Well done. Okay, good. Super. So -- (Applause) So -- (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So -- three versions. (Applause) Oh. (Laughs) (Applause) Three versions of physical thinking, yeah?
Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Here we go. (Applause) (Applause)
Many people face the news each morning with trepidation and dread.
Every day, we read of shootings, inequality, pollution, dictatorship, war and the spread of nuclear weapons.
These are some of the reasons that 2016 was called the "Worst. Year. Ever."
Until 2017 claimed that record -- (Laughter) and left many people longing for earlier decades, when the world seemed safer, cleaner and more equal.
But is this a sensible way to understand the human condition in the 21st century?
As Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."
Let's compare the most recent data on the present with the same measures 30 years ago.
Last year, Americans killed each other at a rate of 5.3 per hundred thousand, had seven percent of their citizens in poverty and emitted 21 million tons of particulate matter and four million tons of sulfur dioxide.
But 30 years ago, the homicide rate was 8.5 per hundred thousand, poverty rate was 12 percent and we emitted 35 million tons of particulate matter and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide.
What about the world as a whole?
Last year, the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons.
But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 60,000 nuclear weapons.
True, last year was a terrible year for terrorism in Western Europe, with 238 deaths, but 1988 was worse with 440 deaths.
Was 1988 a particularly bad year?
Or are these improvements a sign that the world, for all its struggles, gets better over time?
Might we even invoke the admittedly old-fashioned notion of progress?
To do so is to court a certain amount of derision, because I have found that intellectuals hate progress.
(Laughter) (Applause) And intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress.
(Laughter) Now, it's not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you.
Most academics and pundits would rather have their surgery with anesthesia than without it.
Well, Professor Pangloss, as it happens, was a pessimist.
A true optimist believes there can be much better worlds than the one we have today.
But all of this is irrelevant, because the question of whether progress has taken place is not a matter of faith or having an optimistic temperament or seeing the glass as half full.
It's a testable hypothesis.
For all their differences, people largely agree on what goes into human well-being: life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness.
All of these things can be measured.
Let's go to the data, beginning with the most precious thing of all, life.
For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30.
250 years ago, in the richest countries of the world, a third of the children did not live to see their fifth birthday, before the risk was brought down a hundredfold.
Today, that fate befalls less than six percent of children in the poorest countries of the world.
It could bring devastation to any part of the world.
200 years ago, 90 percent of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty.
Today, fewer than 10 percent of people do.
For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars.
Today, they are never at war with each other.
The last great power war pitted the United States against China 65 years ago.
The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22 per hundred thousand per year in the early '50s to 1.2 today.
Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States.
Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade, with two-thirds of the world's people living in democracies.
It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms, so that today a Western European has 1/35th the chance of being murdered compared to his medieval ancestors.
It happened again in colonial New England, in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town, and in Mexico.
Yes, we are 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning.
Before the 17th century, no more than 15 percent of Europeans could read or write.
Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up.
Today, more than 90 percent of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write.
In the 19th century, Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week.
Do all of these gains in health, wealth, safety, knowledge and leisure make us any happier?
The answer is yes.
In 86 percent of the world's countries, happiness has increased in recent decades.
Well, I hope to have convinced you that progress is not a matter of faith or optimism, but is a fact of human history, indeed the greatest fact in human history.
Why don't people appreciate progress?
Part of the answer comes from our cognitive psychology.
We estimate risk using a mental shortcut called the "availability heuristic."
The easier it is to recall something from memory, the more probable we judge it to be.
The other part of the answer comes from the nature of journalism, captured in this satirical headline from "The Onion," "CNN Holds Morning Meeting to Decide What Viewers Should Panic About For Rest of Day."
Also, bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day.
Well, if you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why the world has been coming to an end for a very long time indeed.
Let me address some questions about progress that no doubt have occurred to many of you.
Well, not exactly.
It's good to be accurate.
Of course we should be aware of suffering and danger wherever they occur, but we should also be aware of how they can be reduced, because there are dangers to indiscriminate pessimism.
One of them is fatalism.
If all our efforts at improving the world have been in vain, why throw good money after bad?
The poor will always be with you.
And since the world will end soon -- if climate change doesn't kill us all, then runaway artificial intelligence will -- a natural response is to enjoy life while we can, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
The other danger of thoughtless pessimism is radicalism.
If our institutions are all failing and beyond hope for reform, a natural response is to seek to smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn the empire to the ground, on the hope that whatever rises out of the ashes is bound to be better than what we have now.
Well, if there is such a thing as progress, what causes it?
Progress is not some mystical force or dialectic lifting us ever higher.
It's not a mysterious arc of history bending toward justice.
It's the result of human efforts governed by an idea, an idea that we associate with the 18th century Enlightenment, namely that if we apply reason and science that enhance human well-being, we can gradually succeed.
Is progress inevitable? Of course not.
Progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time.
That would be a miracle, and progress is not a miracle but problem-solving.
Problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn.
The unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like Deep Decarbonization for climate change and Global Zero for nuclear war.
Finally, does the Enlightenment go against human nature?
In my book "The Blank Slate," I argued that the human prospect is more tragic than utopian and that we are not stardust, we are not golden and there's no way we are getting back to the garden.
Admittedly, it's not easy to replicate my own data-driven epiphany with humanity at large.
Some intellectuals have responded with fury to my book "Enlightenment Now," saying first how dare he claim that intellectuals hate progress, and second, how dare he claim that there has been progress.
At the same time, the most common response I have received from readers is gratitude, gratitude for changing their view of the world from a numb and helpless fatalism to something more constructive, even heroic.
I believe that the ideals of the Enlightenment can be cast a stirring narrative, and I hope that people with greater artistic flare and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it further.
We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness and at times astounding stupidity.
Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption.
We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts.
We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our ingenuity and experience.
We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy, for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration.
Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism and the narrative arts.
As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature.
We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences.
From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing and could someday encompass the globe.
Much suffering remains and tremendous peril, but ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.
This heroic story is not just another myth.
Myths are fictions, but this one is true, true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have.
As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true and which ones false, as any of them might be and any could become.
And this story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity, to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being, for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering and knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Since 1992, Dr. Max Bothwell, a Government of Canada scientist, has been studying a type of algae that grows on rocks.
But scientists also call it Didymosphenia geminata and for decades, this algae has been sliming up riverbeds around the world.
The problem with this algae is that it is a threat to salmon, to trout and the river ecosystems it invades.
Now, it turns out Canada's Dr. Bothwell is actually a world expert in the field, so it was no surprise in 2014 when a reporter contacted Dr. Bothwell for a story on the algae.
The problem was, Dr. Bothwell wasn't allowed to speak to the reporter, because the government of the day wouldn't let him.
Why couldn't Dr. Bothwell speak?
Well, we'll never know for sure, but Dr. Bothwell's research did suggest that climate change may have been responsible for the aggressive algae blooms.
But who the heck would want to stifle climate change information, right?
Yes, you can laugh.
I saw it firsthand when I was a university professor.
We see it when countries pull out of international climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accord, and we see it when industry fails to meet its emissions reduction targets.
But it's not just climate change information that's being stifled.
So many other scientific issues are obscured by alternate facts, fake news and other forms of suppression.
We've seen it in the United Kingdom, we've seen it in Russia, we've seen it in the United States and, until 2015, right here in Canada.
In our modern technological age, when our very survival depends on discovery, innovation and science, it is critical, absolutely critical, that our scientists are free to undertake their work, free to collaborate with other scientists, free to speak to the media and free to speak to the public.
Because after all, science is humanity's best effort at uncovering the truth about our world, about our very existence.
Scientists must be free to explore unconventional or controversial topics.
They must be free to challenge the thinking of the day and they must be free to present uncomfortable or inconvenient truths, because that's how scientists push boundaries and pushing boundaries is, after all, what science is all about.
And here's another point: scientists must be free to fail, because even a failed hypothesis teaches us something.
And the best way I can explain that is through one of my own adventures.
One evening during the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, the two attend a lecture together.
The end of the evening, they head for home and for bed.
Vera was dead.
When it comes to Spanish flu, those stories are common, of lightning speed deaths.
Well, I was a professor in my mid-20s when I first heard those shocking facts and the scientist in me wanted to know why and how.
My curiosity would lead me to a frozen land and to lead an expedition to uncover the cause of the 1918 Spanish flu.
I wanted to test our current drugs against one of history's deadliest diseases.
And so I led a team, a research team, of 17 men from Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States to the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic Ocean.
These islands are between Norway and the North Pole.
We exhumed six bodies who had died of Spanish flu and were buried in the permafrost and we hoped the frozen ground would preserve the body and the virus.
Now, I know what you are all waiting for, that big scientific payoff.
But my science story doesn't have that spectacular Hollywood ending.
Most don't.
Truth is, we didn't find the virus, but we did develop new techniques to safely exhume bodies that might contain virus.
We did develop new techniques to safely remove tissue that might contain virus.
And we developed new safety protocols to protect our research team and the nearby community.
We made important contributions to science even though the contributions we made were not the ones originally intended.
In science, attempts fail, results prove inconclusive and theories don't pan out.
In science, research builds upon the work and knowledge of others, or by seeing further, by standing on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Newton.
The point is, scientists must be free to choose what they want to explore, what they are passionate about and they must be free to report their findings.
You heard me say that respect for science started to improve in Canada in 2015.
How did we get here?
What lessons might we have to share?
It infuriated me.
How could politicians twist scientific fact for partisan gain?
So I did what anyone appalled by politics would do: I ran for office, and I won.
(Applause) I thought I would use my new platform to talk about the importance of science.
It quickly became a fight for the freedom of science.
After all, I was a scientist, I came from the world under attack, and I had personally felt the outrage.
But I quickly learned that scientists were nervous, even afraid to talk to me.
One government scientist, a friend of mine, we'll call him McPherson, was concerned about the impact government policies were having on his research and the state of science deteriorating in Canada.
He was so concerned, he wrote to me from his wife's email account because he was afraid a phone call could be traced.
He wanted me to phone his wife's cell phone so that call couldn't be traced.
It quickly brought what was happening in Canada into sharp focus for me.
How could my friend of 20 years be that afraid to talk to me?
So I did what I could at the time.
I listened and I shared what I learned with my friend in Parliament, a man who was interested in all things environment, science, technology, innovation.
And then the 2015 election rolled around and our party won.
And that friend of mine is now the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
(Applause) And he asked if I would serve as his Minister of Science.
Together, with the rest of the government, we are working hard to restore science to its rightful place.
I will never forget that day in December 2015 when I proudly stood in Parliament and proclaimed, "The war on science is now over."
(Applause) And I have worked hard to back up those words with actions.
We've had many successes.
There's still more work to do, because we're building this culture shift.
But we want our government scientists to talk to the media, talk to the public.
After all, Canada is seen as a beacon for science internationally.
So, for Dr. Bothwell, for Claire and Vera, for McPherson and all those other voices, if you see that science is being stifled, suppressed or attacked, speak up.
If you see that scientists are being silenced, speak up.
We must hold our leaders to account.
Whether that is by exercising our right to vote, whether it is by penning an op-ed in a newspaper or by starting a conversation on social media, it is our collective voice that will ensure the freedom of science.
And after all, science is for everyone, and it will lead to a better, brighter, bolder future for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was first asked to do a TED Talk, I Googled to try and find out a little bit more about, you know, how it felt to be giving one.
(Laughter) And it reminded her of a bomb.
I was thinking, "That's the last thing I need."
(Laughter) (Applause) Anyway, it's a great privilege to be here.
I think it's a bit of a joke for an editor of a paper to choose a photographer to open a speaking event.
(Laughter) We're not renowned for our words, and I spent the last 40 years hiding behind a camera so I didn't have to speak.
But I'm here today, and what I want to talk about are stories and the importance of stories to me and, I think, the importance of stories to everybody.
I'm sure today you'll hear a lot of stories and, by listening to other people's stories, I think we can learn about the world, about other people and get a better understanding.
So I want to talk about three stories that I've done as a photographer, and how they've inspired me, and how, in my life, I've become a part of the stories that I document myself.
As John said, I was a fashion photographer and music photographer for 10 years.
I enjoyed it, I had a lot of fun, but always wanted to do something more with my work.
And storytelling was always something I wanted to do.
So 10 years ago, I set out to travel the world, to go and photograph other people in their situations and to record their stories, to bring them back, so that other people might understand.
But this didn't happen overnight.
When I worked as a music photographer and a fashion photographer, I always had this nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn't quite using my skills productively.
As a care worker, I started looking after a young guy called Nick.
Nick has autism, very severe autism.
But over the years of looking after him, we became very close friends.
Bit by bit, though, as I got to know him better, I realized that his story wasn't being told.
He self-harmed, he would punch himself quite a lot in the face.
So this is Nick.
He used to describe his life as living downstairs at a party.
He said he could hear the party in the kitchen, but he felt like he was always trapped in the basement, in his own little world, wanting to be part of the party but not able to walk upstairs.
So I documented his life.
And as I started doing that, I realized that I could tell somebody's story through my photographs.
As I said, Nick would self-harm.
As we built up a kind of closer friendship, he finally would allow me to actually see him doing this and to document it.
It was a moment of trust.
The social services were not particularly good at helping Nick, and they said that he wouldn't be self-harming as bad as we said.
And I'm glad to say now, eight years later, I actually spoke to Nick last night, and he wanted to let me know that he was feeling a lot better, and he doesn't do the self-harming anymore.
And in some small way, I hope that the photographs was a part of that process.
The main thing it did is it inspired me to go out with my camera and to tell other people's stories.
One of the stories I did was in Kutupalong, on the border of Burma and Bangladesh.
Here, the Rohingyas refugees have been left, pretty much to rot, for over 20 years.
This is a picture of the unofficial camp.
At the top, you can see the official UN camp.
All these huts are the unofficial camps.
Literally, the raw sewage runs through the camp.
The people there have been forgotten, so I thought it was important to go and document their stories.
So I arranged with the village elder; the people would come along the next day, and I would take portraits of all these people and record their stories.
So as the time went on, I turned up in the morning, I put a big, white sheet up, and I started to photograph these people.
Suddenly, though, everything got a bit out of control, and, although it was still dawn, we were filled in this small little compound we had made with literally hundreds of people turning up with ailments and diseases and just ... a hopeless situation.
And that's exactly what their situation is -- helpless.
A child with a tumor that nobody helped, who was slowly suffocating.
I got in a bit of a panic, because these people were coming up to me, desperate, and I was trying to explain to the village elder that I was not a doctor, and I couldn't help these people.
And the village elder turned to me and he said, "No, it's really important; these people know you're not a doctor, but at least somebody is now telling their story, and somebody is recording what is happening to them."
And it was a good moment for me.
It was a realization that maybe it was worthwhile going off and doing these things.
Another story that inspired me was in Odessa, in Ukraine.
I was documenting a bunch of street kids.
Many late nights of vodka-fueled violence with me sitting in the corner with my bag, just going, "When was this a good idea?"
(Laughter) I would say it's moments like that when I think, "Why did I leave the fashion world?"
But they were great kids, and on the last day, they took me down to the sea for a sort of trip, a sort of farewell.
There they are, drinking vodka.
And then Serge, who was the oldest and the most violent -- he'd just got out of the prison for stabbing somebody -- comes and puts his arm around me and says, "We go swimming."
Now, I have to say, I had a "Lonely Planet" guide to Ukraine and in it, it gave some advice.
And in that advice was, "Do not talk to the street kids, at no point leave your baggage unattended and in all counts, do not go swimming."
(Laughter) So I was like, "I don't know if this is a good idea."
I'm like, "OK." So there I am.
(Laughter) I literally handed all my cameras, all my equipment, to these street kids.
It's kind of funny to know, if you look in the background, you can see the other street kids who didn't get in the water go, "Why would you get in that water?"
He was really excited by this camera.
And we talked a lot about how I was going to get him a camera and would return and we could start to teach him photography.
He had a real eye for things.
That's him, there.
That was taken on the last evening I was there.
And when I came back in the morning, he was dead.
He had taken a lot of pills and a lot of vodka.
Again, it was another reminder of maybe why I should record these people's stories: because their lives are important, and it's important for me to document them.
I became part of the story.
I thought my work was over, I thought -- everything didn't make sense to me.
I went to those places because I wanted to make some kind of change, and photography happened to be my tool.
And then I became aware that my body was, in many ways, a living example of what war does to somebody.
And I realized I could use my own experience, my own body, to tell that story.
I thought of Nick, and I thought of his resilience.
I thought of the Rohingyas and the fact that they have no hope.
It's strange, but in many ways I look at where I was a year ago, and I look at where I am now, and I realize that I have a lot of things I didn't have then.
I wouldn't be sitting here right now if this hadn't happened.
I wouldn't have been able to show you those photographs and tell you those stories.
I was lucky 10 years ago, when I sat down and I tried to work out what I could do to make a difference in this world.
I realized that my photography was a tool and a way to do it.
It's that we all can be part of that wheel.
We can all make a difference.
Everybody here has an ability to use something to make a difference to the world.
We can all sit in front of the TV and go, "I don't know what to do about it," and forget about it.
But the reality is that we can all do something.
It might be just writing a letter.
And we all have our own experiences that we can use as well.
So really, that's all I wanted to talk about today.
I just wanted to say that life goes on all around the world.
But if we share those and we talk about stories, then we can inspire each other to get through our own bad experiences.
I know that the people I've recorded have gotten me to this point.
And in turn, I hope you will use your experiences to help others.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I remember one morning when I was in the third grade, my mom sent me to school with a Ghanaian staple dish called "fufu."
(Laughter) Fufu is this white ball of starch made of cassava, and it's served with light soup, which is a dark orange color, and contains chicken and/or beef.
It's a savory, flavorful dish that my mom thought would keep me warm on a cold day.
When I got to lunch and I opened my thermos, releasing these new smells into the air, my friends did not react favorably.
(Laughter) "What's that?" one of them asked.
"It's fufu," I responded.
(Laughter) "Ew, that smells funny. What's a fufu?" they asked.
Their reaction made me lose my appetite.
I begged my mother to never send me to school with fufu again.
I asked her to make me sandwiches or chicken noodle soup or any of the other foods that my friends were eating.
And this is one of the first times I began to notice the distinction between what was unique to my family and what was common for everyone else, what was Ghanaian and what was African and what was American.
I'm a first-generation American.
Both of my parents are immigrants.
In fact, my father, Gabriel, came to the US almost 50 years ago.
He arrived in New York from a city called Kumasi in a northern region of Ghana, in West Africa.
He came for school, earning his bachelor's degree in accounting and eventually became an accountant.
My mother, Georgina, joined him years later.
She had a love of fashion and worked in a sewing factory in lower Manhattan, until she saved up enough to open her own women's clothing store.
I consider myself an American and an African and a Ghanaian.
And there's millions of people around the world who are juggling these different classifications.
They might be Jamaican-Canadians or Korean-Americans or Nigerian-Brits.
But what makes our stories and experiences different is that we were born and raised in a country different than our parents, and this can cause us to be misunderstood when being viewed through a narrow lens.
I grew up in New York, which is home to the largest number of immigrants anywhere in the United States.
But all throughout my childhood, there were these moments that formed my understanding of the different worlds I belonged to.
When I was in the fifth grade, a student asked me if my family was refugees.
I didn't know what that word meant.
He explained to me that his parents told him that refugees are people from Africa who come to the US to escape death, starvation and disease.
So I asked my parents, and they laughed a bit, not because it was funny but because it was a generalization.
And they assured me that they had enough to eat in Ghana and came to the US willingly.
(Laughter) These questions became more complex as I got older.
"Are you even black?" a student asked.
I mean, I thought I was black.
(Laughter) I asked my father about it, and he shared his own confusion over the significance of that when he first came to the US.
(Laughter) But he would say, "But you're African.
Remember that."
And he would emphasize this, even though many Africans in the continent would only consider me to be just an American.
These misconceptions and complex cultural issues are not just the inquiries of children.
Adults don't know who immigrants are.
If we look at current trends, if I asked you: What's the fastest-growing immigrant demographic in the United States, who would you think it was?
What's the most educated immigrant demographic?
Even in matters of policy, did you know that three out of the eight countries in the so-called "travel ban" are African countries?
A lot of people assume those targeted Muslims only live in the Middle East, but a lot of those banned people are Africans.
So on these issues of education and policy and religion, a lot of things we presume about immigrants are incorrect.
Even if we look at something like workplace diversity and inclusion, if I asked you what gender-ethnicity combination is least likely to be promoted to senior managerial positions, who would you think it was?
The answer is not Africans this time.
(Laughter) And it's not black women or men, and it's not Latin women or men.
It's Asian women who are least likely to be promoted.
Capturing these stories and issues is part of my work as a digital storyteller that uses tech to make it easier for people to find these stories.
This year, I launched an online gallery of portraits and firsthand accounts for a project called Enodi.
The goal of Enodi is to highlight first-generation immigrants just like me who carry this kinship for the countries we grew up in, for the countries of origin and for this concept called "blackness."
I created this space to be a cyberhome for many of us who are misunderstood in our different home countries.
There are millions of Enodis who use hyphens to connect their countries of origin with their various homes in the US or Canada or Britain or Germany.
In fact, many people you might know are Enodi.
Colin Powell, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, are all the children of African or Caribbean immigrants.
But how much do you know about us?
This complicated navigation is not just the experience of first-generation folks.
We're so intertwined in the lives and culture of people in North America and Europe, that you might be surprised how critical we are to your histories and future.
So, engage us in conversation; discover who immigrants actually are, and see us apart from characterizations or limited media narratives or even who we might appear to be.
We're walking melting pots of culture, and if something in that pot smells new or different to you -- (Laughter) don't turn up your nose.
Ask us to share.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, I have known many alpha males in my life, chimpanzee alpha males, and I'm going to talk about what an alpha male is, because I think we can all learn a lot from our close relatives where we have alpha males.
And as an example, I want to give you Amos, a male that I knew who was a young male and he was alpha male, he was very popular, but he got sick and he lost his position because, you know, chimpanzee males they can spot from a mile away if you are weak and they went for him, and he lost his position, and then he got sicker and sicker until at some point we had to isolate him.
And what happened was most touching.
Other chimps would bring food to him, they would bring wood wool to him, which is this thing that they use to sleep in and build nests out of, and females would put the wood wool behind his back.
And I thought, this is the way to go for an alpha male.
He was loved and respected, and everyone was taking care of him, and this is not always how it goes, because some males don't end so well when they lose their position.
And basically an alpha male for them is a bully.
It's used in a very superficial way that doesn't relate to what a real alpha male is.
And so I'm here to explain what that is.
The term itself goes back actually much further.
It goes back to the '40s and '50s, research on wolves, and basically the definition is very simple.
The highest ranking male is the alpha male.
The highest ranking female is the alpha female.
Every primate group has one alpha male, one alpha female, not more than that, there's only one.
And I will explain how that goes.
So first, the body language.
What you see here is two male chimpanzees who are the same size, but one is walking upright, has his hair up, has a big rock in his hand, and he's the alpha male.
(Chimpanzee grunts) He has all his hair up and he displays.
I'm actually standing far too close.
A chimpanzee is far stronger than I am, and I just was not very prudent, this particular video.
So what you saw him do is he was lifting himself up and standing on two legs, and putting his arms out.
It's a very common posture in high-ranking males, and it's very recognizable because humans do this kind of stuff.
(Laughter) Humans do this all the time.
And what I really like about this particular picture is the two old guys to the side.
In chimpanzees, we have usually old males who are over the hill, who cannot be alpha male themselves anymore, but they start playing games and forming coalitions, and behind the backs of others.
And they become extremely influential, and you may actually have old males who are more influential than the alpha male himself.
Just as an example, the three males that I used to work with most at the Dutch zoo long ago, where I worked, and the middle male here is a 17-year-old alpha male.
The male whom he is grooming on the side is twice as old, and this old male has made him the leader.
So you can imagine that that old male has an enormous amount of power, because he has made the alpha male alpha male.
The male on the right is individually the strongest male.
And so the coalition formation that goes on in chimpanzee society makes it much more complex than you think.
It means, for example, that the smallest male in a group can be the alpha male.
You don't need to be the biggest and strongest male.
So the coalition system makes everything complex, and I'm always waiting here in the US for the primaries, the end of the primaries, because that's a moment where you need to demonstrate unity.
What you see here is two males on the left who are standing together.
You also see the big canine teeth that they have.
And they're standing together and they demonstrate to the rest of the group, "We are together. We are a unit."
That's another way of demonstrating that you are together.
And so demonstrating unity is extremely important in a coalition system, and as I said, in the primaries always I'm waiting for that moment because then you have two members of the same party who have been fighting with each other, and they need to come together at some moment.
And it leads to very awkward situations.
And so if it doesn't go well, like in this particular case -- (Laughter) then the party is in deep doo-doo because they have not demonstrated unity.
Now, how do you become an alpha male?
First of all, you need to be impressive and intimidating and demonstrate your vigor on occasion and show that you are very strong, and there's all sorts of ways of doing that.
But other things that you need to do is you need to be generous.
They share food very easily with everyone.
They're normally, male chimpanzees, not particularly interested in infants, but when they are campaigning like that, they get very interested in infants and they tickle them, and they try to curry favor with the females.
This is not particularly something that babies like -- (Laughter) but since it is a signal to the rest of the world, they need to hold them in the air.
And I was really intrigued by, when we had a female candidate in the last election, the way she held babies was more like this, which is what babies really like.
But she of course didn't need to send the message that she could hold a baby without dropping it, which was what the man was doing.
So this is a very common tactic, and male chimpanzees, they spend a lot of time currying favor with all sorts of parties when they are campaigning.
Now, what are the privileges and the costs of being an alpha male?
Food is secondary to sex.
And so the male chimpanzees -- and we evolutionary biologists, of course, we have an explanation for this, is that sex leads to reproduction, and reproductive success is the measure of evolution.
That's how everything evolves.
And so if males can enhance their reproductive success by being high ranking, you get automatically the ambition to be high ranking in the males.
So that's the privilege.
The costs, one cost is of course that you need to keep your partners happy.
So if you come to power with the support of an old male, you need to let that old male mate with females.
If you become alpha male this way, you need to keep your partners happy.
And so that's one of the costs.
The second cost is that everyone wants your position.
Alpha male position is a very important position, and everyone wants to take it from you, and so you constantly have to watch your back.
You have to be extremely vigilant.
And so that's a very stressful situation, and we actually have data on this.
The data comes from the field, from baboons not chimpanzees in this case, where they did fecal samples on the baboons and they analyzed them for glucocorticoids.
And what you see here is a graph where you see that the lower ranking the male baboon is, the higher is his cortisol level in the feces, but the alpha male, as you see, has just as high a level as the lowest-ranking males, and so you may think that being alpha male is nice and dandy and is wonderful, but it's actually a very stressful position, and we can demonstrate that physiologically.
Now, what are the obligations?
And here, for me, it gets really interesting, and it deviates very much from your typical image of the alpha male.
One is to keep the peace in the group.
So first of all, keeping the peace.
They don't support their mom or their best buddy.
And the second thing they do is they show empathy for others.
Now, I do an enormous amount of research on empathy, and I don't have time to go into it, but empathy is nowadays a topic that we study in rodents and dogs and elephants and primates, all sorts of animals.
And what you see here is two bonobos.
The one in front has been beaten up in a fight.
This is also actually how we measure empathy in young children, by looking at how they respond to distressed individuals.
The pope does this. The presidents do this.
The queen does it and so on.
They don't do it just for the group, because it also stabilizes their position.
The more popular a male becomes as alpha male and the more the rest of them respects them and looks up to them, the better their position is defended in case it's going to be challenged by somebody else, because then, of course, the whole group is going to support that male because they want to keep a leader who is good for them.
So the group is usually very supportive of males who are good leaders, and it's not supportive at all of bullies.
This is basically the whole community.
And this is true for all the mammal studies on empathy is that females have more of it than males.
But look at the alpha male.
The alpha male does far more than anybody else.
The last thing I want to say is something about alpha females.
So she was not physically capable of dominating the males.
She ranked below the males, but she was the center of the community, and if there was big trouble in the community, everyone would end up in the arms of Mama.
And so she was a very important figure.
And so I don't want to minimize the position of alpha females in the chimpanzee group.
And then we have a species that is equally close to us as the chimpanzee, the bonobo.
We often forget about the bonobo, but the bonobos have a matriarchal society and the alpha individual is a female, generally.
But I do want to emphasize that the alpha in a group doesn't need to be a male, and that actually in one of our close relatives, it is a female.
So the message I want to leave you with is that if you are looking at men in our society who are the boss of, let's say, a family or a business or Washington or whatever, you call them alpha male, you should not insult chimpanzees by using the wrong label.
(Laughter) You should not call a bully an alpha male.
Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male.
An alpha male has all sorts of qualities, and I have seen bully alpha males in chimpanzees, they do occur, but most of the ones that we have have leadership capacities and are integrated in their community, and, like Amos at the end, they are loved and respected, and so it's a very different situation than you may think.
And I thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: William, hi. Good to see you.
William Kamkwamba: Thanks.
WK: This is my home. This is where I live.
WK: Yeah. I'm 19 years now.
CA: Five years ago you had an idea. What was that?
WK: I wanted to make a windmill.
CA: A windmill?
CA: So what did you do? How did you realize that?
WK: Ah, no. I just -- CA: What happened?
WK: In fact, a design of the windmill that was in the book, it has got four -- ah -- three blades, and mine has got four blades.
CA: The book had three, yours had four.
CA: OK.
CA: You tested three, and found that four worked better?
CA: And what did you make the windmill out of?
What materials did you use?
WK: Yeah. The windmill.
WK: When the wind blows, it rotates and generates.
WK: 12 watts.
WK: Four bulbs and two radios.
CA: Wow.
(Applause) CA: Next slide -- so who's that?
WK: This is my parents, holding the radio.
CA: So what did they make of -- that you were 14, 15 at the time -- what did they make of this? They were impressed?
WK: Yeah, I want to build another one -- to pump water and irrigation for crops.
CA: How big?
CA: Wow. And so you're talking to people here at TED to get people who might be able to help in some way to realize this dream?
CA: And as you think of your life going forward, you're 19 now, do you picture continuing with this dream of working in energy?
CA: Wow. William, it's a real honor to have you at the TED conference.
WK: Thank you.
(Applause)
I am not a farmer.
And this is my world.
And along the way I've started noticing -- I'm on my third generation of kids -- that they're getting bigger.
They're getting sicker.
In addition to these complexities, I just learned that 70 percent of the kids that I see who are labeled learning disabled would not have been had they had proper prenatal nutrition.
The realities of my community are simple. They look like this.
And as jobs continue to leave my community, and energy continues to come in, be exported in, it's no wonder that really some people refer to the South Bronx as a desert.
But I'm the oldest sixth grader you'll ever meet, so I get up every day with this tremendous amount of enthusiasm that I'm hoping to share with you all today.
And with that note, I come to you with this belief that kids should not have to leave their communities to live, learn and earn in a better one.
So I'm here to tell you a story about me and this wall that I met outside, which I'm now bringing inside.
And it starts with three people.
But it all starts with seeds in classrooms, in my place, which looks like this.
And I'm here today hoping that my reach will exceed my grasp.
And it starts with incredible kids like this, who come early and stay late.
All of my kids are either IEP or ELL learners, most come with a lot of handicaps, most are homeless and many are in foster care.
Almost all of my kids live below poverty.
But with those seeds, from day one, we are growing in my classroom, and this is what it looks like in my classroom.
But again, I am not a farmer. I'm a teacher.
And I don't like weeding, and I don't like back-breaking labor.
So I wanted to figure out how I could get this kind of success into something small, like this, and bring it into my classroom so that handicapped kids could do it, kids who didn't want to be outside could do it, and everyone could have access.
So I called George Irwin, and what do you know?
He came to my class and we built an indoor edible wall.
And what we do is we partner it with authentic learning experiences, private-based learning.
And lo and behold, we gave birth to the first edible wall in New York City.
So if you're hungry, get up and eat.
You can do it right now. My kids play cow all the time.
Okay? But we were just getting started, the kids loved the technology, so we called up George and we said, "We gotta learn more!"
Now, Mayor Bloomberg, thank you very much, we no longer need work permits, which comes with slices and bonded contractors -- we're available for you -- We decided to go to Boston.
And my kids, from the poorest congressional district in America, became the first to install a green wall, designed by a computer, with real-live learning tools, 21 stories up -- if you're going to go visit it, it's on top of the John Hancock building.
But closer to home, we started installing these walls in schools that look like this with lighting like that, real LED stuff, 21st-century technology.
And what do you know? We made 21st century money, and that was groundbreaking. Wow!
This is my harvest, people.
And what do you do with this food? You cook it!
And that is the youngest nationally certified workforce in America with our Bronx Borough President.
And what'd we do then? Well, I met nice people like you, and they invited us to the Hamptons.
So I call this "from South Bronx to Southampton."
And we started putting in roofs that look like this, and we came in from destitute neighborhoods to start building landscape like this, wow! People noticed.
And so we got invited back this past summer, and we actually moved into the Hamptons, payed 3,500 dollars a week for a house, and we learned how to surf.
And when you can do stuff like this -- These are my kids putting in this technology, and when you can build a roof that looks like that on a house that looks like that with sedum that looks like this, this is the new green graffiti.
So, you may wonder what does a wall like this really do for kids, besides changing landscapes and mindsets?
It gets me to meet incredible contractors like this, Jim Ellenberger from Ellenberger Services.
And this is where it becomes true triple bottom line.
Because Jim realized that these kids, my future farmers, really had the skills he needed to build affordable housing for New Yorkers, right in their own neighborhood.
And this is what my kids are doing, making living wage.
Now, if you're like me, you live in a building, there are seven guys out of work looking to manage a million dollars.
That's the beauty of this economy.
And that's my first student to open up, the first in his family to have a bank account.
This immigrant student is the first one in his family to use an ATM.
And this is the true triple bottom line, because we can take neighborhoods that were abandoned and destitute and turn them into something like this with interiors like this.
So CNN called, and we were delighted to have them come to our farmer's market.
And then when Rockefeller Center said, NBC, could you put this thing up on the walls? We were delighted.
But this is not a Getty image.
That's a picture I took of my Bronx Borough President, addressing my kids in his house, not the jailhouse, making them feel a part of it.
That's our State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Bob Bieder, coming to my classroom to make my kids feel important.
And when the Bronx Borough President shows up and the State Senator comes to our class, believe you me, the Bronx can change attitudes now.
We are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity in ways we've never even imagined.
And when the local senator gets on the scale in public and says he's got to lose weight, so do I!
Lorna Sass came and donated books.
And when we realized that we were growing for food justice in the South Bronx, so did the international community.
And my kids in the South Bronx were repped in the first international green roof conference.
And that's just great.
Well, we met this woman, Avis Richards, with the Ground Up Campaign.
Unbelievable! Through her, my kids, the most disenfranchised and marginalized, were able to roll out 100 gardens to New York City public schools.
A year ago today, I was invited to the New York Academy of Medicine.
I thought this concept of designing a strong and healthy New York made sense, especially when the resources were free.
They introduced me to the New York City Strategic Alliance for Health, again, free resources, don't waste them.
And what do you know? Six months later, my school and my kids were awarded the first ever high school award of excellence for creating a healthy school environment.
The greenest class in New York City.
But more importantly is my kids learned to get, they learned to give.
And we took the money that we made from our farmer's market, and started buying gifts for the homeless and for needy around the world.
So we started giving back.
And that's when I realized that the greening of America starts first with the pockets, then with the heart and then with the mind.
And thank God Trinity Wall Street noticed, because they gave us the birth of Green Bronx Machine.
And what does it really do?
It teaches kids to re-vision their communities, so when they grow up in places like this, they can imagine it like this.
No more little Knicks and little Nets.
Okay? And these are my future farmers of America, growing up in Brook Park on 141st Street, the most migrant community in America.
When tenacious little ones learn how to garden like this, it's no wonder we get fruit like that.
And I love it! And so do they.
And we're building teepees in neighborhoods that were burning down.
And again, Brook Park feeds hundreds of people without a food stamp or a fingerprint.
Bissel Gardens is cranking out food in epic proportions, moving kids into an economy they never imagined.
Now, somewhere over the rainbow, my friends, is the South Bronx of America. And we're doing it.
How does it start? Well, look at Jose's attention to detail.
Thank God Omar knows that carrots come from the ground, and not aisle 9 at the supermarket or through a bullet-proof window or through a piece of styrofoam.
And when Henry knows that green is good, so do I.
And most importantly, when you put big kids together with little kids, you get the big fat white guy out of the middle, which is cool, and you create this kind of accountability amongst peers, which is incredible.
But this is my weekly paycheck for kids; that's our green graffiti.
This is what we're doing.
And behold the glory and bounty that is Bronx County.
Nothing thrills me more than to see kids pollinating plants instead of each other.
I gotta tell you, I'm a protective parent.
But those kids are the kids who are now putting pumpkin patches on top of trains.
We're also designing coin ponds for the rich and affluent.
We're also becoming children of the corn, creating farms in the middle of Fordham Road for awareness and window bottles out of garbage.
I expect them to be engaged, and man, are they!
Or more importantly, to local shelters, where most of our kids are getting one to two meals a day.
And in his day, a million dollar gardens and incredible installations.
This is a beautiful moment.
Black field, brown field, toxic waste field, battlefield -- we're proving in the Bronx that you can grow anywhere, on cement.
We take orders now. I'm booking for the spring.
And again, when you can take kids from backgrounds as diverse as this to do something as special as this, we're really creating a moment.
Now, you may ask about these kids.
Forty percent attendance to 93 percent attendance.
The rest are scheduled to graduate this June.
Happy kids, happy families, happy colleagues.
Amazed people. The glory and bounty that is Bronx County.
Let's talk about mint. Where is my mint?
I grow seven kinds of mint in my class.
Ladies and gentlemen, I gotta move quick, but understand this: The borough that gave us baggy pants and funky fresh beats is becoming home to the organic ones.
My green [unclear] 25,000 pounds of vegetables, I'm growing organic citizens, engaged kids.
Martin Luther King said that people need to be uplifted with dignity.
So here in New York, I urge you, my fellow Americans, to help us make America great again.
It's real easy. Go see these two videos, please.
And most importantly, get the biggest bully out of schools.
This has got to go tomorrow.
Big kids love strawberries and bananas.
Let them cook. Great lunch today, let them do culinary things.
But most importantly, just love them.
Nothing works like unconditional love.
So, my good friend Kermit said it's not easy being green.
It's not. I come from a place where kids can buy 35 flavors of blunt wrap at any day of the moment, where ice cream freezers are filled with slushy malt liquor.
Okay? My dear friend Majora Carter once told me, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Right now, we're all tadpoles, but I urge you to become a big frog and take that big, green leap.
Join me. Use -- I've got a lot of energy. Help me use it.
And along the way, please take time to smell the flowers, especially if you and your students grew them.
I'm Steve Ritz, this is Green Bronx Machine.
I've got to say thank you to my wife and family, for my kids, thank you for coming every day, and for my colleagues, believing and supporting me.
We are growing our way into a new economy.
Thank you, God bless you and enjoy the day. I'm Steve Ritz.
(Applause)
Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people.
I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics.
In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab.
Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky.
In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily accessible.
In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority.
That scarcity led to a crisis in January of this year at the University of Johannesburg.
There were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process, and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration, thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions.
She was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life.
But even in parts of the world like the United States where education is available, it might not be within reach.
There has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care.
What might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate, for a total of 559 percent since 1985.
Finally, even for those who do manage to get the higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open.
This, of course, is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions, but for many others, they do not get the value for their time and their effort.
Tom Friedman, in his recent New York Times article, captured, in the way that no one else could, the spirit behind our effort.
Let's talk about what's suddenly possible.
What's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big Stanford classes, each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more.
So to understand this, let's look at one of those classes, the Machine Learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng.
Andrew teaches one of the bigger Stanford classes.
When Andrew taught the Machine Learning class to the general public, it had 100,000 people registered.
So to put that number in perspective, for Andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a Stanford class, he would have to do that for 250 years.
So, having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up, to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could.
So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free.
We currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines, and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like.
(Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus.
Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million people are uninsured.
Scott Page: Models help us design more effective institutions and policies.
Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that in the future, you'd wear a camera right in the center of your head.
RG: Hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine.
Nick Parlante: For each pixel in the image, set the red to zero.
Paul Offit: ... Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus.
Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Well, that sounds funny.
Daphne Koller: So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two tosses.
Andrew Ng: So in large-scale machine learning, we'd like to come up with computational ...
(Applause) DK: It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free.
Since we opened the website in February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries.
We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed.
But it's not just about the numbers, it's also about the people.
Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree.
Or Ryan, who can't go to school, because his immune deficient daughter can't be risked to have germs come into the house, so he couldn't leave the house.
I'm really glad to say -- recently, we've been in correspondence with Ryan -- that this story had a happy ending.
Baby Shannon -- you can see her on the left -- is doing much better now, and Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses.
So what made these courses so different?
After all, online course content has been available for a while.
What made it different was that this was real course experience.
It started on a given day, and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments.
And these would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real deadline.
These are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon.
(Laughter) At the end of the course, the students got a certificate.
They could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job, and we know many students who did.
Some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit.
So these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort.
Let's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses.
The first component is that when you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom and design content explicitly for an online format, you can break away from, for example, the monolithic one-hour lecture.
You can break up the material, for example, into these short, modular units of eight to 12 minutes, each of which represents a coherent concept.
So, for example, some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have.
So this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education, and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum.
Of course, we all know as educators that students don't learn by sitting and passively watching videos.
Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it.
For example, even our videos are not just videos.
Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question.
(Video) SP: ... These four things. Prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base rate bias. They're all well documented.
So they're all well documented deviations from rational behavior.
DK: So here the video pauses, and the student types in the answer into the box and submits. Obviously they weren't paying attention.
And now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture.
One needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions, and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions.
Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs?
Now, fortunately, technology has come a long way, and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework.
In addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video, we can also grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations.
Let me show you one that's actually pretty simple but fairly visual.
This is from Stanford's Computer Science 101 class, and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image.
And so, the student tries again, and now they got it right, and they're told that, and they can move on to the next assignment.
This ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you're right or wrong is really essential to student learning.
Now, of course we cannot yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses.
So we tried to convince, for example, some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy.
And the solution we ended up using is peer grading.
It turns out that previous studies show, like this one by Saddler and Good, that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades.
It was tried only in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis.
What's even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically -- so long as you incentivize them properly so they can't give themselves a perfect score -- are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades.
Around each one of our courses, a community of students had formed, a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor.
Students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways.
First of all, there was a question and answer forum, where students would pose questions, and other students would answer those questions.
And the really amazing thing is, because there were so many students, it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o'clock in the morning, somewhere around the world, there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem.
And so, in many of our courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes.
(Laughter) And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community, they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom.
Some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets.
This is the San Francisco study group, but there were ones all over the world.
Others were virtual study groups, sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures.
There are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework.
The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning.
Because the data that we can collect here is unique.
You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students.
So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology.
You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not?
So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class.
This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew's assignments.
The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot.
Each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer.
The big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer.
Now, if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer, you would never notice.
But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer, it's kind of hard to miss.
So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception, and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively.
Personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well, because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem.
Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what's called the 2 sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations.
The second is a population of students that studied using a standard lecture-based classroom, but with a mastery-based approach, so the students couldn't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one.
And finally, there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor.
The mastery-based population was a full standard deviation, or sigma, in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class, and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance.
To understand what that means, let's look at the lecture-based classroom, and let's pick the median performance as a threshold.
So in a lecture-based class, half the students are above that level and half are below.
Imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average.
Hence, the 2 sigma problem.
Because we cannot afford, as a society, to provide every student with an individual human tutor.
But maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone.
So the question is, how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve?
And even personalization is something that we're starting to see the beginnings of, whether it's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we've shown you.
So the goal here is to try and push, and see how far we can get towards the green curve.
Well, Mark Twain certainly thought so.
He said that, "College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either."
(Laughter) I beg to differ with Mark Twain, though.
And maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them.
So how do we do that?
We do that by doing active learning in the classroom.
So there's been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active learning, interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric -- on attendance, on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test.
You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment.
So to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things.
First it would establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities.
Second, it would enable lifelong learning.
It's a shame that for so many people, learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college.
By having this amazing content be available, we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted, whether it's just to expand our minds or it's to change our lives.
And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere.
Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa.
And if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Before March, 2011, I was a photographic retoucher based in New York City.
We're pale, gray creatures.
We hide in dark, windowless rooms, and generally avoid sunlight.
We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and the impossible possible, and we get criticized in the press all the time, but some of us are actually talented artists with years of experience and a real appreciation for images and photography.
On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan.
Soon after, an organization I volunteer with, All Hands Volunteers, were on the ground, within days, working as part of the response efforts.
I, along with hundreds of other volunteers, knew we couldn't just sit at home, so I decided to join them for three weeks.
On May the 13th, I made my way to the town of Ōfunato.
It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, about 50,000 people, one of the first that was hit by the wave.
The waters here have been recorded at reaching over 24 meters in height, and traveled over two miles inland.
As you can imagine, the town had been devastated.
We cleaned schools. We de-mudded and gutted homes ready for renovation and rehabilitation.
We got dirty, and we loved it.
For weeks, all the volunteers and locals alike had been finding similar things.
They'd been finding photos and photo albums and cameras and SD cards.
And everyone was doing the same.
Now, it wasn't until this point that I realized that these photos were such a huge part of the personal loss these people had felt.
This happened to also be a place in the town where the evacuation center was collecting the photos.
This is where people were handing them in, and I was honored that day that they actually trusted me to help them start hand-cleaning them.
Now, it was emotional and it was inspiring, and I've always heard about thinking outside the box, but it wasn't until I had actually gotten outside of my box that something happened.
So that evening, I just reached out on Facebook and asked a few of them, and by morning the response had been so overwhelming and so positive, I knew we had to give it a go.
So we started retouching photos.
This was the very first.
Not terribly damaged, but where the water had caused that discoloration on the girl's face had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy.
(Applause) Over time, more photos came in, thankfully, and more retouchers were needed, and so I reached out again on Facebook and LinkedIn, and within five days, 80 people wanted to help from 12 different countries.
Within Japan, by July, we'd branched out to the neighboring town of Rikuzentakata, further north to a town called Yamada.
Once a week, we would set up our scanning equipment in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up, where people were reclaiming their photos.
It could take an hour. It could take weeks.
It could take months.
The kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn, or pieced together, picking out the remaining parts of color and detail that the water hadn't damaged.
Now, all these photos had been damaged by water, submerged in salt water, covered in bacteria, in sewage, sometimes even in oil, all of which over time is going to continue to damage them, so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project.
As my team leader Wynne once said, it's like doing a tattoo on someone.
The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, as far as the photos go.
She had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped when she realized she was doing more damage.
She also had duplicates.
When she collected the photos from us, she shared a bit of her story with us.
The day of the tsunami, he'd actually been in charge of making sure the tsunami gates were closed.
One of them got caught up in the water.
It took her a week to find them all again and find out that they had all survived.
The day I gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son's 14th birthday.
For her, despite all of this, those photos were the perfect gift back to him, something he could look at again, something he remembered from before that wasn't still scarred from that day in March when absolutely everything else in his life had changed or been destroyed.
Over five hundred volunteers around the globe helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back, fully restored and retouched.
A photo is a reminder of someone or something, a place, a relationship, a loved one.
They're our memory-keepers and our histories, the last thing we would grab and the first thing you'd go back to look for.
That's all this project was about, about restoring those little bits of humanity, giving someone that connection back.
When a photo like this can be returned to someone like this, it makes a huge difference in the lives of the person receiving it.
For some of them, it's given them a connection to something bigger, giving something back, using their talents on something other than skinny models and perfect skin.
I would like to conclude by reading an email I got from one of them, Cindy, the day I finally got back from Japan after six months.
"As I worked, I couldn't help but think about the individuals and the stories represented in the images.
Across the globe, throughout the ages, our basic needs are just the same, aren't they?"
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart.
And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s.
And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians.
She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work.
And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease.
But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it.
The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers.
Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families.
So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly?
Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research.
In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize.
Now, she had no idea what to look for.
This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked everything she could think of.
Had the children eaten boiled sweets?
Had they consumed colored drinks?
Did they eat fish and chips?
Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing?
What time of life had they started school?
And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of.
Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold.
It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine.
Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956.
People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared.
The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know.
A child a week was dying, but nothing changed.
Openness alone can't drive change.
So, how did she know that she was right?
Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking.
So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse.
Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients.
George frankly preferred numbers to people.
But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship.
He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong."
Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her.
He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories.
Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.
It's a fantastic model of collaboration -- thinking partners who aren't echo chambers.
I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators.
Alice and George were very good at conflict.
Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves.
That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them.
That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.
And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds.
Alice's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again.
"My mother," she said, "My mother didn't enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them."
So it's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship.
But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced, mostly haven't come from individuals, they've come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives.
So how do organizations think?
And that isn't because they don't want to, it's really because they can't.
And they can't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict.
In surveys of European and American executives, fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise.
It means that organizations mostly can't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did.
They can't think together.
And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations, and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them.
So how do we develop the skills that we need?
Because it does take skill and practice, too.
If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it.
So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company.
And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on.
He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people.
But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried.
So, he didn't really want to say anything.
After all, maybe they knew something he didn't.
But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved.
In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns.
And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation.
So now Joe had allies. They could think together.
And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device.
But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence.
So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often?
It doesn't really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority.
I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life.
I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development, if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society.
The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden.
But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.
Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential.
But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.
Openness isn't the end.
It's the beginning.
(Applause)
So, well, I do applied math, and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math, is that we are like management consultants.
No one knows what the hell we do.
So, dancing is one of the most human of activities.
Now, ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill, and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it.
Now, sadly, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability, as it is doing to my friend Jan Stripling, who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time.
However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late.
We need to be able to measure progression objectively, and ultimately, the only way we're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure.
But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test.
But what if patients could do this test at home?
Now, that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic, and what if patients could do that test themselves, right?
Takes about $300, by the way, in the neurologist's clinic to do it.
So what I want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this, because, you see, in one sense, at least, we are all virtuosos like my friend Jan Stripling.
Now, this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds, and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers, because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds, and we all actually have the genes for it. FoxP2, for example.
And like ballet, it takes an extraordinary level of training.
So on the bottom trace, you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor.
We see all the same symptoms.
We see vocal tremor, weakness and rigidity.
So these voice-based tests, how do they stack up against expert clinical tests? We'll, they're both non-invasive.
The neurologist's test is non-invasive. They both use existing infrastructure.
You don't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it.
They're ultra-low cost, and we all know what happens.
When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable.
We can reduce logistical difficulties with patients.
We can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data.
We can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials, and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time.
We have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it's too late.
So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative.
With Aculab and PatientsLikeMe, we're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals.
Anyone healthy or with Parkinson's can call in, cheaply, and leave recordings, a few cents each, and I'm really happy to announce that we've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Tom Rielly: So Max, by taking all these samples of, let's say, 10,000 people, you'll be able to tell who's healthy and who's not?
Max Little: Yeah. Yeah. So what will happen is that, during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not, you see. TR: Right.
But we'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances, and it's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors, and looking for the actual markers of the disease.
ML: It's much better than that.
So what that means is that people will be able to — ML: (Laughs) TR: People will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test, and people with Parkinson's could call in, record their voice, and then their doctor can check up on their progress, see where they're doing in this course of the disease.
TR: Thanks so much. Max Little, everybody.
ML: Thanks, Tom. (Applause)
Bob Dylan is 23 years old, and his career is just reaching its pinnacle.
He's been christened the voice of a generation, and he's churning out classic songs at a seemingly impossible rate, but there's a small minority of dissenters, and they claim that Bob Dylan is stealing other people's songs.
2004. Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, takes the Beatles' "White Album," combines it with Jay-Z's "The Black Album" to create "The Grey Album."
"The Grey Album" becomes an immediate sensation online, and the Beatles' record company sends out countless cease-and-desist letters for "unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property."
It is new media created from old media.
It was made using these three techniques: copy, transform and combine.
It's how you remix. You take existing songs, you chop them up, you transform the pieces, you combine them back together again, and you've got a new song, but that new song is clearly comprised of old songs.
I think these are the basic elements of all creativity.
I think everything is a remix, and I think this is a better way to conceive of creativity.
All right, let's head back to 1964, and let's hear where some of Dylan's early songs came from.
After that, you'll hear Dylan's "Masters of War."
Dominic Behan: ♫ Come all ye young rebels, ♫ ♫ and list while I sing, ♫ ♫ for the love of one's land is a terrible thing. ♫ BD: ♫ Oh my name it is nothin', ♫ ♫ my age it means less, ♫ ♫ the country I come from is called the Midwest. ♫ KF: Okay, so in this case, Dylan admits he must have heard "The Patriot Game," he forgot about it, then when the song kind of bubbled back up in his brain, he just thought it was his song.
Alongside that is "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."
It's been estimated that two thirds of the melodies Dylan used in his early songs were borrowed.
This is pretty typical among folk singers.
Here's the advice of Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie.
Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune."
(Laughter) (Applause) And that's, that's what Guthrie did right here, and I'm sure you all recognize the results.
(Music) We know this tune, right? We know it?
That is "When the World's on Fire," a very old melody, in this case performed by the Carter Family.
Guthrie adapted it into "This Land Is Your Land."
So, Bob Dylan, like all folk singers, he copied melodies, he transformed them, he combined them with new lyrics which were frequently their own concoction of previous stuff.
Now, American copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the work of others.
Instead, these laws and laws around the world use the rather awkward analogy of property.
Henry Ford once said, "I invented nothing new.
Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable."
2007. The iPhone makes it debut.
Apple undoubtedly brings this innovation to us early, but its time was approaching because its core technology had been evolving for decades.
That's multi-touch, controlling a device by touching its display.
Here is Steve Jobs introducing multi-touch and making a rather foreboding joke.
Steve Jobs: And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch.
This is at TED, actually, about a year earlier.
It's the same animal, at least.
Let's hear what Jeff Han has to say about this newfangled technology.
Jeff Han: Multi-touch sensing isn't anything -- isn't completely new. I mean, people like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the '80s.
The technology, you know, isn't the most exciting thing here right now other than probably its newfound accessibility.
KF: So he's pretty frank about it not being new.
Here is the first ever slide-to-unlock.
It's a 28-page software patent, but I will summarize what it covers. Spoiler alert: Unlocking your phone by sliding an icon with your finger. (Laughter) I'm only exaggerating a little bit. It's a broad patent.
Now, can someone own this idea?
Now, back in the '80s, there were no software patents, and it was Xerox that pioneered the graphical user interface.
What if they had patented pop-up menus, scrollbars, the desktop with icons that look like folders and sheets of paper?
Would a young and inexperienced Apple have survived the legal assault from a much larger and more mature company like Xerox?
Now, this idea that everything is a remix might sound like common sense until you're the one getting remixed.
For example ...
He said, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
KF: Okay, so that's in '96. Here's in 2010.
(Laughter) "I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." (Laughter) Okay, so in other words, great artists steal, but not from me.
(Laughter) Now, behavioral economists might refer to this sort of thing as loss aversion We have a strong predisposition towards protecting what we feel is ours.
So here's the sort of equation we're looking at.
We've got laws that fundamentally treat creative works as property, plus massive rewards or settlements in infringement cases, plus huge legal fees to protect yourself in court, plus cognitive biases against perceived loss.
That is the last four years of lawsuits in the realm of smartphones.
Is this promoting the progress of useful arts?
1983. Bob Dylan is 42 years old, and his time in the cultural spotlight is long since past.
He records a song called "Blind Willie McTell," named after the blues singer, and the song is a voyage through the past, through a much darker time, but a simpler one, a time when musicians like Willie McTell had few illusions about what they did.
I think this is mostly what we do.
We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness.
Thank you so much. It was an honor to be here.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
Two years ago, I was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe.
The curator had only one condition: I had to use the Arabic script for my artwork.
Now, as an artist, a woman, an Arab, or a human being living in the world in 2010, I only had one thing to say: I wanted to say no.
And in Arabic, to say "no," we say "no, and a thousand times no."
So I decided to look for a thousand different noes.
on everything ever produced under Islamic or Arab patronage in the past 1,400 years, from Spain to the borders of China.
I collected my findings in a book, placed them chronologically, stating the name, the patron, the medium and the date.
Now, the book sat on a small shelf next to the installation, which stood three by seven meters, in Munich, Germany, in September of 2010.
Now, in January, 2011, the revolution started, and life stopped for 18 days, and on the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo, believing that the revolution had succeeded.
Nine months later I found myself spraying messages in Tahrir Square. The reason for this act was this image that I saw in my newsfeed.
So I took one "no" off a tombstone from the Islamic Museum in Cairo, and I added a message to it: "no to military rule."
And I started spraying that on the streets in Cairo.
But that led to a series of no, coming out of the book like ammunition, and adding messages to them, and I started spraying them on the walls.
No to a new Pharaoh, because whoever comes next should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator.
No to violence: Ramy Essam came to Tahrir on the second day of the revolution, and he sat there with this guitar, singing.
One month after Mubarak stepped down, this was his reward.
No to blinding heroes. Ahmed Harara lost his right eye on the 28th of January, and he lost his left eye on the 19th of November, by two different snipers.
No to killing, in this case no to killing men of religion, because Sheikh Ahmed Adina Refaat was shot on December 16th, during a demonstration, leaving behind three orphans and a widow.
No to stripping the people, and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street, and the footprint reads, "Long live a peaceful revolution," because we will never retaliate with violence.
No to barrier walls. On February 5th, concrete roadblocks were set up in Cairo to protect the Ministry of Defense from protesters.
A group of artists decided to paint a life-size tank on a wall. It's one to one.
After acts of violence, another artist came, painted blood, protesters being run over by the tank, demonstrators, and a message that read, "Starting tomorrow, I wear the new face, the face of every martyr. I exist."
So I come with my stencils, and I spray them on the suit, on the tank, and on the whole wall, and this is how it stands today until further notice. (Laughter) Now, I want to leave you with a final no.
The message reads, [Arabic] "You can crush the flowers, but you can't delay spring."
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Shukran. (Applause)
The will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual places.
This is where I come from, Todmorden.
It's a market town in the north of England, 15,000 people, between Leeds and Manchester, fairly normal market town.
It used to look like this, and now it's more like this, with fruit and veg and herbs sprouting up all over the place.
We call it propaganda gardening. (Laughter) Corner row railway, station car park, front of a health center, people's front gardens, and even in front of the police station. (Laughter) We've got edible canal towpaths, and we've got sprouting cemeteries.
The soil is extremely good. (Laughter) We've even invented a new form of tourism.
It's called vegetable tourism, and believe it or not, people come from all over the world to poke around in our raised beds, even when there's not much growing. (Laughter) But it starts a conversation. (Laughter) And, you know, we're not doing it because we're bored. (Laughter) We're doing it because we want to start a revolution.
And the answer would appear to be yes, and the language would appear to be food.
So, three and a half years ago, a few of us sat around a kitchen table and we just invented the whole thing. (Laughter) (Applause) We came up with a really simple game plan that we put to a public meeting.
We did not consult. We did not write a report.
Enough of all that. (Laughter) And we said to that public meeting in Todmorden, look, let's imagine that our town is focused around three plates: a community plate, the way we live our everyday lives; a learning plate, what we teach our kids in school and what new skills we share amongst ourselves; and business, what we do with the pound in our pocket and which businesses we choose to support.
If we start one of those community plates spinning, that's really great, that really starts to empower people, but if we can then spin that community plate with the learning plate, and then spin it with the business plate, we've got a real show there, we've got some action theater.
We're starting to build resilience ourselves.
We've not asked anybody's permission to do this, we're just doing it. (Laughter) And we are certainly not waiting for that check to drop through the letterbox before we start, and most importantly of all, we are not daunted by the sophisticated arguments that say, "These small actions are meaningless in the face of tomorrow's problems," because I have seen the power of small actions, and it is awesome.
So, back to the public meeting. (Laughter) We put that proposition to the meeting, two seconds, and then the room exploded.
I have never, ever experienced anything like that in my life.
And since we had that meeting three and a half years ago, it's been a heck of a roller coaster.
We started with a seed swap, really simple stuff, and then we took an area of land, a strip on the side of our main road, which was a dog toilet, basically, and we turned it into a really lovely herb garden.
They said, "Absolutely fine, provided you get planning permission and you do it in Latin and you do it in triplicate," so we did — (Laughter) — and now there are fruit trees and bushes and herbs and vegetables around that doctor's surgery.
This is about sharing and investing in kindness.
This is about us going to the people and saying, "We are all part of the local food jigsaw, we are all part of a solution."
And this is a route of exhibition gardens, and edible towpaths, and bee-friendly sites, and the story of pollinators, and it's a route that we designed that takes people through the whole of our town, past our cafes and our small shops, through our market, not just to and fro from the supermarket, and we're hoping that, in changing people's footfall around our town, we're also changing their behavior.
And then there's the second plate, the learning plate.
Well, we're in partnership with a high school.
We've created a company. We are designing and building an aquaponics unit in some land that was spare at the back of the high school, like you do, and now we're going to be growing fish and vegetables in an orchard with bees, and the kids are helping us build that, and the kids are on the board, and because the community was really keen on working with the high school, the high school is now teaching agriculture, and because it's teaching agriculture, we started to think, how could we then get those kids that never had a qualification before in their lives but are really excited about growing, how can we give them some more experience?
So we got some land that was donated by a local garden center.
It was really quite muddy, but in a truly incredible way, totally voluntary-led, we have turned that into a market garden training center, and that is polytunnels and raised beds and all the things you need to get the soil under your fingers and think maybe there's a job in this for me in the future.
And because we were doing that, some local academics said, "You know, we could help design a commercial horticulture course for you.
So they're doing that, and we're going to launch it later this year, and it's all an experiment, and it's all voluntary.
And then there's the third plate, because if you walk through an edible landscape, and if you're learning new skills, and if you start to get interested in what's growing seasonally, you might just want to spend more of your own money in support of local producers, not just veg, but meat and cheese and beer and whatever else it might be.
But then, we're just a community group, you know.
We're just all volunteers. What could we actually do?
So we did some really simple things.
Really popular. People congregated around it.
Sales were up.
And then, we had a chat with the farmers, and we said, "We're really serious about this," but they didn't actually believe us, so we thought, okay, what should we do? I know. If we can create a campaign around one product and show them there is local loyalty to that product, maybe they'll change their mind and see we're serious.
So we launched a campaign -- because it just amuses me -- called Every Egg Matters. (Laughter) And what we did was we put people on our egg map.
It's a stylized map of Togmorden.
Anybody that's selling their excess eggs at the garden gate, perfectly legally, to their neighbors, we've stuck on there. We started with four, and we've now got 64 on, and the result of that was that people were then going into shops asking for a local Todmorden egg, and the result of that was, some farmers upped the amount of flocks they got of free range birds, and then they went on to meat birds, and although these are really, really small steps, that increasing local economic confidence is starting to play out in a number of ways, and we now have farmers doing cheese and they've upped their flocks and rare breed pigs, they're doing pasties and pies and things that they would have never done before.
We've got increasing market stalls selling local food, and in a survey that local students did for us, 49 percent of all food traders in that town said that their bottom line had increased because of what we were actually doing.
And we're just volunteers and it's only an experiment.
(Laughter) Now, none of this is rocket science.
And there's some great ideas already in our patch.
First, they're going to create an asset register of spare land that they've got, put it in a food bank so that communities can use that wherever they live, and they're going to underpin that with a license.
Suddenly, we're seeing actions on the ground from local government. We're seeing this mainstreamed.
We are responding creatively at last to what Rio demanded of us, and there's lots more you could do.
I mean, just to list a few. One, please stop putting prickly plants around public buildings. It's a waste of space.
(Laughter) Secondly, please create -- please, please create edible landscapes so that our children start to walk past their food day in, day out, on our high streets, in our parks, wherever that might be.
Inspire local planners to put the food sites at the heart of the town and the city plan, not relegate them to the edges of the settlements that nobody can see.
Encourage all our schools to take this seriously.
If we want to inspire the farmers of tomorrow, then please let us say to every school, create a sense of purpose around the importance to the environment, local food and soils.
Put that at the heart of your school culture, and you will create a different generation.
Through an organic process, through an increasing recognition of the power of small actions, we are starting, at last, to believe in ourselves again, and to believe in our capacity, each and every one of us, to build a different and a kinder future, and in my book, that's incredible.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)
Because this is where it all really began, isn't it?
Looking at fossils dating back several millions of years -- it all points to evidence that life for the human species as we know it began right here.
You're going to hear stories of "Africa: The Next Chapter."
What's the worst thing you've ever heard about Africa?
And this is not a rhetorical question.
Famine.
Corruption.
More.
Slavery.
We've all heard these things.
But this is about Africa, the story we have not heard.
The stories that we want to know, and the stories that do exist about positive tales.
A part of my talk is going to be about investment opportunities that exist on this continent, to separate the rhetoric from the reality, the fact from the fiction.
To go to the actual data and statistics that exist about the actual things that are happening on the ground that make Africa a realistic investment opportunity and option for you.
So let's get going because Africa, to some degree, is on a turnaround.
And turnarounds are part and parcel of what I have focused on for most of my professional career.
And it all started almost a decade ago, as a young consultant at McKinsey & Company at their first African office in Johannesburg.
And there we worked with leading CEOs on African issues, and African companies on turnarounds, making the companies not just the best in Africa but the best globally.
But I really formalized this focus on turnarounds when I was completing my MBA in the United States.
And the leader that came to mind was Nelson Mandela.
Because Nelson Mandela, as he took over power as the first democratically-elected president of South Africa, faced a situation of a country that could have slid into the abyss of chaos.
Now the case, "Nelson Mandela: Change Leader," became part of the research base for a chapter in Rosabeth's new book called "Confidence."
And "Confidence" became a New York Times bestseller and topped Business Week's hardcover bestseller list.
And why I tell you this story is because later, when I was interviewed on SABC Africa, on a pan-African broadcast, they asked, "What is your key lesson, or the key thing you enjoy the most?" -- because it was a huge privilege to be part of such a project.
The lesson from that was that it was Africa -- an African story -- that was used to share news with the rest of the world of what the benchmark can be for corporate turnarounds.
Africa was being used as a success story!
You should have seen my parents' reaction!
(Laughter) But very soon, I found myself from the southern part of Africa, in South Africa -- at the very north, in Egypt.
And I sought out the most remote places.
I went to the Siwa Oasis. That was one of my stops.
And the Siwa Oasis is famous for several things, but the key thing is that it was the place that Alexander the Great went to when he wanted to find out what his destiny had in store for him.
And legend has it that Alexander trekked through this desert.
Half his battalion was wiped out in the sandstorm.
And myth says that he had an audience with the oracle, and it foretold his destiny of greatness.
This was 300 BC.
So Africa had long been seen as a place to go to for answers.
Now, the thing I remember about Siwa was the magical view of the sky at night.
Fast forward to 2002.
I'm sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Healthcare Development Conference.
A satellite picture looking down at the earth.
And it was that picture that made such a profound impact on me because I'll never forget it. I remember the very moment.
And I wanted to share that image with you of what I saw at that point.
The first thing that I saw was North America at night -- glowing, in all its glory. A warm feeling. Light.
And then I saw it -- Africa. Quite literally the "Dark Continent."
And while Africa may be dark, the thing that brought the message home to me was that this is the challenge we are facing, but it's also the opportunity.
Because whilst Africa may be dark -- other than the few specks that exist north and in the south and other areas -- it's aglow with the light in the hearts of the millions of people that are there.
Entrepreneurs, dynamic people, people with hope.
It was George Kimble, the geographer, who said that, "The only thing dark about Africa is our ignorance of it."
So let's start shedding light on this amazing eclectic continent that has so much to offer.
Africa is the second-largest continent, a landmass second from Asia.
It also is the second most populated continent, with 900 million people.
In fact -- coming back to the land mass -- Africa is so big that you could fit in the continental United States, China, and the entire Europe into Africa, and still have space.
Africa is home to over 1,000 languages -- 2,000 is another estimate that's out there -- with over 2,000 languages and dialects.
But you could say, "Invest in Africa in over 1,000 languages, and it wouldn't make a difference."
What does the data say?
As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets.
So I want to share with you some of these bellwether signals, or signs, and winds of change that are sweeping this continent.
And let's start at the high level, on the macro-factors.
Inflation, in general, is coming down across Africa -- that's the first sign -- in many countries reaching double-digit figures.
Egypt: from the 16 percent to about 8.4 percent.
Nigeria: a similar situation, from the 16 percent to the eight percent. Single digits.
More fascinating, you have other countries -- South Africa, Mauritius, Namibia -- all in single digits.
But that's looking at the big picture.
And the first myth to dispel is that Africa is not a country.
It's made up -- (Applause) It's made up of 53 different countries.
Each country has a unique value proposition.
You can make money, you can lose money in Africa.
I was recently elected, as Emeka mentioned, as the President of the South African Chamber of Commerce in America.
And I'm very proud and happy to be in that role because it is a fascinating position to be in.
To hear this dialogue that's just increasing in tenor and velocity, of decisions about trade and companies wanting to come.
So the first port of call: let's talk a little bit about South Africa.
For example, South Africa was recently voted as the top destination for the top 1,000 UK companies for offshore call-centers.
Same language, timeline, et cetera. Makes sense.
Other headlines that have recently reached South Africa were Bain Capital and KKR, the big boys of private equity.
Bing Capital's acquisition of Edcon, a large retailer, is testimony to the confidence they are starting to place in the economy.
Undoubtedly, Nigeria is clearly a hot spot.
Challenges -- and we will hear a lot about Nigeria in these four days.
But looking at Goldman Sachs' work -- we had the famous BRIC Report.
The new report, "The Next Eleven," highlights that by 2020 Nigeria is going to be amongst the top 10 economies in the world.
It's an investment opportunity. Think about that.
Is anyone -- our banks, our investors -- seriously thinking about going to Nigeria?
What's going on in Nigeria? A couple of things.
I want to talk about it from the perspective of capital markets.
Bellwether signs again.
But the first Eurobond, the raising of international capital offshore, off its own balance sheet, without any sovereign backing -- that is an indication of the confidence that is taking place in that economy.
Looking at the oil industry, Africa provides 18 percent of the U.S.'s oil supply, with the Middle East just 16 percent.
It's an important strategic partner.
Let's put Nigeria in perspective.
2.2 to 2.4 million barrels of oil a day -- the same league as Kuwait, the same league as Venezuela.
And Emeka and I have had these discussions.
We have to move away from what's called "the curse of the commodities."
Because it's not about oil, it's not about commodities.
For Africa to truly be sustainable, we have to move beyond to other industries.
So let's unpack those very quickly, and I'm going to move through these very, very, very fast because I can see that clock counting down.
What else is going on there? Egypt.
Egypt is launching a first large industrial zone -- 2.8 billion investment.
Close to the Mediterranean, near Alexandria -- textiles, petrochemicals.
It's being managed by a Singaporean-based management company.
So they want to emerge as an industrial powerhouse across the industries -- away from oil.
Let's look at agriculture. Let's look at forestry.
What's going on there?
In Tanzania last week, we had the launch of the East African Organic Produce Standard.
Again, gathering together farmers, gathering together stakeholders in East Africa to get standards for organic produce. Better prices.
Uganda: the New Forest Company, replanting and redeveloping their forests. Why is that important?
As the energy needs are met and electricity is needed [we will need] poles for rolling out electricity.
But here is the sweetener in the deal.
They're going to be tapping into carbon credits.
Let's go back to Nigeria.
The banking sector has undergone tremendous transformation, from over 80 banks to 25 banks. Strengthening of the system.
The largest population in Africa is in Nigeria.
135 million-plus people. Think about that.
Now let's look at the continent as a whole.
Nigeria: 70 percent of roads are untarred. Zambia: 80 percent.
In general, more than 50 percent of roads are untarred.
So what are the signs that things are fundamentally changing?
Let's look at the stock markets in Africa.
If I had to ask you, "In 2005 what was the best performing stock market or stock exchange in the world?" Would Egypt come to mind?
In 2005, the Egyptian stock exchange returned over 145 percent.
What's going on in some of the other countries?
Let's look at some 2006 numbers. Kenya: over 60 percent. Nigeria: over 40 percent.
These are the trends that are taking place.
But in any investment decision, the key question is, "What is my alternative investment?"
Because in Africa today, we are competing globally for capital.
What Africa is providing is a diversification play, and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing.
Now, when looking at Africa vis-a-vis other things, and countries in Africa vis-a-vis other things, comparisons become important.
10 years ago there, were very few countries that received sovereign ratings from the Standard & Poors, Moody's and Fitch's.
Today, 16 African countries and growing have sovereign country ratings. What does this mean?
The backbone of making investment decisions for global holders of capital.
Bakino Faso: B-minus. And so on.
Why are they doing that? Because they expect investment to follow.
So one of the big bellwethers, and one of my final points I want to mention, is the interesting thing I read is that CNBC has launched their first African channel. Why is CNBC doing this?
It's the 24-hour rolling African news channel.
They're doing it because they are expecting things to happen.
Me and you, the investments we are going to be making, the investments the world is going to be making -- that's the 24-hour news channel dedicated to Africa.
And think about the concept of transformation in the back of your mind because things can be turned around rather quickly.
In 1899, Joseph Conrad released "The Heart of Darkness," a tale of grim horror along the Congo River.
If one looks carefully, on the Congo River is one of those bright lights. And that's the very Congo river generating light -- the old heart of darkness now generating light with hydro-electric power.
That is a transformation in power of ideas.
So the next step, over the next four days, is us exploring more of these ideas.
And perchance, if you can always keep this picture in your mind, that when we convene maybe in the distant future, in 2020, that picture will look very different.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm 150 feet down an illegal mine shaft in Ghana.
The air is thick with heat and dust, and it's hard to breathe.
I can feel the brush of sweaty bodies passing me in the darkness, but I can't see much else.
I hear voices talking, but mostly the shaft is this cacophony of men coughing, and stone being broken with primitive tools.
Like the others, I wear a flickering, cheap flashlight tied to my head with this elastic, tattered band, and I can barely make out the slick tree limbs holding up the walls of the three-foot square hole dropping hundreds of feet into the earth.
When my hand slips, I suddenly remember a miner I had met days before who had lost his grip and fell countless feet down that shaft.
I got to climb out of that hole, and I got to go home, but they likely never will, because they're trapped in slavery.
For the last 28 years, I've been documenting indigenous cultures in more than 70 countries on six continents, and in 2009 I had the great honor of being the sole exhibitor at the Vancouver Peace Summit.
Amongst all the astonishing people I met there, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern day slavery.
We started talking about slavery, and really, I started learning about slavery, for I had certainly known it existed in the world, but not to such a degree.
Thus began my journey into modern day slavery.
Oddly, I had been to many of these places before.
A conservative estimate tells us there are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today.
That's double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.
A hundred and fifty years ago, an agricultural slave cost about three times the annual salary of an American worker.
That equates to about $50,000 in today's money.
Yet today, entire families can be enslaved for generations over a debt as small as $18.
Astonishingly, slavery generates profits of more than $13 billion worldwide each year.
Many have been tricked by false promises of a good education, a better job, only to find that they're forced to work without pay under the threat of violence, and they cannot walk away.
Today's slavery is about commerce, so the goods that enslaved people produce have value, but the people producing them are disposable.
Slavery exists everywhere, nearly, in the world, and yet it is illegal everywhere in the world.
In India and Nepal, I was introduced to the brick kilns.
This strange and awesome sight was like walking into ancient Egypt or Dante's Inferno.
Enveloped in temperatures of 130 degrees, men, women, children, entire families in fact, were cloaked in a heavy blanket of dust, while mechanically stacking bricks on their head, up to 18 at a time, and carrying them from the scorching kilns to trucks hundreds of yards away.
Deadened by monotony and exhaustion, they work silently, doing this task over and over for 16 or 17 hours a day.
So pervasive was the heat and the dust that my camera became too hot to even touch and ceased working.
Every 20 minutes, I'd have to run back to our cruiser to clean out my gear and run it under an air conditioner to revive it, and as I sat there, I thought, my camera is getting far better treatment than these people.
Back in the kilns, I wanted to cry, but the abolitionist next to me quickly grabbed me and he said, "Lisa, don't do that. Just don't do that here."
And he very clearly explained to me that emotional displays are very dangerous in a place like this, not just for me, but for them.
I couldn't offer them any direct help.
I wasn't a citizen of that country.
I'd have to rely on Free the Slaves to work within the system for their liberation, and I trusted that they would.
As for me, I'd have to wait until I got home to really feel my heartbreak.
In the Himalayas, I found children carrying stone for miles down mountainous terrain to trucks waiting at roads below.
It's difficult to witness something so overwhelming.
Some don't even know they're enslaved, people working 16, 17 hours a day without any pay, because this has been the case all their lives.
They have nothing to compare it to.
When these villagers claimed their freedom, the slaveholders burned down all of their houses.
I mean, these people had nothing, and they were so petrified, they wanted to give up, but the woman in the center rallied for them to persevere, and abolitionists on the ground helped them get a quarry lease of their own, so that now they do the same back-breaking work, but they do it for themselves, and they get paid for it, and they do it in freedom.
Sex trafficking is what we often think of when we hear the word slavery, and because of this worldwide awareness, I was warned that it would be difficult for me to work safely within this particular industry.
In Kathmandu, I was escorted by women who had previously been sex slaves themselves.
They ushered me down a narrow set of stairs that led to this dirty, dimly fluorescent lit basement.
This wasn't a brothel, per se.
It was more like a restaurant.
Cabin restaurants, as they're known in the trade, are venues for forced prostitution.
Each has small, private rooms, where the slaves, women, along with young girls and boys, some as young as seven years old, are forced to entertain the clients, encouraging them to buy more food and alcohol.
Each cubicle is dark and dingy, identified with a painted number on the wall, and partitioned by plywood and a curtain.
The workers here often endure tragic sexual abuse at the hands of their customers.
Standing in the near darkness, I remember feeling this quick, hot fear, and in that instant, I could only imagine what it must be like to be trapped in that hell.
There were no back doors.
There were no windows large enough to climb through.
These people have no escape at all, and as we take in such a difficult subject, it's important to note that slavery, including sex trafficking, occurs in our own backyard as well.
Tens of hundreds of people are enslaved in agriculture, in restaurants, in domestic servitude, and the list can go on.
Recently, the New York Times reported that between 100,000 and 300,000 American children are sold into sex slavery every year.
It's all around us. We just don't see it.
The textile industry is another one we often think of when we hear about slave labor.
I visited villages in India where entire families were enslaved in the silk trade.
This is a family portrait.
The dyed black hands are the father, while the blue and red hands are his sons.
They mix dye in these big barrels, and they submerge the silk into the liquid up to their elbows, but the dye is toxic.
My interpreter told me their stories.
"We have no freedom," they said.
It's estimated that more than 4,000 children are enslaved on Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world.
When we first arrived, I went to have a quick look.
I saw what seemed to be a family fishing on a boat, two older brothers, some younger kids, makes sense right?
Wrong. They were all enslaved.
Children are taken from their families and trafficked and vanished, and they're forced to work endless hours on these boats on the lake, even though they do not know how to swim.
This young child is eight years old.
He was trembling when our boat approached, frightened it would run over his tiny canoe.
The skeletal tree limbs submerged in Lake Volta often catch the fishing nets, and weary, frightened children are thrown into the water to untether the lines.
Many of them drown.
For as long as he can recall, he's been forced to work on the lake.
Terrified of his master, he will not run away, and since he's been treated with cruelty all his life, he passes that down to the younger slaves that he manages.
I met these boys at five in the morning, when they were hauling in the last of their nets, but they had been working since 1 a.m.
in the cold, windy night.
And it's important to note that these nets weigh more than a thousand pounds when they're full of fish.
I want to introduce you to Kofi.
Kofi was rescued from a fishing village.
I met him at a shelter where Free the Slaves rehabilitates victims of slavery.
Here he's seen taking a bath at the well, pouring big buckets of water over his head, and the wonderful news is, as you and I are sitting here talking today, Kofi has been reunited with his family, and what's even better, his family has been given tools to make a living and to keep their children safe.
Kofi is the embodiment of possibility.
Driving down a road in Ghana with partners of Free the Slaves, a fellow abolitionist on a moped suddenly sped up to our cruiser and tapped on the window.
He told us to follow him down a dirt road into the jungle.
At the end of the road, he urged us out of the car, and told the driver to quickly leave.
As we started down the path, we pushed aside the vines blocking the way, and after about an hour of walking in, found that the trail had become flooded by recent rains, so I hoisted the photo gear above my head as we descended into these waters up to my chest.
After another two hours of hiking, the winding trail abruptly ended at a clearing, and before us was a mass of holes that could fit into the size of a football field, and all of them were full of enslaved people laboring.
Many women had children strapped to their backs while they were panning for gold, wading in water poisoned by mercury.
Mercury is used in the extraction process.
These miners are enslaved in a mine shaft in another part of Ghana.
I remember looking into their tired, bloodshot eyes, for many of them had been underground for 72 hours.
The shafts are up to 300 feet deep, and they carry out heavy bags of stone that later will be transported to another area, where the stone will be pounded so that they can extract the gold.
All of them are victim to injury, illness and violence.
When I met him, he had been working in the mines for 14 years, and the leg injury that you see here is actually from a mining accident, one so severe doctors say his leg should be amputated.
Even still, he has a dream that he will become free and become educated with the help of local activists like Free the Slaves, and it's this sort of determination, in the face of unimaginable odds, that fills me with complete awe.
I want to shine a light on slavery.
When I was working in the field, I brought lots of candles with me, and with the help of my interpreter, I imparted to the people I was photographing that I wanted to illuminate their stories and their plight, so when it was safe for them, and safe for me, I made these images.
I wanted them to know that we will be bearing witness to them, and that we will do whatever we can to help make a difference in their lives.
I truly believe, if we can see one another as fellow human beings, then it becomes very difficult to tolerate atrocities like slavery.
I hope that these images awaken a force in those who view them, people like you, and I hope that force will ignite a fire, and that fire will shine a light on slavery, for without that light, the beast of bondage can continue to live in the shadows.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
In half a century of trying to help prevent wars, there's one question that never leaves me: How do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return?
This question: "How do I deal with a bully without becoming a thug in return?"
I remember I was about 13, glued to a grainy black and white television in my parents' living room as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, and kids not much older than me were throwing themselves at the tanks and getting mown down.
And I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase.
And my mother came up and said, "What on Earth are you doing?"
And I said, "I'm going to Budapest."
And I said, "Kids are getting killed there.
There's something terrible happening."
And she said, "Don't be so silly."
And I started to cry.
And she got it, she said, "Okay, I see it's serious.
You're much too young to help.
You need training. I'll help you.
But just unpack your suitcase."
And so I got some training and went and worked in Africa during most of my 20s.
I wanted to understand how violence, how oppression, works.
And what I've discovered since is this: Bullies use violence in three ways.
They use political violence to intimidate, physical violence to terrorize and mental or emotional violence to undermine.
And only very rarely in very few cases does it work to use more violence.
Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy.
And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence.
So what does work?
And the first is that the change that has to take place has to take place here, inside me.
It's my response, my attitude, to oppression that I've got control over, and that I can do something about.
And what I need to develop is self-knowledge to do that.
When do I give in?
What will I stand up for?
And meditation or self-inspection is one of the ways -- again it's not the only one -- it's one of the ways of gaining this kind of inner power.
And my heroine here -- like Satish's -- is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma.
She was leading a group of students on a protest in the streets of Rangoon.
They came around a corner faced with a row of machine guns.
But she told the students to sit down.
And she walked forward with such calm and such clarity and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun, put her hand on it and lower it.
And no one got killed.
But we have to practice.
So what about our fear?
I have a little mantra.
So we all know the three o'clock in the morning syndrome, when something you've been worrying about wakes you up -- I see a lot of people -- and for an hour you toss and turn, it gets worse and worse, and by four o'clock you're pinned to the pillow by a monster this big.
And you talk to the fear and you ask it what it wants, what it needs.
And you make a plan.
(Laughter) So I did the thing.
I got up, made the cup of tea, sat down with it, did it all and I'm here -- still partly paralyzed, but I'm here.
(Applause) So that's fear. What about anger?
Wherever there is injustice there's anger.
But anger is like gasoline, and if you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno.
But anger as an engine -- in an engine -- is powerful.
If we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward, it can get us through the dreadful moments and it can give us real inner power.
And I learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policy-makers.
In order to develop a dialogue for change we have to deal with our anger.
They are human beings just like us.
And they're doing what they think is best.
And that's the basis on which we have to talk with them.
So that's the third one, anger.
And it brings me to the crux of what's going on, or what I perceive as going on, in the world today, which is that last century was top-down power.
It was still governments telling people what to do.
This century there's a shift.
It's like mushrooms coming through concrete.
They know best what to do.
And the kind of thing they're doing is demobilizing militias, rebuilding economies, resettling refugees, even liberating child soldiers.
And they have to risk their lives almost every day to do this.
And I think that the U.S. military is finally beginning to get this.
Up to now their counter-terrorism policy has been to kill insurgents at almost any cost, and if civilians get in the way, that's written as "collateral damage."
And this is so infuriating and humiliating for the population of Afghanistan, that it makes the recruitment for al-Qaeda very easy, when people are so disgusted by, for example, the burning of the Koran.
So the training of the troops has to change.
And I think there are signs that it is beginning to change.
But there is one magnificent example for them to take their cue from, and that's a brilliant U.S. lieutenant colonel called Chris Hughes.
And he was leading his men down the streets of Najaf -- in Iraq actually -- and suddenly people were pouring out of the houses on either side of the road, screaming, yelling, furiously angry, and surrounded these very young troops who were completely terrified, didn't know what was going on, couldn't speak Arabic.
And Chris Hughes strode into the middle of the throng with his weapon above his head, pointing at the ground, and he said, "Kneel."
And complete silence fell.
And after about two minutes, everybody moved aside and went home.
Now that to me is wisdom in action.
In the moment, that's what he did.
And it's happening everywhere now.
Have you asked yourselves why and how so many dictatorships have collapsed over the last 30 years?
Dictatorships in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mali, Madagascar, Poland, the Philippines, Serbia, Slovenia, I could go on, and now Tunisia and Egypt.
A lot of it is due to a book written by an 80-year-old man in Boston, Gene Sharp.
He wrote a book called "From Dictatorship to Democracy" with 81 methodologies for non-violent resistance.
And it's been translated into 26 languages.
And it's being used by young people and older people everywhere, because it works and it's effective.
So this is what gives me hope -- not just hope, this is what makes me feel very positive right now.
We're using the kind of skills that I've outlined: inner power -- the development of inner power -- through self-knowledge, recognizing and working with our fear, using anger as a fuel, cooperating with others, banding together with others, courage, and most importantly, commitment to active non-violence.
Now I don't just believe in non-violence.
I see evidence everywhere of how it works.
And I see that we, ordinary people, can do what Aung San Suu Kyi and Ghandi and Mandela did.
We can bring to an end the bloodiest century that humanity has ever known.
And we can organize to overcome oppression by opening our hearts as well as strengthening this incredible resolve.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The story starts: I was at a friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental disorders.
And it used to be, back in the '50s, a very slim pamphlet.
And it lists currently 374 mental disorders.
(Laughter) I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given.
I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure, and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, "You're a failure!"
(Laughter) I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for.
(Laughter) I'm kidding. I'm not kidding.
And I've got malingering.
And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.
Anyway, I was looking through this book, wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional, or maybe the psychiatry profession has a kind of strange desire to label what's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder.
I didn't know which of these was true, but I thought it was kind of interesting, and I thought maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to get their view, which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists.
(Laughter) It was a man called Brian, who runs a crack team of Scientologists who are determined to destroy psychiatry wherever it lies.
They're called the CCHR.
And I said to him, "Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that can't be trusted?"
And he said, "Yes, we can prove it to you."
And I said, "How?"
And I said, "Who's Tony?"
And he said, "Tony's in Broadmoor."
Now, Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital.
It used to be known as the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
It's where they send the serial killers, and the people who can't help themselves.
And I said to Brian, "Well, what did Tony do?"
And he said, "Hardly anything.
So I said, "Yes, please."
I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park, which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious, they yawn uncontrollably.
And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the patients.
It looks like a giant Hampton Inn.
It's all peach and pine and calming colors.
And the only bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons.
And they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants, and quite docile-looking.
And Brian the Scientologist whispered to me, "They're medicated," which, to the Scientologists, is like the worst evil in the world, but I'm thinking it's probably a good idea.
(Laughter) And then Brian said, "Here's Tony."
And he wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstripe suit.
And he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice.
And he sat down.
And I was in prison awaiting trial, and my cellmate said to me, 'You know what you have to do?
Fake madness.
Tell them you're mad, you'll get sent to some cushy hospital.
He said, "Well, I asked to see the prison psychiatrist.
And I'd just seen a film called 'Crash,' in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.
So I said to the psychiatrist, 'I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.'" And I said, "What else?"
He said, "Oh, yeah. I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died, because it would make me feel more normal."
I said, "Where'd you get that from?"
He said, "Oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had at the prison library."
And they didn't send him to some cushy hospital.
They sent him to Broadmoor.
And the minute he got there, said he took one look at the place, asked to see the psychiatrist, said, "There's been a terrible misunderstanding.
I said, "How long have you been here for?"
He said, "Well, if I'd just done my time in prison for the original crime, I'd have got five years.
I've been in Broadmoor for 12 years."
Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.
He said, "I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football or what's on TV.
I subscribe to New Scientist, and recently they had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives.
So I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?' When I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written: 'Believes bees can sniff out explosives.'" (Laughter) He said, "You know, they're always looking out for nonverbal clues to my mental state.
How do you cross your legs in a sane way?
It's just impossible."
When Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, "Am I sitting like a journalist?
Am I crossing my legs like a journalist?"
He said, "You know, I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and I've got the 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' rapist on the other side of me.
So I tend to stay in my room a lot because I find them quite frightening.
And they take that as a sign of madness.
Anyway, he seemed completely normal to me, but what did I know?
And he said, "Yep. We accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence, because his hallucinations -- that had seemed quite cliche to begin with -- just vanished the minute he got to Broadmoor.
And in fact, faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath.
It's on the checklist: cunning, manipulative.
And I spoke to other experts, and they said the pinstripe suit -- classic psychopath -- speaks to items one and two on the checklist: glibness, superficial charm and grandiose sense of self-worth.
And I said, "Well, but why didn't he hang out with the other patients?"
Classic psychopath -- it speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy.
So all the things that had seemed most normal about Tony was evidence, according to his clinician, that he was mad in this new way.
He was a psychopath.
And his clinician said to me, "If you want to know more about psychopaths, you can go on a psychopath-spotting course run by Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist."
So I did.
I went on a psychopath-spotting course, and I am now a certified -- and I have to say, extremely adept -- psychopath spotter.
So, here's the statistics: One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath.
So there's 1,500 people in his room.
Fifteen of you are psychopaths.
Although that figure rises to four percent of CEOs and business leaders, so I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room.
It could be carnage by the end of the night.
(Laughter) Hare said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior -- the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative.
In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.
It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all.
Hare said, "You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor who may or may not have faked madness.
You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths."
So I gave it a try. I wrote to the Enron people.
I said, "Could I come and interview you in prison, to find out it you're psychopaths?"
(Laughter) And they didn't reply.
(Laughter) So I changed tack.
I emailed "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the asset stripper from the 1990s.
And I emailed him and I said, "I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you ... special, and interested in the predatory spirit, and fearless.
(Laughter) So I went to Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion.
There were lions and tigers -- he was taking me through the garden -- there were falcons and eagles, he was saying, "Over there you've got sharks and --" he was saying this in a less effeminate way -- "You've got more sharks and you've got tigers."
It was like Narnia.
(Laughter) And then we went into his kitchen.
Like, for instance, one famous story about him, somebody came up to him and said, "I've just bought myself a new car."
And he said, "Well, you may have a new car, but I'll tell you what you don't have -- a job."
So in his kitchen -- he was in there with his wife, Judy, and his bodyguard, Sean -- and I said, "You know how I said in my email that you might have a special brain anomaly that makes you special?"
He said, "Yeah, it's an amazing theory, it's like Star Trek.
And I said, "Well --" (Clears throat) (Laughter) Some psychologists might say that this makes you --" (Mumbles) (Laughter) And he said, "What?"
And I said, "I've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket.
Which I have to say, would have been hard for him to deny, because he was standing under a giant oil painting of himself.
(Laughter) He said, "Well, you've got to believe in you!"
And I said, "Manipulative."
He said, "That's leadership."
So he was going down the psychopath checklist, basically turning it into "Who Moved My Cheese?"
(Laughter) But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap.
He said "no" to many short-term marital relationships.
He's only ever been married twice.
Admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like, but people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages in the heat of an argument, and his second marriage has lasted 41 years.
And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had kind of turned me a little bit psychopathic.
Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked "Psychopath."
I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges.
And I realized, my God -- this is what I've been doing for 20 years.
It's what all journalists do.
We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems.
And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee's personality.
And you know, this is a country that over-diagnoses certain mental disorders hugely.
Childhood bipolar -- children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on the bipolar checklist.
When I got back to London, Tony phoned me.
I said, "Well, they say that you're a psychopath."
And he said, "I'm not a psychopath."
One of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse, but another item on the checklist is cunning, manipulative.
So I said okay.
They decided that he shouldn't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he would have a greater than average chance of recidivism.
So they let him go.
Everyone's a bit psychopathic."
I said, "What are you going to do now?"
He said, "I'm going to go to Belgium.
(Laughter) Anyway, that was two years ago, and that's where my book ended.
And for the last 20 months, everything was fine.
Nothing bad happened.
He was, according to Brian the Scientologist, making up for lost time, which I know sounds ominous, but isn't necessarily ominous.
Unfortunately, after 20 months, he did go back to jail for a month.
Ended up going to jail for a month, which I know is bad, but at least a month implies that whatever the fracas was, it wasn't too bad.
And what Tony is, is he's a semi-psychopath.
He's a gray area in a world that doesn't like gray areas.
But the gray areas are where you find the complexity.
It's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth.
And Tony said to me, "Jon, could I buy you a drink in a bar?
I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me."
And I didn't go.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Video) Newscaster: There's a large path of destruction here in town.
After an EF3 tornado ripped straight through our town and took parts of our roof off, I decided to stay in Massachusetts, instead of pursuing the master's program I had moved my boxes home that afternoon for.
Morgan O'Neill: So, on June 1, we weren't disaster experts, but on June 3, we started faking it.
This experience changed our lives, and now we're trying to change the experience.
CO: So, tornadoes don't happen in Massachusetts, and I was cleverly standing in the front yard when one came over the hill.
Trees were thrown against the house, the windows exploded.
MO: I was here in Boston.
I'm a PhD student at MIT, and I happen to study atmospheric science.
Actually, it gets weirder -- I was in the museum of science at the time the tornado hit, playing with the tornado display -- (Laughter) so I missed her call.
I drove home late that night with batteries and ice.
We live across the street from a historic church that had lost its very iconic steeple in the storm.
It had become a community gathering place overnight.
CO: We walked to the church because we heard they had hot meals, but when we arrived, we found problems.
There were a couple large, sweaty men with chainsaws standing in the center of the church, but nobody knew where to send them because no one knew the extent of the damage yet.
As we watched, they became frustrated and left to go find somebody to help on their own.
MO: So we started organizing. Why? It had to be done.
We found Pastor Bob and offered to give the response some infrastructure.
And then, armed with just two laptops and one air card, we built a recovery machine.
(Applause) CO: That was a tornado, and everyone's heading to the church to drop things off and volunteer.
We should inventory the donations piling up here.
CO: And we need a hotline. Can you make a Google Voice number?
MO: Sure. And we need to tell people what not to bring.
Hey, there's a news truck. I'll tell them.
Together: Someone get me Post-its!
(Laughter) CO: And then the rest of the community figured out that we had answers.
MO: I can donate three water heaters, but someone needs to come pick them up.
CO: My car is in my living room!
CO: My puppy is missing and insurance doesn't cover chimneys.
CO: You sent me to that place on Washington Street yesterday, and now I'm covered in poison ivy.
We had to learn how to answer questions quickly and to solve problems in a minute or less; otherwise, something more urgent would come up, and it wouldn't get done.
We just started answering questions and making decisions because someone -- anyone -- had to.
And why not me? I'm a campaign organizer.
I'm good at Facebook.
(Laughter) CO: The point is, if there's a flood or a fire or a hurricane, you, or somebody like you, are going to step up and start organizing things.
After another day and a shower at the shelter, we realized it shouldn't be this hard.
CO: In a country like ours where we breathe Wi-Fi, leveraging technology for a faster recovery should be a no-brainer.
Systems like the ones that we were creating on the fly could exist ahead of time.
And if some community member is in this organizing position in every area after every disaster, these tools should exist.
MO: So, we decided to build them: a recovery in a box, something that could be deployed after every disaster by any local organizer.
CO: I decided to stay in the country, give up the master's in Moscow and to work full-time to make this happen.
In the course of the past year, we've become experts in the field of community-powered disaster recovery.
And there are three main problems that we've observed with the way things work currently.
MO: The tools.
So they use Post-its or Excel or Facebook.
You build both gradually, until a moment of peak mobilization at the time of the election.
And you've only got about seven days to capture 50 percent of all of the Web searches that will ever be made to help your area.
This is the slide for Katrina.
This is the curve for Joplin.
There's a gap here.
Affected households have to wait for the insurance adjuster to visit before they can start accepting help on their properties.
And you've only got about four days of interest in Dallas.
MO: Data.
FEMA and the state will pay 85 percent of the cost of a federally-declared disaster, leaving the town to pay the last 15 percent of the bill.
Now that expense can be huge, but if the town can mobilize X amount of volunteers for Y hours, the dollar value of that labor used goes toward the town's contribution.
Now try to imagine the sinking feeling you get when you've just sent out 2,000 volunteers and you can't prove it.
CO: These are three problems with a common solution.
If we can get the right tools at the right time to the people who will inevitably step up and start putting their communities back together, we can create new standards in disaster recovery.
CO: And we needed help.
Alvin, our software engineer and co-founder, has built these tools.
And we've been flying into disaster areas since this past January, setting up software, training residents and licensing the software to areas that are preparing for disasters.
MO: One of our first launches was after the Dallas tornadoes this past April.
We flew into a town that had a static, outdated website and a frenetic Facebook feed, trying to structure the response, and we launched our platform.
CO: So it's working, but it could be better.
Emergency preparedness is a big deal in disaster recovery because it makes towns safer and more resilient.
Imagine if we could have these systems ready to go in a place before a disaster.
So that's what we're working on.
MO: It's not rocket science.
There are over three volunteer groups working almost every day, and have been since June 1 of last year, to make sure these residents get what they need and get back in their homes.
They have hotlines and spreadsheets and data.
CO: And that makes a difference.
No matter how good an aid organization is at what they do, they eventually have to go home.
But if you give locals the tools, if you show them what they can do to recover, they become experts.
(Applause) MO: All right. Let's go.
(Applause)
Listen to the sounds of why hearing matters to the Alaskan Native people.
Hearing loss makes it hard to fish on the open water, hunt caribou and harvest berries, activities central to Alaskan Native culture.
Hearing loss isn't unique to rural Alaska.
It's global.
The Global Burden of Disease Project estimates there are 1.1 billion people living with hearing loss worldwide.
That's more people than the entire population here in sub-Saharan Africa.
Over 80 percent are in low- and middle-income countries, and many have no access to hearing care.
The impact on people's lives is tremendous.
Anuk is a three-year-old boy I treated in Alaska.
Ear infections started when he was barely four months old.
Sure enough, many rounds of infections had resulted in hearing loss.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
The World Health Organization estimates that half of all global hearing loss can be prevented.
If Anuk's hearing loss is identified and treated promptly, his life and the opportunities he has as he grows up could look vastly different.
I'm an ear surgeon working with partners around the world on new pathways for hearing loss prevention.
This solution comes from my collaboration with a tribal health organization called the Norton Sound Health Corporation.
Hearing loss evaluation traditionally requires testing by an audiologist in a soundproof room, with a lot of permanent equipment.
An ear surgeon then examines Anuk's ears under a microscope and decides a treatment plan.
In a state where 75 percent of communities aren't connected to a hospital by road, an expensive flight is required.
To overcome these barriers, Alaska has developed a state-of-the-art telemedicine system that connects over 250 village health clinics with specialists who triage all types of health concerns.
My colleagues have validated that ear-related telemedicine consults are equivalent to an in-person exam.
Telemedicine has saved over 18 million in travel costs in this single region over the past 15 years.
Our team is taking the power of telemedicine to a new level, through a project funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
For the first time, we are merging telemedicine with mobile screening technology that extends the reach of expert triage beyond health care settings.
This cell-based screen, developed in South Africa, costs over 10 times less than traditional equipment and does not require advanced training.
We then apply Alaska telemedicine technology to transmit the data to specialists, who connect Anuk to the treatment he needs.
Our team is launching a randomized trial in 15 communities along the Bering Sea to study how well this intervention works.
Our goal is to prevent childhood hearing loss across the state of Alaska.
The impact is global.
Mobile telemedicine can revolutionize access to care.
In Malawi, for example, there are only two ear surgeons and 11 audiologists for a population of 17 million.
This technology could empower teachers and community health workers to provide access to care to children in places like Malawi.
Scaling up globally could change children's lives who have never had access to hearing care before, using just the power of a cell phone.
It's time to change the course of preventable hearing loss.
Anuk and countless children like him are depending on us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I want to talk to you today about something the open-source programming world can teach democracy, but before that, a little preamble.
This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute.
A couple months ago, Payne started a food blog called NeverSeconds, and she would take her camera with her every day to school to document her school lunches.
Can you spot the vegetable? (Laughter) And, as sometimes happens, this blog acquired first dozens of readers, and then hundreds of readers, and then thousands of readers, as people tuned in to watch her rate her school lunches, including on my favorite category, "Pieces of hair found in food." (Laughter) This was a zero day. That's good.
And then two weeks ago yesterday, she posted this.
A post that read: "Goodbye."
And she said, "I'm very sorry to tell you this, but my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me I'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore.
I really enjoyed doing this.
Thank you for reading. Goodbye."
You can guess what happened next, right? (Laughter) The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous, that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves the same day and said, "We would, we would never censor a nine-year-old." (Laughter) Except, of course, this morning. (Laughter) And this brings up the question, what made them think they could get away with something like that? (Laughter) And the answer is, all of human history prior to now.
This is something we've faced several times over the last few centuries.
When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry.
Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet.
Even the printing press, even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe.
Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society.
The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with.
That's what happens when the media's space expands.
And the answer, I think, can be found in things like this.
This is the cover of "Philosophical Transactions," the first scientific journal ever published in English in the middle of the 1600s, and it was created by a group of people who had been calling themselves "The Invisible College," a group of natural philosophers who only later would call themselves scientists, and they wanted to improve the way natural philosophers argued with each other, and they needed to do two things for this.
They needed openness. They needed to create a norm which said, when you do an experiment, you have to publish not just your claims, but how you did the experiment.
If you don't tell us how you did it, we won't trust you.
But the other thing they needed was speed.
They had to quickly synchronize what other natural philosophers knew. Otherwise, you couldn't get the right kind of argument going.
The printing press was clearly the right medium for this, but the book was the wrong tool. It was too slow.
And so they invented the scientific journal as a way of synchronizing the argument across the community of natural scientists.
The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press.
It was created by scientists, but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have a printing press as a tool.
So what about us? What about our generation, and our media revolution, the Internet?
So I study social media, which means, to a first approximation, I watch people argue.
And if I had to pick a group that I think is our Invisible College, is our generation's collection of people trying to take these tools and to press it into service, not for more arguments, but for better arguments, I'd pick the open-source programmers.
Programming is a three-way relationship between a programmer, some source code, and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set of instructions that the computer knows how to execute, and that's if one person is writing it.
Once you get more than one person writing it, it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite each other's work if they're working on the same file, or to send incompatible instructions that simply causes the computer to choke, and this problem grows larger the more programmers are involved.
Now, for decades there has been a canonical solution to this problem, which is to use something called a "version control system," and a version control system does what is says on the tin.
The only programmers who can change it are people who've specifically been given permission to access it, and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it that they have permission to change.
And when people draw diagrams of version control systems, the diagrams always look something like this.
This is feudalism: one owner, many workers.
Now, that's fine for the commercial software industry.
The programmers come and go.
But there was one programmer who decided that this wasn't the way to work.
This is Linus Torvalds.
Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer, created Linux, obviously, and Torvalds looked at the way the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem.
Open-source software, the core promise of the open-source license, is that everybody should have access to all the source code all the time, but of course, this creates the very threat of chaos you have to forestall in order to get anything working.
His point of view on this was very clear.
When you adopt a tool, you also adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool, and he wasn't going to adopt anything that didn't work the way the Linux community worked.
And to give you a sense of how enormous a decision like this was, this is a map of the internal dependencies within Linux, within the Linux operating system, which sub-parts of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going.
This is a tremendously complicated process.
This is a tremendously complicated program, and yet, for years, Torvalds ran this not with automated tools but out of his email box.
People would literally mail him changes that they'd agreed on, and he would merge them by hand.
And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out how the community worked, he said, "I think I know how to write a version control system for free people."
And he called it "Git." Git is distributed version control.
It has two big differences with traditional version control systems.
The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise of open-source. Everybody who works on a project has access to all of the source code all of the time.
And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow, they use drawings that look like this.
But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back, and this is Git's second big innovation.
This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service, and every time a programmer uses Git to make any important change at all, creating a new file, modifying an existing one, merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature.
This long string of numbers and letters here is a unique identifier tied to every single change, but without any central coordination.
Every Git system generates this number the same way, which means this is a signature tied directly and unforgeably to a particular change.
Each of them can make changes and they can merge them after the fact even if they didn't know of each other's existence beforehand.
This is cooperation without coordination.
This is the big change.
Now, I tell you all of this not to convince you that it's great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working, although I think that is great.
I tell you all of this because of what I think it means for the way communities come together.
Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination, you start to see communities form that are enormously large and complex.
This is a graph of the Ruby community.
It's an open-source programming language, and all of the interconnections between the people -- this is now not a software graph, but a people graph, all of the interconnections among the people working on that project — and this doesn't look like an org chart.
So there are two good reasons to think that this kind of technique can be applied to democracies in general and in particular to the law.
When you make the claim, in fact, that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often get this reaction.
(Music) (Laughter) Which is, are you talking about the thing with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing you think is going to be good for society?
It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter) You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books very long before someone says, "Hey, you know what I bet people would pay for?" (Laughter) It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal, right? So -- (Laughter) (Applause) So the harnessing by the Invisible College of the printing press to create the scientific journal was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big, and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so if you're going to look for where the change is happening, you have to look on the margins.
But there's also the fact that law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation, but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy, and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around, there are millions and millions of projects, almost all of which are source code, but if you look around the edges, you can see people experimenting with the political ramifications of a system like that.
(Laughter) Right. (Laughter) The New York Senate has put up something called Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub, again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity.
And it includes this very evocative screenshot.
This is a called a "diff," this thing on the right here.
This shows you, for text that many people are editing, when a change was made, who made it, and what the change is.
Programmers take this capability for granted.
Now, I would love to tell you that the fact that the open-source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed, cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love to tell you that because those tools are in place, the innovation is inevitable. But it's not.
Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information.
Somebody put a question up on Quora saying, "Why is it that lawmakers don't use distributed version control?"
This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part.
The bigger problem, of course, is power.
The people experimenting with participation don't have legislative power, and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation.
They are experimenting with openness.
There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have a transparency move, but transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens.
The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions out into the public was a piece of technology, but the thing that kept them there was political will.
That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools.
We have them. We've seen them. They work.
Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this?
T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose."
A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right?
A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade, in fact.
Thank you for listening. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm afraid I'm one of those speakers you hope you're not going to meet at TED.
First, I don't have a mobile, so I'm on the safe side.
Secondly, a political theorist who's going to talk about the crisis of democracy is probably not the most exciting topic you can think about.
And one of the things that I want to question is this very popular hope these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions.
You people, the Church of TED, are a very optimistic community.
(Laughter) Basically you believe in complexity, but not in ambiguity.
As you have been told, I'm Bulgarian.
And according to the surveys, we are marked the most pessimistic people in the world.
(Laughter) The Economist magazine recently wrote an article covering one of the recent studies on happiness, and the title was "The Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians."
(Laughter) So now when you know what to expect, let's give you the story.
And this is a rainy election day in a small country -- that can be my country, but could be also your country.
And because of the rain until four o'clock in the afternoon, nobody went to the polling stations.
But then the rain stopped, people went to vote.
The government and the opposition, they have been simply paralyzed.
Because you know what to do about the protests.
So the government decided to have the elections once again.
And this time even a greater number, 83 percent of the people, voted with blank ballots.
Basically they went to the ballot boxes to tell that they have nobody to vote for.
This is the opening of a beautiful novel by Jose Saramago called "Seeing."
But in my view it very well captures part of the problem that we have with democracy in Europe these days.
On one level nobody's questioning that democracy is the best form of government.
Democracy is the only game in town.
The problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing.
For the last 30 years, political scientists have observed that there is a constant decline in electoral turnout, and the people who are least interested to vote are the people whom you expect are going to gain most out of voting.
I mean the unemployed, the under-privileged.
Because especially now with the economic crisis, you can see that the trust in politics, that the trust in democratic institutions, was really destroyed.
According to the latest survey being done by the European Commission, 89 percent of the citizens of Europe believe that there is a growing gap between the opinion of the policy-makers and the opinion of the public.
Only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks believe that their vote matters.
Basically people start to understand that they can change governments, but they cannot change policies.
And the question which I want to ask is the following: How did it happen that we are living in societies which are much freer than ever before -- we have more rights, we can travel easier, we have access to more information -- at the same time that trust in our democratic institutions basically has collapsed?
So basically I want to ask: What went right and what went wrong in these 50 years when we talk about democracy?
And the first was the cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s, which put the individual at the center of politics.
It was the human rights moment.
But after that you have the market revolution of the 1980s.
And you have more choice-driven societies.
And of course, you have 1989 -- the end of Communism, the end of the Cold War.
And it was the birth of the global world.
And this is not the audience to which I'm going to preach to what extent the Internet empowered people.
The very idea of political community totally has changed.
And I'm going to name one more revolution, and this is the revolution in brain sciences, which totally changed the way we understand how people are making decisions.
Because first you have the 1960s and 1970s, cultural and social revolution, which in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose.
The very idea, all these collective nouns that we have been taught about -- nation, class, family.
And you have the market revolution of the 1980s and the huge increase of inequality in societies.
Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality.
The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming.
And I find this very much disturbing when we're talking about what's going on right and wrong with democracy these days.
And if you go to 1989 -- something that basically you don't expect that anybody's going to criticize -- but many are going to tell you, "Listen, it was the end of the Cold War that tore the social contract between the elites and the people in Western Europe."
When the Soviet Union was still there, the rich and the powerful, they needed the people, because they feared them.
Now the elites basically have been liberated.
They're very mobile. You cannot tax them.
And basically they don't fear the people.
So this is not by accident that the voters are not interested to vote anymore.
And it's becoming more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you.
I know that many people here have been splendidly speaking about the digital world and the possibility for cooperation, but [have you] seen what the digital world has done to American politics these days?
This is also partly a result of the Internet revolution.
And when you go to the brain sciences, what political consultants learned from the brain scientists is don't talk to me about ideas anymore, don't talk to me about policy programs.
What really matters is basically to manipulate the emotions of the people.
And you have this very strongly to the extent that, even if you see when we talk about revolutions these days, these revolutions are not named anymore around ideologies or ideas.
Before, revolutions used to have ideological names.
They could be communist, they could be liberal, they could be fascist or Islamic.
The content doesn't matter anymore, the problem is the media.
And when we're now trying to see how we can change the situation, when basically we're trying to see what can be done about democracy, we should keep this ambiguity in mind.
Because probably some of the things that we love most are going to be also the things that can hurt us most.
These days it's very popular to believe that this push for transparency, this kind of a combination between active citizens, new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics.
You believe that when you have these new technologies and people who are ready to use this, it can make it much more difficult for the governments to lie, it's going to be more difficult for them to steal and probably even going to be more difficult for them to kill.
This is probably true.
But I do believe that we should be also very clear that now when we put the transparency at the center of politics where the message is, "It's transparency, stupid."
Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions.
Transparency is politics' management of mistrust.
We are assuming that our societies are going to be based on mistrust.
And by the way, mistrust was always very important for democracy.
This is why you have checks and balances.
But when politics is only management of mistrust, then -- I'm very glad that "1984" has been mentioned -- now we're going to have "1984" in reverse.
It's not going to be the Big Brother watching you, it's going to be we being the Big Brother watching the political class.
But is this the idea of a free society?
For example, can you imagine that decent, civic, talented people are going to run for office if they really do believe that politics is also about managing mistrust?
Are you not afraid with all these technologies that are going to track down any statement the politicians are going to make on certain issues, are you not afraid that this is going to be a very strong signal to politicians to repeat their positions, even the very wrong positions, because consistency is going to be more important than common sense?
I find this extremely important, because democracy is about people changing their views based on rational arguments and discussions.
And we can lose this with the very noble idea to keep people accountable for showing the people that we're not going to tolerate politicians the opportunism in politics.
So for me this is extremely important.
And I do believe that when we're discussing politics these days, probably it makes sense to look also at this type of a story.
So I had the opportunity to talk to the prime minister, why he made this decision.
And this is Goethe, who is neither Bulgarian nor a political scientist, some centuries ago he said, "There is a big shadow where there is much light."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I want to talk to you about how to build and rebuild trust, because it's my belief that trust is the foundation for everything we do, and that if we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress.
But what if trust is broken?
What if your CEO is caught on video, disparaging an employee?
What if your employees experience a culture of bias, exclusion and worse?
What if there's a data breach, and it feels an awful lot like a cover-up than seriously addressing it?
And most tragically, what if a technological fail leads to the loss of human life?
If I was giving this talk six months ago, I would have been wearing an Uber T-shirt.
I'm a Harvard Business School professor, but I was super attracted to going to an organization that was metaphorically and perhaps quite literally on fire.
I had read everything that was written in the newspaper, and that was precisely what drew me to the organization.
This was an organization that had lost trust with every constituent that mattered.
My favorite trait is redemption.
I believe that there is a better version of us around every corner, and I have seen firsthand how organizations and communities and individuals change at breathtaking speed.
But when I got to Uber, I made a really big mistake.
I publicly committed to wearing an Uber T-shirt every day until every other employee was wearing an Uber T-shirt.
Now I am liberated from that commitment, as I am back at HBS, and what I'd like to do is share with you how far I have taken that liberty, which, it's baby steps, (Laughter) but I would just say I'm on my way.
(Laughter) Now, trust, if we're going to rebuild it, we have to understand its component parts.
There's three things about trust.
If you sense that I have real rigor in my logic, you are far more likely to trust me.
And if you believe that my empathy is directed towards you, you are far more likely to trust me.
But if any one of these three gets shaky, if any one of these three wobbles, trust is threatened.
I want each of us to be able to engender more trust tomorrow, literally tomorrow, than we do today.
And the way to do that is to understand where trust wobbles for ourselves and have a ready-made prescription to overcome it.
Would you give me some sense of whether or not you're here voluntarily?
OK. So -- (Laughter) it's just super helpful feedback.
(Laughter) So the most common wobble is empathy.
We are all so busy with so many demands on our time, it's easy to crowd out the time and space that empathy requires.
But that puts us into a vicious cycle, because without revealing empathy, it makes everything harder.
And if in those instances, we can come up with a trigger that gets us to look up, look at the people right in front of us, listen to them, deeply immerse ourselves in their perspectives, then we have a chance of having a sturdy leg of empathy.
And if you do nothing else, please put away your cell phone.
It is the largest distraction magnet yet to be made, and it is super difficult to create empathy and trust in its presence.
Logic wobbles can come in two forms.
It's either the quality of your logic or it's your ability to communicate the logic.
Now if the quality of your logic is at risk, I can't really help you with that.
(Laughter) But fortunately, it's often the case that our logic is sound, but it's our ability to communicate the logic that is in jeopardy.
Super fortunately, there's a very easy fix to this.
If we consider that there are two ways to communicate in the world, and Harvard Business School professors are known for two-by-twos -- nonsense, it's the triangle that rocks.
(Laughter) If we consider that there are two ways to communicate in the world, and the first one is when you take us on a journey, a magnificent journey that has twists and turns and mystery and drama, until you ultimately get to the point, and some of the best communicators in the world communicate just like this.
So instead, I implore you, start with your point in a crisp half-sentence, and then give your supporting evidence.
ladies -- (Laughter) (Applause) If you get cut off before you're done, you still get credit for the idea, as opposed to someone else coming in and snatching it from you.
(Applause) You just gave me goosebumps.
So in many ways, the prescription is clear.
I'm a woman of super strong opinions, with really deep convictions, direct speech.
I have a magnificent wife, and together, we have such crazy ambition.
I prefer men's clothes and comfortable shoes.
Thank you, Allbirds.
(Laughter) In some contexts, this makes me different.
I hope that each person here has the beautiful luxury of representing difference in some context in your life.
But with that privilege comes a very sincere temptation to hold back who we are, and if we hold back who we are, we're less likely to be trusted.
So here's my advice.
Wear whatever makes you feel fabulous.
Pay less attention to what you think people want to hear from you and far more attention to what your authentic, awesome self needs to say.
So let's go back to Uber. What happened at Uber?
Empathy, logic, authenticity were all wobbling like crazy.
But we were able to find super effective, super quick fixes for two of the wobbles.
In the meetings at Uber, it was not uncommon for people to be texting one another ...
about the meeting.
(Laughter) I had never seen anything like it.
(Laughter) It may have done many things, but it did not create a safe, empathetic environment.
The solution though, super clear: technology, off and away.
And that forced people to look up, to look at the people in front of them, to listen to them, to immerse themselves in their perspectives and to collaborate in unprecedented ways.
Logic was equally wobbly, and this was because the hypergrowth of the organization meant that people, managers were getting promoted again and again and again.
Their positions outstripped their capability, and it was not their fault.
The solution: a massive influx of executive education that focused specifically on logic, on strategy and leadership.
It gave people the rigor of the quality of their logic, and it turned a whole lot of triangles, right-side up, so people were able to communicate effectively with one another.
It is still much easier to reward people when they say something that you were going to say, as opposed to rewarding people when they say something entirely different than what you were going to say.
But when we figure out this, when we figure out how to celebrate difference and how to let people bring the best version of themselves forward, well holy cow, is that the world I want my sons to grow up in.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
One of my favorite words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary is "snollygoster," just because it sounds so good.
And what snollygoster means is "a dishonest politician."
But it's very important that words are at the center of politics, and all politicians know they have to try and control language.
It wasn't until, for example, 1771 that the British Parliament allowed newspapers to report the exact words that were said in the debating chamber.
And he was thrown into the Tower of London and imprisoned, but he was brave enough, he was brave enough to take them on, and in the end, he had such popular support in London that he won.
And it was only a few years later that we have the first recorded use of the phrase "as bold as brass."
And they had to face the question of what to call George Washington, their leader.
They didn't know.
And this was debated in Congress for ages and ages.
And there were all sorts of suggestions on the table, which might have made it.
I mean, some people wanted him to be called "Chief Magistrate Washington," and other people, "His Highness, George Washington," and other people, "Protector of the Liberties of the People of the United States of America Washington."
Not that catchy.
Some people just wanted to call him king -- it was tried and tested.
And, you know, it could have worked.
And everybody got insanely bored, because this debate went on for three weeks.
I read a diary of this poor senator who just keeps coming back, "Still on this subject."
And the reason for the delay and the boredom was that the House of Representatives were against the Senate.
The House of Representatives didn't want Washington to get drunk on power.
They didn't want to call him "king," in case that gave him ideas, or his successor ideas.
So they wanted to give him the humblest, meagerest, most pathetic title that they could think of.
(Laughter) "President." They didn't invent the title.
I mean, it existed before, but it just meant somebody who presides over a meeting.
And that's why the Senate objected to it.
They said, "That's ridiculous! You can't call him 'President.' This guy has to go and sign treaties and meet foreign dignitaries.
Who's going to take him seriously if he's got a silly little title like 'President of the United States of America'?"
Instead, they agreed to use the title "President" for now.
First of all -- and this is my favorite -- is that, so far as I've ever been able to find out, the Senate has never formally endorsed the title of President.
(Laughter) The second thing you can learn is that, when a government says that this is a temporary measure -- (Laughter) you can still be waiting 223 years later.
But the third thing you can learn -- and this is the really important one, the point I want to leave you on -- is that the title, "President of the United States of America," doesn't sound that humble at all these days, does it?
Something to do with the slightly over 5,000 nuclear warheads he has at his disposal and the largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff.
Reality and history have endowed that title with grandeur.
And so the Senate won in the end.
And also, the Senate's other worry, the appearance of singularity -- well, it was a singularity back then.
But now, do you know how many nations have a president?
A hundred and forty-seven.
All because they want to sound like the guy who's got the 5,000 nuclear warheads, etc.
And so, in the end, the Senate won and the House of Representatives lost ...
Politicians try to pick and use words to shape and control reality, but in fact, reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.
Thank you very much.
It's my beautiful baby.
Here's the thing: everybody loves a beautiful baby.
I mean, I was a beautiful baby.
Here's me and my dad a couple days after I was born.
So in the world of product design, the beautiful baby's like the concept car.
It's the knockout.
So why is it that this year's new cars look pretty much exactly like last year's new cars?
(Laughter) What went wrong between the design studio and the factory?
Today, I don't want to talk about beautiful babies, I want to talk about the awkward adolescence of design -- those sort of dorky teenage years where you're trying to figure out how the world works.
So here's a problem: four million babies around the world, mostly in developing countries, die every year before their first birthday, even before their first month of life.
It turns out half of those kids, or about 1.8 million newborns around the world, would make it if you could just keep them warm for the first three days, maybe the first week.
So this is a newborn intensive care unit in Kathmandu, Nepal.
All of these kids in blankets belong in incubators -- something like this.
This is a donated Japanese Atom incubator that we found in a NICU in Kathmandu.
This is what we want.
Probably what happened is a hospital in Japan upgraded their equipment and donated their old stuff to Nepal.
The problem is, without technicians, without spare parts, donations like this very quickly turn into junk.
So this seemed like a problem that we could do something about.
Keeping a baby warm for a week -- that's not rocket science.
We partnered with a leading medical research institution here in Boston.
We conducted months of user research overseas, trying to think like designers, human-centered design -- "Let's figure out what people want."
We made dozens of prototypes to get to this.
So the idea here is, unlike the concept car, we want to marry something beautiful with something that actually works.
And our idea is that this design would inspire manufacturers and other people of influence to take this model and run with it.
Here's the bad news: the only baby ever actually put inside the NeoNurture incubator was this kid during a Time magazine photo shoot.
So recognition is fantastic.
But it felt like a booby prize.
So it turns out that design for inspiration doesn't really ...
I guess what I would say is, for us, for what I want to do, it's either too slow or it just doesn't work, it's ineffective.
I don't want to make beautiful stuff; I want to make the world a better place.
So when we were designing NeoNurture, we paid a lot of attention to the people who are going to use this thing, for example, poor families, rural doctors, overloaded nurses, even repair technicians.
Well, it turns out there's this whole constellation of people who have to be involved in a product for it to be successful: manufacturing, financing, distribution, regulation.
And I have to ask the question that VCs always ask: "Sir, what is your business, and who is your customer?"
Who is our customer?
This is a Bangladeshi hospital director outside his facility.
Similarly, here's a multinational medical-device manufacturer.
It turns out they've got to fish where the fish are.
So it turns out that in emerging markets -- where the fish are -- are the emerging middle class of these countries -- diseases of affluence: heart disease, infertility.
So it turns out that design for outcomes in one aspect really means thinking about design for manufacture and distribution.
OK, that was an important lesson.
Second, we took that lesson and tried to push it into our next project.
So we started by finding a manufacturer, an organization called MTTS in Vietnam, that manufactures newborn-care technologies for Southeast Asia.
Our other partner is East Meets West, an American foundation that distributes that technology to poor hospitals around that region.
So we started with them, saying, "Well, what do you want?
What's a problem you want to solve?"
Jaundice affects two-thirds of newborns around the world.
Of those newborns, one in 10 roughly, if it's not treated, the jaundice gets so severe that it leads to either a life-long disability, or the kids could even die.
There's one way to treat jaundice, and that's what's called an exchange transfusion.
So as you can imagine, that's expensive and a little bit dangerous.
It's very technological, it's very complex, a little daunting.
(Laughter) Bright blue light on as much of the skin as you can cover.
How is this a hard problem?
This is an overhead phototherapy device that's designed for American hospitals, and here's how it's supposed to be used.
Take it out of an American hospital, send it overseas to a crowded facility in Asia, here's how it's actually used.
These dark blue squares show you where it's effective phototherapy.
So those kids on the edges aren't actually receiving effective phototherapy.
But without training, without some kind of light meter, how would you know?
We see other examples of problems like this.
Here's a neonatal intensive care unit, where moms come in to visit their babies.
Mom's visiting her kid.
She sees her baby naked, lying under some blue lights, looking kind of vulnerable.
From a phototherapy standpoint, maybe not the best behavior.
We have to think like existentialists: it's not the painting we would have painted, it's the painting that we actually painted.
So, similarly, when we think about our partner MTTS, they've made some amazing technologies for treating newborn illnesses.
They've treated 50,000 kids in Vietnam with this technology.
But here's the problem: Every doctor in the world, every hospital administrator, has seen TV -- curse those "ER" reruns!
Turns out they all know what a medical device is supposed to look like.
It sounds crazy, it sounds dumb, but there are actually hospitals who would rather have no equipment than something that looks cheap and crummy.
So again, if we want people to trust a device, it has to look trustworthy.
And here's what we developed.
This is the Firefly phototherapy device, except this time, we didn't stop at the concept car.
From the very beginning, we started by talking to manufacturers.
Our goal is to make a state-of-the-art product that our partner MTTS can actually manufacture.
Our goal is to study how they work, the resources they have access to, so that they can make this product.
So that's the design for manufacture question.
When we think about actual use, you'll notice that Firefly has a single bassinet.
It only fits a single baby, and the idea here is it's obvious how you ought to use this device.
If you try to put more than one kid in, you're stacking them on top of each other.
Silly Mom thinks her baby looks cold, wants to put a blanket over the baby.
That's why we have lights above and below the baby in Firefly, so if Mom does put a blanket over the baby, it's still receiving effective phototherapy from below.
I had a laptop in the Peace Corps, and the screen had all these dead pixels on it.
And one day I looked in -- they were all dead ants that had gotten into my laptop and perished.
Those poor ants.
(Laughter) So with Firefly, what we did is -- the problem is electronics get hot, and you have to put in vents or fans to keep them cool -- in most products.
We decided we can't put a "Do not enter" sign next to the vent.
We actually got rid of all that stuff.
These are the kinds of lessons -- as awkward as it was to be a pretty goofy teenager, much worse to be a frustrated designer.
So I was thinking, "What I really want to do is change the world.
I have to think like an existentialist.
I have to accept that there are no dumb users, only dumb products."
We have to ask ourselves hard questions.
Are we designing for the world that we want?
Are we designing for the world that we have?
Are we designing for the world that's coming, whether we're ready or not?
I've since learned that if you really want to make a difference in the world, you have to design outcomes.
And that's design that matters.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was having lunch with him just a few minutes ago, and a Nigerian journalist comes -- and this will only make sense if you've ever watched a James Bond movie -- and a Nigerian journalist comes up to him and goes, "Aha, we meet again, Mr. Bond!"
(Laughter) It was great.
So, I've got a little sheet of paper here, mostly because I'm Nigerian and if you leave me alone, I'll talk for like two hours.
It's been an incredible few days.
It's downhill from now on. I wanted to thank Emeka and Chris.
It's really amazing.
I'm a writer, and I've been watching people with the slide shows and scientists and bankers, and I've been feeling a bit like a gangsta rapper at a bar mitzvah.
And I was watching Jane [Goodall] yesterday, and I thought it was really great, and I was watching those incredible slides of the chimpanzees, and I thought, "Wow. What if a chimpanzee could talk, you know? What would it say?"
My first thought was, "Well, you know, there's George Bush."
But then I thought, "Why be rude to chimpanzees?"
I guess there goes my green card.
And what's become increasingly clear to me is that we're talking about news stories about Africa; we're not really talking about African narratives.
And it's important to make a distinction, because if the news is anything to go by, 40 percent of Americans can't -- either can't afford health insurance or have the most inadequate health insurance, and have a president who, despite the protest of millions of his citizens -- even his own Congress -- continues to prosecute a senseless war.
So if news is anything to go by, the U.S. is right there with Zimbabwe, right?
Which it isn't really, is it?
And talking about war, my girlfriend has this great t-shirt that says, "Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."
The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news.
I live there.
What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories.
It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines.
It comes from popular culture.
In other words, it's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are. And this is important to remember, because in Africa the complicated questions we want to ask about what all of this means has been asked from the rock paintings of the San people, through the Sundiata epics of Mali, to modern contemporary literature.
If you want to know about Africa, read our literature -- and not just "Things Fall Apart," because that would be like saying, "I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America."
That's very important.
There's a poem by Jack Gilbert called "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart."
He says, "When the Sumerian tablets were first translated, they were thought to be business records.
My love is like twelve Ethiopian goats standing still in the morning light.
This is important.
It's important because misreading is really the chance for complication and opportunity.
The first Igbo Bible was translated from English in about the 1800s by Bishop Crowther, who was a Yoruba.
And it's important to know Igbo is a tonal language, and so they'll say the word "igwe" and "igwe": same spelling, one means "sky" or "heaven," and one means "bicycle" or "iron."
So "God is in heaven surrounded by His angels" was translated as -- [Igbo].
And for some reason, in Cameroon, when they tried to translate the Bible into Cameroonian patois, they chose the Igbo version.
Basically, it ends up as "God is on a bicycle with his angels."
This is good, because language complicates things.
You know, we often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true.
The language actually makes the world in which we live.
And language can't be understood in its abstraction.
It can only be understood in the context of story, and everything, all of this is story.
And it's important to remember that, because if we don't, then we become ahistorical.
But these are not new to Africa.
Nigeria got its independence in 1960.
The first time the possibility for independence was discussed was in 1922, following the Aba women's market riots.
In 1967, in the middle of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, Dr. Njoku-Obi invented the Cholera vaccine.
So, what it says to me then is that it's not really -- the problem isn't really the stories that are being told or which stories are being told, the problem really is the terms of humanity that we're willing to bring to complicate every story, and that's really what it's all about.
Let me tell you a Nigerian joke.
Well, it's just a joke, anyway.
So there's Tom, Dick and Harry and they're working construction.
And Tom opens up his lunch box and there's rice in it, and he goes on this rant about, "Twenty years, my wife has been packing rice for lunch.
And Dick and Harry repeat this.
The next day, Tom opens his lunchbox, there's rice, so he throws himself off and kills himself, and Tom, Dick and Harry follow.
And now the inquest -- you know, Tom's wife and Dick's wife are distraught.
They wished they'd not packed rice.
(Laughter) This seemingly innocent joke, when I heard it as a child in Nigeria, was told about Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, with the Hausa being Harry.
So what seems like an eccentric if tragic joke about Harry becomes a way to spread ethnic hatred.
My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s.
But he was also in Oxford in the '50s, and yet growing up as a child in Nigeria, my father used to say to me, "You must never eat or drink in a Yoruba person's house because they will poison you."
It makes sense now when I think about it, because if you'd known my father, you would've wanted to poison him too.
(Laughter) So I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years.
And I was growing up in school and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.
So I had a very inventive teacher, a Pakistani Muslim, who wanted to teach us about this.
So what he did was to teach us Jewish Holocaust history, and so huddled around books with photographs of people in Auschwitz, I learned the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people.
A Pakistani Muslim teaching Jewish Holocaust history to young Igbo children.
Story is powerful.
Story is fluid and it belongs to nobody.
And it should come as no surprise that my first novel at 16 was about Neo-Nazis taking over Nigeria to institute the Fourth Reich.
It makes perfect sense.
And they were to blow up strategic targets and take over the country, and they were foiled by a Nigerian James Bond called Coyote Williams, and a Jewish Nazi hunter.
And it happened over four continents.
And when the book came out, I was heralded as Africa's answer to Frederick Forsyth, which is a dubious honor at best.
But also, the book was launched in time for me to be accused of constructing the blueprint for a foiled coup attempt.
So at 18, I was bonded off to prison in Nigeria.
I was completely terrified, completely broken, and kept trying to find a new language, a new way to make sense of all of this.
Now for those of you who have seen me at the buffet tables know that it was because it was costing them too much to feed me.
(Laughter) But I mean, I grew up with this incredible privilege, and not just me -- millions of Nigerians grew up with books and libraries.
In fact, we were talking last night about how all of the steamy novels of Harold Robbins had done more for sex education of horny teenage boys in Africa than any sex education programs ever had.
All of those are gone.
We are squandering the most valuable resource we have on this continent: the valuable resource of the imagination.
In the film, "Sometimes in April" by Raoul Peck, Idris Elba is poised in a scene with his machete raised, and he's being forced by a crowd to chop up his best friend -- fellow Rwandan Army officer, albeit a Tutsi -- played by Fraser James.
And Fraser's on his knees, arms tied behind his back, and he's crying.
And as we watch it, we are ashamed.
And we want to say to Idris, "Chop him up.
Shut him up."
And as Idris moves, Fraser screams, "Stop!
Please stop!"
Idris pauses, then he moves again, and Fraser says, "Please!
Please stop!"
And it's not the look of horror and terror on Fraser's face that stops Idris or us; it's the look in Fraser's eyes.
It's one that says, "Don't do this.
And I'm not saying this to save myself, although this would be nice. I'm doing it to save you, because if you do this, you will be lost."
In that moment, Fraser says, "I am lost already, but not you ... not you."
African narratives in the West, they proliferate.
I really don't care anymore.
I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves -- how as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.
And this is the difficulty that I face.
I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning.
I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation of what is possible.
As a young middle-class Nigerian activist, I launched myself along with a whole generation of us into the campaign to stop the government.
And I watched them being locked up in prison and tear gassed.
I justified it, and I said, "This is the cost of revolution.
It wasn't until later, when I was imprisoned again, that I understood the real meaning of torture, and how easy your humanity can be taken from you, for the time I was engaged in war, righteous, righteous war.
Excuse me.
It's never going to be easy.
As I was telling Rachel from Google Earth, that I had challenged my students in America -- I said, "You don't know anything about Africa, you're all idiots."
So I went to Google Earth and learned about Africa.
And the truth be told, this is it, isn't it?
There are no essential Africans, and most of us are as completely ignorant as everyone else about the continent we come from, and yet we want to make profound statements about it.
And I think if we can just admit that we're all trying to approximate the truth of our own communities, it will make for a much more nuanced and a much more interesting conversation.
Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it.
"Here is love, all of it."
The fact that it happens in "Another Country" takes you quite by surprise.
My friend Ronald Gottesman says there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't.
(Laughter) He also says that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.
"Gazelle, I killed you for your skin's exquisite touch, for how easy it is to be nailed to a board weathered raw as white butcher paper.
Last night I heard my daughter praying for the meat here at my feet.
You know it wasn't anger that made me stop my heart till the hammer fell.
And now I'm tightening lashes, shaped in hide as if around a ribcage, shaped like five bowstrings.
Ghosts cannot slip back inside the body's drum.
I have to drive trouble in the hills.
Trouble in the valley, and trouble by the river too.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to tell you about why I became a sculptor, and you may think that sculptors, well, they deal with meta, they deal with objects, they deal with bodies, but I think, really, what I care about most is making space, and that's what I've called this talk: Making Space.
Space that exists within us, and without us.
So, when I was a child, I don't know how many of you grew up in the '50s, but I was sent upstairs for an enforced rest. (Laughter) It's a really bad idea. I mean, after lunch, you're, you know, you're six, and you want to go and climb a tree.
But I had to go upstairs, this tiny little room that was actually made out of an old balcony, so it was incredibly hot, small and light, and I had to lie there. It was ridiculous.
And there I was, lying there in this tiny space, hot, dark, claustrophobic, matchbox-sized, behind my eyes, but it was really weird, like, after this went on for days, weeks, months, that space would get bigger and darker and cooler until I really looked forward to that half an hour of enforced immobility and rest, and I really looked forward to going to that place of darkness.
Can we all just close our eyes for a minute?
So close your eyes for a minute.
Here we are, in a space, the subjective, collective space of the darkness of the body.
It is dimensionless. It is limitless.
Okay, open your eyes.
That's the space that I think sculpture -- which is a bit of a paradox, sculpture that is about making material propositions -- but I think that's the space that sculpture can connect us with.
So, imagine we're in the middle of America.
You're asleep. You wake up, and without lifting your head from the earth on your sleeping bag, you can see for 70 miles.
This is a dry lake bed.
I was young. I'd just finished art school.
I picked up a hand-sized stone, threw it as far as I was able, it was about 22 meters.
And then, I stood on the pile, and threw all of those rocks out again, and here is rearranged desert.
(Laughter) What's all the fuss about?
In fact, Chris was worried and said, "Look, don't show them that slide, because they're just going to think you're another one of those crazy modern artists who doesn't do much.
(Laughter) But the fact is, this is evidence of a living body on other bodies, rocks that have been the subject of geological formation, erosion, the action of time on objects.
This is a place, in a way, that I just would like you to, in a way, look at differently because of this event that has happened in it, a human event, and in general, it just asks us to look again at this world, so different from, in a way, the world that we have been sharing with each other, the technological world, to look again at the elemental world.
The elemental world that we all live in is that space that we all visited together, the darkness of the body.
I wanted to start again with that environment, the environment of the intimate, subjective space that each of us lives in, but from the other side of appearance.
Can we map that space, using the language of neutrinos or cosmic rays, taking the bounding condition of the body as its limit, but in complete reversal of, in a way, the most traditional Greek idea of pointing?
In the old days they used to take a lump of Pentelic marble and drill from the surface in order to identify the skin, the appearance, what Aristotle defined as the distinction between substance and appearance, the thing that makes things visible, but here we're working from the other side.
Or can we do it as an exclusive membrane?
This is a lead case made around the space that my body occupied, but it's now void.
This is a work called "Learning To See."
It's a bit of, well, we could call it night, we could call it the 96 percent of gravity that we don't know about, dark matter, placed in space, anyway, another version of a human space in space at large, but I don't know if you can see, the eyes are indicated, they're closed.
It's called "Learning To See" because it's about an object that hopefully works reflexively and talks about that vision or connection with the darkness of the body that I see as a space of potential.
Can we do it another way, using the language of particles around a nucleus, and talk about the body as an energy center?
Is there another way?
Dark matter now placed against a horizon.
And is art about trying to imagine what lies beyond the horizon?
Can we use, in a way, a body as an empty catalyst for a kind of empathy with the experience of space-time as it is lived, as I am standing here in front of you trying to feel and make a connection in this space-time that we are sharing, can we use, at it were, the memory of a body, of a human space in space to catalyze an experience, again, firsthand experience, of elemental time.
You can see this work. It's on the mouth of the Mersey, just outside Liverpool.
And there you can see what a Liverpool sea looks like on a typical afternoon.
The pieces appear and disappear, but maybe more importantly -- this is just looking north from the center of the installation -- they create a field, a field that involves living and the surrogate bodies in a kind of relation, a relation with each other and a relation with that limit, the edge, the horizon.
It's in an undefined location and I've never published where it is.
Again, the darkness of the body, now held within this bunker shape of the minimum position that a body needs to occupy, a crouching body.
There's a hole at the anus, penis level.
This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space?
Taking that idiom of, as it were, the darkness of the body transferred to architecture, can you use architectural space not for living but as a metaphor, and use its systolic, diastolic smaller and larger spaces to provide a kind of firsthand somatic narrative for a journey through space, light and darkness?
This is a work of some proportion and some weight that makes the body into a city, an aggregation of cells that are all interconnected and that allow certain visual access at certain places.
The last work that I just wanted to share with you is "Blind Light," which is perhaps the most open work, and in a conference of radical openness, I think maybe this is as radical as I get, using light and water vapor as my materials.
Here is a box filled at one and a half atmospheres of atmospheric pressure, with a cloud and with very bright light.
As you walk towards the ever-open threshold, you disappear, both to yourselves and to others.
If you hold your hand out in front of you, you can't see it.
If you look down, you can't see your feet.
But this is a space that is actually filled with people, disembodied voices, and out of that ambient environment, when people come close to your own body zone, very close, they appear to you as representations.
When they appear close to the edge, they are representations, representations in which the viewers have become the viewed.
For me, art is not about objects of high monetary exchange.
As John Cage said, "We are not moving towards some kind of goal.
We are at the goal, and it is changing with us.
If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Hello.
My name is Simone.
Like it's this thing that's supposed to make you feel better.
But I was thinking -- picturing all of you naked in 2018 feels kind of weird and wrong.
And I realized that what I'd really like is that I can look at you as much as you're looking at me -- just to even things out a little bit.
So in preparation for this talk, I made myself a shirt.
(Rattling) (Laughter) It's googly eyes.
It took me 14 hours and 227 googly eyes to make this shirt.
And being able to look at you as much as you're looking at me is actually only half of the reason I made this.
The other half is being able to do this.
(Googly eyes rattle) (Laughter) So I do a lot of things like this.
For example, brushing your teeth.
Like, it's this thing we all have to do, it's kind of boring, and nobody really likes it.
If there were any seven-year-olds in the audience, they'd be like, "Yes!"
So what about if you had a machine that could do it for you?
(Laughter) I call it ...
I call it "The Toothbrush Helmet."
(Laughter) (Robot arm buzzing) (Laughter) (Applause) So my toothbrush helmet is recommended by zero out of 10 dentists, and it definitely did not revolutionize the world of dentistry, but it did completely change my life.
Because I finished making this toothbrush helmet three years ago and after I finished making it, I went into my living room and I put up a camera, and I filmed a seven-second clip of it working.
Since then, I've carved out this little niche for myself on the internet as an inventor of useless machines, because as we all know, the easiest way to be at the top of your field is to choose a very small field.
(Laughter) (Applause) So I run a YouTube channel about my machines, and I've done things like cutting hair with drones -- (Drone buzzes) (Laughter) (Drone crashes) (Laughter) (Drone buzzes) (Laughter) (Applause) To a machine that helps me wake up in the morning -- (Alarm) (Laughter) (Video) Simone: Ow!
To this machine that helps me chop vegetables.
(Knives chop) I'm not an engineer.
I did not study engineering in school.
But I was a super ambitious student growing up.
In middle school and high school, I had straight A's, and I graduated at the top of my year.
On the flip side of that, I struggled with very severe performance anxiety.
Here's an email I sent to my brother around that time.
"You won't understand how difficult it is for me to tell you, to confess this.
I'm so freaking embarrassed.
I don't want people to think that I'm stupid.
Now I'm starting to cry too.
And no, I did not accidentally burn our parents' house down.
The thing I'm writing about in the email and the thing I'm so upset about is that I got a B on a math test.
So something obviously happened between here and here.
(Laughter) One of those things was puberty.
But moreover, I got interested in building robots, and I wanted to teach myself about hardware.
But building things with hardware, especially if you're teaching yourself, is something that's really difficult to do.
And that was my biggest fear at the time.
So I came up with a setup that would guarantee success 100 percent of the time.
And even though I didn't realize it at the time, building stupid things was actually quite smart, because as I kept on learning about hardware, for the first time in my life, I did not have to deal with my performance anxiety.
And as soon as I removed all pressure and expectations from myself, that pressure quickly got replaced by enthusiasm, and it allowed me to just play.
So as an inventor, I'm interested in things that people struggle with.
It can be small things or big things or medium-sized things and something like giving a TED talk presents this whole new set of problems that I can solve.
And identifying a problem is the first step in my process of building a useless machine.
So before I came here, I sat down and I thought of some of the potential problems I might have in giving this talk.
Forgetting what to say.
(Laughter) Or that when I get nervous, my hands start shaking and I'm really self-conscious about it.
But one thing I'm actually really nervous about is my hands shaking.
I remember when I was a kid, giving presentations in school, I would have my notes on a piece of paper, and I would put a notebook behind the paper so that people wouldn't be able to see the paper quivering.
I know that about half of you in the audience are probably like, "Building useless machines is really fun, but how is this in any way or form a business?"
And the arrangers always put out a glass of water for you onstage so you have something to drink if you get thirsty, and I always so badly want to drink that water, but I don't dare to pick the glass up because then people might be able to see that my hands are shaking.
So what about a machine that hands you a glass of water?
Sold to the nervous girl in the googly-eye shirt.
Actually, I need to take this off because I have a thing -- (Googly eyes rattle) Oh.
(Clanking) (Laughter) I still don't know what to call this, but I think some sort of "head orbit device," because it rotates this platform around you and you can put anything on it.
You can have a camera; you can get photos of your entire head.
Like it's really -- it's a very versatile machine.
(Laughter) OK, and I have -- I mean, you can put some snacks on it, for example, if you want to.
I have some popcorn here.
And you just put a little bit like that.
(Robot buzzes) (Laughter) And then you have a little hand.
(Laughter) (Applause) It has a little hand.
OK, also I need to chew this popcorn, so if you guys could just clap your hands a little bit more -- (Applause) OK, so it's like your own little personal solar system, because I'm a millennial, so I want everything to revolve around me.
(Laughter) Back to the glass of water, that's what we're here for.
(Robot buzzes) (Singing) Oh no, it got stuck.
Isn't it comforting that even robots sometimes get stage fright?
Oh wait, let's go back a little bit, and then -- (Glass falls) (Laughter) Isn't it a beautiful time to be alive?
(Laughter) (Applause) So as much as my machines can seem like simple engineering slapstick, I realize that I stumbled on something bigger than that.
It's this expression of joy and humility that often gets lost in engineering, and for me it was a way to learn about hardware without having my performance anxiety get in the way.
I often get asked if I think I'm ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will.
Instead it happened just because I was enthusiastic about what I was doing, and I was sharing that enthusiasm with other people.
To me that's the true beauty of making useless things, because it's this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is.
And it turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works.
And maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Sydney. I had been waiting my whole life to get to Sydney.
I got to the airport, to the hotel, checked in, and, sitting there in the lobby, was a brochure for the Sydney Festival. I thumbed through it, and I came across a show called "Minto: Live."
The description read: "The suburban streets of Minto become the stage for performances created by international artists in collaboration with the people of Minto."
What was this place called Minto?
For the performance, the audience walked around the neighborhood from house to house, and the residents, who were the performers, they came out of their houses, and they performed these autobiographical dances on their lawns, on their driveways. (Laughter) The show is a collaboration with a U.K.-based performance company called Lone Twin.
This Australian-Indian girl, she came out and started to dance on her front lawn, and her father peered out the window to see what all the noise and commotion was about, and he soon joined her.
And he was followed by her little sister.
And soon they were all dancing this joyous, exuberant dance right there on their lawn. (Laughter) And as I walked through the neighborhood, I was amazed and I was moved by the incredible sense of ownership this community clearly felt about this event.
"Minto: Live" brought Sydneysiders into dialogue with international artists, and really celebrated the diversity of Sydney on its own terms.
They can transform cities and communities.
Modern arts festivals were born in the rubble of World War II.
Civic leaders created these annual events to celebrate culture as the highest expression of the human spirit.
In 1947, the Edinburgh Festival was born and Avignon was born and hundreds of others would follow in their wake.
But as the decades passed, these festivals, they really became the establishment, and as the culture and capital accelerated, the Internet brought us all together, high and low kind of disappeared, a new kind of festival emerged.
The old festivals, they continued to thrive, but from Brighton to Rio to Perth, something new was emerging, and these festivals were really different.
They're open because they ask the audience to be a player, a protagonist, a partner, rather than a passive spectator, and they're open because they know that imagination cannot be contained in buildings, and so much of the work they do is site-specific or outdoor work.
So, the new festival, it asks the audience to play an essential role in shaping the performance.
Companies like De La Guarda, which I produce, and Punchdrunk create these completely immersive experiences that put the audience at the center of the action, but the German performance company Rimini Protokoll takes this all to a whole new level.
LIFT has always been a pioneer in the use of venues.
They understand that theater and performance can happen anywhere.
You can do a show in a schoolroom, in an airport, — (Laughter) — in a department store window.
Back to Back is an Australian company of people with intellectual disabilities. I saw their amazing show in New York at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal at rush hour.
We, the audience, were given headsets and seated on one side of the terminal.
The actors were right there in front of us, right there among the commuters, and we could hear them, but we might not have otherwise seen them.
So Back to Back takes site-specific theater and uses it to gently remind us about who and what we choose to edit out of our daily lives.
For a few days, they transformed a massive city into a community where endless possibility reigned.
The Guardian wrote, "If art is about transformation, then there can be no more transformative experience.
What 'The Sultan's Elephant' represents is no less than an artistic occupation of the city and a reclamation of the streets for the people."
We can talk about the economic impacts of these festivals on their cities, but I'm much [more] interested in many more things, like how a festival helps a city to express itself, how it lets it come into its own.
Festivals promote diversity, they bring neighbors into dialogue, they increase creativity, they offer opportunities for civic pride, they improve our general psychological well-being.
In short, they make cities better places to live.
Case in point: When "The Sultan's Elephant" came to London just nine months after 7/7, a Londoner wrote, "For the first time since the London bombings, my daughter called up with that sparkle back in her voice.
She had gathered with others to watch 'The Sultan's Elephant,' and, you know, it just made all the difference."
I think what's so brilliant about the festivals, the new festivals, is that they are really fully capturing the complexity and the excitement of the way we all live today.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives.
We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces.
So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk.
And these projects came from questions I had, like: How much are my neighbors paying for their apartments?
(Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time?
How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape?
How can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today?
Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans.
I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade.
(Laughter) The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America.
I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever.
In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much.
And her death was sudden and unexpected.
And I thought about death a lot.
But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life.
I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you.
So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ..."
So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their life, and share their personal aspirations in public space.
And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall.
"Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy."
"Before I die, I want to sing for millions."
"Before I die, I want to plant a tree."
"Before I die, I want to live off the grid."
"Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry."
"Before I die, I want to be completely myself."
So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times.
It's about knowing you're not alone; it's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change.
I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community.
So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond.
Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice, and share more with one another.
Two of the most valuable things we have are time, and our relationships with other people.
In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective, and remember that life is brief and tender.
Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us, as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Every summer when I was growing up, I would fly from my home in Canada to visit my grandparents, who lived in Mumbai, India.
Now, Canadian summers are pretty mild at best -- about 22 degrees Celsius or 72 degrees Fahrenheit is a typical summer's day, and not too hot.
Mumbai, on the other hand, is a hot and humid place well into the 30s Celsius or 90s Fahrenheit.
To make things worse, my grandparents didn't have an air conditioner.
And while I tried my very, very best, I was never able to persuade them to get one.
But this is changing, and fast.
Cooling systems today collectively account for 17 percent of the electricity we use worldwide.
This includes everything from the air conditioners I so desperately wanted during my summer vacations, to the refrigeration systems that keep our food safe and cold for us in our supermarkets, to the industrial scale systems that keep our data centers operational.
Collectively, these systems account for eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
But what keeps me up at night is that our energy use for cooling might grow sixfold by the year 2050, primarily driven by increasing usage in Asian and African countries.
I've seen this firsthand.
Nearly every apartment in and around my grandmother's place now has an air conditioner.
However, one of the most alarming things about climate change is that the warmer our planet gets, the more we're going to need cooling systems -- systems that are themselves large emitters of greenhouse gas emissions.
This then has the potential to cause a feedback loop, where cooling systems alone could become one of our biggest sources of greenhouse gases later this century.
In the worst case, we might need more than 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, just for cooling, by the year 2100.
That's half our electricity supply today.
A 10 or 20 percent improvement in the efficiency of every cooling system could actually have an enormous impact on our greenhouse gas emissions, both today and later this century.
And it could help us avert that worst-case feedback loop.
I'm a scientist who thinks a lot about light and heat.
How were ancient peoples able to make ice in desert climates?
This is a picture of an ice house, also called a Yakhchal, located in the southwest of Iran.
There are ruins of dozens of such structures throughout Iran, with evidence of similar such buildings throughout the rest of the Middle East and all the way to China.
The people who operated this ice house many centuries ago, would pour water in the pool you see on the left in the early evening hours, as the sun set.
And then something amazing happened.
Even though the air temperature might be above freezing, say five degrees Celsius or 41 degrees Fahrenheit, the water would freeze.
The ice generated would then be collected in the early morning hours and stored for use in the building you see on the right, all the way through the summer months.
You've actually likely seen something very similar at play if you've ever noticed frost form on the ground on a clear night, even when the air temperature is well above freezing.
How did the water freeze if the air temperature is above freezing?
Evaporation could have played an effect, but that's not enough to actually cause the water to become ice.
Something else must have cooled it down.
Think about a pie cooling on a window sill.
For it to be able to cool down, its heat needs to flow somewhere cooler.
Namely, the air that surrounds it.
How is this possible?
This is a concept known as thermal radiation.
In fact, we're all sending out our heat as infrared light right now, to each other and our surroundings.
We can actually visualize this with thermal cameras and the images they produce, like the ones I'm showing you right now.
The atmosphere and the molecules in it absorb some of that heat and send it back.
That's actually the greenhouse effect that's responsible for climate change.
Our atmosphere doesn't absorb all of that heat.
If it did, we'd be on a much warmer planet.
At certain wavelengths, in particular between eight and 13 microns, our atmosphere has what's known as a transmission window.
This window allows some of the heat that goes up as infrared light to effectively escape, carrying away that pool's heat.
The cold of this upper atmosphere and all the way out to outer space, which can be as cold as minus 270 degrees Celsius, or minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is an effect known as night-sky cooling or radiative cooling.
And it's always been understood by climate scientists and meteorologists as a very important natural phenomenon.
When I came across all of this, it was towards the end of my PhD at Stanford.
And I was amazed by its apparent simplicity as a cooling method, yet really puzzled.
But there turned out to be at least one big problem.
It was called night-sky cooling for a reason.
Why?
Well, it's a little thing called the sun.
So, for the surface that's doing the cooling, it needs to be able to face the sky.
And during the middle of the day, when we might want something cold the most, unfortunately, that means you're going to look up to the sun.
My colleagues and I spend a lot of our time thinking about how we can structure materials at very small length scales such that they can do new and useful things with light -- length scales smaller than the wavelength of light itself.
Using insights from this field, known as nanophotonics or metamaterials research, we realized that there might be a way to make this possible during the day for the first time.
To do this, I designed a multilayer optical material shown here in a microscope image.
The second thing it does is it avoids getting heated up by the sun.
It's a very good mirror to sunlight.
The first time I tested this was on a rooftop in Stanford that I'm showing you right here.
I left the device out for a little while, and I walked up to it after a few minutes, and within seconds, I knew it was working.
How?
The manufacturing method we used to actually make this material already exists at large volume scales.
How do you actually save energy with this idea?
Well, we believe the most direct way to save energy with this technology is as an efficiency boost for today's air-conditioning and refrigeration systems.
To do this, we've built fluid cooling panels, like the ones shown right here.
These panels have a similar shape to solar water heaters, except they do the opposite -- they cool the water, passively, using our specialized material.
These panels can then be integrated with a component almost every cooling system has, called a condenser, to improve the system's underlying efficiency.
Our start-up, SkyCool Systems, has recently completed a field trial in Davis, California, shown right here.
In that demonstration, we showed that we could actually improve the efficiency of that cooling system as much as 12 percent in the field.
Over the next year or two, I'm super excited to see this go to its first commercial-scale pilots in both the air conditioning and refrigeration space.
In the future, we might be able to integrate these kinds of panels with higher efficiency building cooling systems to reduce their energy usage by two-thirds.
And eventually, we might actually be able to build a cooling system that requires no electricity input at all.
As a first step towards that, my colleagues at Stanford and I have shown that you could actually maintain something more than 42 degrees Celsius below the air temperature with better engineering.
Thank you.
(Applause) So just imagine that -- something that is below freezing on a hot summer's day.
So, while I'm very excited about all we can do for cooling, and I think there's a lot yet to be done, as a scientist, I'm also drawn to a more profound opportunity that I believe this work highlights.
We can use the cold darkness of space to improve the efficiency of every energy-related process here on earth.
They heat up under the sun and become less efficient the hotter they are.
In 2015, we showed that with deliberate kinds of microstructures on top of a solar cell, we could take better advantage of this cooling effect to maintain a solar cell passively at a lower temperature.
This allows the cell to operate more efficiently.
We're probing these kinds of opportunities further.
We're asking whether we can use the cold of space to help us with water conservation.
Or perhaps with off-grid scenarios.
Perhaps we could even directly generate power with this cold.
There's a large temperature difference between us here on earth and the cold of space.
That difference, at least conceptually, could be used to drive something called a heat engine to generate electricity.
Could we then make a nighttime power-generation device that generates useful amounts of electricity when solar cells don't work?
Could we generate light from darkness?
Central to this ability is being able to manage the thermal radiation that's all around us.
We're constantly bathed in infrared light; if we could bend it to our will, we could profoundly change the flows of heat and energy that permeate around us every single day.
This ability, coupled with the cold darkness of space, points us to a future where we, as a civilization, might be able to more intelligently manage our thermal energy footprint at the very largest scales.
As we confront climate change, I believe having this ability in our toolkit will prove to be essential.
So, the next time you're walking around outside, yes, do marvel at how the sun is essential to life on earth itself, but don't forget that the rest of the sky has something to offer us as well.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated -- (Laughter) Oh!
(Laughter) OK, I meant younger and more short.
(Laughter) If that's possible to imagine.
But ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated with how the world worked exactly how it did.
So this, very early on, led me to the fields of mathematics and chemistry.
I would keep going further and further, and as I kept going, I realized that all the fields of science are interconnected.
And without one, the others have little or no value.
So, inspired by Marie Curie and my local science museum, I decided to start asking these questions myself and engage in my own independent research, whether it be out of my garage or my bedroom.
I started reading journal papers, started doing science competitions, started participating in science fairs, doing anything I could to get the knowledge that I so desperately wanted.
So while I was studying anatomy for a competition, I came across the topic of something called chronic wounds.
Hold up.
So what is a chronic wound?
(Laughter) And why haven't I heard about a 5K walk for chronic wounds, why haven't I even heard about a chronic wound in general?
(Laughter) So after I got past those preliminary questions, and one that I will clarify for you, a chronic wound is essentially when someone gets a normal wound, except it fails to heal normally because the patient has some kind of preexisting condition, which in most cases is diabetes.
In the year 2010 alone, 50 billion dollars were spent worldwide to treat chronic wounds.
In addition, I had a lot of criteria, as well.
Since this product would be readily interacting with the body, it had to be biocompatible, it also had to be low-cost, as I was designing it and paying for it myself.
It also had to be mass-manufacturable, because I wanted it to be made anywhere, for anyone.
What you see on the left hand-side is the early schematics in my design, showing both a bird's-eye view and also one stacking variant.
A stacking variant means that the entire product is consisted of different individual parts that have to work in unison.
And what's shown there is one possible arrangement.
So I had gone on to testing my sensors and as all scientists have stumbles along their work, I also had a couple of problems in my first generation of sensors.
First of all, I couldn't figure out how to get a nanoparticle ink into a printcheck cartridge without spilling it all over my carpet.
So I wanted something to solve it.
Problem one was easily solved by some scouting on eBay and Amazon for syringes that I could use.
So what a space-filling curve does is it aims to take up all the area it can within one unit square.
And by writing a computer program, you can have different iterations of the different curve, which increasingly get close to one unit square, but never quite reaches there.
So I started constructing my sensors and testing them more rigorously, using money that I had gotten from previous science fair awards.
So I interfaced it with a Bluetooth chip, which you can see here by the app screenshots on the right.
And what this does is that anyone can monitor the progress of their wound, and it can be transmitted over a wireless connection to the doctor, the patient or whoever needs it.
[Continued Testing and Refinement] So in conclusion, my design was successful -- however, science never ends.
However, what I learned was what's more important than the actual thing I designed is an attitude that I had taken on while doing this.
And that attitude was, even though I'm a 14-year-old working in her garage on something that she doesn't completely understand, I could still make a difference and contribute to the field.
And that's what inspired me to keep going, and I hope it inspires many others to also do work like this even though they're not very sure about it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Have you ever watched a baby learning to crawl?
First, they wriggle about on the floor, usually backwards, but then they drag themselves forwards, and then they pull themselves up to stand, and we all clap.
And that simple motion of forwards and upwards, it's the most basic direction of progress we humans recognize.
So no wonder we so readily believe that economic progress will take this very same shape, this ever-rising line of growth.
It's time to think again, to reimagine the shape of progress, because today, we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, and what we need, especially in the richest countries, are economies that make us thrive whether or not they grow.
Yes, it's a little flippant word hiding a profound shift in mindset, but I believe this is the shift we need to make if we, humanity, are going to thrive here together this century.
So where did this obsession with growth come from?
Well, GDP, gross domestic product, it's just the total cost of goods and services sold in an economy in a year.
It was invented in the 1930s, but it very soon became the overriding goal of policymaking, so much so that even today, in the richest of countries, governments think that the solution to their economic problems lies in more growth.
Just how that happened is best told through the 1960 classic by W.W. Rostow.
I love it so much, I have a first-edition copy.
"The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto."
And Rostow tells us that all economies need to pass through five stages of growth: first, traditional society, where a nation's output is limited by its technology, its institutions and mindset; but then the preconditions for takeoff, where we get the beginnings of a banking industry, the mechanization of work and the belief that growth is necessary for something beyond itself, like national dignity or a better life for the children; then takeoff, where compound interest is built into the economy's institutions and growth becomes the normal condition; fourth is the drive to maturity where you can have any industry you want, no matter your natural resource base; and the fifth and final stage, the age of high-mass consumption where people can buy all the consumer goods they want, like bicycles and sewing machines -- this was 1960, remember.
Well, you can hear the implicit airplane metaphor in this story, but this plane is like no other, because it can never be allowed to land.
As he wrote, "And then the question beyond, where history offers us only fragments.
He asked that question, but he never answered it, and here's why.
The year was 1960, he was an advisor to the presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who was running for election on the promise of five-percent growth, so Rostow's job was to keep that plane flying, not to ask if, how, or when it could ever be allowed to land.
We're politically addicted to growth because politicians want to raise tax revenue without raising taxes and a growing GDP seems a sure way to do that.
And no politician wants to lose their place in the G-20 family photo.
And we are socially addicted to growth, because thanks to a century of consumer propaganda, which fascinatingly was created by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who realized that his uncle's psychotherapy could be turned into very lucrative retail therapy if we could be convinced to believe that we transform ourselves every time we buy something more.
And the economy has become incredibly degenerative, rapidly destabilizing this delicately balanced planet on which all of our lives depend.
Our politicians know it, and so they offer new destinations for growth.
You can have green growth, inclusive growth, smart, resilient, balanced growth.
Choose any future you want so long as you choose growth.
I think it's time to choose a higher ambition, a far bigger one, because humanity's 21st century challenge is clear: to meet the needs of all people within the means of this extraordinary, unique, living planet so that we and the rest of nature can thrive.
And when I sat down to try and draw a picture of what that might look like, strange though this is going to sound, it came out looking like a doughnut.
I know, I'm sorry, but let me introduce you to the one doughnut that might actually turn out to be good for us.
They don't have the food, health care, education, political voice, housing that every person needs for a life of dignity and opportunity.
But, and it's a big but, we cannot let our collective resource use overshoot that outer circle, the ecological ceiling, because there we put so much pressure on this extraordinary planet that we begin to kick it out of kilter.
We cause climate breakdown, we acidify the oceans, a hole in the ozone layer, pushing ourselves beyond the planetary boundaries of the life-supporting systems that have for the last 11,000 years made earth such a benevolent home to humanity.
So this double-sided challenge to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet, it invites a new shape of progress, no longer this ever-rising line of growth, but a sweet spot for humanity, thriving in dynamic balance between the foundation and the ceiling.
So can we find this dynamic balance in the 21st century?
Well, that's a key question, because as these red wedges show, right now we are far from balanced, falling short and overshooting at the same time.
Look in that hole, you can see that millions or billions of people worldwide still fall short on their most basic of needs.
And yet, we've already overshot at least four of these planetary boundaries, risking irreversible impact of climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse.
We, the people of the early 21st century, this is our selfie.
No economist from last century saw this picture, so why would we imagine that their theories would be up for taking on its challenges?
We need ideas of our own, because we are the first generation to see this and probably the last with a real chance of turning this story around.
You see, 20th century economics assured us that if growth creates inequality, don't try to redistribute, because more growth will even things up again.
If growth creates pollution, don't try to regulate, because more growth will clean things up again.
You see, we've inherited degenerative industries.
We take earth's materials, make them into stuff we want, use it for a while, often only once, and then throw it away, and that is pushing us over planetary boundaries, so we need to bend those arrows around, create economies that work with and within the cycles of the living world, so that resources are never used up but used again and again, economies that run on sunlight, where waste from one process is food for the next.
Over a hundred cities worldwide, from Quito to Oslo, from Harare to Hobart, already generate more than 70 percent of their electricity from sun, wind and waves.
Cities like London, Glasgow, Amsterdam are pioneering circular city design, finding ways to turn the waste from one urban process into food for the next.
And from Tigray, Ethiopia to Queensland, Australia, farmers and foresters are regenerating once-barren landscapes so that it teems with life again.
This century, we can design our technologies and institutions to distribute wealth, knowledge and empowerment to many.
Instead of fossil fuel energy and large-scale manufacturing, we've got renewable energy networks, digital platforms and 3D printing.
200 years of corporate control of intellectual property is being upended by the bottom-up, open-source, peer-to-peer knowledge commons.
And corporations that still pursue maximum rate of return for their shareholders, well they suddenly look rather out of date next to social enterprises that are designed to generate multiple forms of value and share it with those throughout their networks.
You see, regenerative and distributive design create extraordinary opportunities for the 21st-century economy.
Well, for some it still carries the hope of endless green growth, the idea that thanks to dematerialization, exponential GDP growth can go on forever while resource use keeps falling.
But look at the data. This is a flight of fancy.
Yes, we need to dematerialize our economies, but this dependency on unending growth cannot be decoupled from resource use on anything like the scale required to bring us safely back within planetary boundaries.
I know this way of thinking about growth is unfamiliar, because growth is good, no?
We want our children to grow, our gardens to grow.
Yes, look to nature and growth is a wonderful, healthy source of life.
It's a phase, but many economies like Ethiopia and Nepal today may be in that phase.
Their economies are growing at seven percent a year.
But look again to nature, because from your children's feet to the Amazon forest, nothing in nature grows forever.
Things grow, and they grow up and they mature, and it's only by doing so that they can thrive for a very long time.
We already know this.
So why would we imagine that our economies would be the one system that could buck this trend and succeed by growing forever?
We urgently need financial, political and social innovations that enable us to overcome this structural dependency on growth, so that we can instead focus on thriving and balance within the social and the ecological boundaries of the doughnut.
And if the mere idea of boundaries makes you feel, well, bounded, think again.
Because the world's most ingenious people turn boundaries into the source of their creativity.
From Mozart on his five-octave piano Jimi Hendrix on his six-string guitar, Serena Williams on a tennis court, it's boundaries that unleash our potential.
And the doughnut's boundaries unleash the potential for humanity to thrive with boundless creativity, participation, belonging and meaning.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones.
Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt.
Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad.
We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves.
After all, what's wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly line can't even afford to buy one?
It's taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that it's our desire for cheap goods that makes them so.
So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but it's also inaccurate and disrespectful.
We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways.
In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands.
By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.
Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods.
They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world.
In the ongoing debate about globalization, what's been missing is the voices of the workers themselves.
Here are a few.
Bao Yongxiu: "My mother tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I'm not in a rush."
Chen Ying: "When I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do that you have changed so much?
Wu Chunming: "Even if I make a lot of money, it won't satisfy me.
Just to make money is not enough meaning in life."
Xiao Jin: "Now, after I get off work, I study English, because in the future, our customers won't be only Chinese, so we must learn more languages."
All of these speakers, by the way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old.
So I spent two years getting to know assembly line workers like these in the south China factory city called Dongguan.
Other subjects came up almost never, including living conditions that to me looked close to prison life: 10 or 15 workers in one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and nights ruled by the factory clock.
Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China.
The workers rarely spoke about the products they made, and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did.
When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best, what exactly she did on the factory floor, she said something to me in Chinese that sounded like "qiu xi."
Only much later did I realize that she had been saying "QC," or quality control.
She couldn't even tell me what she did on the factory floor.
All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she didn't even understand.
Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor.
But like so many theories that Marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, he got this one wrong.
What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in that place, and how it changes her, these are the things that matter.
Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, on the other hand, plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make.
Many articles calculate: How long would it take for this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he's making?
For example, an entry-level-line assembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out two and a half months' wages for an iPhone.
But how meaningful is this calculation, really?
For example, I recently wrote an article in The New Yorker magazine, but I can't afford to buy an ad in it.
But, who cares? I don't want an ad in The New Yorker, and most of these workers don't really want iPhones.
Their calculations are different.
How much money can I save?
The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor.
On the train home, she gave me a present: a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim.
I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan.
After we got home, Min gave her mother another present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights later, her sister was showing off a maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag.
Slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every single one of them was authentic.
Min's sister said to her parents, "In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars."
"And that's not all -- Coach is coming out with a new line, 2191," she said. "One bag will sell for 6,000."
She paused and said, "I don't know if that's 6,000 yuan or 6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it's 6,000." (Laughter) Min's sister's boyfriend, who had traveled home with her for the new year, said, "It doesn't look like it's worth that much."
Min's sister turned to him and said, "Some people actually understand these things. You don't understand shit."
They weren't exactly worthless, but they were nothing close to the actual value, because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth.
Another time, after Min had already left the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit, bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts.
I looked in the zippered pocket of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, "An American classic.
In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbags from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather.
Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair.
They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was born."
Their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated, surprising and funny than he could have imagined.
And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses, to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking.
The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics factory.
Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs five times, eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory.
Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents.
She recently returned to Dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village.
In a recent email to me, she explained, "A person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose."
Across China, there are 150 million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities.
When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers.
By opening up their lives to me, they taught me so much about factories and about China and about how to live in the world.
This is the Coach purse that Min gave me on the train home to visit her family.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight that a lot of us haven't had before.
But I'm curious. If you had a minute, say, with Apple's head of manufacturing, what would you say?
CA: One minute. (Laughter) LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers is how much they're self-motivated, self-driven, resourceful, and the thing that struck me, what they want most is education, to learn, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds.
They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade.
Their parents are often illiterate, and then they come to the city, and they, on their own, at night, during the weekends, they'll take a computer class, they'll take an English class, and learn really, really rudimentary things, you know, like how to type a document in Word, or how to say really simple things in English.
They do not say, "I want better hot water in the showers.
I want a nicer room. I want a TV set."
CA: Was there a sense from them of a narrative that things were kind of tough and bad, or was there a narrative of some kind of level of growth, that things over time were getting better?
LC: Oh definitely, definitely. I mean, you know, it was interesting, because I spent basically two years hanging out in this city, Dongguan, and over that time, you could see immense change in every person's life: upward, downward, sideways, but generally upward.
If you spend enough time, it's upward, and I met people who had moved to the city 10 years ago, and who are now basically urban middle class people, so the trajectory is definitely upward.
Certainly, the factory conditions are really tough, and it's nothing you or I would want to do, but from their perspective, where they're coming from is much worse, and where they're going is hopefully much better, and I just wanted to give that context of what's going on in their minds, not what necessarily is going on in yours.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
In System D, this is a store, and what I mean by that is that this is a photograph I took in Makoko, shantytown in Lagos, Nigeria.
And in the same community, this is business synergy.
This is the boat that that lady was paddling around in, and this artisan makes the boat and the paddles and sells directly to the people who need the boat and the paddles.
And this is a global business.
Ogandiro smokes fish in Makoko in Lagos, and I asked her, "Where does the fish come from?"
And I thought she'd say, "Oh, you know, up the lagoon somewhere, or maybe across Africa," but you'll be happy to know she said it came from here, it comes from the North Sea.
It's caught here, frozen, shipped down to Lagos, smoked, and sold for a tiny increment of profit on the streets of Lagos.
And this is a business incubator.
This is Olusosun dump, the largest garbage dump in Lagos, and 2,000 people work here, and I found this out from this fellow, Andrew Saboru.
Andrew spent 16 years scavenging materials on the dump, earned enough money to turn himself into a contract scaler, which meant he carried a scale and went around and weighed all the materials that people had scavenged from the dump. Now he's a scrap dealer.
That's his little depot behind him, and he earns twice the Nigerian minimum wage.
This is a shopping mall.
This is Oshodi Market in Lagos.
Jorge Luis Borges had a story called "The Aleph," and the Aleph is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists, and for me, this image is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists.
So, what am I talking about when I talk about System D?
It's traditionally called the informal economy, the underground economy, the black market.
I think it's really important to understand that something like this is totally open. It's right there for you to find.
It's our prejudgment that it's underground.
There's a word in French that is débrouillardise, that means to be self-reliant, and the former French colonies have turned that into System D for the economy of self-reliance, or the DIY economy.
But governments hate the DIY economy, and that's why -- I took this picture in 2007, and this is the same market in 2009 -- and I think, when the organizers of this conference were talking about radical openness, they didn't mean that the streets should be open and the people should be gone.
I think what we have is a pickle problem.
This is the pickle economy.
It's worth 1.5 trillion dollars every year, and that's a vast amount of money, right?
That's three times the Gross Domestic Product of Switzerland.
So it's vast. But it should come with an asterisk, and the asterisk is that it excludes two thirds of the workers of the world.
1.8 billion people around the world work in the economy that is unregulated and informal.
That's a huge number, and what does that mean?
And given that projections are that the bulk of economic growth over the next 15 years will come from emerging economies in the developing world, it could easily overtake the United States and become the largest economy in the world.
it's that the Gala sausage roll is a product that's made by a global company called UAC foods that's active throughout Africa and the Middle East, but the Gala sausage roll is not sold in stores.
It's only sold by a phalanx of street hawkers who run around the streets of Lagos at bus stations and in traffic jams and sell it as a snack, and it's been sold that way for 40 years.
It's a business plan for a corporation.
And it's not just in Africa.
Here's Mr. Clean looking amorously at all the other Procter & Gamble products, and Procter & Gamble, you know, the statistic always cited is that Wal-Mart is their largest customer, and it's true, as one store, Wal-Mart buys 15 percent, thus 15 percent of Procter & Gamble's business is with Wal-Mart, but their largest market segment is something that they call "high frequency stores," which is all these tiny kiosks and the lady in the canoe and all these other businesses that exist in System D, the informal economy, and Procter & Gamble makes 20 percent of its money from that market segment, and it's the only market segment that's growing.
So Procter & Gamble says, "We don't care whether a store is incorporated or registered or anything like that.
We want our products in that store."
And then there's mobile phones.
This is an ad for MTN, which is a South African multinational active in about 25 countries, and when they came into Nigeria — Nigeria is the big dog in Africa.
One in seven Africans is a Nigerian, and so everyone wants in to the mobile phone market in Nigeria. And when MTN came in, they wanted to sell the mobile service like I get in the United States or like people get here in the U.K. or in Europe -- expensive monthly plans, you get a phone, you pay overages, you're killed with fees -- and their plan crashed and burned.
And they went back to the drawing board, and they retooled, and they came up with another plan: We don't sell you the phone, we don't sell you the monthly plan.
We only sell you airtime.
And where's the airtime sold?
It's sold at umbrella stands all over the streets, where people are unregistered, unlicensed, but MTN makes most of its profits, perhaps 90 percent of its profits, from selling through System D, the informal economy.
And where do the phones come from?
The name is a misnomer.
Most of them are pirated. They have the name brand on them, but they're not manufactured by the name brand.
Now, are there downsides to that?
Versace without the vowels.
S. Guuuci, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) All around the world this is how products are being distributed, so, for instance, in one street market on Rua 25 de Março in São Paulo, Brazil, you can buy fake designer glasses.
You can buy cloned cologne.
You can buy pirated DVDs, of course.
You can buy New York Yankees caps in all sorts of unauthorized patterns.
You can buy cuecas baratas, designer underwear that isn't really manufactured by a designer, and even pirated evangelical mixtapes. (Laughter) Now, businesses tend to complain about this, and their, they, I don't want to take away from their entire validity of complaining about it, but I did ask a major sneaker manufacturer earlier this year what they thought about piracy, and they told me, "Well, you can't quote me on this, because if you quote me on this, I have to kill you," but they use piracy as market research.
The sneaker manufacturer told me that if they find that Pumas are being pirated, or Adidas are being pirated and their sneakers aren't being pirated, they know they've done something wrong. (Laughter) So it's very important to them to track piracy exactly because of this, and the people who are buying, the pirates, are not their customers anyway, because their customers want the real deal.
Now, there's another problem.
This is a real street sign in Lagos, Nigeria.
All of System D really doesn't pay taxes, right?
All over the world. And that company was the big German electronics giant Siemens.
First, it would be to understand that it could be considered a cooperative, and this is a thought from the Brazilian legal scholar Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
Secondly, from the [Austrian] anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend, facts are relative, and what is a massive right of self-reliance to a Nigerian businessperson is considered unauthorized and horrible to other people, and we have to recognize that there are differences in how people define things and what their facts are.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
"Five hospitals in Aleppo have been bombed."
That was a text message that I received on a dark winter night in November 2016.
One of them was a children's hospital run by my Syrian colleagues at the Independent Doctors Association, IDA.
I watched in horror heartbreaking footage of the head nurse, Malak, in the aftermath of the bombing, grabbing premature babies out of their incubators, desperate to get them to safety, before she broke down in tears.
And I felt devastated.
Fellow humanitarians and I have spent blood, sweat and tears rebuilding hospitals so that our patients may live, not die.
And through this work, I made a discovery.
The reason that people survive in crisis is because of the remarkable work of the people in crisis themselves.
People survive because of the local doctors, nurses and aid workers who are from the very heart of the affected community, the people who dare to work where others can't or won't.
People survive because of people like Malak, who, despite sustaining a severe burns injury in the line of duty, the first thing she did when discharged from hospital was to go back caring for small children.
Local humanitarians are the beacons of light in the darkness of war.
Now, the data shows that Syrian organizations carry out 75 percent of the humanitarian work in Syria.
Yet, they receive 0.3 percent of the Syria aid budget.
And what's more, the same is happening across the crises of the world.
I have witnessed this reality.
It means those with the knowledge, skill and ability to respond on the front lines have little of the necessary tools, equipment and resources they need to save lives.
It means groups like IDA don't have funds to rebuild their hospital.
Now, at the time of receiving that message, I was on sabbatical from my clinical work, setting up CanDo, a start-up determined to address this imbalance and enable local responders to provide health care to their war-devastated communities.
We had devised a simple model: source trusted and impactful local groups, support their development through an accelerator program and connect them to you via our crowdfunding platform, where they can fund-raise for their health needs.
So when IDA asked for help, I decided to launch CanDo seven months early, with very little money, and many people, including myself, thought I had finally gone mad.
I wanted to do something that transformed our collective anger into something beautiful.
And that's how the People's Convoy was born.
It was a global crowdfunding campaign to enable IDA to rebuild a whole new children's hospital, and, if successful, we the people would take the medical equipment all the way from London to the Syria border.
And we did it.
Thousands of people came together from across the world to achieve a global first: we built the first-ever crowdfunded hospital.
The location was carefully chosen by the local experts, IDA, where they knew it would be safe and serve the greatest number of displaced children.
IDA was so moved by people's response, they named it "Hope Hospital."
The system needs to change, and change starts with us all sharing a new humanitarian vision, one where you, global citizens with skills, expertise and resources, stand together with the local responders; one where we are all humanitarians, putting the necessary resources in the hands of those who need them most and are best placed to use them effectively and efficiently.
We need to support the people who are not only saving lives now, but it will also be them stitching their wounded communities back together, once a conflict is over to help them heal.
Local humanitarians have the courage to persist, to dust themselves off from the wreckage and to start again, risking their lives to save others.
And we can match their courage by not looking away or turning our backs, by helping those who are helping themselves, and together, save more lives.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Shoham Arad: Come over here, please.
Why are hospitals being bombed?
So, Physicians for Human Rights have documented nearly 500 attacks on hospitals and over 800 medical personnel who have been killed -- over 90 percent of it by the Syrian regime -- and they say this is part of a systemic targeting and destruction of health care, using it as a weapon of war.
And the thing with this is that it's not just our problem, it's yours, too, and everyone's, because A, it exacerbates the refugee situation -- when you have a decimated health care system, it means the next Ebola-type epicenter of disease is going to be Syria; and unfortunately, it sets a very dangerous precedent that makes all of our hospitals anywhere in the world dangerous, and that is not how it should be.
SA: So this actually isn't just about money, either, CanDo isn't just about money.
Tell me what it means to you that 5,000 people all over the world contributed 350,000 dollars to build Hope Hospital.
RH: I think the answer is in that word, it's in hope.
I think everyone who donated, they had their faith in humanity renewed, knowing there are people like IDA and those doctors, who are exhibiting the absolute best of humanity, and it was like an absolute reciprocation.
And I think the fact that -- and they see things through the prism of government, so when they see government's not acting, they assume everyone who lives in those places doesn't care.
RH: Thank you. SA: Thank you for everything.
(Applause)
(Laughter) And here it is ... are you ready?
I have stage IV lung cancer.
Oh, I know, "poor me."
I don't feel that way.
I have a grown daughter who's brilliant and happy and wonderful.
My cancer isn't that aggressive.
It's kind of like the Democratic leadership -- (Laughter) not convinced it can win.
It's basically just sitting there, waiting for Goldman Sachs to give it some money.
Yes.
I didn't even know it until someone tweeted me a year ago.
(Laughter) (Applause) Not that I can take all the credit, but ...
(Laughter) But what if you don't have my advantages?
The only advice I can give you is to do what I did: make friends with reality.
If they'd had Tinder when I met reality, I would have swiped left and the whole thing would have been over.
(Laughter) And reality and I -- we don't share the same values, the same goals -- (Laughter) To be honest, I don't have goals; I have fantasies.
(Laughter) But something happened that made me realize that reality may not be reality.
So what happened was, because I basically wanted reality to leave me alone -- but I wanted to be left alone in a nice house with a Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator ...
private yoga lessons -- I ended up with a development deal at Disney.
And one day I found myself in my new office on Two Dopey Drive -- (Laughter) which reality thought I should be proud of ...
(Laughter) And I'm staring at the present they sent me to celebrate my arrival -- not the Lalique vase or the grand piano I've heard of other people getting, but a three-foot-tall, stuffed Mickey Mouse (Laughter) with a catalog, in case I wanted to order some more stuff that didn't jibe with my aesthetic.
(Laughter) And when I looked up in the catalog to see how much this three-foot-high mouse cost, here's how it was described ...
"Life-sized."
Reality wasn't "reality."
So I dived into quantum physics and chaos theory to try to find actual reality, and I've just finished a movie -- yes, finally finished -- about all that, so I won't go into it here, and anyway, it wasn't until after we shot the movie, when I broke my leg and then it didn't heal, so then they had to do another surgery a year later, and then that took a year -- two years in a wheelchair, and that's when I came into contact with actual reality: limits.
Those very limits I'd spent my whole life denying and pushing past and ignoring were real, and I had to deal with them, and they took imagination, creativity and my entire skill set.
And I should've known, given my equally shaky relationship with the zeitgeist ...
I'll just say, if anyone is in the market for a Betamax -- (Laughter) I should have known that the moment I fell in love with reality, the rest of the country would decide to go in the opposite direction.
(Laughter) But I'm not here to talk about Trump or the alt-right or climate-change deniers or even the makers of this thing, which I would have called a box, except that right here, it says, "This is not a box."
(Laughter) They're gaslighting me.
(Laughter) (Applause) But what I do want to talk about is a personal challenge to reality that I take personally, and I want to preface it by saying that I absolutely love science.
I have this -- not a scientist myself -- but an uncanny ability to understand everything about science, except the actual science -- (Laughter) which is math.
But the most outlandish concepts make sense to me.
The string theory; the idea that all of reality emanates from the vibrations of these teeny -- I call it "The Big Twang."
(Laughter) Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest as two things ...
That a photon can manifest as a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad, ideas are right and wrong.
Freud was right about penis envy and he was wrong about who has it.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) And then there's this slight variation on that, which is reality looks like two things, but it turns out to be the interaction of those two things, like space -- time, mass -- energy and life and death.
So I don't understand -- I simply just don't understand the mindset of people who are out to "defeat death" and "overcome death."
How do you do that?
It doesn't make sense to me.
I also have to say, I find it incredibly ungrateful.
I mean, you're given this extraordinary gift -- life -- but it's as if you had asked Santa for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and you had gotten a salad spinner instead.
You know, it's the beef -- the beef with it is that it comes with an expiration date.
I don't understand -- to me, it's disrespectful.
The idea that we're going to dominate nature, we're going to master nature, nature is too weak to withstand our intellect -- no, I don't think so.
I think if you've actually read quantum physics as I have -- well, I read an email from someone who'd read it, but -- (Laughter) You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore.
We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything.
Nature is like a self-driving car.
The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke -- I don't know if you've heard it.
And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?"
And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"
(Laughter) (Applause) So ...
And my source on this is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who wrote a book called "The Human Condition."
And in it, she says that classically, work is associated with men.
Work is what comes out of the head; it's what we invent, it's what we create, it's how we leave our mark upon the world.
Whereas labor is associated with the body.
First of all, I am incredibly grateful for life, but I don't want to be immortal.
(Laughter) And I have actual proof of that.
A headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Anne Frank: Not so nice after all."
(Laughter) Plus, I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe.
That's what's so extraordinary about life: it's a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration.
"I" am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern.
To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process.
You know, I look at death now from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at it as part of the gift economy.
I have had an enormous appetite for life, I've consumed life, but in death, I'm going to be consumed.
I think they'll find me delicious.
You can see it.
You can observe it.
It actually happens.
Well, maybe not my enriching the gift, I don't know about that -- but my life has certainly been enriched by other people.
By TED, which introduced me to a whole network of people who have enriched my life, including Tricia McGillis, my website designer, who's working with my wonderful daughter to take my website and turn it into something where all I have to do is write a blog.
Ha, ha, ha, I win!
And, you know, quantum physicists are not exactly sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle.
There are different theories -- the collapse of the wave function, decoherence -- but they're all agreed on one thing: that reality comes into being through an interaction.
(Voice breaking) So do you.
And every audience I've ever had, past and present.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
I'd like to tell you about two games of chess.
The first happened in 1997, in which Garry Kasparov, a human, lost to Deep Blue, a machine.
But here we are, 20 years on, and the greatest change in how we relate to computers is the iPad, not HAL.
The second game was a freestyle chess tournament in 2005, in which man and machine could enter together as partners, rather than adversaries, if they so chose.
At first, the results were predictable.
The surprise came at the end. Who won?
Not a grandmaster with a supercomputer, but actually two American amateurs using three relatively weak laptops.
Their ability to coach and manipulate their computers to deeply explore specific positions effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of the grandmasters and the superior computational power of other adversaries.
This is an astonishing result: average men, average machines beating the best man, the best machine.
And anyways, isn't it supposed to be man versus machine?
Instead, it's about cooperation, and the right type of cooperation.
We've been paying a lot of attention to Marvin Minsky's vision for artificial intelligence over the last 50 years.
It's a sexy vision, for sure. Many have embraced it.
But as we enter the era of big data, of network systems, of open platforms, and embedded technology, I'd like to suggest it's time to reevaluate an alternative vision that was actually developed around the same time.
I'm talking about J.C.R. Licklider's human-computer symbiosis, perhaps better termed "intelligence augmentation," I.A.
Licklider was a computer science titan who had a profound effect on the development of technology and the Internet.
His vision was to enable man and machine to cooperate in making decisions, controlling complex situations without the inflexible dependence on predetermined programs.
Note that word "cooperate."
Humans are so amazing -- how we think, our non-linear approaches, our creativity, iterative hypotheses, all very difficult if possible at all for computers to do.
Licklider intuitively realized this, contemplating humans setting the goals, formulating the hypotheses, determining the criteria, and performing the evaluation.
Of course, in other ways, humans are so limited.
We require high-end talent management to keep the rock band together and playing.
Licklider foresaw computers doing all the routinizable work that was required to prepare the way for insights and decision making.
Protein folding, a topic that shares the incredible expansiveness of chess — there are more ways of folding a protein than there are atoms in the universe.
This is a world-changing problem with huge implications for our ability to understand and treat disease.
Foldit, a game created by computer scientists, illustrates the value of the approach.
Non-technical, non-biologist amateurs play a video game in which they visually rearrange the structure of the protein, allowing the computer to manage the atomic forces and interactions and identify structural issues.
This approach beat supercomputers 50 percent of the time and tied 30 percent of the time.
Foldit recently made a notable and major scientific discovery by deciphering the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus.
A protease that had eluded determination for over 10 years was solved was by three players in a matter of days, perhaps the first major scientific advance to come from playing a video game.
Last year, on the site of the Twin Towers, the 9/11 memorial opened.
It displays the names of the thousands of victims using a beautiful concept called "meaningful adjacency."
It places the names next to each other based on their relationships to one another: friends, families, coworkers.
When first reported by the media, full credit for such a feat was given to an algorithm from the New York City design firm Local Projects. The truth is a bit more nuanced.
While an algorithm was used to develop the underlying framework, humans used that framework to design the final result.
So the more you look around you, the more you see Licklider's vision everywhere.
Whether it's augmented reality in your iPhone or GPS in your car, human-computer symbiosis is making us more capable.
So if you want to improve human-computer symbiosis, what can you do?
When you do this, you'll quickly realize that you spent all of your time on the interface between man and machine, specifically on designing away the friction in the interaction.
That's why two amateurs with a few laptops handily beat a supercomputer and a grandmaster.
What Kasparov calls process is a byproduct of friction.
The better the process, the less the friction.
And minimizing friction turns out to be the decisive variable.
Or take another example: big data.
Every interaction we have in the world is recorded by an ever growing array of sensors: your phone, your credit card, your computer. The result is big data, and it actually presents us with an opportunity to more deeply understand the human condition.
The major emphasis of most approaches to big data focus on, "How do I store this data? How do I search this data? How do I process this data?"
When PayPal was first starting as a business, their biggest challenge was not, "How do I send money back and forth online?"
It was, "How do I do that without being defrauded by organized crime?"
Why so challenging? Because while computers can learn to detect and identify fraud based on patterns, they can't learn to do that based on patterns they've never seen before, and organized crime has a lot in common with this audience: brilliant people, relentlessly resourceful, entrepreneurial spirit — (Laughter) — and one huge and important difference: purpose.
There's a whole class of problems like this, ones with adaptive adversaries. They rarely if ever present with a repeatable pattern that's discernable to computers.
For example, terrorism. Terrorists are always adapting in minor and major ways to new circumstances, and despite what you might see on TV, these adaptations, and the detection of them, are fundamentally human.
Computers don't detect novel patterns and new behaviors, but humans do. Humans, using technology, testing hypotheses, searching for insight by asking machines to do things for them.
Osama bin Laden was not caught by artificial intelligence.
As appealing as it might sound, you cannot algorithmically data mine your way to the answer.
There is no "Find Terrorist" button, and the more data we integrate from a vast variety of sources across a wide variety of data formats from very disparate systems, the less effective data mining can be.
Instead, people will have to look at data and search for insight, and as Licklider foresaw long ago, the key to great results here is the right type of cooperation, and as Kasparov realized, that means minimizing friction at the interface.
Now this approach makes possible things like combing through all available data from very different sources, identifying key relationships and putting them in one place, something that's been nearly impossible to do before.
To some, this has terrifying privacy and civil liberties implications. To others it foretells of an era of greater privacy and civil liberties protections, but privacy and civil liberties are of fundamental importance.
That must be acknowledged, and they can't be swept aside, even with the best of intents.
So let's explore, through a couple of examples, the impact that technologies built to drive human-computer symbiosis have had in recent time.
In October, 2007, U.S. and coalition forces raided an al Qaeda safe house in the city of Sinjar on the Syrian border of Iraq.
They found a treasure trove of documents: 700 biographical sketches of foreign fighters.
These foreign fighters had left their families in the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa to join al Qaeda in Iraq.
It turns out that al Qaeda, too, is not without its bureaucracy. (Laughter) They answered questions like, "Who recruited you?"
"What's your hometown?" "What occupation do you seek?"
In that last question, a surprising insight was revealed.
The vast majority of foreign fighters were seeking to become suicide bombers for martyrdom -- hugely important, since between 2003 and 2007, Iraq had 1,382 suicide bombings, a major source of instability.
Analyzing this data was hard. The originals were sheets of paper in Arabic that had to be scanned and translated.
The researchers had to lever up their human minds with technology to dive deeper, to explore non-obvious hypotheses, and in fact, insights emerged.
Twenty percent of the foreign fighters were from Libya, 50 percent of those from a single town in Libya, hugely important since prior statistics put that figure at three percent. It also helped to hone in on a figure of rising importance in al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi, a senior cleric in the Libyan Islamic fighting group.
In March of 2007, he gave a speech, after which there was a surge in participation amongst Libyan foreign fighters.
Perhaps most clever of all, though, and least obvious, by flipping the data on its head, the researchers were able to deeply explore the coordination networks in Syria that were ultimately responsible for receiving and transporting the foreign fighters to the border.
These were networks of mercenaries, not ideologues, who were in the coordination business for profit.
For example, they charged Saudi foreign fighters substantially more than Libyans, money that would have otherwise gone to al Qaeda.
Perhaps the adversary would disrupt their own network if they knew they cheating would-be jihadists.
In January, 2010, a devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, third deadliest earthquake of all time, left one million people, 10 percent of the population, homeless.
One seemingly small aspect of the overall relief effort became increasingly important as the delivery of food and water started rolling.
So the question is, which camps are at risk, how many people are in these camps, what's the timeline for flooding, and given very limited resources and infrastructure, how do we prioritize the relocation?
There was data online from a 2006 environmental risk conference, other geospatial data, none of it integrated.
The human goal here was to identify camps for relocation based on priority need.
The computer had to integrate a vast amount of geospacial information, social media data and relief organization information to answer this question.
By implementing a superior process, what was otherwise a task for 40 people over three months became a simple job for three people in 40 hours, all victories for human-computer symbiosis.
We're more than 50 years into Licklider's vision for the future, and the data suggests that we should be quite excited about tackling this century's hardest problems, man and machine in cooperation together.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Two men, Rahul and Rajiv, living in the same neighborhood, from the same educational background, similar occupation, and they both turn up at their local accident emergency complaining of acute chest pain.
Rahul is offered a cardiac procedure, but Rajiv is sent home.
What might explain the difference in the experience of these two nearly identical men?
Rajiv suffers from a mental illness.
The difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness.
Even in the best-resourced countries in the world, this life expectancy gap is as much as 20 years.
In the developing countries of the world, this gap is even larger.
But of course, mental illnesses can kill in more direct ways as well. The most obvious example is suicide.
It might surprise some of you here, as it did me, when I discovered that suicide is at the top of the list of the leading causes of death in young people in all countries in the world, including the poorest countries of the world.
But beyond the impact of a health condition on life expectancy, we're also concerned about the quality of life lived.
Now, in order for us to examine the overall impact of a health condition both on life expectancy as well as on the quality of life lived, we need to use a metric called the DALY, which stands for a Disability-Adjusted Life Year.
Now when we do that, we discover some startling things about mental illness from a global perspective.
We discover that, for example, mental illnesses are amongst the leading causes of disability around the world.
Depression, for example, is the third-leading cause of disability, alongside conditions such as diarrhea and pneumonia in children.
When you put all the mental illnesses together, they account for roughly 15 percent of the total global burden of disease.
Indeed, mental illnesses are also very damaging to people's lives, but beyond just the burden of disease, let us consider the absolute numbers.
The World Health Organization estimates that there are nearly four to five hundred million people living on our tiny planet who are affected by a mental illness.
But beyond the staggering numbers, what's truly important from a global health point of view, what's truly worrying from a global health point of view, is that the vast majority of these affected individuals do not receive the care that we know can transform their lives, and remember, we do have robust evidence that a range of interventions, medicines, psychological interventions, and social interventions, can make a vast difference.
And yet, even in the best-resourced countries, for example here in Europe, roughly 50 percent of affected people don't receive these interventions.
It isn't surprising, then, that if you should speak to anyone affected by a mental illness, the chances are that you will hear stories of hidden suffering, shame and discrimination in nearly every sector of their lives.
But perhaps most heartbreaking of all are the stories of the abuse of even the most basic human rights, such as the young woman shown in this image here that are played out every day, sadly, even in the very institutions that were built to care for people with mental illnesses, the mental hospitals.
It's this injustice that has really driven my mission to try to do a little bit to transform the lives of people affected by mental illness, and a particularly critical action that I focused on is to bridge the gulf between the knowledge we have that can transform lives, the knowledge of effective treatments, and how we actually use that knowledge in the everyday world.
And an especially important challenge that I've had to face is the great shortage of mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists and psychologists, particularly in the developing world.
Now I trained in medicine in India, and after that I chose psychiatry as my specialty, much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son.
Any case, I went on, I soldiered on with psychiatry, and found myself training in Britain in some of the best hospitals in this country. I was very privileged.
I worked in a team of incredibly talented, compassionate, but most importantly, highly trained, specialized mental health professionals.
Soon after my training, I found myself working first in Zimbabwe and then in India, and I was confronted by an altogether new reality.
In Zimbabwe, for example, there were just about a dozen psychiatrists, most of whom lived and worked in Harare city, leaving only a couple to address the mental health care needs of nine million people living in the countryside.
To give you a perspective, if I had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in Britain to India, one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in India.
The actual number is about 3,000, about two percent of that number.
I had to think out of the box about some other model of care.
It was then that I came across these books, and in these books I discovered the idea of task shifting in global health.
The idea is actually quite simple. The idea is, when you're short of specialized health care professionals, use whoever is available in the community, train them to provide a range of health care interventions, and in these books I read inspiring examples, for example of how ordinary people had been trained to deliver babies, diagnose and treat early pneumonia, to great effect.
Well today, I'm very pleased to report to you that there have been many experiments in task shifting in mental health care across the developing world over the past decade, and I want to share with you the findings of three particular such experiments, all three of which focused on depression, the most common of all mental illnesses.
In rural Uganda, Paul Bolton and his colleagues, using villagers, demonstrated that they could deliver interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and, using a randomized control design, showed that 90 percent of the people receiving this intervention recovered as compared to roughly 40 percent in the comparison villages.
Similarly, using a randomized control trial in rural Pakistan, Atif Rahman and his colleagues showed that lady health visitors, who are community maternal health workers in Pakistan's health care system, could deliver cognitive behavior therapy for mothers who were depressed, again showing dramatic differences in the recovery rates. Roughly 75 percent of mothers recovered as compared to about 45 percent in the comparison villages.
Now, if I had to draw together all these different experiments in task shifting, and there have of course been many other examples, and try and identify what are the key lessons we can learn that makes for a successful task shifting operation, I have coined this particular acronym, SUNDAR.
What SUNDAR stands for, in Hindi, is "attractive."
It seems to me that there are five key lessons that I've shown on this slide that are critically important for effective task shifting.
We need to unpack complex health care interventions into smaller components that can be more easily transferred to less-trained individuals.
We need to deliver health care, not in large institutions, but close to people's homes, and we need to deliver health care using whoever is available and affordable in our local communities.
And importantly, we need to reallocate the few specialists who are available to perform roles such as capacity-building and supervision.
Now for me, task shifting is an idea with truly global significance, because even though it has arisen out of the situation of the lack of resources that you find in developing countries, I think it has a lot of significance for better-resourced countries as well. Why is that?
It empowers ordinary people to be more effective in caring for the health of others in their community, and in doing so, to become better guardians of their own health. Indeed, for me, task shifting is the ultimate example of the democratization of medical knowledge, and therefore, medical power.
Just over 30 years ago, the nations of the world assembled at Alma-Ata and made this iconic declaration.
Still, today, armed with that knowledge that ordinary people in the community can be trained and, with sufficient supervision and support, can deliver a range of health care interventions effectively, perhaps that promise is within reach now.
Indeed, to implement the slogan of Health for All, we will need to involve all in that particular journey, and in the case of mental health, in particular we would need to involve people who are affected by mental illness and their caregivers.
And in closing, when you have a moment of peace or quiet in these very busy few days or perhaps afterwards, spare a thought for that person you thought about who has a mental illness, or persons that you thought about who have mental illness, and dare to care for them. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
So when the White House was built in the early 19th century, it was an open house.
Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams, a local dentist happened by.
He wanted to shake the President's hand.
The President dismissed the Secretary of State, whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist if he would remove a tooth.
Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce, he was known to have remarked — probably the only thing he's known for — when a neighbor passed by and said, "I'd love to see the beautiful house," and Pierce said to him, "Why my dear sir, of course you may come in.
This isn't my house. It is the people's house."
Social media were blocked at the firewall.
We didn't have a blog, let alone a dozen twitter accounts like we have today.
Turns out that had never been done before.
In fact, many people told us it was illegal.
But the way that our institutions are designed, in our rather 18th-century, centralized model, is to channel the flow of values through voting, once every four years, once every two years, at best, once a year. This is a rather anemic and thin way, in this era of social media, for us to actually express our values.
Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves a great deal, perhaps a little too much.
Then in the 19th century, we layer on the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state to help us govern complex and large societies.
But we've centralized these bureaucracies.
We need to only look around this room to know that expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society, and not limited simply to our institutions.
Scientists have been studying in recent years the phenomenon that they often describe as flow, that the design of our systems, whether natural or social, channel the flow of whatever runs through them.
The same can be said for our social systems, for our systems of government, where, at the very least, flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding what the problem is, what's really broken, and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today, to redesign the flow of our institutions.
We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks, and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions that are actually quite recent.
Think about it: What other business do you know, what other sector of the economy, and especially one as big as the public sector, that doesn't seek to reinvent its business model on a regular basis?
Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime, especially around election time, but the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people, many of whom will lack basic resources.
So complain as we might, what actually can replace what we have today?
What comes the day after the Arab Spring?
Well, one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself to us is that of networks. Right? Networks like Facebook and Twitter. They're lean. They're mean.
You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook governing 900 million inhabitants.
We might even call them citizens, because they've recently risen up to fight against legislative incursion, and the citizens of these networks work together to serve each other in great ways.
But private communities, private, corporate, privatizing communities, are not bottom-up democracies.
They cannot replace government.
But social media do teach us something.
Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform.
It opens up the API to allow hundreds of thousands of new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can read and process information in new and exciting ways.
We need to think about how to open up the API of government, and the way that we're going to do that, the next great superpower is going to be the one who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution -- because we have to maintain those public values, we have to coordinate the flow -- but with the diversity and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement of networks, all of us working together to build these new innovations on top of our institutions, to engage in the practice of governance.
We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here, in the 12th century, invented the jury.
Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury, the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance.
Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution emerging all around us -- maybe not even evolution, I'd even start to call it a revolution -- in the way that we govern.
It's also about creating government.
Spacehive in the U.K. is engaging in crowd-funding, getting you and me to raise the money to build the goalposts and the park benches that will actually allow us to deliver better services in our communities.
Created after the post-election riots in Kenya in 2008, this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able to crowdsource and target the delivery of better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble, whether it's after the earthquakes in Haiti, or more recently in Italy.
And the Red Cross too is training volunteers and Twitter is certifying them, not simply to supplement existing government institutions, but in many cases, to replace them.
Now what we're seeing lots of examples of, obviously, is the opening up of government data, not enough examples of this yet, but we're starting to see this practice of people creating and generating innovative applications on top of government data.
February 2012 to June of 2012, the finalists are announced in the competition.
Can you imagine, in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear, getting anything done in a four-month period of time?
You can barely fill out the forms in that amount of time, let alone generate real, palpable innovations that improve people's lives.
And I want to be clear to mention that this open government revolution is not about privatizing government, because in many cases what it can do when we have the will to do so is to deliver more progressive and better policy than the regulations and the legislative and litigation-oriented strategies by which we make policy today.
In the State of Texas, they regulate 515 professions, from well-driller to florist.
Now, you can carry a gun into a church in Dallas, but do not make a flower arrangement without a license, because that will land you in jail.
So what is Texas doing? They're asking you and me, using online policy wikis, to help not simply get rid of burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship, but to replace those regulations with more innovative alternatives, sometimes using transparency in the creation of new iPhone apps that will allows us both to protect consumers and the public and to encourage economic development.
It's not only the benefits that we've talked about with regard to development. It's the economic benefits and the job creation that's coming from this open innovation work.
Sberbank, the largest and oldest bank in Russia, largely owned by the Russian government, has started practicing crowdsourcing, engaging its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations.
Last year they saved a billion dollars, 30 billion rubles, from open innovation, and they're pushing radically the extension of crowdsourcing, not only from banking, but into the public sector.
And we see lots of examples of these innovators using open government data, not simply to make apps, but then to make companies and to hire people to build them working with the government.
So a lot of these innovations are local.
In San Ramon, California, they published an iPhone app in which they allow you or me to say we are certified CPR-trained, and then when someone has a heart attack, a notification goes out so that you can rush over to the person over here and deliver CPR.
The victim who receives bystander CPR is more than twice as likely to survive.
"There is a hero in all of us," is their slogan.
But it's not limited to the local.
British Columbia, Canada, is publishing a catalogue of all the ways that its residents and citizens can engage with the state in the cocreation of governance.
Let me be very clear, and perhaps controversial, that open government is not about transparent government.
What it does is it creates an adversarial relationship between civil society and government over the control and ownership of information.
And transparency, by itself, is not reducing the flow of money into politics, and arguably, it's not even producing accountability as well as it might if we took the next step of combining participation and collaboration with transparency to transform how we work.
We're going to see this evolution really in two phases, I think. The first phase of the open government revolution is delivering better information from the crowd into the center.
We piloted the work in the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan and Australia, and now I'm pleased to report that the United States Patent Office will be rolling out universal, complete, and total openness, so that all patent applications will now be open for citizen participation, beginning this year.
Participatory budgeting has long been practiced in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
They're just starting it in the 49th Ward in Chicago.
Russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together, as is Lithuania. When we start to see power over the core functions of government — spending, legislation, decision-making — then we're well on our way to an open government revolution.
There are many things that we can do to get us there.
Hackathons and mashathons and working with data to build apps is an intelligible way for people to engage and participate, like the jury is, but we're going to need lots more things like it.
And that's why we need to start with our youngest people.
We've heard talk here at TED about people biohacking and hacking their plants with Arduino, and Mozilla is doing work around the world in getting young people to build websites and make videos.
When we start by teaching young people that we live, not in a passive society, a read-only society, but in a writable society, where we have the power to change our communities, to change our institutions, that's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards this open government innovation, towards this open government movement, towards this open government revolution.
So let me close by saying that I think the important thing for us to do is to talk about and demand this revolution.
They're not fun enough. They're not exciting enough to get us engaged in this tremendous opportunity that awaits us. But I would argue that if we want to see the kinds of innovations, the hopeful and exciting innovations that we hear talked about here at TED, in clean energy, in clean education, in development, if we want to see those adopted and we want to see those scaled, we want to see them become the governance of tomorrow, then we must all participate, then we must get involved.
We must open up our institutions, and like the leaf, we must let the nutrients flow throughout our body politic, throughout our culture, to create open institutions to create a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow.
Thank you. (Applause)
I thought I would start with a very brief history of cities.
Settlements typically began with people clustered around a well, and the size of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk with a pot of water on your head.
In fact, if you fly over Germany, for example, and you look down and you see these hundreds of little villages, they're all about a mile apart.
And for hundreds, even thousands of years, the home was really the center of life.
Life was very small for most people.
It was a center of entertainment, of energy production, of work, a center of health care.
Then, with industrialization, everything started to become centralized.
You had dirty factories that were moved to the outskirts of cities.
Production was centralized in assembly plants.
Learning took place in schools.
And then you had networks that developed.
You had water, sewer networks that allowed for this kind of unchecked expansion.
You had rail networks that connected residential, industrial, commercial areas.
In fact, the model was really, give everybody a car, build roads to everything, and give people a place to park when they get there.
And we still live in that world, and this is what we end up with.
So you have the sprawl of LA, the sprawl of Mexico City.
They're all building cities on the model that we invented in the '50s and '60s, which is really obsolete, I would argue, and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities that are being planned all over the world.
That means building the equivalent of the entire built infrastructure of the US in 15 years.
Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth, 80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use, but at the same time it's where people want to be, increasingly.
More than half the people now in the world live in cities, and that will just continue to escalate.
Cities are places of celebration, personal expression.
You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that -- I've been to a couple. They're quite fun.
You have -- (Laughter) Cities are where most of the wealth is created, and particularly in the developing world, it's where women find opportunities.
That's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly.
The home, once again, because of distributed computation -- Communication is becoming a center of life, so it's a center of production and learning and shopping and health care and all of these things that we used to think of as taking place outside of the home.
And increasingly, everything that people buy, every consumer product, in one way or another, can be personalized.
And that's a very important trend to think about.
So this is my image of the city of the future.
(Laughter) In that it's a place for people, you know.
Maybe not the way people dress, but -- You know, the question now is, how can we have all the good things that we identify with cities without all the bad things?
This is Bangalore.
So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things.
So we went back and started looking at the great cities that evolved before the cars.
Paris was a series of these little villages that came together, and you still see that structure today.
Most of what people need in life can be within a five- or 10-minute walk.
And if you look at the data, when you have that kind of a structure, you get a very even distribution of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies and the cafes in Paris.
And then you look at cities that evolved after the automobile, and it's not that kind of a pattern.
Not to pick on Pittsburgh, but most American cities really have evolved this way.
So we said, well, let's look at new cities, and we're involved in a couple of new city projects in China.
We think of it as a compact urban cell.
This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid, community heating, power, communication networks, etc.
And he might be right.
And then we can form, in effect, a mesh network.
You can dial up the density -- about 20,000 people per cell, if it's Cambridge.
Go up to 50,000 if it's Manhattan density.
You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes and the vehicles that can go on them.
I won't go through all of them. I'll just show one.
This is Boulder. It's a great example of kind of a mobility parkway, a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists, where you can go from one end of the city to the other without crossing the street, and they also have bike-sharing, which I'll get into in a minute.
This is even a more interesting solution in Seoul, Korea.
They took the elevated highway, they got rid of it, they reclaimed the street, the river down below, below the street, and you can go from one end of Seoul to the other without crossing a pathway for cars.
The High Line in Manhattan is very similar.
You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes all over the world.
I lived in Manhattan for 15 years.
I went back a couple of weekends ago, took this photograph of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed.
They're still not to where Copenhagen is, where something like 42 percent of the trips within the city are by bicycle.
It's mostly just because they have fantastic infrastructure there.
Mobility on demand is something we've been thinking about, so we think we need an ecosystem of these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit.
These are some of the vehicles that we've been working on.
But shared use is really key.
If you share a vehicle, you can have at least four people use one vehicle, as opposed to one.
We have Hubway here in Boston, the Vélib' system in Paris.
We've been developing, at the Media Lab, this little city car that is optimized for shared use in cities.
We moved everything to the wheels, so you have the drive motor, the steering motor, the breaking -- all in the wheel.
This was a video that was on European television last week showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving this little vehicle, and when it's folded, it can spin.
(Laughter) So we've been working with a company to commercialize this.
My PhD student Ryan Chin presented these early ideas two years ago at a TEDx conference.
So what's interesting is, then if you begin to add new things to it, like autonomy, you get out of the car, you park at your destination, you pat it on the butt, it goes and it parks itself, it charges itself, and you can get something like seven times as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars, and we think this is the future.
One of our graduate students then says, well, how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians?
So he's developing strategies so the vehicle can communicate with pedestrians, so -- (Laughter) So the headlights are eyeballs, the pupils can dilate, we have directional audio, we can throw sound directly at people.
What I love about this project is he solved a problem that doesn't exist yet, so -- (Laughter) We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes.
You know, bike lanes are mostly used by young guys in stretchy pants. So -- (Laughter) We think we can develop a vehicle that operates on bike lanes, accessible to elderly and disabled, women in skirts, businesspeople, and address the issues of energy congestion, mobility, aging and obesity simultaneously.
You have to pedal to operate it in a bike lane, but if you're an older person, that's a switch.
We hope to have that built this fall.
Housing is another area where we can really improve.
Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing for young people is one of the biggest problems the city faces.
People say, we don't really want to live in a little teeny conventional apartment.
So we're saying, let's build a standardized chassis, much like our car.
Now, the most interesting implementation of that for us is when you can begin to have robotic walls, so your space can convert from exercise to a workplace, if you run a virtual company.
Maybe that's most of the time.
The table folds out to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom, or maybe you want a dance studio.
I mean, architects have been thinking about these ideas for a long time.
What we need to do now, develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese people that would like to live in the city, and very comfortably.
We think we can make a very small apartment that functions as if it's twice as big by utilizing these strategies.
I don't believe in smart homes. That's sort of a bogus concept.
(Laughter) And so we've been working on a chassis of the wall itself.
You know, standardized platform with the motors and the battery when it operates, little solenoids that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power.
(Laughter) So the developers say, well, this is great.
Parking's really expensive.
It's about 70,000 dollars per space to build a conventional parking spot inside a building.
So if you can have folding and autonomy, you can do that in one-seventh of the space.
You add shared use, and you can even go further.
We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology through this process.
There's a path to market for innovative companies to bring technology into the home.
In this case, a project we're doing with Siemens.
We have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill, that understands where people are and what they're doing.
Blue light is very efficient, so we have these tunable 24-bit LED lighting fixtures.
This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors that are embedded in the furniture.
We don't really believe in cameras to do things in homes.
We think these little wireless sensors are more effective.
We think we can also personalize sunlight.
That's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways.
So we've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space, therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass on a hot day like today.
In this case, she picks up her phone, she can map food preparation at the kitchen island to a particular location of sunlight.
This can be combined with LED lighting as well.
We think workplaces should be shared.
I mean, this is really the workplace of the future, I think.
This is Starbucks, you know.
We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration.
We're not doing a very good job with that.
At the Cambridge Innovation Center, you can have shared desks.
I've spent a lot of time in Finland at the design factory of Aalto University, where the they have a shared shop and shared fab lab, shared quiet spaces, electronics spaces, recreation places.
We think ultimately, all of this stuff can come together, a new model for mobility, a new model for housing, a new model for how we live and work, a path to market for advanced technologies.
But in the end, the main thing we need to focus on are people.
They're places for people.
There's no reason why we can't dramatically improve the livability and creativity of cities like they've done in Melbourne with the laneways while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy.
Thank you.
Like many of you here, I am trying to contribute towards a renaissance in Africa.
The question of transformation in Africa really is a question of leadership.
And it is my contention that the manner in which we educate our leaders is fundamental to progress on this continent.
We all heard about the importance of stories yesterday.
An American friend of mine this year volunteered as a nurse in Ghana, and in a period of three months she came to a conclusion about the state of leadership in Africa that had taken me over a decade to reach.
Twice she was involved in surgeries where they lost power at the hospital.
The emergency generators did not start.
There was not a flashlight, not a lantern, not a candle -- pitch black.
The second time was a procedure that involved local anesthesia.
Anesthetic wears off. The patient feels pain.
He's crying. He's screaming. He's praying.
Pitch black. Not a candle, not a flashlight.
And that hospital could have afforded flashlights.
They could have afforded to purchase these things, but they didn't.
And it happened twice.
Another time, she watched in horror as nurses watched a patient die because they refused to give her oxygen that they had.
And so three months later, just before she returned to the United States, nurses in Accra go on strike.
And her recommendation is take this opportunity to fire everyone, start all over again.
Start all over again.
Now what does this have to do with leadership?
They are the elite. They are our leaders.
Their decisions, their actions matter.
And when they fail, a nation literally suffers.
So when I speak of leadership, I'm not talking about just political leaders.
We've heard a lot about that.
I'm talking about the elite.
Those who've been trained, whose job it is to be the guardians of their society.
The lawyers, the judges, the policemen, the doctors, the engineers, the civil servants -- those are the leaders.
And we need to train them right.
Now, my first pointed and memorable experience with leadership in Ghana occurred when I was 16 years old.
They were a pervasive presence.
And one day I go to the airport to meet my father, and as I walk up this grassy slope from the car park to the terminal building, I'm stopped by two soldiers wielding AK-47 assault weapons.
And they asked me to join a crowd of people that were running up and down this embankment.
I was especially concerned of what the girls might think.
And so I started to argue with these men.
It was a little reckless, but you know, I was 16.
I got lucky.
Because of his uniform they speak to him differently, and they explain to him that they're just following orders.
Leadership matters. Those men are following the orders of a superior officer.
I learned something about courage.
It was important not to look at those guns.
And I also learned that it can be helpful to think about girls.
(Laughter) So a few years after this event, I leave Ghana on a scholarship to go to Swarthmore College for my education.
It was a breath of fresh air.
You know, the faculty there didn't want us to memorize information and repeat back to them as I was used to back in Ghana.
They wanted us to think critically.
They wanted us to be analytical.
They wanted us to be concerned about social issues.
In my economics classes I got high marks for my understanding of basic economics.
But I learned something more profound than that, which is that the leaders -- the managers of Ghana's economy -- were making breathtakingly bad decisions that had brought our economy to the brink of collapse.
And so here was this lesson again -- leadership matters.
But I didn't really fully understand what had happened to me at Swarthmore.
I had an inkling, but I didn't fully realize it until I went out into the workplace and I went to work at Microsoft Corporation.
And I was part of this team -- this thinking, learning team whose job it was to design and implement new software that created value in the world.
And it was brilliant to be part of this team.
And I realized just what had happened to me at Swarthmore, this transformation -- the ability to confront problems, complex problems, and to design solutions to those problems.
Now, while I was at Microsoft, the annual revenues of that company grew larger than the GDP of the Republic of Ghana.
Now, I've already spoken about one of the reasons why this has occurred.
I mean, it's the people there who are so hardworking, persistent, creative, empowered.
But there were also some external factors: free markets, the rule of law, infrastructure.
These things were provided by institutions run by the people that I call leaders.
And those leaders did not emerge spontaneously.
Now, while I was at Microsoft, this funny thing happened.
I became a parent.
And for the first time, Africa mattered more to me than ever before.
That the state of the world -- the state of the world depends on what's happening to Africa, as far as my kids would be concerned.
And at this time, when I was going through what I call my "pre-mid-life crisis," Africa was a mess.
Rwanda was in the throes of this genocidal war.
And it seemed to me that that was the wrong direction, and I needed to be back helping.
I couldn't just stay in Seattle and raise my kids in an upper-middle class neighborhood and feel good about it.
This was not the world that I'd want my children to grow up in.
So I decided to get engaged, and the first thing that I did was to come back to Ghana and talk with a lot of people and really try to understand what the real issues were.
And three things kept coming up for every problem: corruption, weak institutions and the people who run them -- the leaders.
Now, I was a little scared because when you see those three problems, they seem really hard to deal with.
And they might say, "Look, don't even try."
But, for me, I asked the question, "Well, where are these leaders coming from?
What is it about Ghana that produces leaders that are unethical or unable to solve problems?"
So I went to look at what was happening in our educational system.
And it was the same -- learning by rote -- from primary school through graduate school.
Very little emphasis on ethics, and the typical graduate from a university in Ghana has a stronger sense of entitlement than a sense of responsibility.
This is wrong.
Because it seems to me that every society, every society, must be very intentional about how it trains its leaders.
And Ghana was not paying enough attention.
And this is true across sub-Saharan Africa, actually.
So this is what I'm doing now.
I'm trying to bring the experience that I had at Swarthmore to Africa.
I wish there was a liberal arts college in every African country.
We're trying to train leaders of exceptional integrity, who have the ability to confront the complex problems, ask the right questions, and come up with workable solutions.
I'll admit that there are times when it seems like "Mission: Impossible," but we must believe that these kids are smart.
That if we involve them in their education, if we have them discuss the real issues that they confront -- that our whole society confronts -- and if we give them skills that enable them to engage the real world, that magic will happen.
And a month into it, I come to the office, and I have this email from one of our students.
It's such a simple statement.
And it is an awesome thing to be a part of empowering someone in this way.
I am thinking now.
This year we challenged our students to craft an honor code themselves.
There's a very vibrant debate going on on campus now over whether they should have an honor code, and if so, what it should look like.
One of the students asked a question that just warmed my heart.
Can we create a perfect society?
Her understanding that a student-crafted honor code constitutes a reach towards perfection is incredible.
Now, we cannot achieve perfection, but if we reach for it, then we can achieve excellence.
I don't know ultimately what they will do.
I don't know whether they will decide to have this honor code.
But the conversation they're having now -- about what their good society should look like, what their excellent society should look like, is a really good thing.
That for many of them, it has been a life-altering experience.
These young future leaders are beginning to understand the real business of leadership, the real privilege of leadership, which is after all to serve humanity.
I am even more thrilled by the fact that least year our student body elected a woman to be the head of Student Government.
It's the first time in the history of Ghana that a woman has been elected head of Student Government at any university.
It says a lot about her.
It says a lot about the culture that's forming on campus.
She won with 75 percent of the vote.
And it gives me a lot of hope.
It turns out that corporate West Africa also appreciates what's happening with our students.
We've graduated two classes of students to date.
And we're getting great reports back from corporate Ghana, corporate West Africa, and the things that they're most impressed about is work ethic.
You know, that passion for what they're doing.
This is good because over the past five years, there have been times when I've felt this is "Mission: Impossible."
And it's just wonderful to see these glimmers of the promise of what can happen if we train our kids right.
I think that the current and future leaders of Africa have an incredible opportunity to drive a major renaissance on the continent.
It's an incredible opportunity.
There aren't very many more opportunities like this in the world.
I believe that Africa has reached an inflection point with a march of democracy and free markets across the continent.
We have reached a moment from which can emerge a great society within one generation.
It will depend on inspired leadership.
And it is my contention that the manner in which we train our leaders will make all the difference.
Thank you, and God bless.
(Applause)
The murder happened a little over 21 years ago, January the 18th, 1991, in a small bedroom community of Lynwood, California, just a few miles southeast of Los Angeles.
And as the father was administering these instructions, a car drove by, slowly, and just after it passed the father and the teenagers, a hand went out from the front passenger window, and -- "Bam, Bam!" -- killing the father.
They considered all the usual culprits, and in less than 24 hours, they had selected their suspect: Francisco Carrillo, a 17-year-old kid who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred.
They found photos of him. They prepared a photo array, and the day after the shooting, they showed it to one of the teenagers, and he said, "That's the picture.
That's the shooter I saw that killed the father."
The reason we're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicial system, but that's another whole TEDx talk for later. (Laughter) So at the actual trial, all six of the teenagers testified, and indicated the identifications they had made in the photo array.
He was convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and transported to Folsom Prison.
And Mr. Carrillo's alibi?
Sent to prison, adamantly insisting on his innocence, which he has consistently for 21 years.
So what's the problem?
First of all, we have all the statistical analyses from the Innocence Project work, where we know that we have, what, 250, 280 documented cases now where people have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated, some from death row, on the basis of later DNA analysis, and you know that over three quarters of all of those cases of exoneration involved only eyewitness identification testimony during the trial that convicted them.
The other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that's related to various brain functions but I can sum up for the sake of brevity here in a simple line: The brain abhors a vacuum.
So now, when it's important for us to be able to recall what it was that we experienced, we have an incomplete, we have a partial store, and what happens?
It's called reconstructed memories.
It happens to us in all the aspects of our life, all the time.
They retained me, as a forensic neurophysiologist, because I had expertise in eyewitness memory identification, which obviously makes sense for this case, right?
But also because I have expertise and testify about the nature of human night vision.
Well, what's that got to do with this?
Well, when you read through the case materials in this Carrillo case, one of the things that suddenly strikes you is that the investigating officers said the lighting was good at the crime scene, at the shooting.
But this occurred in mid-January, in the Northern Hemisphere, at 7 p.m. at night.
So when I did the calculations for the lunar data and the solar data at that location on Earth at the time of the incident of the shooting, all right, it was well past the end of civil twilight and there was no moon up that night.
So all the light in this area from the sun and the moon is what you see on the screen right here.
The only lighting in that area had to come from artificial sources, and that's where I go out and I do the actual reconstruction of the scene with photometers, with various measures of illumination and various other measures of color perception, along with special cameras and high-speed film, right?
This is looking directly across the street from where they were standing.
Remember, the investigating officers' report said the lighting was good.
As you can see, it is at best poor.
No one's going to call this well-lit, good lighting, and in fact, as nice as these pictures are, and the reason we take them is I knew I was going to have to testify in court, and a picture is worth more than a thousand words when you're trying to communicate numbers, abstract concepts like lux, the international measurement of illumination, the Ishihara color perception test values.
When you present those to people who are not well-versed in those aspects of science and that, they become salamanders in the noonday sun. It's like talking about the tangent of the visual angle, all right?
A good forensic expert also has to be a good educator, a good communicator, and that's part of the reason why we take the pictures, to show not only where the light sources are, and what we call the spill, the distribution, but also so that it's easier for the trier of fact to understand the circumstances.
And here I became a bit audacious, and I turned and I asked the judge, I said, "Your Honor, I think you should go out and look at the scene yourself."
Now I may have used a tone which was more like a dare than a request — (Laughter) — but nonetheless, it's to this man's credit and his courage that he said, "Yes, I will."
So in fact, we found the same identical conditions, we reconstructed the entire thing again, he came out with an entire brigade of sheriff's officers to protect him in this community, all right? (Laughter) We had him stand actually slightly in the street, so closer to the suspect vehicle, the shooter vehicle, than the actual teenagers were, so he stood a few feet from the curb toward the middle of the street.
It had a driver and a passenger, and after the car had passed the judge by, the passenger extended his hand, pointed it back to the judge as the car continued on, just as the teenagers had described it, right?
Now, he didn't use a real gun in his hand, so he had a black object in his hand that was similar to the gun that was described.
He pointed by, and this is what the judge saw.
This is the car 30 feet away from the judge.
There's an arm sticking out of the passenger side and pointed back at you.
That's 30 feet away.
At this point, I became a little concerned.
This judge is someone you'd never want to play poker with.
I had no sense of how he was reacting to this, and after he looked at this reenactment, he turned to me and he says, "Is there anything else you want me to look at?"
And that's what he saw. (Laughter) You'll notice, which was also in my test report, all the dominant lighting is coming from the north side, which means that the shooter's face would have been photo-occluded. It would have been backlit.
Furthermore, the roof of the car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker.
And this is three to four feet away.
Why did I take the risk?
I knew that the depth of field was 18 inches or less.
Three to four feet, it might as well have been a football field away.
This is what he saw.
He went back, there was a few more days of evidence that was heard. At the end of it, he made the judgment that he was going to grant the petition for a retrial.
Which they decided not to.
He is now a freed man. (Applause) (Applause) This is him embracing his grandmother-in-law.
He -- His girlfriend was pregnant when he went to trial, right? And she had a little baby boy.
He and his son are both attending Cal State, Long Beach right now taking classes. (Applause) And what does this example -- what's important to keep in mind for ourselves?
First of all, there's a long history of antipathy between science and the law in American jurisprudence.
I could regale you with horror stories of ignorance over decades of experience as a forensic expert of just trying to get science into the courtroom.
One suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity, through policy, through procedures, to get more science in the courtroom, and I think one large step toward that is more requirements, with all due respect to the law schools, of science, technology, engineering, mathematics for anyone going into the law, because they become the judges.
Think about how we select our judges in this country.
There is decades of research, examples and examples of cases like this, where individuals really, really believe. None of those teenagers who identified him thought that they were picking the wrong person.
We all have to be very careful.
All our memories are reconstructed memories.
They're dynamic.
They're malleable. They're volatile, and as a result, we all need to remember to be cautious, that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they're correct.
Thank you. (Applause)
Some years ago, I set out to try to understand if there was a possibility to develop biofuels on a scale that would actually compete with fossil fuels but not compete with agriculture for water, fertilizer or land.
So here's what I came up with.
Imagine that we build an enclosure where we put it just underwater, and we fill it with wastewater and some form of microalgae that produces oil, and we make it out of some kind of flexible material that moves with waves underwater, and the system that we're going to build, of course, will use solar energy to grow the algae, and they use CO2, which is good, and they produce oxygen as they grow.
The algae that grow are in a container that distributes the heat to the surrounding water, and you can harvest them and make biofuels and cosmetics and fertilizer and animal feed, and of course you'd have to make a large area of this, so you'd have to worry about other stakeholders like fishermen and ships and such things, but hey, we're talking about biofuels, and we know the importance of potentially getting an alternative liquid fuel.
Why are we talking about microalgae?
Here you see a graph showing you the different types of crops that are being considered for making biofuels, so you can see some things like soybean, which makes 50 gallons per acre per year, or sunflower or canola or jatropha or palm, and that tall graph there shows what microalgae can contribute.
That is to say, microalgae contributes between 2,000 and 5,000 gallons per acre per year, compared to the 50 gallons per acre per year from soy.
So what are microalgae? Microalgae are micro -- that is, they're extremely small, as you can see here a picture of those single-celled organisms compared to a human hair.
Those small organisms have been around for millions of years and there's thousands of different species of microalgae in the world, some of which are the fastest-growing plants on the planet, and produce, as I just showed you, lots and lots of oil.
Now, why do we want to do this offshore?
Well, the reason we're doing this offshore is because if you look at our coastal cities, there isn't a choice, because we're going to use waste water, as I suggested, and if you look at where most of the waste water treatment plants are, they're embedded in the cities.
This is the city of San Francisco, which has 900 miles of sewer pipes under the city already, and it releases its waste water offshore.
So different cities around the world treat their waste water differently. Some cities process it.
Some cities just release the water.
But in all cases, the water that's released is perfectly adequate for growing microalgae.
So let's envision what the system might look like.
We call it OMEGA, which is an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae.
The algae that grow produce oxygen, as I've mentioned, and they also produce biofuels and fertilizer and food and other bi-algal products of interest.
And the system is contained. What do I mean by that?
It's modular. Let's say something happens that's totally unexpected to one of the modules.
So we may be able to go beyond that when thinking about this system that I'm showing you, and that is to say we need to think in terms of the water, the fresh water, which is also going to be an issue in the future, and we're working on methods now for recovering the waste water.
The other thing to consider is the structure itself.
It provides a surface for things in the ocean, and this surface, which is covered by seaweeds and other organisms in the ocean, will become enhanced marine habitat so it increases biodiversity.
So you're probably thinking, "Gee, this sounds like a good idea. What can we do to try to see if it's real?"
We also set up experiments in San Francisco at one of the three waste water treatment plants, again a facility to test ideas.
And finally, we wanted to see where we could look at what the impact of this structure would be in the marine environment, and we set up a field site at a place called Moss Landing Marine Lab in Monterey Bay, where we worked in a harbor to see what impact this would have on marine organisms.
The laboratory that we set up in Santa Cruz was our skunkworks.
It was a place where we were growing algae and welding plastic and building tools and making a lot of mistakes, or, as Edison said, we were finding the 10,000 ways that the system wouldn't work.
So the most important feature that we needed to develop were these so-called photobioreactors, or PBRs.
These were the structures that would be floating at the surface made out of some inexpensive plastic material that'll allow the algae to grow, and we had built lots and lots of designs, most of which were horrible failures, and when we finally got to a design that worked, at about 30 gallons, we scaled it up to 450 gallons in San Francisco.
We basically take waste water with algae of our choice in it, and we circulate it through this floating structure, this tubular, flexible plastic structure, and it circulates through this thing, and there's sunlight of course, it's at the surface, and the algae grow on the nutrients.
But this is a bit like putting your head in a plastic bag.
They suffocate because they produce oxygen, and they don't really suffocate, but the oxygen that they produce is problematic, and they use up all the CO2.
So the next thing we had to figure out was how we could remove the oxygen, which we did by building this column which circulated some of the water, and put back CO2, which we did by bubbling the system before we recirculated the water.
And what you see here is the prototype, which was the first attempt at building this type of column.
So the column actually had another very nice feature, and that is the algae settle in the column, and this allowed us to accumulate the algal biomass in a context where we could easily harvest it.
So we wanted to also investigate what would be the impact of this system in the marine environment, and I mentioned we set up this experiment at a field site in Moss Landing Marine Lab.
Well, we found of course that this material became overgrown with algae, and we needed then to develop a cleaning procedure, and we also looked at how seabirds and marine mammals interacted, and in fact you see here a sea otter that found this incredibly interesting, and would periodically work its way across this little floating water bed, and we wanted to hire this guy or train him to be able to clean the surface of these things, but that's for the future.
Now really what we were doing, we were working in four areas.
Our research covered the biology of the system, which included studying the way algae grew, but also what eats the algae, and what kills the algae.
We did engineering to understand what we would need to be able to do to build this structure, not only on the small scale, but how we would build it on this enormous scale that will ultimately be required.
And what about operating costs?
And what about capital costs?
And what about, just, the whole economic structure?
So let me tell you that it's not going to be easy, and there's lots more work to do in all four of those areas to be able to really make the system work.
But we don't have a lot of time, and I'd like to show you the artist's conception of how this system might look if we find ourselves in a protected bay somewhere in the world, and we have in the background in this image, the waste water treatment plant and a source of flue gas for the CO2, but when you do the economics of this system, you find that in fact it will be difficult to make it work.
We'd be growing oysters and things that would be producing high value products and food, and this would be a market driver as we build the system to larger and larger scales so that it becomes, ultimately, competitive with the idea of doing it for fuels.
So there's always a big question that comes up, because plastic in the ocean has got a really bad reputation right now, and so we've been thinking cradle to cradle.
Well, I don't know if you know about this, but in California, there's a huge amount of plastic that's used in fields right now as plastic mulch, and this is plastic that's making these tiny little greenhouses right along the surface of the soil, and this provides warming the soil to increase the growing season, it allows us to control weeds, and, of course, it makes the watering much more efficient.
So the OMEGA system will be part of this type of an outcome, and that when we're finished using it in the marine environment, we'll be using it, hopefully, on fields.
Where are we going to put this, and what will it look like offshore?
Here's an image of what we could do in San Francisco Bay.
San Francisco produces 65 million gallons a day of waste water. If we imagine a five-day retention time for this system, we'd need 325 million gallons to accomodate, and that would be about 1,280 acres of these OMEGA modules floating in San Francisco Bay.
Well, that's less than one percent of the surface area of the bay.
It would produce, at 2,000 gallons per acre per year, it would produce over 2 million gallons of fuel, which is about 20 percent of the biodiesel, or of the diesel that would be required in San Francisco, and that's without doing anything about efficiency.
There's lots of possibilities.
There's, of course, San Francisco Bay, as I mentioned.
San Diego Bay is another example, Mobile Bay or Chesapeake Bay, but the reality is, as sea level rises, there's going to be lots and lots of new opportunities to consider. (Laughter) So what I'm telling you about is a system of integrated activities.
Biofuels production is integrated with alternative energy is integrated with aquaculture.
I set out to find a pathway to innovative production of sustainable biofuels, and en route I discovered that what's really required for sustainability is integration more than innovation.
Long term, I have great faith in our collective and connected ingenuity.
I think we need to consider everything, everything from alpha to OMEGA.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Just a quick question for you, Jonathan.
Can this project continue to move forward within NASA or do you need some very ambitious green energy fund to come and take it by the throat?
Jonathan Trent: So it's really gotten to a stage now in NASA where they would like to spin it out into something which would go offshore, and there are a lot of issues with doing it in the United States because of limited permitting issues and the time required to get permits to do things offshore.
JT: Absolutely.
CA: All right. Thank you so much.
JT: Thank you. (Applause)
Soon, we actually will be able to use stem cells to replace cells that are damaged or diseased.
But that's not what I want to talk to you about, because right now there are some really extraordinary things that we are doing with stem cells that are completely changing the way we look and model disease, our ability to understand why we get sick, and even develop drugs.
I truly believe that stem cell research is going to allow our children to look at Alzheimer's and diabetes and other major diseases the way we view polio today, which is as a preventable disease.
So here we have this incredible field, which has enormous hope for humanity, but much like IVF over 35 years ago, until the birth of a healthy baby, Louise, this field has been under siege politically and financially.
Critical research is being challenged instead of supported, and we saw that it was really essential to have private safe haven laboratories where this work could be advanced without interference.
And so, in 2005, we started the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory so that we would have a small organization that could do this work and support it.
What we saw very quickly is the world of both medical research, but also developing drugs and treatments, is dominated by, as you would expect, large organizations, but in a new field, sometimes large organizations really have trouble getting out of their own way, and sometimes they can't ask the right questions, and there is an enormous gap that's just gotten larger between academic research on the one hand and pharmaceutical companies and biotechs that are responsible for delivering all of our drugs and many of our treatments, and so we knew that to really accelerate cures and therapies, we were going to have to address this with two things: new technologies and also a new research model.
Because if you don't close that gap, you really are exactly where we are today.
And we did this because we think that it's actually going to allow us to realize the potential, the promise, of all of the sequencing of the human genome, but it's going to allow us, in doing that, to actually do clinical trials in a dish with human cells, not animal cells, to generate drugs and treatments that are much more effective, much safer, much faster, and at a much lower cost.
So let me put that in perspective for you and give you some context.
This is an extremely new field.
In 1998, human embryonic stem cells were first identified, and just nine years later, a group of scientists in Japan were able to take skin cells and reprogram them with very powerful viruses to create a kind of pluripotent stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or what we refer to as an IPS cell.
This was really an extraordinary advance, because although these cells are not human embryonic stem cells, which still remain the gold standard, they are terrific to use for modeling disease and potentially for drug discovery.
So a few months later, in 2008, one of our scientists built on that research. He took skin biopsies, this time from people who had a disease, ALS, or as you call it in the U.K., motor neuron disease.
He turned them into the IPS cells that I've just told you about, and then he turned those IPS cells into the motor neurons that actually were dying in the disease.
So basically what he did was to take a healthy cell and turn it into a sick cell, and he recapitulated the disease over and over again in the dish, and this was extraordinary, because it was the first time that we had a model of a disease from a living patient in living human cells.
And as he watched the disease unfold, he was able to discover that actually the motor neurons were dying in the disease in a different way than the field had previously thought. There was another kind of cell that actually was sending out a toxin and contributing to the death of these motor neurons, and you simply couldn't see it until you had the human model.
So you could really say that researchers trying to understand the cause of disease without being able to have human stem cell models were much like investigators trying to figure out what had gone terribly wrong in a plane crash without having a black box, or a flight recorder.
They could hypothesize about what had gone wrong, but they really had no way of knowing what led to the terrible events.
And stem cells really have given us the black box for diseases, and it's an unprecedented window.
And this opens up the ability, which hopefully will become something that is routine in the near term, of using human cells to test for drugs.
To bring a successful drug to market, it takes, on average, 13 years — that's one drug — with a sunk cost of 4 billion dollars, and only one percent of the drugs that start down that road are actually going to get there.
It's a terrible business model.
But it is really a worse social model because of what's involved and the cost to all of us.
So the way we develop drugs now is by testing promising compounds on -- We didn't have disease modeling with human cells, so we'd been testing them on cells of mice or other creatures or cells that we engineer, but they don't have the characteristics of the diseases that we're actually trying to cure.
But what you can do with human stem cells, now, is actually create avatars, and you can create the cells, whether it's the live motor neurons or the beating cardiac cells or liver cells or other kinds of cells, and you can test for drugs, promising compounds, on the actual cells that you're trying to affect, and this is now, and it's absolutely extraordinary, and you're going to know at the beginning, the very early stages of doing your assay development and your testing, you're not going to have to wait 13 years until you've brought a drug to market, only to find out that actually it doesn't work, or even worse, harms people.
But it isn't really enough just to look at the cells from a few people or a small group of people, because we have to step back.
We've got to look at the big picture.
Look around this room. We are all different, and a disease that I might have, if I had Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, it probably would affect me differently than if one of you had that disease, and if we both had Parkinson's disease, and we took the same medication, but we had different genetic makeup, we probably would have a different result, and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfully for me was actually ineffective for you, and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for you is safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious, but unfortunately it is not the way that the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs because, until now, it hasn't had the tools.
And so we need to move away from this one-size-fits-all model.
The way we've been developing drugs is essentially like going into a shoe store, no one asks you what size you are, or if you're going dancing or hiking.
They just say, "Well, you have feet, here are your shoes."
It doesn't work with shoes, and our bodies are many times more complicated than just our feet.
So we really have to change this.
There was a very sad example of this in the last decade.
But imagine a different scenario, where we could have had an array, a genetically diverse array, of cardiac cells, and we could have actually tested that drug, Vioxx, in petri dishes, and figured out, well, okay, people with this genetic type are going to have cardiac side effects, people with these genetic subgroups or genetic shoes sizes, about 25,000 of them, are not going to have any problems.
So that is terrific, and we thought, all right, as we're trying to solve this problem, clearly we have to think about genetics, we have to think about human testing, but there's a fundamental problem, because right now, stem cell lines, as extraordinary as they are, and lines are just groups of cells, they are made by hand, one at a time, and it takes a couple of months.
But even with that, there still was another big hurdle, and that actually brings us back to the mapping of the human genome, because we're all different.
It's like having an app without having a smartphone.
We need to have stem cells from all the genetic sub-types that represent who we are.
So this is what we've built.
It's an automated robotic technology.
It has the capacity to produce thousands and thousands of stem cell lines. It's genetically arrayed.
It has massively parallel processing capability, and it's going to change the way drugs are discovered, we hope, and I think eventually what's going to happen is that we're going to want to re-screen drugs, on arrays like this, that already exist, all of the drugs that currently exist, and in the future, you're going to be taking drugs and treatments that have been tested for side effects on all of the relevant cells, on brain cells and heart cells and liver cells.
It's here now, and in our family, my son has type 1 diabetes, which is still an incurable disease, and I lost my parents to heart disease and cancer, but I think that my story probably sounds familiar to you, because probably a version of it is your story.
At some point in our lives, all of us, or people we care about, become patients, and that's why I think that stem cell research is incredibly important for all of us.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life.
Back then, 15 years ago, we didn't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan.
And we also use functional MRI, called fMRI, to take a video, a movie, of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something.
So many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research, and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops, and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it's not all over in early childhood, and instead, the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the '20s and '30s.
Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area.
It's proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species, and it's involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions, things like decision-making, planning, planning what you're going to do tomorrow or next week or next year, inhibiting inappropriate behavior, so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid.
It's also involved in social interaction, understanding other people, and self-awareness.
So if you look at gray matter volume, for example, gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 years increases during childhood, which is what you can see on this graph. It peaks in early adolescence.
The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.
Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses.
This is a really important process. It's partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in, and the synapses that are being used are strengthened, and synapses that aren't being used in that particular environment are pruned away.
You can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush.
You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining, important branches, can grow stronger, and this process, which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment, is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regions during the period of human adolescence.
So a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional MRI to look at changes in brain activity across age.
So I'll just give you an example from my lab.
So in my lab, we're interested in the social brain, that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people.
So I like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work.
So this is a soccer game. (Laughter) Michael Owen has just missed a goal, and he's lying on the ground, and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are, so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face, even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass, is doing the same thing with his arms, and presumably has a similar facial expression, and the only people who don't are the guys in yellow at the back — (Laughs) — and I think they're on the wrong end of the stadium, and they're doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize, and that's the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates, how good we are at reading other people's behavior, their actions, their gestures, their facial expressions, in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states.
You have a pretty good idea of what they're feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time.
So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we've found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head.
This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other people than it is in adults, and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence.
And we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach, a different cognitive strategy, to make social decisions, and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of behavioral task, and I'll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab.
So imagine that you're the participant in one of our experiments. You come into the lab, you see this computerized task.
In this task, you see a set of shelves.
Now, there are objects on these shelves, on some of them, and you'll notice there's a guy standing behind the set of shelves, and there are some objects that he can't see.
This is the same set of shelves from his point of view.
Notice that there are only some objects that he can see, whereas there are many more objects that you can see.
The director, standing behind the set of shelves, is going to direct you to move objects around, but remember, he's not going to ask you to move objects that he can't see. This introduces a really interesting condition whereby there's a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director's perspective.
They move the white truck instead of the blue truck.
We tell them, okay, we're going to do exactly the same thing but this time there's no director. Instead you've got to ignore objects with the dark gray background.
You'll see that this is exactly the same condition, only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule, whereas in the director condition, they have to remember to take into account the director's perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior.
Okay, so if I just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did, this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood, and what you're going to see is the percentage errors in the adult group in both conditions, so the gray is the director condition, and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time, whereas they make far fewer errors when there's no director present, when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background.
Developmentally, these two conditions develop in exactly the same way. Between late childhood and mid-adolescence, there's an improvement, in other words a reduction of errors, in both of these trials, in both of these conditions.
In other words, everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by mid-adolescence, whereas in contrast, if you look at the last two gray bars, there's still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood, and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else's perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior, which is something, by the way, that we do in everyday life all the time, is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence.
So if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people's perspectives, you're right. They do. And this is why.
So we sometimes laugh about teenagers.
They're parodied, sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior. They take risks, they're sometimes moody, they're very self-conscious.
So, he said, "Before puberty, if my two daughters were messing around in a shop, I'd say, 'Hey, stop messing around and I'll sing your favorite song,' and instantly they'd stop messing around and he'd sing their favorite song. After puberty, that became the threat.
(Laughter) The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave.
Is it something we've invented recently in the West?"
And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today.
So there's a famous quote by Shakespeare from "The Winter's Tale" where he describes adolescence as follows: "I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." (Laughter) He then goes on to say, "Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?" (Laughter) So almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today, but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.
So for example, take risk-taking. We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks. They do.
They take more risks than children or adults, and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they're with their friends. There's an important drive to become independent from one's parents and to impress one's friends in adolescence.
But now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system, so I'm going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me, and also on this brain.
So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain, and it's involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing. It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things, including taking risks.
And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents.
So brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development, and this has implications for education, for rehabilitation, and intervention. The environment, including teaching, can and does shape the developing adolescent brain, and yet it's only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the West.
All four of my grandparents, for example, left school in their early adolescence. They had no choice.
And that's still the case for many, many teenagers around the world today. Forty percent of teenagers don't have access to secondary school education.
And yet, this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable.
It's a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity.
So what's sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents — heightened risk-taking, poor impulse control, self-consciousness — shouldn't be stigmatized.
It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
It's time to start designing for our ears.
Architects and designers tend to focus exclusively on these.
It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.
How does this work? Well, two ways.
Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviorally all the time.
The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it.
That's interference. Communication requires sending and receiving, and I have another whole TEDTalk about the importance of conscious listening, but I can send as well as I like, and you can be brilliant conscious listeners.
Spaces tend to include noise and acoustics.
A room like this has acoustics, this one very good acoustics.
Many rooms are not so good.
Let me give you some examples from a couple of areas which I think we all care about: health and education.
Hospital sound is getting worse all the time.
Noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years, and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there.
Most of all, though, it affects the patients, and that could be you, it could be me.
Sleep is absolutely crucial for recovery.
It's when we regenerate, when we rebuild ourselves, and with threatening noise like this going on, your body, even if you are able to sleep, your body is telling you, "I'm under threat. This is dangerous."
I am forced to ask myself a question.
("Do architects have ears?") (Laughter) Now, that's a little unfair. Some of my best friends are architects. (Laughter) And they definitely do have ears.
But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings. Here's a case in point.
Unfortunately, it was designed like a corporate headquarters, with a vast central atrium and classrooms leading off it with no back walls at all.
It's not just these modern buildings which suffer.
A study in Florida just a few years ago found that if you're sitting where this photograph was taken in the classroom, row four, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent.
Now that doesn't mean they only get half their education, but it does mean they have to work very hard to join the dots and understand what's going on.
This is affected massively by reverberation time, how reverberant a room is.
In a classroom with a reverberation time of 1.2 seconds, which is pretty common, this is what it sounds like.
(Inaudible echoing voice) Not so good, is it?
If you take that 1.2 seconds down to 0.4 seconds by installing acoustic treatments, sound absorbing materials and so forth, this is what you get.
Julian Treasure: What a difference.
Now that education you would receive, and thanks to the British acoustician Adrian James for those simulations. The signal was the same, the background noise was the same.
All that changed was the acoustics of the classroom in those two examples.
If education can be likened to watering a garden, which is a fair metaphor, sadly, much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers, especially for some groups, for example, those with hearing impairment.
Now that's not just deaf children. That could be any child who's got a cold, glue ear, an ear infection, even hay fever. On a given day, one in eight children fall into that group, on any given day.
Then you have children for whom English is a second language, or whatever they're being taught in is a second language.
In the U.K., that's more than 10 percent of the school population.
And finally, after Susan Cain's wonderful TEDTalk in February, we know that introverts find it very difficult to relate when they're in a noisy environment doing group work.
It's not just the children who are affected, though.
(Noisy conversation) This study in Germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels.
I have to really raise my voice to talk over 65 decibels of sound, and teachers are not just raising their voices.
This chart maps the teacher's heart rate against the noise level.
Noise goes up, heart rate goes up.
That is not good for you.
In fact, 65 decibels is the very level at which this big survey of all the evidence on noise and health found that, that is the threshold for the danger of myocardial infarction.
To you and me, that's a heart attack.
It may not be pushing the boat out too far to suggest that many teachers are losing significant life expectancy by teaching in environments like that day after day.
What does it cost to treat a classroom down to that 0.4-second reverberation time?
I think the economics are pretty clear on this.
I just moderated a major conference in London a few weeks ago called Sound Education, which brought together top acousticians, government people, teachers, and so forth.
Out of that conference, incidentally, also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they're having to work at home, for example, in a noisy kitchen.
Let's broaden the perspective a little bit and look at cities.
We have urban planners.
Where are the urban sound planners?
The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of Europe's population is having its sleep degraded by noise in cities. We can do better than that.
And in our offices, we spend a lot of time at work.
People who say, don't sit that team next to this team, because they like noise and they need quiet.
So office sound is a huge area, and incidentally, noise in offices has been shown to make people less helpful, less enjoy their teamwork, and less productive at work.
Where are the interior sound designers?
My friend Richard Mazuch, an architect in London, coined the phrase "invisible architecture."
It's about designing, not appearance, but experience, so that we have spaces that sound as good as they look, that are fit for purpose, that improve our quality of life, our health and well being, our social behavior and our productivity.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
The job of uncovering the global food waste scandal started for me when I was 15 years old.
I bought some pigs. I was living in Sussex.
And I started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way.
I went to the local baker and took their stale bread.
This was great. My pigs turned that food waste into delicious pork. I sold that pork to my school friends' parents, and I made a good pocket money addition to my teenage allowance.
But I noticed that most of the food that I was giving my pigs was in fact fit for human consumption, and that I was only scratching the surface, and that right the way up the food supply chain, in supermarkets, greengrocers, bakers, in our homes, in factories and farms, we were hemorrhaging out food.
One morning, when I was feeding my pigs, I noticed a particularly tasty-looking sun-dried tomato loaf that used to crop up from time to time.
We're talking about good, fresh food that is being wasted on a colossal scale.
Eventually, I set about writing my book, really to demonstrate the extent of this problem on a global scale. What this shows is a nation-by-nation breakdown of the likely level of food waste in each country in the world.
So I took the food supply of every single country and I compared it to what was actually likely to be being consumed in each country.
That's based on diet intake surveys, it's based on levels of obesity, it's based on a range of factors that gives you an approximate guess as to how much food is actually going into people's mouths.
That black line in the middle of that table is the likely level of consumption with an allowance for certain levels of inevitable waste.
But that black line shows what a food supply should be in a country if they allow for a good, stable, secure, nutritional diet for every person in that country.
Any dot above that line, and you'll quickly notice that that includes most countries in the world, represents unnecessary surplus, and is likely to reflect levels of waste in each country.
As a country gets richer, it invests more and more in getting more and more surplus into its shops and restaurants, and as you can see, most European and North American countries fall between 150 and 200 percent of the nutritional requirements of their populations.
So a country like America has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the American people.
But the thing that really struck me, when I plotted all this data, and it was a lot of numbers, was that you can see how it levels off.
Countries rapidly shoot towards that 150 mark, and then they level off, and they don't really go on rising as you might expect.
And that's what I came up with.
A country like America has four times the amount of food that it needs.
When people talk about the need to increase global food production to feed those nine billion people that are expected on the planet by 2050, I always think of these graphs.
In many ways, this is a great success story of human civilization, of the agricultural surpluses that we set out to achieve 12,000 years ago.
It is a success story. It has been a success story.
But what we have to recognize now is that we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear, and when we chop down forests, as we are every day, to grow more and more food, when we extract water from depleting water reserves, when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest to grow more and more food, and then we throw away so much of it, we have to think about what we can start saving.
And yesterday, I went to one of the local supermarkets that I often visit to inspect, if you like, what they're throwing away.
I found quite a few packets of biscuits amongst all the fruit and vegetables and everything else that was in there.
And I thought, well this could serve as a symbol for today.
That's what's in fields around the world every single year.
The next three biscuits are the foods that we decide to feed to livestock, the maize, the wheat and the soya.
Unfortunately, our beasts are inefficient animals, and they turn two-thirds of that into feces and heat, so we've lost those two, and we've only kept this one in meat and dairy products.
That is not a superlatively efficient use of global resources, especially when you think of the billion hungry people that exist already in the world.
Having gone through the data, I then needed to demonstrate where that food ends up.
Supermarkets are an easy place to start.
But this is what you can see more or less on every street corner in Britain, in Europe, in North America.
It represents a colossal waste of food, but what I discovered whilst I was writing my book was that this very evident abundance of waste was actually the tip of the iceberg.
When you start going up the supply chain, you find where the real food waste is happening on a gargantuan scale.
Can I have a show of hands if you have a loaf of sliced bread in your house?
Who lives in a household where that crust -- that slice at the first and last end of each loaf -- who lives in a household where it does get eaten?
Okay, most people, not everyone, but most people, and this is, I'm glad to say, what I see across the world, and yet has anyone seen a supermarket or sandwich shop anywhere in the world that serves sandwiches with crusts on it? (Laughter) I certainly haven't.
So I kept on thinking, where do those crusts go? (Laughter) This is the answer, unfortunately: 13,000 slices of fresh bread coming out of this one single factory every single day, day-fresh bread.
In the same year that I visited this factory, I went to Pakistan, where people in 2008 were going hungry as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies.
Parsnips that are too small for supermarket specifications, tomatoes in Tenerife, oranges in Florida, bananas in Ecuador, where I visited last year, all being discarded. This is one day's waste from one banana plantation in Ecuador.
As a result, this stuff gets fed to dogs at best, or is incinerated.
This man, in Kashgar, Xinjiang province, in Western China, is serving up his national dish.
It's called sheep's organs.
It's delicious, it's nutritious, and as I learned when I went to Kashgar, it symbolizes their taboo against food waste.
I was sitting in a roadside cafe.
A chef came to talk to me, I finished my bowl, and halfway through the conversation, he stopped talking and he started frowning into my bowl.
I thought, "My goodness, what taboo have I broken?
He pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl, and he said, "Clean." (Laughter) I thought, "My God, you know, I go around the world telling people to stop wasting food.
In our homes, we've lost touch with food.
This is an experiment I did on three lettuces.
Who keeps lettuces in their fridge?
Most people. The one on the left was kept in a fridge for 10 days.
The one in the middle, on my kitchen table. Not much difference.
It's a living organism, cut the slice off, stuck it in a vase of water, it was all right for another two weeks after this.
Some food waste, as I said at the beginning, will inevitably arise, so the question is, what is the best thing to do with it?
I answered that question when I was 15.
In fact, humans answered that question 6,000 years ago: We domesticated pigs to turn food waste back into food.
And yet, in Europe, that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
It's unscientific. It's unnecessary.
If you cook food for pigs, just as if you cook food for humans, it is rendered safe.
It's also a massive saving of resources.
At the moment, Europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from South America, where its production contributes to global warming, to deforestation, to biodiversity loss, to feed livestock here in Europe.
At the same time we throw away millions of tons of food waste which we could and should be feeding them.
If we did that, and fed it to pigs, we would save that amount of carbon.
If we feed our food waste which is the current government favorite way of getting rid of food waste, to anaerobic digestion, which turns food waste into gas to produce electricity, you save a paltry 448 kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton of food waste. It's much better to feed it to pigs.
We knew that during the war. (Laughter) A silver lining: It has kicked off globally, the quest to tackle food waste.
Feeding the 5,000 is an event I first organized in 2009.
We fed 5,000 people all on food that otherwise would have been wasted.
Since then, it's happened again in London, it's happening internationally, and across the country.
It's a way of organizations coming together to celebrate food, to say the best thing to do with food is to eat and enjoy it, and to stop wasting it.
Stop wasting food. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
You know, we wake up in the morning, you get dressed, put on your shoes, you head out into the world.
Living in New York City, as I do, it's almost as if, with so many people doing so many things at the same time in such close quarters, it's almost like life is dealing you extra hands out of that deck.
And one night, I'm riding the uptown local train.
And I get on the car, and I look, and I notice this couple, college-aged, student-looking kids, a guy and a girl, and they're sitting next to each other, and she's got her leg draped over his knee, and they're doing -- they have this little contraption, and they're tying these knots, and they're doing it with one hand, they're doing it left-handed and right-handed very quickly, and then she'll hand the thing to him and he'll do it.
I've never seen anything like this.
And at the next stop, a guy gets on the car, and he has this sort of visiting professor look to him.
He's got the overstuffed leather satchel and the rectangular file case and a laptop bag and the tweed jacket with the leather patches, and — (Laughter) — he looks at them, and then in a blink of an eye, he kneels down in front of them, and he starts to say, "You know, listen, here's how you can do it. Look, if you do this -- " and he takes the laces out of their hand, and instantly, he starts tying these knots, and even better than they were doing it, remarkably.
And it turns out they are medical students on their way to a lecture about the latest suturing techniques, and he's the guy giving the lecture.
One of the very lucky things, when I was at Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team, so I put my hands up right away, instinctively.
The guy on the right had a knife with a 10-inch blade, and he went in under my elbow, and it went up and cut my inferior vena cava.
I ran down the street and collapsed, and the ambulance guys intubated me on the sidewalk and let the trauma room know they had an incoming.
And one of the side effects of having major massive blood loss is you get tunnel vision, so I remember being on the stretcher and having a little nickel-sized cone of vision, and I was moving my head around and we got to St. Vincent's, and we're racing down this hallway, and I see the lights going, and it's a peculiar effect of memories like that.
They don't really go to the usual place that memories go.
And I get into the trauma room, and they're waiting for me, and the lights are there, and I'd been able to breathe a little more now, because the blood has left, had been filling up my lungs and I was having a very hard time breathing, but now it's kind of gone into the stretcher.
And I said, "Is there anything I can do to help?"
and — (Laughter) — the nurse kind of had a hysterical laugh, and I'm turning my head trying to see everybody, and I had this weird memory of being in college and raising, raising money for the flood victims of Bangladesh, and then I look over and my anesthesiologist is clamping the mask on me, and I think, "He looks Bangladeshi," — (Laughter) — and I just have those two facts, and I just think, "This could work somehow." (Laughter) And then I go out, and they work on me for the rest of the night, and I needed about 40 units of blood to keep me there while they did their work, and the surgeon took out about a third of my intestines, my cecum, organs I didn't know that I had, and he later told me one of the last things he did while he was in there was to remove my appendix for me, which I thought was great, you know, just a little tidy thing there at the end. (Laughter) And I came to in the morning.
So he was there when I woke up, and it was, waking up was like breaking through the ice into a frozen lake of pain.
It was that enveloping, and there was only one spot that didn't hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt, and it was my instep, and he was holding the arch of my foot and rubbing the instep with his thumb.
And in those days, my hair was down to my waist, I drove a motorcycle, I was unmarried, I owned a bar, so those were different times. (Laughter) But I had three days of life support, and everybody was expecting, due to just the massive amount of what they had had to do that I wasn't going to make it, so it was three days of everybody was either waiting for me to die or poop, and — (Laughter) — when I finally pooped, then that somehow, surgically speaking, that's like you crossed some good line, and, um — (Laughter) — on that day, the surgeon came in and whipped the sheet off of me.
He had three or four friends with him, and he does that, and they all look, and there was no infection, and they bend over me and they're poking and prodding, and they're like, "There's no hematomas, blah blah, look at the color," and they're talking amongst themselves and I'm, like, this restored automobile that he's just going, "Yeah, I did that." (Laughter) And it was just, it was amazing, because these guys are high-fiving him over how good I turned out, you know? (Laughter) And it's my zipper, and I've still got the staples in and everything.
And I think, kind of, as a surgeon, he basically said, "Kid, I saved your life.
It's like I gave you a new car and you're complaining about not finding parking.
Like, just, go out, and, you know, do your best.
But you're alive. That's what it's about."
And then I hear, "Bing-bong," and the subway doors are closing, and my stop is next, and I look at these kids, and I go, I think to myself, "I'm going to lift my shirt up and show them," — (Laughter) — and then I think, "No, this is the New York City subway, that's going to lead to other things." (Laughter) And so I just think, they got their lecture to go to.
I step off, I'm standing on the platform, and I feel my index finger in the first scar that I ever got, from my umbilical cord, and then around that, is traced the last scar that I got from my surgeon, and I think that, that chance encounter with those kids on the street with their knives led me to my surgical team, and their training and their skill and, always, a little bit of luck pushed back against chaos.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Very lucky to be here. Thank you. (Applause)
I want to talk to you today about a difficult topic that is close to me, and closer than you might realize to you.
I came to the UK 21 years ago, as an asylum-seeker.
I was 21.
I was forced to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo, my home, where I was a student activist.
I would love my children to be able to meet my family in the Congo.
But I want to tell you what the Congo has got to do with you.
how naturally your finger slides towards the buttons.
(Laughter) Can you imagine your world without it?
It connects us to our loved ones, our family, friends and colleagues, at home and overseas.
It is a symbol of an interconnected world.
But what you hold in your hand leaves a bloody trail, and it all boils down to a mineral: tantalum, mined in the Congo as coltan.
It is used in aerospace and medical equipment as an alloy.
It would be great if the story ended there.
Unfortunately, what you hold in your hand has not only enabled incredible technological development and industrial expansion, but it has also contributed to unimaginable human suffering.
Since 1996, over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Countless women, men and children have been raped, tortured or enslaved.
Rape is used as a weapon of war, instilling fear and depopulating whole areas.
The quest for extracting this mineral has not only aided, but it has fueled the ongoing war in the Congo.
But don't throw away your phones yet.
The Congo consistently scores dreadfully in global health and poverty rankings.
But remarkably, the UN Environmental Programme has estimated the wealth of the country to be over 24 trillion dollars.
The state-regulated mining industry has collapsed, and control over mines has splintered.
One well-known illicit trade route is that across the border to Rwanda, where Congolese tantalum is disguised as Rwandan.
But don't throw away your phones yet, because the incredible irony is that the technology that has placed such unsustainable, devastating demands on the Congo is the same technology that has brought this situation to our attention.
As with the Arab Spring, during the recent elections in the Congo, voters were able to send text messages of local polling stations to the headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa.
And in the wake of the result, the diaspora has joined with the Carter Center, the Catholic Church and other observers, to draw attention to the undemocratic result.
The mobile phone has given people around the world an important tool towards gaining their political freedom.
It has truly revolutionized the way we communicate on the planet.
It has allowed momentous political change to take place.
The mobile phone is an instrument of freedom and an instrument of oppression.
TED has always celebrated what technology can do for us, technology in its finished form.
It is time to be asking questions about technology.
Where does it come from?
Who makes it?
And for what?
Here, I am speaking directly to you, the TED community, and to all those who might be watching on a screen, on your phone, across the world, in the Congo.
All the technology is in place for us to communicate, and all the technology is in place to communicate this.
At the moment, there is no clear fair-trade solution.
But there has been a huge amount of progress.
The US has recently passed legislation to target bribery and misconduct in the Congo.
Recent UK legislation could be used in the same way.
In February, Nokia unveiled its new policy on sourcing minerals in the Congo, and there is a petition to Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone.
But we're not there yet.
When I first came to the UK, 21 years ago, I was homesick.
I missed my family and the friends I left behind.
Communication was extremely difficult.
Sending and receiving letters took months -- if you were lucky.
Even if I could have afforded the phone bills home, like most people in the Congo, my parents did not own a phone line.
Today, my two sons -- David and Daniel, can talk to my parents and get to know them.
Why should we allow such a wonderful, brilliant and necessary product to be the cause of unnecessary suffering for human beings?
We demand fair-trade food and fair-trade clothes.
It is time to demand fair-trade phones.
This is an idea worth spreading.
(Applause)
It's a great time to be a molecular biologist. (Laughter) Reading and writing DNA code is getting easier and cheaper.
By the end of this year, we'll be able to sequence the three million bits of information in your genome in less than a day and for less than 1,000 euros.
Biotech is probably the most powerful and the fastest-growing technology sector.
It has the power, potentially, to replace our fossil fuels, to revolutionize medicine, and to touch every aspect of our daily lives.
But what about that guy? (Laughter) (Laughter) In 2009, I first heard about DIYbio.
It's a movement that -- it advocates making biotechnology accessible to everyone, not just scientists and people in government labs.
The idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate, it could really stimulate innovation.
Putting technology in the hands of the end user is usually a good idea because they've got the best idea of what their needs are.
And here's this really sophisticated technology coming down the road, all these associated social, moral, ethical questions, and we scientists are just lousy at explaining to the public just exactly what it is we're doing in those labs.
So wouldn't it be nice if there was a place in your local neighborhood where you could go and learn about this stuff, do it hands-on?
I thought so.
So, three years ago, I got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations and we founded Genspace.
None of my previous experience prepared me for what came next. Can you guess?
The press started calling us.
And the more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy, the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next Frankenstein, and as a result, for the next six months, when you Googled my name, instead of getting my scientific papers, you got this.
They were opening biohacker spaces, and some of them were facing much greater challenges than we did, more regulations, less resources.
But now, three years later, here's where we stand.
It's a vibrant, global community of hackerspaces, and this is just the beginning.
These are some of the biggest ones, and there are others opening every day.
There's one probably going to open up in Moscow, one in South Korea, and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of.
Let me take you on a little tour.
Biohackers work alone.
We work in groups, in big cities — (Laughter) — and in small villages.
We reverse engineer lab equipment.
We genetically engineer bacteria.
We hack hardware, software, wetware, and, of course, the code of life.
We make things grow.
And we make cells dance.
Any powerful technology is inherently dual use, and, you know, you get something like synthetic biology, nanobiotechnology, it really compels you, you have to look at both the amateur groups but also the professional groups, because they have better infrastructure, they have better facilities, and they have access to pathogens.
So the United Nations did just that, and they recently issued a report on this whole area, and what they concluded was the power of this technology for positive was much greater than the risk for negative, and they even looked specifically at the DIYbio community, and they noted, not surprisingly, that the press had a tendency to consistently overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics.
As a matter of fact, DIY people from all over the world, America, Europe, got together last year, and we hammered out a common code of ethics.
Now, we follow state and local regulations.
We dispose of our waste properly, we follow safety procedures, we don't work with pathogens.
You know, if you're working with a pathogen, you're not part of the biohacker community, you're part of the bioterrorist community, I'm sorry.
And sometimes people ask me, "Well, what about an accident?"
Well, working with the safe organisms that we normally work with, the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating, like, some sort of superbug, that's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Now, it could happen, but I'm not going to plan my life around it.
I've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk.
I signed up for something called the Personal Genome Project.
It's a study at Harvard where, at the end of the study, they're going to take my entire genomic sequence, all of my medical information, and my identity, and they're going to post it online for everyone to see.
There were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion.
The one I liked the best is, someone could download my sequence, go back to the lab, synthesize some fake Ellen DNA, and plant it at a crime scene. (Laughter) But like DIYbio, the positive outcomes and the potential for good for a study like that far outweighs the risk.
Well, it wasn't that long ago we were asking, "Well, what would anyone do with a personal computer?"
So this stuff is just beginning.
We're only seeing just the tip of the DNA iceberg.
Let me show you what you could do right now.
(Laughter) (Applause) Yep, you guessed it. He threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs, analyzed the saliva, identified the dog, and confronted the dog owner.
It actually is a Japanese beetle.
And the same kind of technology -- it's called DNA barcoding, it's really cool -- You can use it to check if your caviar is really beluga, if that sushi is really tuna, or if that goat cheese that you paid so much for is really goat's.
In a biohacker space, you can analyze your genome for mutations.
You can analyze your breakfast cereal for GMO's, and you can explore your ancestry.
You can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere, collect microbes, see what's up there.
You can make some sort of a biofuel cell.
You can do a lot of things.
You can also do an art science project. Some of these are really spectacular, and they look at social, ecological problems from a completely different perspective.
Some people ask me, well, why am I involved?
The thing is, there's something in these labs that they have to offer society that you can't find anywhere else.
There's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project, and you don't have to justify to anyone that it's going to make a lot of money, that it's going to save mankind, or even that it's feasible.
It just has to follow safety guidelines.
If you had spaces like this all over the world, it could really change the perception of who's allowed to do biotech.
It's spaces like these that spawned personal computing.
Why not personal biotech?
This is such a new area, and as we say back in Brooklyn, you ain't seen nothin' yet. (Laughter) (Applause)
But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body.
Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you.
So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now.
So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language.
You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.
Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10.
This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States.
Here comes the Prime Minister -- No. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) (Applause) Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Even the BBC and The New York Times.
So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists -- it's language, so we think about communication.
When we think about communication, we think about interactions.
So what is your body language communicating to me?
And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this.
So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments.
And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language.
And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.
Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation.
We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.
We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.
So what nonverbals am I talking about?
I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics.
I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.
So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding.
It's about opening up.
And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are.
This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied.
She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition.
So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it.
They do this.
What do we do when we feel powerless?
We do exactly the opposite.
We make ourselves small.
So again, both animals and humans do the same thing.
And this is what happens when you put together high and low power.
So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals.
We do the opposite of them.
So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice?
So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.
They raise their hands like this.
I notice a couple of things about this.
So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men.
Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.
So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap.
Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more?
So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence.
But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?
There's some evidence that they do.
So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy.
When it comes to power, it also goes both ways.
So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful.
So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds?
So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones.
So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like?
So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.
They actually feel they're going to win even at games of chance.
They also tend to be able to think more abstractly.
So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks.
There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.
Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol.
So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance.
But really, power is also about how you react to stress.
So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive?
Probably not, right?
You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.
So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind.
So this is what we did.
So here's one.
This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman" by the media.
This one is very low-power.
When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself.
So this is what happens.
They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, "You need to do this or this."
They don't look at pictures of the poses.
We don't want to prime them with a concept of power.
We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample.
That's it. That's the whole experiment.
So this is what we find.
Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble.
So again, two minutes, and you get these changes.
So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down.
So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves.
Also, our bodies change our minds.
But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways?
This is in the lab, it's this little task, it's just a couple of minutes.
And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations.
It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview.
So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right?
For numerous reasons, no, don't do that.
It's you talking to yourself.
What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this.
So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview.
It's five minutes long. They are being recorded.
Imagine this is the person interviewing you.
People hate this.
It's what Marianne LaFrance calls "standing in social quicksand."
So this really spikes your cortisol.
We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them.
They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions.
But what's driving it?
It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech.
No effect on those things. This is what's affected.
They're bringing themselves.
So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect.
So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, "It feels fake." Right?
I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here.
When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident.
I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times.
I was thrown from the car.
And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic.
I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child.
So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back.
They say, "You're not going to finish college.
Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you."
And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people.
That's it.
I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, "I'm quitting."
You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do.
You are going to fake it.
You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it.
Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, "Not supposed to be here."
So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail," came into my office. I really didn't know her at all.
She came in totally defeated, and she said, "I'm not supposed to be here."
And that was the moment for me.
One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore.
I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling.
Like, she can fake it, she can become it.
And tomorrow you're going to fake it, you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know -- (Applause) And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever."
You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there. (Laughter) She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it.
So she had changed.
The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this.
Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.
Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors.
That's what you want to do.
Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation.
Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down.
Give it to them because they can do it in private.
They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I really am honored to be here, and as Chris said, it's been over 20 years since I started working in Africa.
My first introduction was at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty, Ivory Coast morning.
I had just left Wall Street, cut my hair to look like Margaret Mead, given away most everything that I owned, and arrived with all the essentials -- some poetry, a few clothes, and, of course, a guitar -- because I was going to save the world, and I thought I would just start with the African continent.
But literally within days of arriving I was told, in no uncertain terms, by a number of West African women, that Africans didn't want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me.
I was too young, unmarried, I had no children, didn't really know Africa, and besides, my French was pitiful.
And so, it was an incredibly painful time in my life, and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening.
I think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well, so I moved to Kenya and worked in Uganda, and I met a group of Rwandan women, who asked me, in 1986, to move to Kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there.
And so I started looking around, and I heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes.
And, being a little intrigued, I went to go meet this group, and what I found was 20 unwed mothers who were trying to survive.
So, I made a deal with the women. I said, "Look, we get rid of the charity side, and we run this as a business and I'll help you."
First of all, I thought, well, we need a sales team, and we clearly aren't the A-Team here, so let's -- I did all this training.
And the women said, "You know, Jacqueline, who in Nyamirambo is not going to buy doughnuts out of an orange bucket from a tall American woman?" And like -- (Laughter) -- it's a good point.
And they started listening to the marketplace, and they came back with ideas for cassava chips, and banana chips, and sorghum bread, and before you knew it, we had cornered the Kigali market, and the women were earning three to four times the national average.
And with that confidence surge, I thought, "Well, it's time to create a real bakery, so let's paint it." And the women said, "That's a really great idea."
And I said, "Well, what color do you want to paint it?" And they said, "Well, you choose." And I said, "No, no, I'm learning to listen.
You choose. It's your bakery, your street, your country -- not mine."
But they wouldn't give me an answer.
So, one week, two weeks, three weeks went by, and finally I said, "Well, how about blue?"
And they said, "Blue, blue, we love blue. Let's do it blue."
So, I went to the store, I brought Gaudence, the recalcitrant one of all, and we brought all this paint and fabric to make curtains, and on painting day, we all gathered in Nyamirambo, and the idea was we would paint it white with blue as trim, like a little French bakery. But that was clearly not as satisfying as painting a wall of blue like a morning sky.
So, blue, blue, everything became blue.
The walls were blue, the windows were blue, the sidewalk out front was painted blue.
And Aretha Franklin was shouting "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," the women's hips were swaying and little kids were trying to grab the paintbrushes, but it was their day.
And at the end of it, we stood across the street and we looked at what we had done, and I said, "It is so beautiful."
And the women said, "It really is."
And I said, "And I think the color is perfect," and they all nodded their head, except for Gaudence, and I said, "What?"
And she said, "Nothing." And I said, "What?"
And, mostly because people never really ask you, and when they do, you don't really think they want to know the truth.
And so then I learned that listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions.
And so, I lived in Kigali for about two and a half years, doing these two things, and it was an extraordinary time in my life.
And it taught me three lessons that I think are so important for us today, and certainly in the work that I do.
The first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth.
As Eleni has said, when people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity.
But as human beings, we also want to see each other, and we want to be heard by each other, and we should never forget that.
The second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.
I think Andrew pretty well covered that, so I will move to the third point, which is that markets alone also are not going to solve the problems of poverty.
Yes, we ran this as a business, but someone needed to pay the philanthropic support that came into the training, and the management support, the strategic advice and, maybe most important of all, the access to new contacts, networks and new markets.
And so, on a micro level, there's a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy.
And on a macro level -- some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized.
And so, it was really those lessons that made me decide to build Acumen Fund about six years ago.
We've invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises, and have, in so doing, created nearly 20,000 jobs, and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them.
I want to tell you two stories. Both of them are in Africa.
Both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service, and who really know the markets.
Both of them live at the confluence of public health and enterprise, and both of them, because they're manufacturers, create jobs directly, and create incomes indirectly, because they're in the malaria sector, and Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year because of malaria.
And so as people get healthier, they also get wealthier.
The first one is called Advanced Bio-Extracts Limited.
It's a company built in Kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named Patrick Henfrey and his three colleagues.
These are old-hand farmers who've gone through all the agricultural ups and downs in Kenya over the last 30 years.
It's indigenous to China and the Far East, but given that the prevalence of malaria is here in Africa, Patrick and his colleagues said, "Let's bring it here, because it's a high value-add product."
So that's about 50,000 people affected.
And I think some of you may have visited -- these farmers are helped by KickStart and TechnoServe, who help them become more self-sufficient.
Acumen's been working with ABE for the past year, year and a half, both on looking at a new business plan, and what does expansion look like, helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital.
And I really understood what patient capital meant emotionally in the last month or so. Because the company was literally 10 days away from proving that the product they produced was at the world-quality level needed to make Coartem, when they were in the biggest cash crisis of their history.
And we called all of the social investors we know.
Now, some of these same social investors are really interested in Africa and understand the importance of agriculture, and they even helped the farmers.
And even when we explained that if ABE goes away, all those 7,500 jobs go away too, we sometimes have this bifurcation between business and the social.
So Acumen made not one, but two bridge loans, and the good news is they did indeed meet world-quality classification and are now in the final stages of closing a 20-million-dollar round, to move it to the next level, and I think that this will be one of the more important companies in East Africa.
This is Samuel. He's a farmer.
So he moved back to the farm, and, long story short, they now have seven acres under cultivation.
I talked about it a little at Oxford two years ago, and some of you visited A to Z manufacturing, which is one of the great, real companies in East Africa.
It's another one that lives at the confluence of health and enterprise.
And this is really a story about a public-private solution that has really worked.
It started in Japan. Sumitomo had developed a technology essentially to impregnate a polyethylene-based fiber with organic insecticide, so you could create a bed net, a malaria bed net, that would last five years and not need to be re-dipped.
Acumen came in with the patient capital, and we also helped to identify the entrepreneur that we would all partner with here in Africa, and Exxon provided the initial resin.
It's gone from socialist Tanzania into capitalist Tanzania, and continued to flourish. It had about 1,000 employees when we first found it.
And so, Anuj took the entrepreneurial risk here in Africa to produce a public good that was purchased by the aid establishment to work with malaria.
This year, they are now producing eight million nets a year, and they employ 5,000 people, 90 percent of whom are women, mostly unskilled.
They're in a joint venture with Sumitomo.
And so, from an enterprise perspective for Africa, and from a public health perspective, these are real successes.
But it's only half the story if we're really looking at solving problems of poverty, because it's not long-term sustainable.
It's a company with one big customer.
And if avian flu hits, or for any other reason the world decides that malaria is no longer as much of a priority, everybody loses.
And so, Anuj and Acumen have been talking about testing the private sector, because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that, look, in a country like Tanzania, 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day.
It costs, at manufacturing point, six dollars to produce these, and it costs the establishment another six dollars to distribute it, so the market price in a free market would be about 12 dollars per net.
Most people can't afford that, so let's give it away free.
And we said, "Well, there's another option.
Let's use the market as the best listening device we have, and understand at what price people would pay for this, so they get the dignity of choice.
We can start building local distribution, and actually, it can cost the public sector much less."
And so we came in with a second round of patient capital to A to Z, a loan as well as a grant, so that A to Z could play with pricing and listen to the marketplace, and found a number of things.
And when you listen to them, they'll also have a lot to say about what they like and what they don't like.
And that some of the channels we thought would work didn't work.
So then, from a policy perspective, when you start with the market, we have a choice.
We can continue going along at 12 dollars a net, and the customer pays zero, or we could at least experiment with some of it, to charge one dollar a net, costing the public sector another six dollars a net, give the people the dignity of choice, and have a distribution system that might, over time, start sustaining itself.
We've got to start having conversations like this, and I don't think there's any better way to start than using the market, but also to bring other people to the table around it.
Whenever I go to visit A to Z, I think of my grandmother, Stella.
She was very much like those women sitting behind the sewing machines.
She grew up on a farm in Austria, very poor, didn't have very much education.
She moved to the United States, where she met my grandfather, who was a cement hauler, and they had nine children. Three of them died as babies.
My grandmother had tuberculosis, and she worked in a sewing machine shop, making shirts for about 10 cents an hour.
But because she had the opportunity of the marketplace, and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education, her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams.
I look around at my siblings and my cousins -- and as I said, there are a lot of us -- and I see teachers and musicians, hedge fund managers, designers.
It shouldn't be that difficult.
It takes opening your arms, both, wide, and expecting very little love in return, but demanding accountability, and bringing the accountability to the table as well.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, this is my grandfather, Salman Schocken, who was born into a poor and uneducated family with six children to feed, and when he was 14 years old, he was forced to drop out of school in order to help put bread on the table.
He never went back to school.
Instead, he went on to build a glittering empire of department stores.
Salman was the consummate perfectionist, and every one of his stores was a jewel of Bauhaus architecture.
He was also the ultimate self-learner, and like everything else, he did it in grand style.
He surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars like Martin Buber and Shai Agnon and Franz Kafka, and he paid each one of them a monthly salary so that they could write in peace.
He fled Germany, together with his family, leaving everything else behind.
His department stores confiscated, he spent the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture.
Such is the power of self-study.
And these are my parents.
They too did not enjoy the privilege of college education.
They were too busy building a family and a country.
And yet, just like Salman, they were lifelong, tenacious self-learners, and our home was stacked with thousands of books, records and artwork.
I remember quite vividly my father telling me that when everyone in the neighborhood will have a TV set, then we'll buy a normal F.M. radio. (Laughter) And that's me, I was going to say holding my first abacus, but actually holding what my father would consider an ample substitute to an iPad. (Laughter) So one thing that I took from home is this notion that educators don't necessarily have to teach.
Self-study, self-exploration, self-empowerment: these are the virtues of a great education.
So I'd like to share with you a story about a self-study, self-empowering computer science course that I built, together with my brilliant colleague Noam Nisan.
As you can see from the pictures, both Noam and I had an early fascination with first principles, and over the years, as our knowledge of science and technology became more sophisticated, this early awe with the basics has only intensified.
As computers became increasingly more complex, our students were losing the forest for the trees, and indeed, it is impossible to connect with the soul of the machine if you interact with a black box P.C. or a Mac which is shrouded by numerous layers of closed, proprietary software.
Now, we had to start somewhere, and so Noam and I decided to base our cathedral, so to speak, on the simplest possible building block, which is something called NAND.
It is nothing more than a trivial logic gate with four input-output states.
So we now start this journey by telling our students that God gave us NAND — (Laughter) — and told us to build a computer, and when we asked how, God said, "One step at a time."
And then, following this advice, we start with this lowly, humble NAND gate, and we walk our students through an elaborate sequence of projects in which they gradually build a chip set, a hardware platform, an assembler, a virtual machine, a basic operating system and a compiler for a simple, Java-like language that we call "JACK."
The students celebrate the end of this tour de force by using JACK to write all sorts of cool games like Pong, Snake and Tetris.
It's a tremendous personal triumph of going from first principles all the way to a fantastically complex and useful system.
Noam and I worked five years to facilitate this ascent and to create the tools and infrastructure that will enable students to build it in one semester.
And this is the great team that helped us make it happen.
The trick was to decompose the computer's construction into numerous stand-alone modules, each of which could be individually specified, built and unit-tested in isolation from the rest of the project.
So chip specifications, APIs, project descriptions, software tools, hardware simulators, CPU emulators, stacks of hundreds of slides, lectures -- we laid out everything on the Web and invited the world to come over, take whatever they need, and do whatever they want with it.
And then something fascinating happened.
And NAND2Tetris became one of the first massive, open, online courses, although seven years ago we had no idea that what we were doing is called MOOCs.
We just observed how self-organized courses were kind of spontaneously spawning out of our materials.
For example, Pramode C.E., an engineer from Kerala, India, has organized groups of self-learners who build our computer under his good guidance.
And Parag Shah, another engineer, from Mumbai, has unbundled our projects into smaller, more manageable bites that he now serves in his pioneering do-it-yourself computer science program.
The people who are attracted to these courses typically have a hacker mentality.
They want to figure out how things work, and they want to do it in groups, like this hackers club in Washington, D.C., that uses our materials to offer community courses.
And because these materials are widely available and open-source, different people take them to very different and unpredictable directions.
For example, Yu Fangmin, from Guangzhou, has used FPGA technology to build our computer and show others how to do the same using a video clip, and Ben Craddock developed a very nice computer game that unfolds inside our CPU architecture, which is quite a complex 3D maze that Ben developed using the Minecraft 3D simulator engine.
The Minecraft community went bananas over this project, and Ben became an instant media celebrity.
And indeed, for quite a few people, taking this NAND2Tetris pilgrimage, if you will, has turned into a life-changing experience.
For example, take Dan Rounds, who is a music and math major from East Lansing, Michigan.
But given what I now feel capable of doing, I would certainly do it again.
To anyone considering NAND2Tetris, it's a tough journey, but you'll be profoundly changed."
They have a tremendous passion to learn.
And with that in mind, I'd like to say a few words about traditional college grading.
We are obsessed with grades because we are obsessed with data, and yet grading takes away all the fun from failing, and a huge part of education is about failing.
Courage, according to Churchill, is the ability to go from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm. (Laughter) And [Joyce] said that mistakes are the portals of discovery.
And yet we don't tolerate mistakes, and we worship grades.
So we collect your B pluses and your A minuses and we aggregate them into a number like 3.4, which is stamped on your forehead and sums up who you are.
Well, in my opinion, we went too far with this nonsense, and grading became degrading.
So with that, I'd like to say a few words about upgrading, and share with you a glimpse from my current project, which is different from the previous one, but it shares exactly the same characteristics of self-learning, learning by doing, self-exploration and community-building, and this project deals with K-12 math education, beginning with early age math, and we do it on tablets because we believe that math, like anything else, should be taught hands on.
So if area is what interests us, then one thing which is natural to do is to tile the area of this particular shape and simply count how many tiles it takes to cover it completely.
And this little exercise here gives you a first good insight of the notion of area.
Moving along, what about the area of this figure?
(Applause) Now this particular transformation did not change the area of the original figure, so a six-year-old who plays with this has just discovered a clever algorithm to compute the area of any given parallelogram.
We don't replace teachers, by the way.
We believe that teachers should be empowered, not replaced.
Moving along, what about the area of a triangle?
Now this transformation has doubled the area of the original figure, and therefore we have just learned that the area of the triangle equals the area of this rectangle divided by two.
But we discovered it by self-exploration.
So, in addition to learning some useful geometry, the child has been exposed to some pretty sophisticated science strategies, like reduction, which is the art of transforming a complex problem into a simple one, or generalization, which is at the heart of any scientific discipline, or the fact that some properties are invariant under some transformations.
And because we cannot do it on our own, we've developed a very fancy authoring tool that any author, any parent or actually anyone who has an interest in math education, can use this authoring tool to develop similar apps on tablets without programming.
And finally, we are putting together an adaptive ecosystem that will match different learners with different apps according to their evolving learning style.
The driving force behind this project is my colleague Shmulik London, and, you see, just like Salman did about 90 years ago, the trick is to surround yourself with brilliant people, because at the end, it's all about people.
And a few years ago, I was walking in Tel Aviv and I saw this graffiti on a wall, and I found it so compelling that by now I preach it to my students, and I'd like to try to preach it to you.
Now, I don't know how many people here are familiar with the term "mensch."
It basically means to be human and to do the right thing.
The most important thing is to be a mensch." (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I have to say that I'm very glad to be here.
I understand we have over 80 countries here, so that's a whole new paradigm for me to speak to all of these countries.
In each country, I'm sure you have this thing called the parent-teacher conference.
Well, I remember in third grade, I had this moment where my father, who never takes off from work, he's a classical blue collar, a working-class immigrant person, going to school to see his son, how he's doing, and the teacher said to him, he said, "You know, John is good at math and art."
And he kind of nodded, you know?
The next day I saw him talking to a customer at our tofu store, and he said, "You know, John's good at math."
(Laughter) And that always stuck with me all my life.
Why didn't Dad say art? Why wasn't it okay?
Why? It became a question my entire life, and that's all right, because being good at math meant he bought me a computer, and some of you remember this computer, this was my first computer.
Who had an Apple II? Apple II users, very cool. (Applause) As you remember, the Apple II did nothing at all. (Laughter) You'd plug it in, you'd type in it and green text would come out.
That computer is a computer that I learned about going to MIT, my father's dream. And at MIT, however, I learned about the computer at all levels, and after, I went to art school to get away from computers, and I began to think about the computer as more of a spiritual space of thinking.
And I was influenced by performance art -- so this is 20 years ago. I made a computer out of people.
It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment.
I have a power manager, mouse driver, memory, etc., and I built this in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan.
It's a room broken in two halves.
I've turned the computer on, and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer.
And the floppy disk drive person wears it. (Laughter) She finds the first sector on the disk, and takes data off the disk and passes it off to, of course, the bus.
So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer to the memory, to the CPU, the VRAM, etc., and it's an actual working computer. That's a bus, really. (Laughter) And it looks kind of fast. That's a mouse driver, where it's XY. (Laughter) It looks like it's happening kind of quickly, but it's actually a very slow computer, and when I realized how slow this computer was compared to how fast a computer is, it made me wonder about computers and technology in general.
And so I'm going to talk today about four things, really.
And I'll talk about how I've looked to combine these four areas into a kind of a synthesis, a kind of experiment.
So starting from technology, technology is a wonderful thing.
When that Apple II came out, it really could do nothing.
Remember when images were first possible with a computer, those gorgeous, full-color images?
And then after a few years, we got CD-quality sound.
And then movies, via CD-ROM. It was amazing.
Remember that excitement?
And then the browser appeared. The browser was great, but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth.
Text first, then images, we waited, CD-quality sound over the Net, then movies over the Internet. Kind of incredible.
And then the mobile phone occurred, text, images, audio, video. And now we have iPhone, iPad, Android, with text, video, audio, etc.
You see this little pattern here?
We're kind of stuck in a loop, perhaps, and this sense of possibility from computing is something I've been questioning for the last 10 or so years, and have looked to design, as we understand most things, and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine.
And I have a small experiment to give you a quick design lesson.
Designers talk about the relationship between form and content, content and form. Now what does that mean?
Well, content is the word up there: fear.
It's a four-letter word. It's a kind of a bad feeling word, fear.
Fear is set in Light Helvetica, so it's not too stressful, and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica, it's like, "Oh, fear, who cares?" Right? (Laughter) You take the same Ultra Light Helvetica and make it big, and like, whoa, that hurts. Fear.
So you can see how you change the scale, you change the form. Content is the same, but you feel differently.
You change the typeface to, like, this typeface, and it's kind of funny. It's like pirate typeface, like Captain Jack Sparrow typeface. Arr! Fear!
Or fear like this, kind of a nightclub typeface. (Laughter) Like, we gotta go to Fear. (Laughter) It's, like, amazing, right? (Laughter) (Applause) It just changes the same content.
It's very classy. It's like that expensive restaurant, Fear.
If you just change one letter in that content, you get a much better word, much better content: free.
Free even light feels kind of like, ah, I can breathe in free.
And I can add in a blue gradient and a dove, and I have, like, Don Draper free. (Laughter) So you see that -- form, content, design, it works that way.
It's a powerful thing. It's like magic, almost, like the magicians we've seen at TED. It's magic.
And I've been curious about how design and technology intersect, and I'm going to show you some old work I never really show anymore, to give you a sense of what I used to do.
So -- yeah.
We'd go to a computer store, and they'd do the same thing.
And they'd say, "Daddy, why doesn't the computer respond to sound?"
And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn't the computer respond to sound?
So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time.
And then I spent a lot of time in the space of interactive graphics and things like this, and I stopped doing it because my students at MIT got so much better than myself, so I had to hang up my mouse.
But in '96, I made my last piece. It was in black and white, monochrome, fully monochrome, all in integer mathematics.
It's called "Tap, Type, Write."
It's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary.
Ten variations. This is, like, spin the letter around.
(Typing noises) This is, like, a ring of letters. (Typing noises) This is 20 years old, so it's kind of a -- Let's see, this is — I love the French film "The Red Balloon."
Great movie, right? I love that movie. So, this is sort of like a play on that. (Typing noises) (Typewriter bell) It's peaceful, like that. (Laughter) I'll show this last one. This is about balance, you know.
It's kind of stressful typing out, so if you type on this keyboard, you can, like, balance it out.
(Laughter) If you hit G, life's okay, so I always say, "Hit G, and it's going to be all right.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.
So that was 20 years ago, and I was always on the periphery of art.
By being President of RISD I've gone deep into art, and art is a wonderful thing, fine art, pure art.
It's like, art is supposed to be enigmatic, so when you say, like, "I don't get it," like, oh, that's great. (Laughter) Art does that, because art is about asking questions, questions that may not be answerable.
At RISD, we have this amazing facility called the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. It has 80,000 samples of animal, bone, mineral, plants.
You know, in Rhode Island, if an animal gets hit on the road, they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it.
Because at RISD, you have to look at the actual animal, the object, to understand its volume, to perceive it.
So they'd go to an antique shop, and they'd look at this cup, and they'd say, "Tell us about this cup."
And as a new media artist, he reflected, and said, you know, I've spent my whole career making new media art.
People say, "Wow, your art, what is it?" It's new media.
And he realized, it isn't about old or new.
It's about something in between.
It isn't about "old," the dirt, "new," the cloud. It's about what is good.
You see it in all interesting art today, in all interesting businesses today. How we combine those two together to make good is very interesting.
So art makes questions, and leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions.
We aren't functioning so easily anymore.
We aren't a simple authoritarian regime anymore.
As an example of authoritarianism, I was in Russia one time traveling in St. Petersburg, at a national monument, and I saw this sign that says, "Do Not Walk On The Grass," and I thought, oh, I mean, I speak English, and you're trying to single me out. That's not fair.
But I found a sign for Russian-speaking people, and it was the best sign ever to say no.
It was like, "No swimming, no hiking, no anything."
My favorite ones are "no plants." Why would you bring a plant to a national monument? I'm not sure.
And also "no love." (Laughter) So that is authoritarianism.
It's a hierarchy. We all know that a hierarchy is how we run many systems today, but as we know, it's been disrupted.
It is now a network instead of a perfect tree.
And so today, leaders are faced with how to lead differently, I believe.
This is work I did with my colleague Becky Bermont on creative leadership. What can we learn from artists and designers for how to lead?
A traditional leader is always wanting to be right, whereas a creative leader hopes to be right.
And this frame is important today, in this complex, ambiguous space, and artists and designers have a lot to teach us, I believe.
And I had a show in London recently where my friends invited me to come to London for four days to sit in a sandbox, and I said great.
And so I sat in a sandbox for four days straight, six hours every day, six-minute appointments with anyone in London, and that was really bad.
But I would listen to people, hear their issues, draw in the sand, try to figure things out, and it was kind of hard to figure out what I was doing.
And it felt kind of like being president, actually.
I was like, "Oh, this my job. President. I do a lot of meetings, you know?"
And by the end of the experience, I realized why I was doing this.
It's because leaders, what we do is we connect improbable connections and hope something will happen, and in that room I found so many connections between people across all of London, and so leadership, connecting people, is the great question today.
And one thing I've been doing is doing some research on systems that can combine technology and leadership with an art and design perspective.
So what this is, is a kind of a sketch, an application sketch I wrote in Python. You know how there's Photoshop?
This is called Powershop, and the way it works is imagine an organization. You know, the CEO isn't ever at the top. The CEO's at the center of the organization.
You know, how do you, as the leader, scan, connect, make things happen? So for instance, you might open up a distribution here and find the different subdivisions in there, and know that you know someone in Eco, over here, and these people here are in Eco, the people you might engage with as CEO, people going across the hierarchy.
And part of the challenge of the CEO is to find connections across areas, and so you might look in R&D, and here you see one person who crosses the two areas of interest, and it's a person important to engage.
So you might want to, for instance, get a heads-up display on how you're interacting with them.
How many coffees do you have?
You can also imagine using technology like from Luminoso, the guys from Cambridge who were looking at deep text analysis. What is the tenor of your communications?
So these kind of systems, I believe, are important.
And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design, because art and design lets you think like this, find different systems like this, and I've just begun thinking like this, so I'm glad to share that with you.
So if someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation, what would you say?
Today I'd like to explore with you why the answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will be your most valuable asset.
I'd like to start by introducing you to someone whose life has been changed by a marketplace fueled by reputation.
Sebastian Sandys has been a bed and breakfast host on Airbnb since 2008.
I caught up with him recently, where, over the course of several cups of tea, he told me how hosting guests from all over the world has enriched his life.
Now, I mention Squeak because Sebastian's first guest happened to see a rather large mouse run across the kitchen, and she promised that she would refrain from leaving a bad review on one condition: he got a cat.
And so Sebastian bought Squeak to protect his reputation.
Now, as many of you know, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people who have space to rent with people who are looking for a place to stay in over 192 countries.
The places being rented out are things that you might expect, like spare rooms and holiday homes, but part of the magic is the unique places that you can now access: treehouses, teepees, airplane hangars, igloos.
If you don't like the hotel, there's a castle down the road that you can rent for 5,000 dollars a night.
It's a fantastic example of how technology is creating a market for things that never had a marketplace before.
Now let me show you these heat maps of Paris to see how insanely fast it's growing.
This image here is from 2008.
The pink dots represent host properties.
Even four years ago, letting strangers stay in your home seemed like a crazy idea.
And now, 2012.
There is an Airbnb host on almost every main street in Paris.
Now, what's happening here is people are realizing the power of technology to unlock the idling capacity and value of all kinds of assets, from skills to spaces to material possessions, in ways and on a scale never possible before.
It's an economy and culture called collaborative consumption, and, through it, people like Sebastian are becoming micro-entrepreneurs.
They're empowered to make money and save money from their existing assets.
But the real magic and the secret source behind collaborative consumption marketplaces like Airbnb isn't the inventory or the money.
It's using the power of technology to build trust between strangers.
He woke up around 9, and he checked his email and he saw a bunch of messages all asking him if he was okay.
Because at its core, it's about empowerment.
Now the irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us.
They're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the Facebook age.
We're literally beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything. We're sharing our cars on WhipCar, our bikes on Spinlister, our offices on Loosecubes, our gardens on Landshare. We're lending and borrowing money from strangers on Zopa and Lending Club.
We are trading lessons on everything from sushi-making to coding on Skillshare, and we're even sharing our pets on DogVacay.
Now, I've looked at thousands of these marketplaces, and trust and efficiency are always the critical ingredients.
Meet 46-year-old Chris Mok, who has, I bet, the best job title here of SuperRabbit.
Now, four years ago, Chris lost his job, unfortunately, as an art buyer at Macy's, and like so many people, he struggled to find a new one during the recession.
Now, the story behind TaskRabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of Kobe.
Now what happened was, in February 2008, Leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner, when Kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva.
They realized they'd run out of dog food.
Kevin had to cancel the cab and trudge out in the snow.
Now, later that evening, the two self-confessed tech geeks starting talking about how cool it would be if some kind of eBay for errands existed.
Six months later, Leah quit her job, and TaskRabbit was born.
At the time, she didn't realize that she was actually hitting on a bigger idea she later called service networking.
It's essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world.
Now the way TaskRabbit works is, people outsource the tasks that they want doing, name the price they're willing to pay, and then vetted Rabbits bid to run the errand.
Yes, there's actually a four-stage, rigorous interview process that's designed to find the people that would make great personal assistants and weed out the dodgy Rabbits.
Now, there's over 4,000 Rabbits across the United States and 5,000 more on the waiting list.
Now the tasks being posted are things that you might expect, like help with household chores or doing some supermarket runs.
But I love that the number one task posted, over a hundred times a day, is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing: yes, assembling Ikea furniture. (Laughter) (Applause) It's brilliant. Now, we may laugh, but Chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life.
And 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed.
Now, when you think about it, it's amazing, right, that over the past 20 years, we've evolved from trusting people online to share information to trusting to handing over our credit card information, and now we're entering the third trust wave: connecting trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people-powered marketplaces.
I actually came across this fascinating study by the Pew Center this week that revealed that an active Facebook user is three times as likely as a non-Internet user to believe that most people are trustworthy.
Virtual trust will transform the way we trust one another face to face.
How to ensure our digital identities reflect our real world identities? Do we want them to be the same?
How do we mimic the way trust is built face-to-face online?
How do we stop people who've behaved badly in one community doing so under a different guise?
Reputation is the measurement of how much a community trusts you.
You can see that over 200 people have given him an average rating over 4.99 out of 5.
And interestingly, what Chris has noted is that as his reputation has gone up, so has his chances of winning a bid and how much he can charge.
In other words, for SuperRabbits, reputation has a real world value.
And it's not just the breadth but the volume of reputation data out there that is staggering.
Just consider this: Five million nights have been booked on Airbnb in the past six months alone.
30 million rides have been shared on Carpooling.com.
This year, two billion dollars worth of loans will go through peer-to-peer lending platforms.
This adds up to millions of pieces of reputation data on how well we behave or misbehave.
Now, capturing and correlating the trails of information that we leave in different places is a massive challenge, but one we're being asked to figure out.
What the likes of Sebastian are starting to rightfully ask is, shouldn't they own their reputation data?
Shouldn't the reputation that he's personally invested on building on Airbnb mean that it should travel with him from one community to another?
What I mean by this is, say he started selling second-hand books on Amazon. Why should he have to start from scratch?
It's a bit like when I moved from New York to Sydney.
It was ridiculous. I couldn't get a mobile phone plan because my credit history didn't travel with me.
I was essentially a ghost in the system.
Now I'm not suggesting that the next stage of the reputation economy is about adding up multiple ratings into some kind of empty score.
People's lives are too complex, and who wants to do that?
I also want to be clear that this isn't about adding up tweets and likes and friends in a Klout-like fashion.
Just because Sebastian is a wonderful host does not mean that he can assemble Ikea furniture.
The big challenge is figuring out what data makes sense to pull, because the future's going to be driven by a smart aggregation of reputation, not a single algorithm.
It's only a matter of time before we'll be able to perform a Facebook- or Google-like search and see a complete picture of someone's behaviors in different contexts over time.
Now this is a concept that I'm currently researching and writing my next book on, and currently define as the worth of your reputation, your intentions, capabilities and values across communities and marketplaces.
This isn't some far-off frontier.
There are actually a wave of startups like Connect.Me and Legit and TrustCloud that are figuring out how you can aggregate, monitor and use your online reputation.
Now, I realize that this concept may sound a little Big Brother to some of you, and yes, there are some enormous transparency and privacy issues to solve, but ultimately, if we can collect our personal reputation, we can actually control it more, and extract the immense value that will flow from it.
Now privacy issues aside, the other really interesting issue I'm looking at is how do we empower digital ghosts, people [who] for whatever reason, are not active online, but are some of the most trustworthy people in the world?
How do we take their contributions to their jobs, their communities and their families, and convert that value into reputation capital?
Ultimately, when we get it right, reputation capital could create a massive positive disruption in who has power, trust and influence.
Indeed, reputation is a currency that I believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century.
Reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me.
Let me give you one example from the world of recruiting, where reputation data will make the résumé seem like an archaic relic of the past.
Four years ago, tech bloggers and entrepreneurs Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, decided to start something called Stack Overflow.
Now, Stack Overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions.
Now a few months after this site launched, the founders heard about something interesting, and it actually didn't surprise them.
What they heard was that users were putting their reputation scores on the top of their résumés, and that recruiters were searching the platform to find people with unique talents.
Now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way, because Stack Overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves, and what their peers think of them.
But the bigger principle of what's happening behind Stack Overflow, I think, is incredibly exciting.
People are starting to realize that the reputation they generate in one place has value beyond the environments from which it was built.
When you talk to super-users, whether that's SuperRabbits or super-people on Stack Overflow, or Uberhosts, they all talk about how having a high reputation unlocks a sense of their own power.
On Stack Overflow, it creates a level playing field, enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top.
On Airbnb, the people often become more important than the spaces. On TaskRabbit, it gives people control of their economic activity.
He's turning 50 this year, and he's convinced that the rich tapestry of reputation he's built on Airbnb will lead him to doing something interesting with the rest of his life.
You know, there are only a few windows in history where the opportunity exists to reinvent part of how our socioeconomic system works.
We're living through one of those moments.
In the 20th century, the invention of traditional credit transformed our consumer system, and in many ways controlled who had access to what.
In the 21st century, new trust networks, and the reputation capital they generate, will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power and personal identity, in ways we can't yet even imagine.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
It's 2008, and I'm just finishing my first year of design school.
So it's my turn and I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable.
And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything.
It's just completely silent.
And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."
Joy?
I wanted to be a designer because I wanted to solve real problems.
But I was also kind of intrigued, because joy is this intangible feeling, and how does that come from the stuff on the table next to me?
I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy?
How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?"
and this launched a journey -- one that I didn't know at the time would take me 10 years -- to understand the relationship between the physical world and the mysterious, quixotic emotion we call "joy."
And what I discovered is that not only are they linked, but that the physical world can be a powerful resource to us in creating happier, healthier lives.
After my review, I thought, "I know what joy feels like, but what is it, exactly?"
And I found that even scientists don't always agree, and they sometimes use the words "joy" and "happiness" and "positivity" more or less interchangeably.
But broadly speaking, when psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion -- one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down.
It's different than happiness, which measures how good we feel over time.
Joy is about feeling good in the moment, right now.
And this was interesting to me because as a culture, we are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and yet in the process, we kind of overlook joy.
So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from?
I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy.
On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?"
I felt like a detective.
Who were you with? What color was it?
I was the Nancy Drew of joy.
(Laughter) And after a few months of this, I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again.
hot air balloons and googly eyes -- (Laughter) and ice cream cones, especially the ones with the sprinkles.
These things seemed to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity.
And fireworks -- we don't even need to know what they're for, and we feel like we're celebrating, too.
They're universally joyful.
And seeing them all together, it gave me this indescribably hopeful feeling.
The sharply divided, politically polarized world we live in sometimes has the effect of making our differences feel so vast as to be insurmountable.
And yet underneath it all, there's a part of each of us that finds joy in the same things.
And though we're often told that these are just passing pleasures, in fact, they're really important, because they remind us of the shared humanity we find in our common experience of the physical world.
I had pictures of them up on my studio wall, and every day, I would come in and try to make sense of it.
And then one day, something just clicked.
symmetrical shapes ...
When I saw it this way, I realized that though the feeling of joy is mysterious and elusive, we can access it through tangible, physical attributes, or what designers call aesthetics, a word that comes from the same root as the Greek word "aísthomai," which means, "I feel," "I sense," "I perceive."
And since these patterns were telling me that joy begins with the senses, I began calling them "Aesthetics of Joy"; the sensations of joy.
And in the wake of this discovery, I noticed something that as I walked around, I began spotting little moments of joy everywhere I went -- a vintage yellow car or a clever piece of street art.
It was like I had a pair of rose-colored glasses, and now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing it everywhere.
It was like these little moments of joy were hidden in plain sight.
And at the same time, I had another realization, that if these are the things that bring us joy, then why does so much of the world look like this?
(Laughter) Why do we go to work here?
Why do we send our kids to schools that look like this?
And this is most acute for the places that house the people that are most vulnerable among us: nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters, housing projects.
Adults who exhibit genuine joy are often dismissed as childish or too feminine or unserious or self-indulgent, and so we hold ourselves back from joy, and we end up in a world that looks like this.
But if the aesthetics of joy can be used to help us find more joy in the world around us, then couldn't they also be used to create more joy?
And this led me to the work of the artist Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins, who believed that these kinds of environments are literally killing us.
And so they set out the create an apartment building that they believed would reverse aging.
And this is it.
(Laughter) (Applause) It's a real place, just outside Tokyo.
(Laughter) The floors undulate, so you don't end up walking around so much as kind of bouncing around the apartment, and there are bright colors in every direction.
I'm not sure I left any younger, but it's as if, by trying to create an apartment that would make us feel youthful, they ended up creating one that was joyful.
How do we bring these ideas back into the real world?
So I started finding people who were doing just that.
For example, this hospital, designed by the Danish artist Poul Gernes.
Or these schools, transformed by the non-profit Publicolor.
What's interesting is that Publicolor has heard from school administrators who say that attendance improves, graffiti disappears and kids actually say they feel safer in these painted schools.
And this aligns with research conducted in four countries, which shows that people working in more colorful offices are actually more alert, more confident and friendlier than those working in drab spaces.
Well, as I started to trace back our love of color, I found that some researchers see a connection to our evolution.
Color, in a very primal way, is a sign of life, a sign of energy.
And the same is true of abundance.
We evolved in a world where scarcity is dangerous, and abundance meant survival.
The architect Emmanuelle Moureaux uses this idea in her work a lot.
And what about all those round things I noticed?
Well, it turns out neuroscientists have studied this, too.
They put people into fMRI machines, and they showed them pictures of angular objects and round ones.
And what they found is that the amygdala, a part of the brain associated in part with fear and anxiety, lit up when people looked at angular objects, but not when they looked at the round ones.
They speculate that because angles in nature are often associated with objects that might be dangerous to us, that we evolved an unconscious sense of caution around these shapes, whereas curves set us at ease.
You can see this in action in the new Sandy Hook Elementary School.
After the mass shooting there in 2012, the architects Svigals + Partners knew that they needed to create a building that was secure, but they wanted to create one that was joyful, and so they filled it with curves.
Each moment of joy is small, but over time, they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
And so maybe instead of chasing after happiness, what we should be doing is embracing joy and finding ways to put ourselves in the path of it more often.
Deep within us, we all have this impulse to seek out joy in our surroundings.
And we have it for a reason.
Joy isn't some superfluous extra.
It's directly connected to our fundamental instinct for survival.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
(Applause)
Other people. Everyone is interested in other people.
Everyone has relationships with other people, and they're interested in these relationships for a variety of reasons.
Good relationships, bad relationships, annoying relationships, agnostic relationships, and what I'm going to do is focus on the central piece of an interaction that goes on in a relationship.
But before I do that, let me tell you a couple of things that made this possible.
The first is we can now eavesdrop safely on healthy brain activity.
Without needles and radioactivity, without any kind of clinical reason, we can go down the street and record from your friends' and neighbors' brains while they do a variety of cognitive tasks, and we use a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging.
You've probably all read about it or heard about in some incarnation. Let me give you a two-sentence version of it.
So we've all heard of MRIs. MRIs use magnetic fields and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain or your knee or your stomach, grayscale images that are frozen in time.
In the 1990s, it was discovered you could use the same machines in a different mode, and in that mode, you could make microscopic blood flow movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain.
You make a blood flow movie, you have an independent proxy of brain activity.
This has literally revolutionized cognitive science.
Take any cognitive domain you want, memory, motor planning, thinking about your mother-in-law, getting angry at people, emotional response, it goes on and on, put people into functional MRI devices, and image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity.
That's caused a literal revolution, and it's opened us up to a new experimental preparation. Neurobiologists, as you well know, have lots of experimental preps, worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this.
And now, we have a new experimental prep: human beings.
We can now use human beings to study and model the software in human beings, and we have a few burgeoning biological measures.
Cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago.
If you want to compare oranges to windshields, what do you do?
So instead, you convert them to a common currency scale, put them on that scale, and value them accordingly.
I won't go through the details of it, but that's an important discovery, and we know a good bit about that now, and it's just a small piece of it, but it's important because those are the neurons that you would lose if you had Parkinson's disease, and they're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally every drug of abuse, and that makes sense.
Drugs of abuse would come in, and they would change the way you value the world. They change the way you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice, and they make you value that over everything else.
Here's the key feature though. These neurons are also involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas, and I put some symbols up here that we assign value to for various reasons.
We have a behavioral superpower in our brain, and it at least in part involves dopamine.
We can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea, for a mere idea. No other species can do that.
In 1997, the cult Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet Hale-Bopp waiting to take them to the next level. It was an incredibly tragic event.
More than two thirds of them had college degrees.
But the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival using exactly the same systems that were put there to make them survive. That's a lot of control, okay?
One thing that I've left out of this narrative is the obvious thing, which is the focus of the rest of my little talk, and that is other people.
Let me just give you a few examples. So here's a baby.
She's three months old. She still poops in her diapers and she can't do calculus.
You can cover up one of her eyes, and you can still read something in the other eye, and I see sort of curiosity in one eye, I see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other.
Here's a couple. They're sharing a moment together, and we've even done an experiment where you can cut out different pieces of this frame and you can still see that they're sharing it. They're sharing it sort of in parallel.
Now, the elements of the scene also communicate this to us, but you can read it straight off their faces, and if you compare their faces to normal faces, it would be a very subtle cue.
Here's another couple. He's projecting out at us, and she's clearly projecting, you know, love and admiration at him.
Here's another couple. (Laughter) And I'm thinking I'm not seeing love and admiration on the left. (Laughter) In fact, I know this is his sister, and you can just see him saying, "Okay, we're doing this for the camera, and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face." (Laughter) He'll kill me for showing that.
All right, so what does this mean?
It engages deep systems in our brain, in dopaminergic systems that are there to make you chase sex, food and salt.
They keep you alive. It gives them the pie, it gives that kind of a behavioral punch which we've called a superpower.
So how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe?
And the short answer is games.
Economic games. So what we do is we go into two areas.
One area is called experimental economics. The other area is called behavioral economics.
And we steal their games. And we contrive them to our own purposes.
So this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game.
So a rational choice economist would say, well, you should take all non-zero offers.
At 80-20, it's a coin flip whether you accept that or not.
Why is that? You know, because you're pissed off.
You're mad. That's an unfair offer, and you know what an unfair offer is.
This is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world.
You have to be able to remember what you've done.
Then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back, and you have to do something that is interesting, which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay.
That is, you have to decide what that other person expects of you.
You have to send signals to manage your image in their mind.
Like a job interview. You sit across the desk from somebody, they have some prior image of you, you send signals across the desk to move their image of you from one place to a place where you want it to be.
We're so good at this we don't really even notice it.
In doing this, what we've discovered is that humans are literal canaries in social exchanges.
Canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines.
When methane built up, or carbon dioxide built up, or oxygen was diminished, the birds would swoon before people would -- so it acted as an early warning system: Hey, get out of the mine. Things aren't going so well.
Well, the so what is, that's a really nice behavioral measure, the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play.
Here's the cool thing. Six or seven years ago, we developed a team. It was at the time in Houston, Texas.
We synchronize the machines, set them into these staged social interactions, and we eavesdrop on both of the interacting brains. So for the first time, we don't have to look at just averages over single individuals, or have individuals playing computers, or try to make inferences that way. We can study individual dyads.
We can study the way that one person interacts with another person, turn the numbers up, and start to gain new insights into the boundaries of normal cognition, but more importantly, we can put people with classically defined mental illnesses, or brain damage, into these social interactions, and use these as probes of that.
There's another hub in London, now, and the rest are getting set up. We hope to give the data away at some stage. That's a complicated issue about making it available to the rest of the world.
But we're also studying just a small part of what makes us interesting as human beings, and so I would invite other people who are interested in this to ask us for the software, or even for guidance on how to move forward with that.
We just haven't had the tools to look at interacting brains simultaneously.
The fact is, though, that even when we're alone, we're a profoundly social creature. We're not a solitary mind built out of properties that kept it alive in the world independent of other people. In fact, our minds depend on other people. They depend on other people, and they're expressed in other people, so the notion of who you are, you often don't know who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people that are close to you, people that are enemies of you, people that are agnostic to you.
So this is the first sort of step into using that insight into what makes us human beings, turning it into a tool, and trying to gain new insights into mental illness.
Thanks for having me. (Applause) (Applause)
As it turns out, when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, there's a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force.
The topic that it's focused on, the question is whether or not all these digital technologies are affecting people's ability to earn a living, or, to say it a little bit different way, are the droids taking our jobs?
And there's some evidence that they are.
The Great Recession ended when American GDP resumed its kind of slow, steady march upward, and some other economic indicators also started to rebound, and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly.
Corporate profits are quite high; in fact, if you include bank profits, they're higher than they've ever been.
And business investment in gear -- in equipment and hardware and software -- is at an all-time high.
What they're not really doing is hiring.
So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio, in other words, the percentage of working-age people in America who have work.
But the story is not just a recession story.
The decade that we've just been through had relatively anemic job growth all throughout, especially when we compare it to other decades, and the 2000s are the only time we have on record where there were fewer people working at the end of the decade than at the beginning.
When you graph the number of potential employees versus the number of jobs in the country, you see the gap gets bigger and bigger over time, and then, during the Great Recession, it opened up in a huge way.
This is the government's projection for the working-age population going forward.
So if these predictions are accurate, that gap is not going to close.
In particular, I think my projection is way too optimistic, because when I did it, I was assuming that the future was kind of going to look like the past, with labor productivity growth, and that's actually not what I believe.
Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never, ever had before, and that kind of eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living.
Throughout all of history, if you wanted something translated from one language into another, you had to involve a human being.
Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices, all the way down to smartphones.
And if any of us have used these, we know that they're not perfect, but they're decent.
Throughout all of history, if you wanted something written, a report or an article, you had to involve a person.
Not anymore.
This is an article that appeared in Forbes online a while back, about Apple's earnings.
It was written by an algorithm.
A lot of people look at this and they say, "OK, but those are very specific, narrow tasks, and most knowledge workers are actually generalists.
And what they do is sit on top of a very large body of expertise and knowledge and they use that to react on the fly to kind of unpredictable demands, and that's very, very hard to automate."
One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings.
Took home three million dollars.
That's Ken on the right, getting beat three-to-one by Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer from IBM.
Now, Siri is far from perfect, and we can make fun of her flaws, but we should also keep in mind that if technologies like Siri and Watson improve along a Moore's law trajectory, which they will, in six years, they're not going to be two times better or four times better, they'll be 16 times better than they are right now.
So I start to think a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this.
And digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work, they're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well.
(Laughter) And I will vouch that it handled the stop-and-go traffic on US 101 very smoothly.
There are about three and a half million people who drive trucks for a living in the United States; I think some of them are going to be affected by this technology.
And right now, humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive.
But they're getting better quite quickly and DARPA, which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, is trying to accelerate their trajectory.
So, in short, yeah, the droids are coming for our jobs.
In the short term, we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren't very good at fixing bridges.
But in the not-too-long-term, I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room, we're going to transition into an economy that is very productive, but that just doesn't need a lot of human workers.
And managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces.
Voltaire summarized why; he said, "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need."
But despite this challenge -- personally, I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're developing now are going to take us into a Utopian future, not a dystopian future.
And to explain why, I want to pose a ridiculously broad question.
I want to ask: what have been the most important developments in human history?
Now, I want to share some of the answers that I've gotten in response to this question.
It's a wonderful question to ask and start an endless debate about, because some people are going to bring up systems of philosophy in both the West and the East that have changed how a lot of people think about the world.
And then other people will say, "No, actually, the big stories, the big developments are the founding of the world's major religions, which have changed civilizations and have changed and influenced how countless people are living their lives."
And then some other folk will say, "Actually, what changes civilizations, what modifies them and what changes people's lives are empires, so the great developments in human history are stories of conquest and of war."
(Laughter) There are some optimistic answers to this question, so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration and the opening up of the world.
It's an endless debate and there's no conclusive, single answer to it.
But if you're a geek like me, you say, "Well, what do the data say?"
And you start to do things like graph things that we might be interested in -- the total worldwide population, for example, or some measure of social development or the state of advancement of a society.
And you start to plot the data, because, by this approach, the big stories, the big developments in human history, are the ones that will bend these curves a lot.
You conclude, actually, that none of these things have mattered very much.
The steam engine and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much, that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, "... they made mockery out of all that had come before."
And they did this by infinitely multiplying the power of our muscles, overcoming the limitations of our muscles.
Now, what we're in the middle of now is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains and infinitely multiplying our mental power.
How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming the limitations of our muscles?
So at the risk of repeating myself a little bit, when I look at what's going on with digital technology these days, we are not anywhere near through with this journey.
And when I look at what is happening to our economies and our societies, my single conclusion is that we ain't seen nothing yet.
Economies don't run on energy.
They don't run on capital, they don't run on labor.
So the work of innovation, the work of coming up with new ideas, is some of the most powerful, most fundamental work that we can do in an economy.
(Laughter) We'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into other elite institutions and we'd wait for the innovation.
Now -- (Laughter) as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard, I've got no problem with this.
(Laughter) So here are the winners of a Topcoder programming challenge, and I assure you that nobody cares where these kids grew up, where they went to school, or what they look like.
All anyone cares about is the quality of the work, the quality of the ideas.
And over and over again, we see this happening in the technology-facilitated world.
The work of innovation is becoming more open, more inclusive, more transparent and more merit-based, and that's going to continue no matter what MIT and Harvard think of it, and I couldn't be happier about that development.
I hear once in a while, "OK, I'll grant you that, but technology is still a tool for the rich world, and what's not happening, these digital tools are not improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid."
The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a while back where he watched, in great detail, what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, when they got mobile phones for the very first time.
And when you write for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, you have to use very dry and very circumspect language.
Prices stabilized, so people could plan their economic lives.
Waste was not reduced -- it was eliminated.
And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages measurably improved."
What happened instead is he very carefully documented what happens over and over again when technology comes for the first time to an environment and a community: the lives of people, the welfares of people, improve dramatically.
So as I look around at all the evidence and I think about the room that we have ahead of us, I become a huge digital optimist and I start to think that this wonderful statement from the physicist Freeman Dyson is actually not hyperbole.
Our technologies are great gifts, and we, right now, have the great good fortune to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing, when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world.
So, yeah, the droids are taking our jobs, but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely.
The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we're going to do, I am very confident, what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world.
I'm very confident we're going to learn to live more lightly on the planet, and I am extremely confident that what we're going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound and so beneficial that it's going to make a mockery out of everything that came before.
I'm with him; I'm going to echo his words: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."
(Laughter) Thanks very much.
His name is Nostradamus, although here the Sun have made him look a little bit like Sean Connery. (Laughter) And like most of you, I suspect, I don't really believe that people can see into the future.
Now we expect that to happen with silly stories about precognition, but the problem is, we have exactly the same problem in academia and in medicine, and in this environment, it costs lives.
So firstly, thinking just about precognition, as it turns out, just last year a researcher called Daryl Bem conducted a piece of research where he found evidence of precognitive powers in undergraduate students, and this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and most of the people who read this just said, "Okay, well, fair enough, but I think that's a fluke, that's a freak, because I know that if I did a study where I found no evidence that undergraduate students had precognitive powers, it probably wouldn't get published in a journal.
But it doesn't just happen in the dry academic field of psychology.
It also happens in, for example, cancer research.
So in March, 2012, just one month ago, some researchers reported in the journal Nature how they had tried to replicate 53 different basic science studies looking at potential treatment targets in cancer, and out of those 53 studies, they were only able to successfully replicate six.
And they say in their discussion that this is very likely because freaks get published.
And their first recommendation of how to fix this problem, because it is a problem, because it sends us all down blind alleys, their first recommendation of how to fix this problem is to make it easier to publish negative results in science, and to change the incentives so that scientists are encouraged to post more of their negative results in public.
But it doesn't just happen in the very dry world of preclinical basic science cancer research.
It also happens in the very real, flesh and blood of academic medicine. So in 1980, some researchers did a study on a drug called lorcainide, and this was an anti-arrhythmic drug, a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, and the idea was, after people have had a heart attack, they're quite likely to have abnormal heart rhythms, so if we give them a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, this will increase the chances of them surviving.
Early on its development, they did a very small trial, just under a hundred patients.
Fifty patients got lorcainide, and of those patients, 10 died.
Another 50 patients got a dummy placebo sugar pill with no active ingredient, and only one of them died.
So they rightly regarded this drug as a failure, and its commercial development was stopped, and because its commercial development was stopped, this trial was never published.
Unfortunately, over the course of the next five, 10 years, other companies had the same idea about drugs that would prevent arrhythmias in people who have had heart attacks.
Now actually, in 1993, the researchers who did that 1980 study, that early study, published a mea culpa, an apology to the scientific community, in which they said, "When we carried out our study in 1980, we thought that the increased death rate that occurred in the lorcainide group was an effect of chance."
The development of lorcainide was abandoned for commercial reasons, and this study was never published; it's now a good example of publication bias.
Now these are stories from basic science.
The academic publishing environment is very different now.
There are academic journals like "Trials," the open access journal, which will publish any trial conducted in humans regardless of whether it has a positive or a negative result.
So this is a drug called reboxetine, and this is a drug that I myself have prescribed. It's an antidepressant.
But it turned out that I was misled. In fact, seven trials were conducted comparing reboxetine against a dummy placebo sugar pill. One of them was positive and that was published, but six of them were negative and they were left unpublished.
Three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants in which reboxetine was just as good, and they were published, but three times as many patients' worth of data was collected which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments, and those trials were not published.
But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied.
So here is one example of how you approach it.
The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know that they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature. So this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA.
And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. And this is what they found.
It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive, half of them were negative, in reality.
But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture.
Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published.
Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature.
In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find.
Publication bias affects every field of medicine.
About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings.
This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
If I flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses, I could make it look as if I had a coin that always came up heads.
But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin.
And to me, this is research misconduct.
If I conducted one study and I withheld half of the data points from that one study, you would rightly accuse me, essentially, of research fraud.
And yet, for some reason, if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want, we don't consider that to be research misconduct.
And when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers, academics, industry sponsors, journal editors, for some reason we find it more acceptable, but the effect on patients is damning.
Complications is a medical euphemism for pneumonia and death. (Laughter) Now when the Cochrane systematic reviewers were trying to collect together all of the data from all of the trials that had ever been conducted on whether Tamiflu actually did this or not, they found that several of those trials were unpublished.
And if you want to read the full correspondence and the excuses and the explanations given by the drug company, you can see that written up in this week's edition of PLOS Medicine.
But people didn't bother to use those registers.
And so then the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors came along, and they said, oh, well, we will hold the line.
But they didn't hold the line. In 2008, a study was conducted which showed that half of all of trials published by journals edited by members of the ICMJE weren't properly registered, and a quarter of them weren't registered at all.
And then finally, the FDA Amendment Act was passed a couple of years ago saying that everybody who conducts a trial must post the results of that trial within one year.
And in the BMJ, in the first edition of January, 2012, you can see a study which looks to see if people kept to that ruling, and it turns out that only one in five have done so.
This is a disaster.
We need to publish all trials in humans, including the older trials, for all drugs in current use, and you need to tell everyone you know that this is a problem and that it has not been fixed.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
I've always written primarily about architecture, about buildings, and writing about architecture is based on certain assumptions.
An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place, or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics and culture and economics that shapes these places, at the end of the day, you can go and you can visit them. You can walk around them.
You can smell them. You can get a feel for them.
You can experience their sense of place.
And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, but I was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket.
And what was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world had changed.
In this very short period of time, you know, whether you call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last, you know, four or five years of being online all the time, our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that our attention is constantly divided. You know, we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking out in the world around us.
It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest, I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole.
We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse.
So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them together in the same place.
And then this happened.
My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does, and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard, and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall.
And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire, and he said, "There's your problem.
A squirrel is chewing on your Internet." (Laughter) And this seemed astounding. The Internet is a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed everything from shopping to dating to revolutions.
It was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) But that in fact seemed to be the case.
A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter) And then I got this image in my head of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started to follow it. Where would it go?
Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit?
And the answer, by all accounts, was no.
This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it, as represented in the sitcom "The IT Crowd."
Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben, because that's where you get the best reception, but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it for the afternoon to use in an office presentation.
The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it for a short while, and she looks at it and she says, "This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?"
The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly black box with a blinking red light on it.
It wasn't a real world out there.
But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, and that's what I spent about two years visiting, these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, which is one of the buildings in the world, one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, where more networks of the Internet connect to each other than anywhere else.
And that connection is an unequivocally physical process.
It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is, connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into the ceiling and down into the router of another network, and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate.
A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others, has 10 times more networks connecting within it than the next tier of buildings.
And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home to about a half a dozen very important networks, which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect Europe and America and connect all of us.
If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath the ocean, cables like this.
And in this dimension, they are incredibly small.
You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose.
They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five or eight thousand miles in length, and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other, and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction.
They connect in a manhole like this. Literally, this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in.
This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland.
And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, when I started thinking about this, there was one cable down the Western coast of Africa, represented in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line.
Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast.
Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable, they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build an industry around it, they need to know that their connection isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks, you have to send a ship out into the water, throw a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end, and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over.
It's an intensely, intensely physical process.
So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate.
And I've never met him. We've only communicated via this telepresence system, which always makes me think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) And he is English. The undersea cable industry is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42.
(Laughter) Because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago.
They have -- this is literally a beam of light around the world, and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around the other direction. And then having done that, they started to look for places to wire next.
They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant North and South, primarily these cables to Africa.
But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination.
He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness.
And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time online we experience these fleeting moments of connection, these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that.
And Simon was working on a new cable, WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon.
And he said there was coming soon, depending on the weather, but he'd let me know when, and so with about four days notice, he said to go to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9, this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter) And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line, called a messenger line, and that was the first link between sea and land, this link that would then be leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light.
Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place.
And then, once it was in the right place, he got back in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off, and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out to the ship, and when he got there, they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore, and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter) And then once that cable was on shore, they began to prepare to connect it to the other side, for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station.
And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud.
It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing.
And what surprised me as well was that as much as this is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same.
You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer giving directions in the background. And more importantly, the places are the same. These cables still connect these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore, New York.
And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, but every time we put something on the cloud, we give up some responsibility for it.
And that doesn't seem right.
And we should know, I think, we should know where our Internet comes from, and we should know what it is that physically, physically connects us all.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thanks. (Applause)
(Music) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here.
A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets.
This one entered her left hemisphere, and knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain.
And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, and she's struggling to produce some of the most basic words, and you can see her growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist.
And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, and they start singing together, and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels, and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings, "Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine."
And it's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail, in this case literally speak.
Seeing this video of Gabby Giffords reminded me of the work of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard, and Schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called Melodic Intonation Therapy, which has become very popular in music therapy now.
Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic, could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences, but they could still sing the lyrics to a song, whether it was "Happy Birthday To You" or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones.
And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons, he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere's damage.
But I had an ulterior motive of visiting Gottfried Schlaug, and it was this: that I was at a crossroads in my life, trying to choose between music and medicine.
I had just completed my undergraduate, and I was working as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe, studying Parkinson's disease at Harvard, and I had fallen in love with neuroscience. I wanted to become a surgeon.
I wanted to become a doctor like Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes, these kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or Ethiopia and work with AIDS patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or with children with disfiguring cancers.
I wanted to become that kind of Red Cross doctor, that doctor without borders.
On the other hand, I had played the violin my entire life.
Music for me was more than a passion. It was obsession.
It was oxygen. I was lucky enough to have studied at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and to have played my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv, and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory, but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine. And that afternoon, I had to ask him, "How was it for you making that decision?"
And he said that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to, and that for me, medical school could wait, but that the violin simply would not.
And after two more years of studying music, I decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT and applying to medical school like a good Indian son to become the next Dr. Gupta. (Laughter) And I decided to shoot for the impossible and I took an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic.
It was my first audition, and after three days of playing behind a screen in a trial week, I was offered the position.
And it was a dream. It was a wild dream to perform in an orchestra, to perform in the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in an orchestra conducted now by the famous Gustavo Dudamel, but much more importantly to me to be surrounded by musicians and mentors that became my new family, my new musical home.
But a year later, I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician.
Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the United States, as told through the book and the movie "The Soloist," but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher, and I told him that wherever he had his violin, and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him.
And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row, I witnessed how music was able to bring him back from his very darkest moments, from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode.
Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper meaning, because now it was about communication, a communication where words failed, a communication of a message that went deeper than words, that registered at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel's psyche, yet came as a true musical offering from me.
And at the very core of this crisis of mine, I felt somehow the life of music had chosen me, where somehow, perhaps possibly in a very naive sense, I felt what Skid Row really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer and not another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill.
And this is a particularly poignant quote because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum.
And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel, I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians called Street Symphony, bringing the light of music into the very darkest places, performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on Skid Row, performing for combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane.
After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face, and she had a palsy, she was shaking, and she had this gorgeous smile, and she said that she had never heard classical music before, she didn't think she was going to like it, she had never heard a violin before, but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine, and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first time in six years, when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication.
Suddenly, what we're finding with these concerts, away from the stage, away from the footlights, out of the tuxedo tails, the musicians become the conduit for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access to this room, would never have access to the kind of music that we make.
Just as medicine serves to heal more than the building blocks of the body alone, the power and beauty of music transcends the "E" in the middle of our beloved acronym.
The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by Wagner, or a symphony by Brahms, or chamber music by Beethoven, compels us to remember our shared, common humanity, the deeply communal connected consciousness, the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired into our brain's right hemisphere.
And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mental illness within homelessness and incarceration, the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them, to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them.
And the spark of that beauty, the spark of that humanity transforms into hope, and we know, whether we choose the path of music or of medicine, that's the very first thing we must instill within our communities, within our audiences, if we want to inspire healing from within.
Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry, but he died when he was a year older than me.
And Keats said, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.
That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."
(Music) (Applause)
(Circus music) [Ted N' Ed's Carnival] [John Lloyd's Inventory of the Invisible] [Adapted from a TEDTalk given by John Lloyd in 2009] June Cohen: Our next speaker has spent his whole career eliciting that sense of wonder.
Please welcome John Lloyd.
(Applause) [Hall of Mirrors] The question is, "What is invisible?"
We can see matter but we can't see what's the matter.
We can see the stars and the planets but we can't see what holds them apart, or what draws them together.
In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there.
One of the interesting things about invisibility is, the things that we can's see, we also can't understand.
Gravity is one thing that we can't see, and which we don't understand.
It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest, and nobody really knows what it is or why it's there.
For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to Earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity.
Isn't that amazing?
Isn't it incredible that we can't read each other's minds, when we can touch each other, taste each other, perhaps, if we get close enough, but we can't read each other's minds.
In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion which some claim is the root of all religions, Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say, but their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist.
So that's why we don't think it exists; the Sufi masters working on us.
In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness, gotten nowhere, we have no idea how consciousness works.
Not only have they not created artificial intelligence, they haven't yet created artificial stupidity.
(Laughter) The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all powerful.
Interesting.
[God?] I refuse to be drawn on the question on whether God exists until somebody properly defines the terms.
And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100 thousand genes.
Every year since, it's been revised downwards.
We now think there are likely to be just over 20 thousand genes in the human genome.
This is extraordinary, because rice -- get this -- rice is known to have 38 thousand genes.
Potatoes have 48 chromosomes, two more than people, and the same as a gorilla.
The universe disappears.
The more light there is, the less you can see.
Time. Nobody can see time.
I don't know if you know this.
There's a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures.
You can't see the future, obviously, and you can't see the past, except in your memory.
And I said, "Yes." He said, "Why can't I?"
Which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job.
You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed.
Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff -- but every cell in your body is replaced at some point.
Taste buds, every ten days or so.
Livers and internal organs take a bit longer.
Spine takes several years.
But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago.
The question is: who then are we? What are we?
They're smaller than the wavelength of light.
Gas, can't see that.
Interesting, somebody mentioned 1600 recently.
Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called van Helmont.
It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual.
(Laughter) But well done, him.
Light -- you can't see light.
When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it.
Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this.
Electricity, can't see that.
Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity, they don't.
Nobody knows what it is.
(Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light, when you turn the light on, they don't.
How many can we see?
Five. Five, out of a hundred billion galaxies, with the naked eye.
And one of them is quite difficult to see, unless you've got very good eyesight.
Radio waves. There's another thing.
Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves, in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated.
And he said, "Well, I've no idea, but I guess somebody will find a use for them someday.
It is incredible how little we know.
Thomas Edison once said, "We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything."
And I've come to the conclusion -- because you ask this other question: "What's another thing we can't see?"
The point -- what I've got it down to is there are only two questions really worth asking.
"Why are we here?", and "What should we do about it while we are?"
To help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century.
One a mathematician and engineer, and the other a poet.
The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, "I don't know why we are here, but I am pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves."
(Laughter) And secondly, and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, "We are here on Earth to help others.
(Laughter) (Applause) (Circus music) [Get your souvenir photo here!] [Continue your journey into the unknown!] (Circus music)
When I was considering a career in the art world, I took a course in London, and one of my supervisors was this irascible Italian called Pietro, who drank too much, smoked too much and swore much too much.
But he was a passionate teacher, and I remember one of our earlier classes with him, he was projecting images on the wall, asking us to think about them, and he put up an image of a painting.
It was a landscape with figures, semi-dressed, drinking wine. There was a nude woman in the lower foreground, and on the hillside in the back, there was a figure of the mythological god Bacchus, and he said, "What is this?"
And I -- no one else did, so I put up my hand, and I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
"It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian." (Laughter) He said, "You boneless bookworm!
It's a fucking orgy!"
(Laughter) As I said, he swore too much.
Pietro was suspicious of formal art training, art history training, because he feared that it filled people up with jargon, and then they just classified things rather than looking at them, and he wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary, and he wanted us to use our eyes, and he was especially evangelical about this message, because he was losing his sight.
He wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects.
How is it used?
And these were important lessons to me when I subsequently became a professional art historian.
Tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages and, really, well into the 18th century, and it was pretty apparent why.
Tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes with whom they wanted to be associated, or even themselves, and in addition to that, tapestries were hugely expensive.
They required scores of highly skilled weavers working over extended periods of time with very expensive materials -- the wools, the silks, even gold and silver thread.
Well, I became a tapestry historian.
In due course, I ended up as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, because I saw the Met as one of the few places where I could organize really big exhibitions about the subject I cared so passionately about.
We thought very hard about how to present this unknown subject to a modern audience: the dark colors to set off the colors that remained in objects that were often faded; the placing of lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread; the labeling.
There was a lot of skepticism. On the opening night, I overheard one of the senior members of staff saying, "This is going to be a bomb."
But in reality, in the course of the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show.
The exhibition was designed to be an experience, and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs.
So I want you to use your imaginations, thinking of these wall-high objects, some of them 10 meters wide, depicting lavish court scenes with courtiers and dandies who would look quite at home in the pages of the fashion press today, thick woods with hunters crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of wild boars and deer, violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism.
I remember taking my son's school class. He was eight at the time, and all the little boys, they kind of -- you know, they were little boys, and then the thing that caught their attention was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog pooping in the foreground — (Laughter) — kind of an in-your-face joke by the artist.
And you can just imagine them.
But it brought it alive to them. I think they suddenly saw that these weren't just old faded tapestries.
And for me as a curator, I felt proud. I felt I'd shifted the needle a little.
Through this experience that could only be created in a museum, I'd opened up the eyes of my audience -- historians, artists, press, the general public -- to the beauty of this lost medium.
And that, to me, today, is now the challenge and the fun of my job, supporting the vision of my curators, whether it's an exhibition of Samurai swords, early Byzantine artifacts, Renaissance portraits, or the show we heard mentioned earlier, the McQueen show, with which we enjoyed so much success last summer.
That was an interesting case.
In the late spring, early summer of 2010, shortly after McQueen's suicide, our curator of costume, Andrew Bolton, came to see me, and said, "I've been thinking of doing a show on McQueen, and now is the moment. We have to, we have to do it fast."
It wasn't easy. McQueen had worked throughout his career with a small team of designers and managers who were very protective of his legacy, but Andrew went to London and worked with them over the summer and won their confidence, and that of the designers who created his amazing fashion shows, which were works of performance art in their own right, and we proceeded to do something at the museum, I think, we've never done before.
It wasn't just your standard installation.
And in this extraordinary setting, the costumes were like actors and actresses, or living sculptures.
It could have looked like shop windows on Fifth Avenue at Christmas, but because of the way that Andrew connected with the McQueen team, he was channeling the rawness and the brilliance of McQueen, and the show was quite transcendant, and it became a phenomenon in its own right.
By the end of the show, we had people queuing for four or five hours to get into the show, but no one really complained.
I heard over and over again, "Wow, that was worth it.
Now, I've described two very immersive exhibitions, but I also believe that collections, individual objects, can also have that same power.
Whether it's Libya, Egypt, Syria, it's in our galleries that we can explain and give greater understanding.
I mean, our new Islamic galleries are a case in point, opened 10 years, almost to the week, after 9/11.
I think for most Americans, knowledge of the Islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11, and then it was thrust upon us in one of America's darkest hours, and the perception was through the polarization of that terrible event.
Now, in our galleries, we show 14 centuries of the development of different Islamic cultures across a vast geographic spread, and, again, hundreds of thousands of people have come to see these galleries since they opened last October.
I'm often asked, "Is digital media replacing the museum?"
It gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe, but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passionate scholarship.
Bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time, across space, whose lives may have been very different to our own, but who, like us, had hopes and dreams, frustrations and achievements in their lives. And I think this is a process that helps us better understand ourselves, helps us make better decisions about where we're going.
From there, you can walk in any direction to almost any culture.
I frequently go out into the hall and the galleries and I watch our visitors coming in.
Some of them are comfortable. They feel at home.
They feel that the institution is elitist.
I'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism.
Because for us, it's all about bringing them face to face with great works of art, capturing them at that moment of discomfort, when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iPhone, your Blackberry, but to create a zone where their curiosity can expand.
And whether it's in the expression of a Greek sculpture that reminds you of a friend, or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry, or, to bring it back to my tutor Pietro, those dancing figures who are indeed knocking back the wine, and that nude figure in the left foreground.
Wow. She is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality.
You know it's an orgy.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I’d like to dedicate this one to all the women in South Africa -- those women who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid.
And, of course, I’m dedicating it also to my grandmother, whom I think really played quite a lot of important roles, especially for me when I was an activist, and being harassed by the police.
And the students wanted to speak to the government, and police answered with bullets.
So every year, June 16, we will commemorate all those comrades or students who died.
And I was very young then. I think I was 11 years, and I started asking questions, and that’s when my political education started.
And I joined, later on, the youth organization under the African National Congress.
So as part of organizing this and whatever, this commemoration, the police will round us up as they call us leaders.
And I used to run away from home, when I know that maybe the police might be coming around the ninth or 10th of June or so.
And my grandmother one time said, "No, look, you’re not going to run away.
This is your place, you stay here."
And indeed, the police came -- because they’ll just arrest us and put us in jail and release us whenever they feel like, after the 20th or so.
So it was on the 10th of June, and they came, and they surrounded the house, and my grandmother switched off all the lights in the house, and opened the kitchen door.
I'm tired of you having to come here, harassing us, while your children are sleeping peacefully in your homes.
He is here, and you're not going to take him.
I've got a bowl full of boiling water -- the first one who comes in here, gets it."
And they left.
(Applause) (Music) ♫ Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama. ♫ ♫ Through the mist of the tears in your eyes on my childhood memory, ♫ ♫ I know the truth in your smile, ♫ ♫ I know the truth in your smile, ♫ ♫ piercing through the gloom of my ignorance. ♫ ♫ Oh, there is a mama lying down sleeping ♫ ♫ you're very ill and your heart crying. ♫ ♫ Wondering, wondering, wondering, wondering where is this world coming to. ♫ ♫ Is it right the children have to fend for themselves? No, no, no, no, no. no. ♫ ♫ Is it right heaping trouble on an old lady's head? ♫ ♫ So unlucky faceless people. ♫ ♫ Thula Mama Mama, Thula Mama. Thula Mama Mama. ♫ ♫ Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama Mama, Thula Mama ♫ ♫ Tomorrow it’s going to be better. ♫ ♫ Tomorrow it's going to be better to climb, Mama. ♫ ♫ Thula Mama, Thula Mama. ♫ ♫ Am I to break into the song like the blues man or troubadour. ♫ ♫ And then from long distance in no blues club am I to sing, ♫ ♫ baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby. ♫ ♫ Should I now stop singing of love, ♫ ♫ now that my memory’s surrounded by blood? ♫ ♫ Sister, why oh why do we at times mistake a pimple for a cancer? ♫ ♫ So who are they who says, no more love poems now? ♫ ♫ I want to sing a song of love ♫ ♫ for that woman who jumped the fences pregnant ♫ ♫ and still gave birth to a healthy child. ♫ ♫ Softly I walk into the sun rays of the smile ♫ ♫ that will ignite my love song, my song of life, ♫ ♫ my song of love, my song of life, my song of love, ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love, my song of life. ♫ ♫ Ooh, I’ve not tried to run away from song, ♫ ♫ I hear a persistent voice, more powerful than the enemy bombs. ♫ ♫ The song that washed our lives and the rains of our blood. ♫ ♫ My song of love and my song of life, my song of love, ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love, ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love -- I want everybody to sing with me -- ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love, my song of life -- everybody sing with me -- ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love -- I can’t hear you -- ♫ ♫ my song of love, my song of life -- you can do better -- ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love -- keep singing, keep singing -- ♫ ♫ my song of love, my song of life, yes, my song of love -- ♫ ♫ you can do better than that -- ♫ ♫ my song of life, yes, my song of love, my song of life, my song of love -- ♫ ♫ keep singing, keep singing, keep singing -- my song of love. ♫ ♫ Oh yeah. My song of -- a love song, my song of life. Sing. A love song, my song of life. Sing. ♫ ♫ Love song, my song of life. Sing. Love song, my song of life. Sing. ♫ ♫ Love song, my song of life. Sing. Love song, my song of life. ♫ ♫ Love song, my song of life. ♫ (Applause)
Over the past six months, I've spent my time traveling. I think I've done 60,000 miles, but without leaving my desk.
I look like one person but I'm two people. I'm Eddie who is here, and at the same time, my alter ego is a big green boxy avatar nicknamed Cyber Frank.
And then I struggled, because I was thinking to myself, "What should I talk? What should I do? It's a TED audience.
The question is, which of these horizontal lines is longer?
The answer is?
Audience: The same.Eddie Obeng: The same.
No, they're not the same. (Laughter) They're not the same. The top one is 10 percent longer than the bottom one.
It was to teach us parallax. Do you remember?
And you got, you said, "It's the same!" And you got it wrong.
And this is what I'm trying to explain has happened to us in the 21st century.
Somebody or something has changed the rules about how our world works.
When I'm joking, I try and explain it happened at midnight, you see, while we were asleep, but it was midnight 15 years ago. Okay?
You probably — No, you didn't. Okay. (Laughter) My simple idea is that what's happened is, the real 21st century around us isn't so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer exists.
If you search Amazon for the word "creativity," you'll discover something like 90,000 books.
If you go on Google and you look for "innovation + creativity," you get 30 million hits. If you add the word "consultants," it doubles to 60 million. (Laughter) Are you with me? And yet, statistically, what you discover is that about one in 100,000 ideas is found making money or delivering benefits two years after its inception.
People are supposed to be good at making stuff happen.
However, if I use as an example a family of five going on holiday, if you can imagine this, all the way from London all the way across to Hong Kong, what I want you to think about is their budget is only 3,000 pounds of expenses.
What actually happens is, if I compare this to the average real project, average real successful project, the family actually end up in Makassar, South Sulawesi, at a cost of 4,000 pounds, whilst leaving two of the children behind. (Laughter) What I'm trying to explain to you is, there are things which don't make sense to us.
This was a group of eminent economists apologizing to the Queen of England when she asked the question, "Why did no one tell us that the crisis was coming?" (Laughter) I'll never get my knighthood. I'll never get my knighthood. (Laughter) That's not the important point. The thing you have to remember is, these are eminent economists, some of the smartest people on the planet. Do you see the challenge? (Laughter) It's scary. My friend and mentor, Tim Brown of IDEO, he explains that design must get big, and he's right.
He wisely explains this to us. He says design thinking must tackle big systems for the challenges we have.
He's absolutely right.
What we do know is that the world has accelerated.
Cyberspace moves everything at the speed of light.
Technology accelerates things exponentially.
So if this is now, and that's the past, and we start thinking about change, you know, all governments are seeking change, you're here seeking change, everybody's after change, it's really cool. (Laughter) So what happens is, we get this wonderful whooshing acceleration and change.
The speed is accelerating. That's not the only thing.
At the same time, as we've done that, we've done something really weird.
We've doubled the population in 40 years, put half of them in cities, then connected them all up so they can interact.
There are charts which show all these movements of information. That density of information is amazing.
you know, for those of you who have as an office a little desk underneath the stairs, and you say, well this is my little desk under the stairs, no! You are sitting at the headquarters of a global corporation if you're connected to the Internet.
What's happened is, we've changed the scale.
Size and scale are no longer the same.
And then add to that, every time you tweet, over a third of your followers follow from a country which is not your own.
Global is the new scale. We know that.
And so people say things like, "The world is now a turbulent place." Have you heard them saying things like that?
And they use it as a metaphor. Have you come across this?
And they think it's a metaphor, but this is not a metaphor.
It's reality. As a young engineering student, I remember going to a demonstration where they basically, the demonstrator did something quite intriguing.
Okay? So I'll write the word "tap." Is that okay? It's a tap. (Laughter) Okay, so he attaches it to a transparent pipe, and he turns the water on.
And he says, do you notice anything? And the water is whooshing down this pipe.
So he's changing the flow of the water, but it's just a boring green line.
He adds some more. He adds some more. And then something weird happens.
There's this little flicker, and then as he turns it ever so slightly more, the whole of that green line disappears, and instead there are these little sort of inky dust devils close to the needle.
They're called eddies. Not me. And they're violently dispersing the ink so that it actually gets diluted out, and the color's gone.
What's happened in this world of pipe is somebody has flipped it. They've changed the rules from laminar to turbulent.
And I think this is our challenge, because somebody has actually increased — and it's probably you guys with all your tech and stuff — the speed, the scale and the density of interaction.
So I'll put a little line up here which represents learning, and that's how we used to do it. We could see things, understand them, take the time to put them into practice.
If you work in an institution, one day you will get them to make that decision.
So it's likely that the line, in terms of learning, is pretty flat.
You with me? This point over here, the point at which the lines cross over, the pace of change overtakes the pace of learning, and for me, that is what I was describing when I was telling you about midnight.
So what does it do to us? Well, it completely transforms what we have to do, many mistakes we make. We solve last year's problems without thinking about the future. If you try and think about it, the things you're solving now, what problems are they going to bring in the future?
I'll give you an example, a quick one. Creativity and ideas, I mentioned that earlier. All the CEOs around me, my clients, they want innovation, so they seek innovation. They say to people, "Take risks and be creative!"
But unfortunately the words get transformed as they travel through the air.
So we learned the answer and we carried this in our heads for 20, 30 years, are you with me?
And then suddenly we tell them to and it doesn't work.
Well, free pizzas! You should be treated better than the people who succeed.
So what I want to leave you, then, is with the explanation of why I actually traveled 60,000 miles from my desk.
When I realized the power of this new world, I quit my safe teaching job, and set up a virtual business school, the first in the world, in order to teach people how to make this happen, and I used some of my learnings about some of the rules which I'd learned on myself.
If you're interested, worldaftermidnight.com, you'll find out more, but I've applied them to myself for over a decade, and I'm still here, and I still have my house, and the most important thing is, I hope I've done enough to inject a little green ink into your lives, so that when you go away and you're making your next absolutely sensible and rational decision, you'll take some time to think, "Hmm, I wonder whether this also makes sense in our new world after midnight." Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you, thank you. (Applause)
To understand the world that live in, we tell stories.
And while remixing and sharing have come to define the web as we know it, all of us can now be part of that story through simple tools that allow us to make things online.
But video has been left out. It arrived on the web in a small box, and there it has remained, completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it.
In fact, in over a decade on the web, the only thing that has changed about video is the size of the box and the quality of the picture.
It's an online tool that allows anyone to combine video with content pulled live directly from the web.
Videos created with Popcorn behave like the web itself: dynamic, full of links, and completely remixable, and finally allowed to break free from the frame.
I want to give you a demo of a prototype that we're working on that we'll launch later this fall.
It will be completely free, and it will work in any browser.
So, every Popcorn production begins with the video, and so I've made a short, 20-second clip using a newscaster template that we use in workshops.
Hi, and welcome to my newscast.
I've added my location with a Google Map, and it's live, so try moving it around.
You can add pop-ups with live links and custom icons, or pull in content from any web service, like Flickr, or add articles and blog posts with links out to the full content.
So this is the timeline, and if you've ever edited video, you're familiar with this, but instead of clips in the timeline, what you're looking at is web events pulled into the video.
Now in this Popcorn production we've got the title card, we've got a Google Map that shows up picture-in-picture, then Popcorn lets it push outside the frame and take over the whole screen.
There are two pop-ups bringing you some other information, and a final article with a link out to the original article.
Let's go to this Google Map, and I'll show you how you can edit it.
All you do, go into the timeline, double-click the item, and I've set it to Toronto, because that's where I'm from.
Let's set it to something else.
Popcorn immediately goes out onto the web, talks to Google, grabs the map, and puts it in the display.
And it's live. It's not an image. So you click on it, you zoom in, right down to street view if you want to.
Now in the video, I mentioned adding a live feed, which we can do right now, so let's add a live feed from Flickr. Go over to the right-hand side, grab Flickr from the list of options, drag it into the timeline, and put it where you'd like it to go, and it immediately goes out to Flickr and starts pulling in images based on the tags. Now, my developers really like ponies, and so they've set that as the default tag.
Let's try something else, maybe something a bit more relevant to today.
If you come and watch this a week from now, this will be completely different, dynamic, just like the web, and just like the web, everything is sourced, so click your link, and you go straight to Flickr and see the source image.
Everything you've seen today is built with the basic building blocks of the web: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
That means it's completely remixable. It also means there's no proprietary software. All you need is a web browser.
So imagine if every video that we watched on the web worked like the web, completely remixable, linked to its source content, and interactive for everyone who views it.
I think Popcorn could change the way that we tell stories on the web, and the way we understand the world we live in.
Thank you. (Applause)
[This talk contains mature content Viewer discretion is advised] My specialty, as a sex educator, is I bring the science.
At the end of a conference in a hotel lobby once, I'm literally on my way out the door and a colleague chases me down.
A friend of mine -- (Laughter) wants to know if it's possible to get addicted to her vibrator."
The answer is no, but it is possible to get spoiled.
"Hi, Emily, we're sorry to interrupt you but we just wanted to ask a quick question about premature ejaculation."
"Sure, let me tell you about the stop/start technique."
That is my life.
So, it's a product.
The reason you experience it is because you spent the first two decades of your life learning that sex is a dangerous and disgusting source of everlasting shame and if you're not really good at it, no one will ever love you.
(Laughter) So you might squick, hearing me talk about sex while you're sitting in a room full of strangers -- that is normal.
We make our way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.
And I promise it's worth it.
Because I want to share with you today a piece of science that has changed how I think about everything, from the behavior of neurotransmitters in our emotional brain, to the dynamics of our interpersonal relationships.
To our judicial system.
And it starts with our brain.
There's an area of your brain you've probably heard referred to as the "reward center."
I think calling it the reward center is a little bit like calling your face your nose.
That is one prominent feature, but it ignores some other parts and will leave you really confused if you're trying to understand how faces work.
Which is like reward, so this is the opioid hotspots in your emotional brain.
How good?
How bad?"
If you drop sugar water on the tongue of a newborn infant, the opioid-liking system sets off fireworks.
Wanting is mediated by this vast dopaminergic network in and beyond the emotional brain.
It motivates us to move toward or away from a stimulus.
Wanting is more like your toddler, following you around, asking for another cookie.
So wanting and liking are related.
They are not identical.
And the third system is learning.
Learning is Pavlov's dogs.
You remember Pavlov?
He makes dogs salivate in response to a bell.
It's easy, you give a dog food, salivates automatically, and you ring a bell.
Bell, salivate.
Does that salivation mean that the dog wants to eat the bell?
Does it mean that the dog finds the bell delicious?
No.
What Pavlov did was make the bell food-related.
That happens in every emotional and motivational system that we have, including sex.
Research over the last 30 years has found that genital blood flow can increase in response to sex-related stimuli even if those sex-related stimuli are not also associated with the subjective experience of wanting and liking.
In fact, the predictive relationship between genital response and subjective experience is between 10 and 50 percent.
Which is an enormous range.
You just can't predict necessarily how a person feels about that sex-related stimulus just by looking at their genital blood flow.
When I explained this to my husband, he gave me the best possible example.
He was like, "So, that could explain this one time, when I was in high school, I ...
I got an erection in response to the phrase 'doughnut hole.'" (Laughter) Did he want to have sex with the doughnut?
No.
He was a teenage boy flooded with testosterone, which makes everything a little bit sex-related.
So what's the matter, is it hormonal, should I talk to a doctor, what's going on?"
Answer?
If you're experiencing unwanted pain, talk to a medical provider.
Another friend, back in college, told me about her first experiences of power play in a sexual relationship.
She told me that her partner tied her up with her arms over her head like this, she's standing up and he positions her so she's straddling a bar, presses up against her clitoris, like this.
It's a power play.
Leaves her alone.
So there's my friend, and she goes, "I'm bored."
(Laughter) And the guy comes back and she says, "I am bored."
And he looks at her and he looks at the bar and he says, "Then why are you wet?"
Why was she wet?
Is it sex-related to have pressure directly against your clitoris?
Yeah.
Nope.
She recognized and articulated what she wanted and liked.
All he had to do was listen to her words.
My friend on the phone -- what's the solution?
You tell your partner, "Listen to your words."
Also, buy some lube.
(Laughter) (Applause) Applause for lube, absolutely.
(Applause) Everyone, everywhere.
She was with a partner, a new partner, glad to be doing things, and they reached a point where that was as far as she was interested in going and so she said no.
Shy?
But she said it again.
She said no.
In the age of Me Too and Time's Up, people ask me, "How do I even know what my partner wants and likes?
There are times when consent is ambiguous and we need a large-scale cultural conversation about that.
But can we make sure we're noticing how clear consent is if we eliminate this myth?
In every example I've described so far, one partner recognized and articulated what they wanted and liked: "I want you right now."
"No."
And their partner told them they were wrong.
It's gaslighting.
You say you feel one way, but your body proves that you feel something else.
If my mouth waters when I bite into a wormy apple, does anybody say to me, "You said no, but your body said yes?"
The National Judicial Education Program published a document called "Judges Tell: What I Wish I Had Known Before I Presided in a Case of an Adult Victim of Sexual Assault."
This brings me one step closer into the darkness, and then I promise we will find our way into the light.
I'm thinking of a recent court case involving multiple instances of non-consensual sexual contact.
Imagine you're on the jury and you learn that the victim had orgasms.
Let me remind you, orgasm is physiological; it is a spontaneous, involuntary release of tension, generated in response to sex-related stimuli.
But the perpetrator’s lawyer made sure the jury knew about those orgasms because he thought the orgasms could be construed as consent.
I will also add that this was a child being abused by an adult in the family.
But even though I know it's difficult to sit with those feelings in a room full of strangers, if we can find our way through all of the messy feelings, I believe we will find our way to the light of compassion for that child, whose relationship with her body was damaged by an adult whose job it was to protect it.
(Applause) That compassion and that hope are why I travel all over, talking about this to anyone who will listen.
I can see it helping people, even as I say the words.
You don't have to say "clitoris" in front of 1000 strangers.
But do have one brave conversation.
In the US it's one in three women.
Almost half of transgender folks.
Say "Genital response means it's a sex-related stimulus.
It doesn't mean it was wanted or liked."
Say it to a judge you know or a lawyer you know, or a cop or anyone who might sit on a jury in a sexual assault case.
Say "Some people think that your body doesn't respond if you don't want or like what's happening, if only that were true.
Say, if you bite this moldy fruit and your mouth waters, nobody would say to you, "Well, you just don't want to admit how much you like it."
Say it to your partner.
My genitals do not tell you what I want or like.
(Applause) The roots of this myth are deep and they are entangled with some very dark forces in our culture.
But with every brave conversation we have, we make the world that little bit better, a little simpler for the confused teenager.
A little easier for your friend on the phone, worried that she's broken.
A little easier and safer for the survivors, one in three women.
Me too.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Helen Walters: Emily, come up here.
Thank you so much.
I know that you do this all the time, and yet, still, I'm so grateful to you for having the courage to come and talk about that on this stage.
So thank you.
Emily Nagoski: I am grateful to be here.
HW: So in your regular day job, I imagine, as you put at the top of the talk, you get asked a lot of questions.
But what's the one question that you get asked all the time that you can share with everyone here so you don't have to answer it 1000 times throughout the rest of the week?
EN: The question I get asked most often is actually the question underneath pretty much all the other questions, so, can you get addicted to your vibrator, please help me with my erectile dysfunction?
Why do we only want to be normal around sexuality?
I think, though, there's a lot of fear around being too different sexually.
Do I belong in this relationship, do I belong in this community of people, do I belong on earth as a sexual person?
To which the answer is always a resounding yes.
The only barrier there is, the only limit there is, there are two: one, if you're experiencing unwanted sexual pain, talk to a medical provider.
And two: As along as everybody involved is free and glad to be there, and free to leave whenever they want to, you're allowed to do anything that you want to.
There is no script, there is no box you have to fit into, you're allowed, as long as there is consent and no unwanted pain, you're totally free to do whatever you want.
HW: Thank you, you're incredible.
(Applause)
(Cello music starts) You found me, you found me under a pile of broken memories with your steady, steady love.
You rocked me, you rocked me, you rocked me all through the night with your steady, steady love.
(Cello music continues) (Taps rhythmically) You found me, you found me under a pile of broken memories with your steady, your steady, steady love.
And you rocked me, you rocked me, you rocked me all through the night with your steady, steady, steady love.
(Music ends) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
What I do is I organize information.
Professionally, I try to make sense often of things that don't make much sense themselves.
So my father might not understand what it is that I do for a living.
He's part of this ethnic minority called the Pontic Greeks.
They lived in Asia Minor and fled to Greece after a genocide about a hundred years ago.
And ever since that, migration has somewhat been a theme in my family.
My father moved to Germany, studied there and married, and as a result, I now have this half-German brain, with all the analytical thinking and that slightly dorky demeanor that come with that.
But of course, most journeys that we undertake from day to day are within a city.
But the question is, why is it obvious?
How do we know where we're going?
You arrive in a new city, and your brain is trying to make sense of this new place.
Once you find your base, your home, you start to build this cognitive map of your environment.
It's essentially this virtual map that only exists in your brain.
All animal species do it, even though we all use slightly different tools.
Us humans, of course, we don't move around marking our territory by scent, like dogs.
We don't run around emitting ultrasonic squeaks, like bats.
We just don't do that, although a night in the Temple Bar district can get pretty wild.
(Laughter) No, we do two important things to make a place our own.
But our mind keeps it pretty simple, yeah?
Every street is generally perceived as a straight line, and we kind of ignore the little twists and turns that the streets make.
When we do, however, make a turn into a side street, our mind tends to adjust that turn to a 90-degree angle.
This of course makes for some funny moments when you're in some old city layout that follows some sort of circular city logic, yeah?
Maybe you've had that experience as well.
Let's say you're on some spot on a side street that projects from a main cathedral square, and you want to get to another point on a side street just like that.
Now, I don't know about you, but I always feel like I find this wormhole or this inter-dimensional portal.
(Laughter) So we move along linear routes and our mind straightens streets and perceives turns as 90-degree angles.
The second thing that we do to make a place our own is we attach meaning and emotions to the things that we see along those lines.
If you go to the Irish countryside and you ask an old lady for directions, brace yourself for some elaborate Irish storytelling about all the landmarks, yeah?
We recognize them by the experiences and we abstract them into symbols.
(Laughter) What's more, we're all capable of understanding the cognitive maps, and you are all capable of creating these cognitive maps yourselves.
So next time, when you want to tell your friend how to get to your place, you grab a beermat, grab a napkin, and you just observe yourself create this awesome piece of communication design.
You might add little symbols along the way.
And when you look at what you've just drawn, you realize it does not resemble a street map.
No, what you've just drawn is more like a diagram or a schematic.
It's a visual construct of lines, dots, letters, designed in the language of our brains.
So it's no big surprise that the big information-design icon of the last century -- the pinnacle of showing everybody how to get from A to B, the London Underground map -- was not designed by a cartographer or a city planner; it was designed by an engineering draftsman.
In the 1930s, Harry Beck applied the principles of schematic diagram design and changed the way public transport maps are designed forever.
Now the very key to the success of this map is in the omission of less important information and in the extreme simplification.
If you were to look at the actual locations of these stations, you'd see they're very different.
But this is all for the clarity of the public Tube map.
Now we've reached the subject of public transport, and public transport here in Dublin is a somewhat touchy subject.
(Laughter) For everybody who does not know the public transport here in Dublin, essentially, we have this system of local buses that grew with the city.
And as these local buses approach the city center, they all run side by side and converge in pretty much one main street.
So when I stepped off the boat 12 years ago, I tried to make sense of that.
But when you explore a foreign and new public transport system, you will build a cognitive map in your mind in pretty much the same way.
Typically, you choose yourself a rapid transport route, and in your mind, this route is perceived as a straight line.
And like a pearl necklace, all the stations and stops are nicely and neatly aligned along the line.
And only then you start to discover some local bus routes that would fill in the gaps, and that allow for those wormhole, inter-dimensional portal shortcuts.
So I tried to make sense, and when I arrived, I was looking for some information leaflets that would help me crack this system and understand it, and I found those brochures.
(Laughter) They were not geographically distorted.
(Laughter) Now, the maps of Dublin transport have gotten better, and after I finished the project, they got a good bit better, but still no station names, still no routes.
So that's what I did.
I plotted it into my own map of Dublin, and in the city center ...
I got a nice spaghetti plate.
(Laughter) Now, this is a bit of a mess, so I decided, of course, "You're going to apply the rules of schematic design," cleaning up the corridors, widening the streets where there were loads of buses and making the streets at straight, 90-degree corners, 45-degree corners or fractions of that, and filled it in with the bus routes.
(Laughter) Now I can proudly say -- (Applause) I can proudly say, as a public transport map, this diagram is an utter failure.
Now, call me old-fashioned, but I think a public transport route map should have lines, because that's what they are, yeah?
So the outcome of my academic research, loads of questionnaires, case studies and looking at a lot of maps, was that a lot of the problems and shortcomings of the public transport system here in Dublin was the lack of a coherent public transport map -- a simplified, coherent public transport map -- because I think this is the crucial step to understanding a public transport network on a physical level, but it's also the crucial step to make a public transport network mappable on a visual level.
So I teamed up with a gentleman called James Leahy, a civil engineer and a recent master's graduate of the Sustainable Development program at DIT, and together we drafted the simplified model network, which I could then go ahead and visualize.
So here's what we did.
We distributed these rapid-transport corridors throughout the city center, and extended them into the outskirts.
James wanted to use bus rapid transport for that, rather than light rail.
This map only shows the rapid transport connections, no local bus, very much in the "metro map" style that was so successful in London, and that since has been exported to so many other major cities, and therefore is the language that we should use for public transport maps.
What's also important is, with a simplified network like this, it now would become possible for me to tackle the ultimate challenge and make a public transport map for the city center, one where I wouldn't just show rapid transport connections, but also all the local bus routes, streets and the likes, and this is what a map like this could look like.
I'll zoom in a little bit.
In this map, I'm including each transport mode, so rapid transport, bus, DART, tram and the likes.
Each individual route is represented by a separate line.
In fact, most of the side streets even with their name, and for good measure, also a couple of landmarks, some of them signified by little symbols, others by these isometric three-dimensional bird's-eye-view drawings.
The map is relatively small in overall size, so something that you could still hold as a fold-out map or display in a reasonably-sized display box on a bus shelter.
If you, for example, have a look at the two main corridors that run through the city -- the yellow and orange one over here -- this is how they look in an actual, accurate street map, and this is how they would look in my distorted, simplified public transport map.
So for a successful public transport map, we should not stick to accurate representation, but design them in the way our brains work.
This is the skyline of my hometown, New Orleans.
It was a great place to grow up, but it's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world.
Half the city is already below sea level.
In 2005, the world watched as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Fortunately, they and other family members got out in time, but they lost their homes, and as you can see, just about everything in them.
Other parts of the world have been hit by storms in even more devastating ways.
In 2008, Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath killed 138,000 in Myanmar.
This talk is about being prepared for, and resilient to the changes that are coming and that will affect our homes and our collective home, the Earth.
The changes in these times won't affect us all equally.
There are important distributional consequences, and they're not what you always might think.
In New Orleans, the elderly and female-headed households were among the most vulnerable.
For those in vulnerable, low-lying nations, how do you put a dollar value on losing your country where you ancestors are buried? And where will your people go?
And how will they cope in a foreign land?
Will there be tensions over immigration, or conflicts over competition for limited resources?
Like it or not, ready or not, this is our future.
Sure, some are looking for opportunities in this new world.
That's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice.
But while there might be some short-term individual winners, our collective losses will far outweigh them.
Look no further than the insurance industry as they struggle to cope with mounting catastrophic losses from extreme weather events.
The military gets it. They call climate change a threat multiplier that could harm stability and security, while governments around the world are evaluating how to respond.
So what can we do? How can we prepare and adapt?
I'd like to share three sets of examples, starting with adapting to violent storms and floods.
In New Orleans, the I-10 Twin Spans, with sections knocked out in Katrina, have been rebuilt 21 feet higher to allow for greater storm surge.
And these raised and energy-efficient homes were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right for the hard-hit Ninth Ward.
The devastated church my mom attends has been not only rebuilt higher, it's poised to become the first Energy Star church in the country.
They're selling electricity back to the grid thanks to solar panels, reflective paint and more.
Their March electricity bill was only 48 dollars.
Now these are examples of New Orleans rebuilding in this way, but better if others act proactively with these changes in mind.
For example, in Galveston, here's a resilient home that survived Hurricane Ike, when others on neighboring lots clearly did not.
And around the world, satellites and warning systems are saving lives in flood-prone areas such as Bangladesh.
But as important as technology and infrastructure are, perhaps the human element is even more critical.
We need better planning and systems for evacuation.
We need to better understand how people make decisions in times of crisis, and why.
While it's true that many who died in Katrina did not have access to transportation, others who did refused to leave as the storm approached, often because available transportation and shelters refused to allow them to take their pets.
Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or a rescue.
Fortunately in 2006, Congress passed the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (Laughter) — it spells "PETS" — to change that.
Second, preparing for heat and drought.
Farmers are facing challenges of drought from Asia to Africa, from Australia to Oklahoma, while heat waves linked with climate change have killed tens of thousands of people in Western Europe in 2003, and again in Russia in 2010.
In Ethiopia, 70 percent, that's 7-0 percent of the population, depends on rainfall for its livelihood.
Oxfam and Swiss Re, together with Rockefeller Foundation, are helping farmers like this one build hillside terraces and find other ways to conserve water, but they're also providing for insurance when the droughts do come.
The stability this provides is giving the farmers the confidence to invest.
It's giving them access to affordable credit.
It's a virtuous cycle, and one that could be replicated throughout the developing world.
After a lethal 1995 heat wave turned refrigerator trucks from the popular Taste of Chicago festival into makeshift morgues, Chicago became a recognized leader, tamping down on the urban heat island impact through opening cooling centers, outreach to vulnerable neighborhoods, planting trees, creating cool white or vegetated green roofs.
This is City Hall's green roof, next to Cook County's [portion of the] roof, which is 77 degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the surface.
Washington, D.C., last year, actually led the nation in new green roofs installed, and they're funding this in part thanks to a five-cent tax on plastic bags.
They're splitting the cost of installing these green roofs with home and building owners.
The roofs not only temper urban heat island impact but they save energy, and therefore money, the emissions that cause climate change, and they also reduce stormwater runoff.
So some solutions to heat can provide for win-win-wins.
Sea level rise threatens coastal ecosystems, agriculture, even major cities. This is what one to two meters of sea level rise looks like in the Mekong Delta.
That's where half of Vietnam's rice is grown.
Infrastructure is going to be affected.
Airports around the world are located on the coast.
It makes sense, right? There's open space, the planes can take off and land without worrying about creating noise or avoiding tall buildings.
Here's just one example, San Francisco Airport, with 16 inches or more of flooding.
San Francisco is also spending 40 million dollars to rethink and redesign its water and sewage treatment, as water outfall pipes like this one can be flooded with seawater, causing backups at the plant, harming the bacteria that are needed to treat the waste.
Beyond these technical solutions, our work at the Georgetown Climate Center with communities encourages them to look at what existing legal and policy tools are available and to consider how they can accommodate change.
For example, in land use, which areas do you want to protect, through adding a seawall, for example, alter, by raising buildings, or retreat from, to allow the migration of important natural systems, such as wetlands or beaches?
Other examples to consider. In the U.K., the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge.
The Asian Cities Climate [Change] Resilience Network is restoring vital ecosystems like forest mangroves.
These are not only important ecosystems in their own right, but they also serve as a buffer to protect inland communities.
New York City is incredibly vulnerable to storms, as you can see from this clever sign, and to sea level rise, and to storm surge, as you can see from the subway flooding.
But back above ground, these raised ventilation grates for the subway system show that solutions can be both functional and attractive. In fact, in New York, San Francisco and London, designers have envisioned ways to better integrate the natural and built environments with climate change in mind.
I think these are inspiring examples of what's possible when we feel empowered to plan for a world that will be different.
But now, a word of caution.
Adaptation's too important to be left to the experts.
Why? Well, there are no experts.
We're entering uncharted territory, and yet our expertise and our systems are based on the past.
"Stationarity" is the notion that we can anticipate the future based on the past, and plan accordingly, and this principle governs much of our engineering, our design of critical infrastructure, city water systems, building codes, even water rights and other legal precedents.
But we can simply no longer rely on established norms.
We're operating outside the bounds of CO2 concentrations that the planet has seen for hundreds of thousands of years.
It's up to us to look at our homes and our communities, our vulnerabilities and our exposures to risk, and to find ways to not just survive, but to thrive, and it's up to us to plan and to prepare and to call on our government leaders and require them to do the same, even while they address the underlying causes of climate change.
There are no quick fixes.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.
We're all learning by doing.
Thank you.
One in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness, so if it was one, two, three, four, it's you, sir.
You. Yeah. (Laughter) With the weird teeth. And you next to him. (Laughter) You know who you are.
I think I inherit it from my mother, who, used to crawl around the house on all fours.
She had two sponges in her hand, and then she had two tied to her knees. My mother was completely absorbent. (Laughter) And she would crawl around behind me going, "Who brings footprints into a building?!"
So that was kind of a clue that things weren't right.
So before I start, I would like to thank the makers of Lamotrigine, Sertraline, and Reboxetine, because without those few simple chemicals, I would not be vertical today.
So how did it start?
My mental illness -- well, I'm not even going to talk about my mental illness.
There were all the parents sitting in a parking lot eating food out of the back of their car -- only the English -- eating their sausages. They loved their sausages. (Laughter) Lord and Lady Rigor Mortis were nibbling on the tarmac, and then the gun went off and all the girlies started running, and all the mummies went, "Run! Run Chlamydia! Run!" (Laughter) "Run like the wind, Veruca! Run!"
And all the girlies, girlies running, running, running, everybody except for my daughter, who was just standing at the starting line, just waving, because she didn't know she was supposed to run.
So I took to my bed for about a month, and when I woke up I found I was institutionalized, and when I saw the other inmates, I realized that I had found my people, my tribe. (Laughter) Because they became my only friends, they became my friends, because very few people that I knew -- Well, I wasn't sent a lot of cards or flowers. I mean, if I had had a broken leg or I was with child I would have been inundated, but all I got was a couple phone calls telling me to perk up.
Because I didn't think of that. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Because, you know, the one thing, one thing that you get with this disease, this one comes with a package, is you get a real sense of shame, because your friends go, "Oh come on, show me the lump, show me the x-rays," and of course you've got nothing to show, so you're, like, really disgusted with yourself because you're thinking, "I'm not being carpet-bombed. I don't live in a township."
So you start to hear these abusive voices, but you don't hear one abusive voice, you hear about a thousand -- 100,000 abusive voices, like if the Devil had Tourette's, that's what it would sound like.
But we all know in here, you know, there is no Devil, there are no voices in your head.
Oh, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg.
If you get a little baby, and you abuse it verbally, its little brain sends out chemicals that are so destructive that the little part of its brain that can tell good from bad just doesn't grow, so you might have yourself a homegrown psychotic.
If a soldier sees his friend blown up, his brain goes into such high alarm that he can't actually put the experience into words, so he just feels the horror over and over again.
How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain?
I'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain, because I know you like that here at TED, so if you just give me a minute here, okay.
There is some good news. First of all, let me say, we've come a long, long way.
Here we go. (Laughter) This little baby has a lot of horsepower.
We've got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world.
We got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world.
Can you imagine, every human being is carrying that equipment, even Paris Hilton? (Laughter) Go figure.
But I got a little bad news for you folks. I got some bad news.
We are not equipped for the 21st century.
Evolution did not prepare us for this. We just don't have the bandwidth, and for people who say, oh, they're having a nice day, they're perfectly fine, they're more insane than the rest of us.
When we were ancient man — (Laughter) — millions of years ago, and we suddenly felt threatened by a predator, okay? — (Laughter) — we would — Thank you. I drew these myself. (Laughter) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Anyway, we would fill up with our own adrenaline and our own cortisol, and then we'd kill or be killed, we'd eat or we'd be eaten, and then suddenly we'd de-fuel, and we'd go back to normal. Okay.
So the problem is, nowadays, with modern man— (Laughter) — when we feel in danger, we still fill up with our own chemical but because we can't kill traffic wardens — (Laughter) — or eat estate agents, the fuel just stays in our body over and over, so we're in a constant state of alarm, a constant state. And here's another thing that happened.
Oh my God, everybody can see I'm stupid. I didn't get invited to the Christmas party!"
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but somebody has to be.
Your pets are happier than you are. (Laughter) (Applause) So kitty cat, meow, happy happy happy, human beings, screwed. (Laughter) Completely and utterly -- so, screwed.
But my point is, if we don't talk about this stuff, and we don't learn how to deal with our lives, it's not going to be one in four. It's going to be four in four who are really, really going to get ill in the upstairs department.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you.
So I have bad news, I have good news, and I have a task.
So the bad news is that we all get sick.
I get sick. You get sick.
And every one of us gets sick, and the question really is, how sick do we get? Is it something that kills us?
Is it something that we can treat?
And so we've always looked for reasons to explain why we get sick.
And for a long time, it was the gods, right?
And as long as we've looked for explanations, we've wound up with something that gets closer and closer to science, which is hypotheses as to why we get sick, and as long as we've had hypotheses about why we get sick, we've tried to treat it as well.
He thought yellow fever was not transmitted by dirty clothing.
He thought it was transmitted by mosquitos.
And they laughed at him. For 20 years, they called this guy "the mosquito man." But he ran an experiment in people, right? He had this hypothesis, and he tested it in people.
So he got volunteers to go move to Cuba and live in tents and be voluntarily infected with yellow fever.
So some of the people in some of the tents had dirty clothes and some of the people were in tents that were full of mosquitos that had been exposed to yellow fever.
But it wasn't until we tested it in people that we actually knew.
And this is what those people signed up for.
This is what it looked like to have yellow fever in Cuba at that time. You suffered in a tent, in the heat, alone, and you probably died.
But people volunteered for this.
And it's not just a cool example of a scientific design of experiment in theory. They also did this beautiful thing.
They signed this document, and it's called an informed consent document.
And informed consent is an idea that we should be very proud of as a society, right? It's something that separates us from the Nazis at Nuremberg, enforced medical experimentation. It's the idea that agreement to join a study without understanding isn't agreement.
It's something that protects us from harm, from hucksters, from people that would try to hoodwink us into a clinical study that we don't understand, or that we don't agree to.
And so you put together the thread of narrative hypothesis, experimentation in humans, and informed consent, and you get what we call clinical study, and it's how we do the vast majority of medical work. It doesn't really matter if you're in the north, the south, the east, the west.
But the world is changing around the clinical study, which has been fairly well established for tens of years if not 50 to 100 years.
And more importantly, we're able to gather information about our choices, because it turns out that what we think of as our health is more like the interaction of our bodies, our genomes, our choices and our environment.
And the clinical methods that we've got aren't very good at studying that because they are based on the idea of person-to-person interaction. You interact with your doctor and you get enrolled in the study.
So this is my grandfather. I actually never met him, but he's holding my mom, and his genes are in me, right?
So my grandfather's genes go all the way through to him, and my choices are going to affect his health.
The technology between these two pictures cannot be more different, but the methodology for clinical studies has not radically changed over that time period.
The way we gain informed consent was formed in large part after World War II, around the time that picture was taken.
That was 70 years ago, and the way we gain informed consent, this tool that was created to protect us from harm, now creates silos. So the data that we collect for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's trials goes into silos where it can only be used for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's research.
And this is an accident. These are tools that we created to protect us from harm, but what they're doing is protecting us from innovation now.
And that wasn't the goal. It wasn't the point. Right?
And so if you think about it, the depressing thing is that Facebook would never make a change to something as important as an advertising algorithm with a sample size as small as a Phase III clinical trial.
We cannot take the information from past trials and put them together to form statistically significant samples.
And that sucks, right? So 45 percent of men develop cancer. Thirty-eight percent of women develop cancer.
One in four men dies of cancer.
One in five women dies of cancer, at least in the United States.
And three out of the four drugs we give you if you get cancer fail. And this is personal to me.
My sister is a cancer survivor.
My mother-in-law is a cancer survivor. Cancer sucks.
People you don't know come in and look at you and poke you and prod you, and when I tell cancer survivors that this tool we created to protect them is actually preventing their data from being used, especially when only three to four percent of people who have cancer ever even sign up for a clinical study, their reaction is not, "Thank you, God, for protecting my privacy."
It's outrage that we have this information and we can't use it.
And it's an accident.
So the cost in blood and treasure of this is enormous.
And it's getting worse.
So the good news is that some things have changed, and the most important thing that's changed is that we can now measure ourselves in ways that used to be the dominion of the health system.
So a lot of people talk about it as digital exhaust.
We can reach back and grab that dust, and we can learn a lot about health from it, so if our choices are part of our health, what we eat is a really important aspect of our health. So you can do something very simple and basic and take a picture of your food, and if enough people do that, we can learn a lot about how our food affects our health.
One interesting thing that came out of this — this is an app for iPhones called The Eatery — is that we think our pizza is significantly healthier than other people's pizza is. Okay? (Laughter) And it seems like a trivial result, but this is the sort of research that used to take the health system years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to accomplish.
I don't have any financial interest in it.
This is the interpretation of it. As you can see, I carry a 32 percent risk of prostate cancer, 22 percent risk of psoriasis and a 14 percent risk of Alzheimer's disease.
So that means, if you're a geneticist, you're freaking out, going, "Oh my God, you told everyone you carry the ApoE E4 allele. What's wrong with you?"
Right? When I got these results, I started talking to doctors, and they told me not to tell anyone, and my reaction is, "Is that going to help anyone cure me when I get the disease?"
And I live in a web world where, when you share things, beautiful stuff happens, not bad stuff.
As you can see, I have high cholesterol.
I have particularly high bad cholesterol, and I have some bad liver numbers, but those are because we had a dinner party with a lot of good wine the night before we ran the test. (Laughter) Right. But look at how non-computable this information is.
This is like the photograph of my granddad holding my mom from a data perspective, and I had to go into the system and get it out.
So the thing that I'm proposing we do here is that we reach behind us and we grab the dust, that we reach into our bodies and we grab the genotype, and we reach into the medical system and we grab our records, and we use it to build something together, which is a commons.
And there's been a lot of talk about commonses, right, here, there, everywhere, right. A commons is nothing more than a public good that we build out of private goods.
We do it voluntarily, and we do it through standardized legal tools. We do it through standardized technologies.
Right. That's all a commons is. It's something that we build together because we think it's important.
And a commons of data is something that's really unique, because we make it from our own data. And although a lot of people like privacy as their methodology of control around data, and obsess around privacy, at least some of us really like to share as a form of control, and what's remarkable about digital commonses is you don't need a big percentage if your sample size is big enough to generate something massive and beautiful.
So not that many programmers write free software, but we have the Apache web server.
Not that many people who read Wikipedia edit, but it works. So as long as some people like to share as their form of control, we can build a commons, as long as we can get the information out.
And in biology, the numbers are even better.
So Vanderbilt ran a study asking people, we'd like to take your biosamples, your blood, and share them in a biobank, and only five percent of the people opted out.
So people like to share, if you give them the opportunity and the choice.
And the reason that I got obsessed with this, besides the obvious family aspects, is that I spend a lot of time around mathematicians, and mathematicians are drawn to places where there's a lot of data because they can use it to tease signals out of noise.
And those correlations that they can tease out, they're not necessarily causal agents, but math, in this day and age, is like a giant set of power tools that we're leaving on the floor, not plugged in in health, while we use hand saws.
If we have a lot of shared genotypes, and a lot of shared outcomes, and a lot of shared lifestyle choices, and a lot of shared environmental information, we can start to tease out the correlations between subtle variations in people, the choices they make and the health that they create as a result of those choices, and there's open-source infrastructure to do all of this.
Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit that's built a giant math system that's waiting for data, but there isn't any.
So that's what I do. I've actually started what we think is the world's first fully digital, fully self-contributed, unlimited in scope, global in participation, ethically approved clinical research study where you contribute the data.
So if you reach behind yourself and you grab the dust, if you reach into your body and grab your genome, if you reach into the medical system and somehow extract your medical record, you can actually go through an online informed consent process -- because the donation to the commons must be voluntary and it must be informed -- and you can actually upload your information and have it syndicated to the mathematicians who will do this sort of big data research, and the goal is to get 100,000 in the first year and a million in the first five years so that we have a statistically significant cohort that you can use to take smaller sample sizes from traditional research and map it against, so that you can use it to tease out those subtle correlations between the variations that make us unique and the kinds of health that we need to move forward as a society.
And I've spent a lot of time around other commons.
I've been around the early web. I've been around the early creative commons world, and there's four things that all of these share, which is, they're all really simple.
But it's not simplistic. These things are weak intentionally, right, because you can always add power and control to a system, but it's very difficult to remove those things if you put them in at the beginning, and so being simple doesn't mean being simplistic, and being weak doesn't mean weakness.
Those are strengths in the system.
Closed systems, corporations, make a lot of money on the open web, and they're one of the reasons why the open web lives is that corporations have a vested interest in the openness of the system.
You can start analyzing the data.
And the other thing about these systems is that it only takes a small number of really unreasonable people working together to create them. It didn't take that many people to make Wikipedia Wikipedia, or to keep it Wikipedia.
And we're going to be able to do an experiment in the next several months that lets us know exactly how many unreasonable people are out there.
So this is the Athena Breast Health Network. It's a study of 150,000 women in California, and they're going to return all the data to the participants of the study in a computable form, with one-clickability to load it into the study that I've put together. So we'll know exactly how many people are willing to be unreasonable.
You just have to be willing to be unreasonable, and the risk we're running is not the risk those 14 men who got yellow fever ran. Right?
And being naked and alone can be terrifying.
But to be naked in a group, voluntarily, can be quite beautiful.
(Applause)
We are at war with a new form of terrorism.
It's sort of the good old, traditional form of terrorism, but it's sort of been packaged for the 21st century.
One of the big things about countering terrorism is, how do you perceive it?
Because perception leads to your response to it.
So if you have a traditional perception of terrorism, it would be that it's one of criminality, one of war.
You fight it. If you have a more modernist approach, and your perception of terrorism is almost cause-and-effect, then naturally from that, the responses that come out of it are much more asymmetrical.
We live in a modern, global world.
Terrorists have actually adapted to it.
It's something we have to, too, and that means the people who are working on counterterrorism responses have to start, in effect, putting on their Google-tinted glasses, or whatever.
Both are fairly bad for your health. (Laughter) If you look at it as a brand in those ways, what you'll come to realize is, it's a pretty flawed product.
As we've said, it's pretty bad for your health, it's bad for those who it affects, and it's not actually good if you're a suicide bomber either.
It's not going to happen, I don't think.
And you're not really going to, in the '80s, end capitalism by supporting one of these groups. It's a load of nonsense.
But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel.
The brand has an Achilles' heel.
They're the people who buy into the brand, support them, facilitate them, and they're the people we've got to reach out to.
We've got to attack that brand in front of them.
One is reducing their market. What I mean is, it's their brand against our brand. We've got to compete.
We've got to show we're a better product.
If I'm trying to show we're a better product, I probably wouldn't do things like Guantanamo Bay.
We've talked there about curtailing the underlying need for the product itself. You could be looking there at poverty, injustice, all those sorts of things which feed terrorism.
You know, there's nothing heroic about killing a young kid.
Perhaps we need to focus on that and get that message back across.
So the essentials are, we've got to have interaction in those areas, with the terrorists, the facilitators, etc.
We've got to show our values.
We've got to practice what we preach.
But when it comes to knocking the brand, if the terrorists are Coca-Cola and we're Pepsi, I don't think, being Pepsi, anything we say about Coca-Cola, anyone's going to believe us.
They are somebody who can actually stand there and say, "This product's crap. I had it and I was sick for days.
It burnt my hand, whatever." You believe them.
You can see their scars. You trust them.
But whether it's victims, whether it's governments, NGOs, or even the Queen yesterday, in Northern Ireland, we have to interact and engage with those different layers of terrorism, and, in effect, we do have to have a little dance with the devil.
This is my favorite part of my speech.
I wanted to blow you all up to try and make a point, but — (Laughter) — TED, for health and safety reasons, have told me I've got to do a countdown, so I feel like a bit of an Irish or Jewish terrorist, sort of a health and safety terrorist, and I — (Laughter) — I've got to count 3, 2, 1, and it's a bit alarming, so thinking of what my motto would be, and it would be, "Body parts, not heart attacks."
So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound) Very good. (Laughter) Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all.
We're all victims of terrorism.
There's 625 of us in this room. We're going to be scarred for life.
And that is a hard thing for the head to take.
There's a lady over there as well who lost her legs in this bombing.
She's going to find out that she gets a pitiful amount of money off our government for looking after what's happened to her.
We're all here, and all of those who watch it are going to be traumatized by this event, but all of you here who are victims are going to learn some hard truths.
That is, our society, we sympathize, but after a while, we start to ignore. We don't do enough as a society.
We do not look after our victims, and we do not enable them, and what I'm going to try and show is that actually, victims are the best weapon we have against more terrorism.
How would the government at the turn of the millennium approach today? Well, we all know.
If the suicide bomber was from Wales, good luck to Wales, I'd say.
Today's approach, governments have learned from their mistakes.
But mistakes of the past are inevitable.
It's human nature.
The fear and the pressure to do something on them is going to be immense. They are going to make mistakes.
There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up the point very beautifully. He said, "The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once."
We've got to start thinking about being more proactive.
But of course, it's ideas -- is not something that governments do very well.
We see it as terrorism versus democracy in that brand war.
They'll see it as freedom fighters and truth against injustice, imperialism, etc.
We do have to see this as a deadly battlefield.
It's not just [our] flesh and blood they want.
They actually want our cultural souls, and that's why the brand analogy is a very interesting way of looking at this.
If we look at al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was essentially a product on a shelf in a souk somewhere which not many people had heard of.
They were effectively [doing] something in this brand image of creating a brand which can be franchised around the world, where there's poverty, ignorance and injustice.
There's a bomb, people start suing.
But one of the first early cases on this was the Omagh Bombing.
In Omagh, bomb went off, Real IRA, middle of a peace process.
That meant that the culprits couldn't really be prosecuted for lots of reasons, mostly to do with the peace process and what was going on, the greater good.
It also meant, then, if you can imagine this, that the people who bombed your children and your husbands were walking around the supermarket that you lived in.
Some of those victims said enough is enough.
It was effective not just because justice was seen to be done where there was a huge void.
There's other examples. We have a case called Almog which is to do with a bank that was, allegedly, from our point of view, giving rewards to suicide bombers.
Just by bringing the very action, that bank has stopped doing it, and indeed, the powers that be around the world, which for real politic reasons before, couldn't actually deal with this issue, because there was lots of competing interests, have actually closed down those loopholes in the banking system.
There's another case called the McDonald case, where some victims of Semtex, of the Provisional IRA bombings, which were supplied by Gaddafi, sued, and that action has led to amazing things for new Libya.
But the problem is, we need more and more support for these ideas and cases.
What we're trying to do there is turn pirates to fisherman.
They used to be fisherman, of course, but we stole their fish and dumped a load of toxic waste in their water, so what we're trying to do is create security and employment by bringing a coastguard along with the fisheries industry, and I can guarantee you, as that builds, al Shabaab and such likes will not have the poverty and injustice any longer to prey on those people.
The advantages of dialogue are obvious.
It self-educates both sides, enables a better understanding, reveals the strengths and weaknesses, and yes, like some of the speakers before, the shared vulnerability does lead to trust, and it does then become, that process, part of normalization.
But it's not an easy road. After the bomb, the victims are not into this.
It's politically risky for the protagonists and for the interlocutors. On one occasion I was doing it, every time I did a point that they didn't like, they actually threw stones at me, and when I did a point they liked, they starting shooting in the air, equally not great. (Laughter) Whatever the point, it gets to the heart of the problem, you're doing it, you're talking to them.
Now, I just want to end with saying, if we follow reason, we realize that I think we'd all say that we want to have a perception of terrorism which is not just a pure military perception of it.
We need to foster more modern and asymmetrical responses to it.
It's about fighting them on contemporary battlefields.
We must foster innovation, as I've said.
The private sector has a role.
If I was to leave you with some big questions here which may change one's perception to it, and who knows what thoughts and responses will come out of it, but did myself and my terrorist group actually need to blow you up to make our point?
Have we been ignoring an injustice or a humanitarian struggle somewhere in the world?
What if, actually, engagement on poverty and injustice is exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do?
What if the bombs are just simply wake-up calls for us?
What happens if that bomb went off because we didn't have any thoughts and things in place to allow dialogue to deal with these things and interaction?
What is definitely uncontroversial is that, as I've said, we've got to stop being reactive, and more proactive, and I just want to leave you with one idea, which is that it's a provocative question for you to think about, and the answer will require sympathy with the devil.
It's a question that's been tackled by many great thinkers and writers: What if society actually needs crisis to change?
What if society actually needs terrorism to change and adapt for the better?
It's those Bulgakov themes, it's that picture of Jesus and the Devil hand in hand in Gethsemane walking into the moonlight.
What it would mean is that humans, in order to survive in development, quite Darwinian spirit here, inherently must dance with the devil.
A lot of people say that communism was defeated by the Rolling Stones. It's a good theory.
Thank you.
(Music) (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. (Applause)
Beau Lotto: So, this game is very simple.
All you have to do is read what you see. Right?
Okay, one, two, three.Audience: Can you read this?
BL: All right. One, two, three. (Laughter) If you were Portuguese, right? How about this one? One, two, three.
Audience: What are you reading?
BL: What are you reading? There are no words there.
I said, read what you're seeing. Right?
It literally says, "Wat ar ou rea in?" (Laughter) Right?
That's what you should have said. Right? Why is this?
Right? The brain takes meaningless information and makes meaning out of it, which means we never see what's there, we never see information, we only ever see what was useful to see in the past.
All right? Which means, when it comes to perception, we're all like this frog.
(Laughter) Right? It's getting information. It's generating behavior that's useful. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Video) Man: Ow! Ow! (Laughter) (Applause) BL: And sometimes, when things don't go our way, we get a little bit annoyed, right?
But we're talking about perception here, right?
And perception underpins everything we think, we know, we believe, our hopes, our dreams, the clothes we wear, falling in love, everything begins with perception.
The problem with questions is they create uncertainty.
Now, uncertainty is a very bad thing. It's evolutionarily a bad thing. If you're not sure that's a predator, it's too late.
Okay? (Laughter) Even seasickness is a consequence of uncertainty.
Your brain cannot deal with the uncertainty of that information, and it gets ill.
The question "why?" is one of the most dangerous things you can do, because it takes you into uncertainty.
And yet, the irony is, the only way we can ever do anything new is to step into that space.
So how can we ever do anything new? Well fortunately, evolution has given us an answer, right?
They're the ones that question the things we think to be true already. Right?
It's easy to ask questions about how did life begin, or what extends beyond the universe, but to question what you think to be true already is really stepping into that space.
So what is evolution's answer to the problem of uncertainty?
It's play.
Now play is not simply a process. Experts in play will tell you that actually it's a way of being.
Play is one of the only human endeavors where uncertainty is actually celebrated. Uncertainty is what makes play fun.
Now if you look at these five ways of being, these are the exact same ways of being you need in order to be a good scientist.
Science is not defined by the method section of a paper.
It's actually a way of being, which is here, and this is true for anything that is creative.
That's actually what an experiment is.
And who better to ask than 25 eight- to 10-year-old children?
Because they're experts in play. So I took my bee arena down to a small school in Devon, and the aim of this was to not just get the kids to see science differently, but, through the process of science, to see themselves differently. Right?
The first step was to ask a question.
Now, I should say that we didn't get funding for this study because the scientists said small children couldn't make a useful contribution to science, and the teachers said kids couldn't do it.
So they were asking questions that were significant to expert scientists.
Now here, I want to share the stage with someone quite special. Right?
She was one of the young people who was involved in this study, and she's now one of the youngest published scientists in the world. Right? She will now, once she comes onto stage, will be the youngest person to ever speak at TED. Right?
Now, science and asking questions is about courage.
Now she is the personification of courage, because she's going to stand up here and talk to you all.
So Amy, would you please come up? (Applause) (Applause) So Amy's going to help me tell the story of what we call the Blackawton Bees Project, and first she's going to tell you the question that they came up with. So go ahead, Amy.
But we wondered if there's a possible link with other animals. It'd be amazing if humans and bees thought similar, since they seem so different from us.
So we asked if humans and bees might solve complex problems in the same way.
Really, we wanted to know if bees can also adapt themselves to new situations using previously learned rules and conditions. So what if bees can think like us?
But it actually makes a lot of sense they should, because bees, like us, can recognize a good flower regardless of the time of day, the light, the weather, or from any angle they approach it from. (Applause) BL: So the next step was to design an experiment, which is a game. So the kids went off and they designed this experiment, and so -- well, game -- and so, Amy, can you tell us what the game was, and the puzzle that you set the bees?
AO: The puzzle we came up with was an if-then rule.
We asked the bees to learn not just to go to a certain color, but to a certain color flower only when it's in a certain pattern.
Now there's a number of different rules the bees can learn to solve this puzzle. The interesting question is, which?
It was completely new, and no one had done it before, including adults. (Laughter) BL: Including the teachers, and that was really hard for the teachers.
So I'm not going to go through the whole details of the study because actually you can read about it, but the next step is observation. So here are some of the students doing the observations. They're recording the data of where the bees fly.
(Video) Dave Strudwick: So what we're going to do —Student: 5C.
Dave Strudwick: Is she still going up here?Student: Yeah.
Dave Strudwick: So you keep track of each.Student: Henry, can you help me here?
BL: "Can you help me, Henry?" What good scientist says that, right?
Student: There's two up there.
They do the simple mathematics, averaging, etc., etc.
And now we want to share. That's the next step.
Methods, what did you do? Results, what was the observation?
That's a science paper, basically. (Laughter) So the kids give me the words, right? I put it into a narrative, which means that this paper is written in kidspeak.
It's not written by me. It's written by Amy and the other students in the class. As a consequence, this science paper begins, "Once upon a time ... " (Laughter) The results section, it says: "Training phase, the puzzle ... duh duh duuuuuhhh." Right? (Laughter) And the methods, it says, "Then we put the bees into the fridge (and made bee pie)," smiley face. Right? (Laughter) This is a science paper. We're going to try to get it published.
All the ones in bold are eight to 10 years old.
The first author is Blackawton Primary School, because if it were ever referenced, it would be "Blackawton et al," and not one individual. So we submit it to a public access journal, and it says this. It said many things, but it said this.
"I'm afraid the paper fails our initial quality control checks in several different ways." (Laughter) In other words, it starts off "once upon a time," the figures are in crayon, etc. (Laughter) So we said, we'll get it reviewed. So I sent it to Dale Purves, who is at the National Academy of Science, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, and he says, "This is the most original science paper I have ever read" — (Laughter) — "and it certainly deserves wide exposure."
Larry Maloney, expert in vision, says, "The paper is magnificent.
So what did we do? We send it back to the editor.
They say no.
So we asked Larry and Natalie Hempel to write a commentary situating the findings for scientists, right, putting in the references, and we submit it to Biology Letters.
And there, it was reviewed by five independent referees, and it was published. Okay? (Applause) (Applause) It took four months to do the science, two years to get it published. (Laughter) Typical science, actually, right? So this makes Amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world.
What was the feedback like?
It's forever freely accessible by Biology Letters.
Last year, it was the second-most downloaded paper by Biology Letters, and the feedback from not just scientists and teachers but the public as well.
"I have read 'Blackawton Bees' recently. I don't have words to explain exactly how I am feeling right now.
What you guys have done is real, true and amazing.
Curiosity, interest, innocence and zeal are the most basic and most important things to do science.
Who else can have these qualities more than children?
Please congratulate your children's team from my side."
So I'd like to conclude with a physical metaphor.
Now, science is about taking risks, so this is an incredible risk, right? (Laughter) For me, not for him. Right? Because we've only done this once before. (Laughter) And you like technology, right?
Shimon Schocken: Right, but I like myself.
BL: This is the epitome of technology. Right. Okay.
Now ... (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) Now, we're going to do a little demonstration, right?
Audience: (Shouts) (Laughter) (Shouts) (Laughter) Brilliant. Now, open your eyes. We'll do it one more time.
Everyone over there shout. (Shouts) Where's the sound coming from? (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) What's the point? The point is what science does for us.
Right? We normally walk through life responding, but if we ever want to do anything different, we have to step into uncertainty. When he opened his eyes, he was able to see the world in a new way.
That's what science offers us. It offers the possibility to step on uncertainty through the process of play, right?
Now, true science education I think should be about giving people a voice and enabling to express that voice, so I've asked Amy to be the last voice in this short story.
So, Amy?
Changing the way a person thinks about something can be easy or hard. It all depends on the way the person feels about change.
But changing the way I thought about science was surprisingly easy. Once we played the games and then started to think about the puzzle, I then realized that science isn't just a boring subject, and that anyone can discover something new.
You just need an opportunity. My opportunity came in the form of Beau, and the Blackawton Bee Project.
Thank you.BL: Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
In 1975, I met in Florence a professor, Carlo Pedretti, my former professor of art history, and today a world-renowned scholar of Leonardo da Vinci.
Well, he asked me if I could find some technological way to unfold a five-centuries-old mystery related to a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the "Battle of Anghiari," which is supposed to be located in the Hall of the 500 in Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence.
Well, in the mid-'70s, there were not great opportunities for a bioengineer like me, especially in Italy, and so I decided, with some researchers from the United States and the University of Florence, to start probing the murals decorated by Vasari on the long walls of the Hall of the 500 searching for the lost Leonardo.
Unfortunately, at that time we did not know that that was not exactly where we should be looking, because we had to go much deeper in, and so the research came to a halt, and it was only taken up in 2000 thanks to the interest and the enthusiasm of the Guinness family.
Well, this time, we focused on trying to reconstruct the way the Hall of the 500 was before the remodeling, and the so-called Sala Grande, which was built in 1494, and to find out the original doors, windows, and in order to do that, we first created a 3D model, and then, with thermography, we went on to discover hidden windows. These are the original windows of the hall of the Sala Grande. We also found out about the height of the ceiling, and we managed to reconstruct, therefore, all the layout of this original hall the way it was before there came Vasari, and restructured the whole thing, including a staircase that was very important in order to precisely place "The Battle of Anghiari" on a specific area of one of the two walls.
Well, we also learned that Vasari, who was commissioned to remodel the Hall of the 500 between 1560 and 1574 by the Grand Duke Cosimo I of the Medici family, we have at least two instances when he saved masterpieces specifically by placing a brick wall in front of it and leaving a small air gap.
One that we [see] here, Masaccio, the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, so we just said, well maybe, Visari has done something like that in the case of this great work of art by Leonardo, since he was a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci.
And so we built some very sophisticated radio antennas just for probing both walls and searching for an air gap.
Well, from there, unfortunately, in 2004, the project came to a halt. Many political reasons.
So I decided to go back to my alma mater, and, at the University of California, San Diego, and I proposed to open up a research center for engineering sciences for cultural heritage.
And in 2007, we created CISA3 as a research center for cultural heritage, specifically art, architecture and archaeology. So students started to flow in, and we started to build technologies, because that's basically what we also needed in order to move forward and go and do fieldwork.
We came back in the Hall of the 500 in 2011, and this time, with a great group of students, and my colleague, Professor Falko Kuester, who is now the director at CISA3, and we came back just since we knew already where to look for to find out if there was still something left.
Well, we were confined though, limited, I should rather say, for several reasons that it's not worth explaining, to endoscopy only, of the many other options we had, and with a 4mm camera attached to it, we were successful in documenting and taking some fragments of what it turns out to be a reddish color, black color, and there is some beige fragments that later on we ran a much more sophisticated exams, XRF, X-ray diffraction, and the results are very positive so far. It seems to indicate that indeed we have found some pigments, and since we know for sure that no other artist has painted on that wall before Vasari came in about 60 years later, well, those pigments are therefore firmly related to mural painting and most likely to Leonardo.
As a matter of fact, this is by far the most important commission that Leonardo has ever had, and for doing this great masterpiece, he was named the number one artist influence at the time.
There is a lot of varnish still sitting there, several retouches, and some over cleaning. It becomes very visible.
But also, technology has helped to write new pages of our history, or at least to update pages of our histories.
A lot has been said and written about the unicorn, but if you take an X-ray of the unicorn, it becomes a puppy dog.
And — (Laughter) — no problem, but, unfortunately, continuing with the scientific examination of this painting came out that Rafael did not paint the unicorn, did not paint the puppy dog, actually left the painting unfinished, so all this writing about the exotic symbol of the unicorn — (Laughter) — unfortunately, is not very reliable. (Laughter) Well, also, authenticity. Just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art. There would be a cultural revolution to say the least, but also, I would say, a market revolution, let me add. Take this example: Otto Marseus, nice painting, which is "Still Life" at the Pitti Gallery, and just have an infrared camera peering through, and luckily for art historians, it just was confirmed that there is a signature of Otto Marseus. It even says when it was made and also the location.
So that was a good result. Sometimes, it's not that good, and so, again, authenticity and science could go together and change the way, not attributions being made, but at least lay the ground for a more objective, or, I should rather say, less subjective attribution, as it is done today.
But I would say the discovery that really caught my imagination, my admiration, is the incredibly vivid drawing under this layer, brown layer, of "The Adoration of the Magi." Here you see a handmade setting XYZ scanner with an infrared camera put on it, and just peering through this brown layer of this masterpiece to reveal what could have been underneath.
Well, this happens to be the most important painting we have in Italy by Leonardo da Vinci, and look at the wonderful images of faces that nobody has seen for five centuries. Look at these portraits.
This was an epiphany. We came to understand and to prove that the brown coating that we see today was not done by Leonardo da Vinci, which left us only the other drawing that for five centuries we were not able to see, so thanks only to technology.
Well, the tablet. Well, we thought, well, if we all have this pleasure, this privilege to see all this, to find all these discoveries, what about for everybody else?
So we thought of an augmented reality application using a tablet. Let me show you just simulating what we could be doing, any of us could be doing, in a museum environment.
So all we need is one finger. Just wipe off and we see the elephant. (Applause) (Applause) Okay? And then if we want, we can continue the scroll to find out, for example, on the staircase, the whole iconography is going to be changed. There are a lot of laymen reconstructing from the ruins of an old temple a new temple, and there are a lot of figures showing up. See?
This is not just a curiosity, because it changes not just the iconography as you see it, but the iconology, the meaning of the painting, and we believe this is a cool way, easy way, that everybody could have access to, to become more the protagonist of your own discovery, and not just be so passive about it, as we are when we walk through endless rooms of museums.
(Applause) Another concept is the digital clinical chart, which sounds very obvious if we were to talk about real patients, but when we talk about works of art, unfortunately, it's never been tapped as an idea.
Well, we believe, again, that this should be the beginning, the very first step, to do real conservation, and allowing us to really explore and to understand everything related to the state of our conservation, the technique, materials, and also if, when, and why we should restore, or, rather, to intervene on the environment surrounding the painting.
Well, our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the Renaissance, create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together.
We definitely need a new breed of engineers that will go out and do this kind of work and rediscover for us these values, these cultural values that we badly need, especially today.
As long as we live a life of curiosity and passion, there is a bit of Leonardo in all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I am very happy and honored to be amidst very, very innovative and intelligent people.
I have listened to the three previous speakers, and guess what happened?
(Laughter) But there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something, that bud is a young one.
It is the G8 Summit.
The G8 Summit proposes that the solution to Africa's problems should be a massive increase in aid, something akin to the Marshall Plan.
Unfortunately, I personally do not believe in the Marshall Plan.
One, because the benefits of the Marshall Plan have been overstated.
Its largest recipients were Germany and France, and it was only 2.5 percent of their GDP.
An average African country receives foreign aid to the tune of 13, 15 percent of its GDP, and that is an unprecedented transfer of financial resources from rich countries to poor countries.
How the media covers Africa in the West, and the consequences of that.
By displaying despair, helplessness and hopelessness, the media is telling the truth about Africa, and nothing but the truth.
However, the media is not telling us the whole truth.
Because despair, civil war, hunger and famine, although they're part and parcel of our African reality, they are not the only reality.
And secondly, they are the smallest reality.
Africa has 53 nations.
Africa has immense opportunities that never navigate through the web of despair and helplessness that the Western media largely presents to its audience.
It appeals to pity. It appeals to something called charity.
And, as a consequence, the Western view of Africa's economic dilemma is framed wrongly.
The wrong framing is a product of thinking that Africa is a place of despair.
We should send peacekeeping troops to serve those who are facing a civil war.
I want to say that it is important to recognize that Africa has fundamental weaknesses.
We need to reframe the challenge that is facing Africa, from a challenge of despair, which is called poverty reduction, to a challenge of hope.
We frame it as a challenge of hope, and that is worth creation.
The challenge facing all those who are interested in Africa is not the challenge of reducing poverty.
It should be a challenge of creating wealth.
And in the process, none of these things really are productive because you are treating the symptoms, not the causes of Africa's fundamental problems.
Wealth is a function of income, and income comes from you finding a profitable trading opportunity or a well-paying job.
Now, once we begin to talk about wealth creation in Africa, our second challenge will be, who are the wealth-creating agents in any society?
They are entrepreneurs. [Unclear] told us they are always about four percent of the population, but 16 percent are imitators.
But they also succeed at the job of entrepreneurship.
We need to put money where it can productively grow.
Support private investment in Africa, both domestic and foreign.
Support research institutions, because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation.
But what is the international aid community doing with Africa today?
The entire continent has been turned into a place of despair, in need of charity.
Ladies and gentlemen, can any one of you tell me a neighbor, a friend, a relative that you know, who became rich by receiving charity?
Does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another?
(Bono: Yes!) Andrew Mwenda: I can see Bono says he knows the country.
Which country is that?
(Bono: It's an Irish land.) (Laughter) (Bono: [unclear]) AM: Thank you very much. But let me tell you this.
Africa has received many opportunities.
Why? Because we lack the internal, institutional framework and policy framework that can make it possible for us to benefit from our external relations. I'll give you an example.
Under the Cotonou Agreement, formerly known as the Lome Convention, African countries have been given an opportunity by Europe to export goods, duty-free, to the European Union market.
My own country, Uganda, has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union market.
We haven't exported one kilogram yet.
We import 50,000 metric tons of sugar from Brazil and Cuba.
Secondly, under the beef protocol of that agreement, African countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the European Union market.
None of those countries, including Africa's most successful nation, Botswana, has ever met its quota.
So, I want to argue today that the fundamental source of Africa's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework.
And all forms of intervention need support, the evolution of the kinds of institutions that create wealth, the kinds of institutions that increase productivity.
Because all governments across the world need money to survive.
Money is needed for a simple thing like keeping law and order.
You have to pay the army and the police to show law and order.
Why should people support their government?
Well, because it gives them good, paying jobs, or, in many African countries, unofficial opportunities to profit from corruption.
The fact is no government in the world, with the exception of a few, like that of Idi Amin, can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule.
To get legitimacy, governments often need to deliver things like primary education, primary health, roads, build hospitals and clinics.
If the government's fiscal survival depends on it having to raise money from its own people, such a government is driven by self-interest to govern in a more enlightened fashion.
It will sit with those who create wealth.
The problem with the African continent and the problem with the aid industry is that it has distorted the structure of incentives facing the governments in Africa.
I can tell you, even if you have ten Ph.Ds., you can never beat Bill Gates in understanding the computer industry.
Why? Because the knowledge that is required for you to understand the incentives necessary to expand a business -- it requires that you listen to the people, the private sector actors in that industry.
Governments in Africa have therefore been given an opportunity, by the international community, to avoid building productive arrangements with your own citizens, and therefore allowed to begin endless negotiations with the IMF and the World Bank, and then it is the IMF and the World Bank that tell them what its citizens need.
The IMF, the World Bank, and the cartel of good intentions in the world has taken over our rights as citizens, and therefore what our governments are doing, because they depend on aid, is to listen to international creditors rather than their own citizens.
But I want to put a caveat on my argument, and that caveat is that it is not true that aid is always destructive.
The mistake of the international aid industry is to pick these isolated incidents of success, generalize them, pour billions and trillions of dollars into them, and then spread them across the whole world, ignoring the specific and unique circumstances in a given village, the skills, the practices, the norms and habits that allowed that small aid project to succeed -- like in Sauri village, in Kenya, where Jeffrey Sachs is working -- and therefore generalize this experience as the experience of everybody.
By increasing the political attractiveness of the state, especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in Africa, aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie.
Ladies and gentlemen, the most enterprising people in Africa cannot find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business.
They talk to international donors.
So, the most enterprising Africans end up going to work for government, and that has increased the political tensions in our countries precisely because we depend on aid.
I also want to say that it is important for us to note that, over the last 50 years, Africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community, in the form of technical assistance, and financial aid, and all other forms of aid.
Between 1960 and 2003, our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid, and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in Africa.
Where has all the aid gone?
I want to use the example of my own country, called Uganda, and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there.
In the 2006-2007 budget, expected revenue: 2.5 trillion shillings.
The expected foreign aid: 1.9 trillion.
Why does the government of Uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue?
It's because there's somebody there called foreign aid, who contributes for it.
But this shows you that the government of Uganda is not committed to spending its own revenue to invest in productive investments, but rather it devotes this revenue to paying structure of public expenditure.
The military, 380 billion.
Agriculture, which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens, takes only 18 billion.
Trade and industry takes 43 billion.
And let me show you, what does public expenditure -- rather, public administration expenditure -- in Uganda constitute?
(Laughter) (Applause) And when they see him physically, it is at public functions like this, and even there, it is him who advises them.
(Laughter) We have 81 units of local government.
Each local government is organized like the central government -- a bureaucracy, a cabinet, a parliament, and so many jobs for the political hangers-on.
You need Wembley Stadium to host our parliament.
One hundred thirty-four commissions and semi-autonomous government bodies, all of which have directors and the cars. And the final thing, this is addressed to Mr. Bono. In his work, he may help us on this.
A recent government of Uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the Minister of Health headquarters.
Uganda has 961 sub-counties, each of them with a dispensary, none of which has an ambulance.
So, the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers, the permanent secretaries, the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects, while the poor die without ambulances and medicine.
Finally, I want to say that before I came to speak here, I was told that the principle of TEDGlobal is that the good speech should be like a miniskirt.
It should be short enough to arouse interest, but long enough to cover the subject.
(Laughter) Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Companies are losing control.
What happens on Wall Street no longer stays on Wall Street.
What happens in Vegas ends up on YouTube. (Laughter) Reputations are volatile. Loyalties are fickle.
Management teams seem increasingly disconnected from their staff. (Laughter) A recent survey said that 27 percent of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm.
However, in the same survey, only four percent of employees agreed.
Companies are losing control of their customers and their employees.
I'm a marketer, and as a marketer, I know that I've never really been in control.
Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room, the saying goes.
They can listen and join the conversation.
In fact, they have more control over the loss of control than ever before.
They can design for it. But how?
First of all, they can give employees and customers more control.
They can collaborate with them on the creation of ideas, knowledge, content, designs and product.
They can give them more control over pricing, which is what the band Radiohead did with its pay-as-you-like online release of its album "In Rainbows." Buyers could determine the price, but the offer was exclusive, and only stood for a limited period of time.
The album sold more copies than previous releases of the band.
The Danish chocolate company Anthon Berg opened a so-called "generous store" in Copenhagen.
It asked customers to purchase chocolate with the promise of good deeds towards loved ones.
It turned transactions into interactions, and generosity into a currency.
Companies can even give control to hackers.
When Microsoft Kinect came out, the motion-controlled add-on to its Xbox gaming console, it immediately drew the attention of hackers.
Microsoft first fought off the hacks, but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits.
The sense of co-ownership, the free publicity, the added value, all helped drive sales.
Outdoor clothier Patagonia encouraged prospective buyers to check out eBay for its used products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones.
In an even more radical stance against consumerism, the company placed a "Don't Buy This Jacket" advertisement during the peak of shopping season.
It may have jeopardized short-term sales, but it builds lasting, long-term loyalty based on shared values.
Research has shown that giving employees more control over their work makes them happier and more productive.
The Brazilian company Semco Group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries.
Companies can give people more control, but they can also give them less control.
Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior, but when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences?
Giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier.
Take the travel service Nextpedition.
Nextpedition turns the trip into a game, with surprising twists and turns along the way.
It does not tell the traveler where she's going until the very last minute, and information is provided just in time. Similarly, Dutch airline KLM launched a surprise campaign, seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination.
U.K.-based Interflora monitored Twitter for users who were having a bad day, and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers.
Force them to help others.
A recent study suggests that having employees complete occasional altruistic tasks throughout the day increases their sense of overall productivity.
At Frog, the company I work for, we hold internal speed meet sessions that connect old and new employees, helping them get to know each other fast.
By applying a strict process, we give them less control, less choice, but we enable more and richer social interactions.
That should make them more humble, more vulnerable and more human.
Or as the ballet dancer Alonzo King said, "What's interesting about you is you."
For the true selves of companies to come through, openness is paramount, but radical openness is not a solution, because when everything is open, nothing is open.
"A smile is a door that is half open and half closed," the author Jennifer Egan wrote.
Companies can give their employees and customers more control or less. They can worry about how much openness is good for them, and what needs to stay closed.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland.
Penn State asked me, a communications teacher, to teach a communications class for engineering students.
And I was scared. (Laughter) Really scared. Scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big, unfamiliar words.
But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world.
That's just how I felt as I had those conversations with the students. I was amazed at the ideas that they had, and I wanted others to experience this wonderland as well.
And I believe the key to opening that door is great communication.
We desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world.
Our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges, from energy to environment to health care, among others, and if we don't know about it and understand it, then the work isn't done, and I believe it's our responsibility as non-scientists to have these interactions.
So scientists and engineers, please, talk nerdy to us.
Tell us why your science is relevant to us.
Don't just tell me that you study trabeculae, but tell me that you study trabeculae, which is the mesh-like structure of our bones because it's important to understanding and treating osteoporosis.
And when you're describing your science, beware of jargon.
Instead, as Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.
A few things to consider are having examples, stories and analogies. Those are ways to engage and excite us about your content.
Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? (Laughter) What do bullets do? Bullets kill, and they will kill your presentation.
Instead, this example slide by Genevieve Brown is much more effective. It's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the Eiffel Tower.
And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described.
So I think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering.
And because the engineers that I've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd, I want to summarize with an equation. (Laughter) Take your science, subtract your bullet points and your jargon, divide by relevance, meaning share what's relevant to the audience, and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work that you're doing, and that is going to equal incredible interactions that are full of understanding.
And so, scientists and engineers, when you've solved this equation, by all means, talk nerdy to me. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)
I'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are, how globalized we aren't, and why it's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments.
And the leading point of view on this, whether measured by number of books sold, mentions in media, or surveys that I've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the World Trade Organization, is this view that national borders really don't matter very much anymore, cross-border integration is close to complete, and we live in one world.
And what's interesting about this view is, again, it's a view that's held by pro-globalizers like Tom Friedman, from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted, but it's also held by anti-globalizers, who see this giant globalization tsunami that's about to wreck all our lives if it hasn't already done so.
I'm a little bit of an amateur historian, so I've spent some time going back, trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing. And the best, earliest quote that I could find was one from David Livingstone, writing in the 1850s about how the railroad, the steam ship, and the telegraph were integrating East Africa perfectly with the rest of the world.
Now clearly, David Livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time, but it does seem useful to ask ourselves, "Just how global are we?"
So the best way I've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat, may not even be close to flat, is with some data.
So one of the things I've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders, and I've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total.
I'm not going to present all the data that I have here today, but let me just give you a few data points.
I'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow, one kind of flow of people, one kind of flow of capital, and, of course, trade in products and services.
Of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year, what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls?
The answer turns out to be two percent.
If you include Internet telephony, you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent, but it's nowhere near what people tend to estimate.
Or let's turn to people moving across borders.
One particular thing we might look at, in terms of long-term flows of people, is what percentage of the world's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants?
Again, please pick a percentage.
Or think of investment. Take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010.
What percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment?
And then finally, the one statistic that I suspect many of the people in this room have seen: the export-to-GDP ratio.
If you look at the official statistics, they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent.
However, there's a big problem with the official statistics, in that if, for instance, a Japanese component supplier ships something to China to be put into an iPod, and then the iPod gets shipped to the U.S., that component ends up getting counted multiple times.
So nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is, so I thought I would ask the person who's spearheading the effort to generate data on this, Pascal Lamy, the Director of the World Trade Organization, what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of GDP, without the double- and triple-counting, and it's actually probably a bit under 20 percent, rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we're talking about.
So it's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that I talk about in my book, "World 3.0," that we're very, very far from the no-border effect benchmark, which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85, 90, 95 percent.
Let me share with you the results of a survey that Harvard Business Review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people's guesses along these dimensions actually were.
So a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide.
First of all, there is a suggestion of some error.
And third, this is not just confined to the readers of the Harvard Business Review.
I've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world, and in all cases except one, where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-GDP ratio, people have this tendency towards overestimation, and so I thought it important to give a name to this, and that's what I refer to as globaloney, the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars.
A couple of different reasons come to mind.
Let me give you an example. When I first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called Foreign Policy, one of the people who wrote in, not entirely in agreement, was Tom Friedman. And since my article was titled "Why the World Isn't Flat," that wasn't too surprising. (Laughter) What was very surprising to me was Tom's critique, which was, "Ghemawat's data are narrow."
A second reason has to do with peer pressure.
I remember, I decided to write my "Why the World Isn't Flat" article, because I was being interviewed on TV in Mumbai, and the interviewer's first question to me was, "Professor Ghemawat, why do you still believe that the world is round?" And I started laughing, because I hadn't come across that formulation before. (Laughter) And as I was laughing, I was thinking, I really need a more coherent response, especially on national TV. I'd better write something about this. (Laughter) But what I can't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question.
The perspective was, here is this poor professor.
He really has no idea as to what's actually going on in the world.
So try this out with your friends and acquaintances, if you like. You'll find that it's very cool to talk about the world being one, etc.
If you listen to techno music for long periods of time, it does things to your brainwave activity. (Laughter) Something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers, all political barriers, all geographic barriers, because at this point I know you aren't allowed to ask me questions, but when I get to this point in my lecture with my students, hands go up, and people ask me, "Yeah, but what about Facebook?"
Because, in some sense, it's the ideal kind of technology to think about. Theoretically, it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door.
What percentage of people's friends on Facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we're analyzing are based?
The answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent.
Non-negligible, so we don't live in an entirely local or national world, but very, very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect, and the reason's very simple.
We don't, or I hope we don't, form friendships at random on Facebook. The technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have, and those relationships are what the technology doesn't quite displace. Those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are.
So does all this matter? Or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues?
I want to suggest that actually, globaloney can be very harmful to your health.
First of all, recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration, whereas if we thought we were already there, there would be no particular point to pushing harder.
So being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more, something that would contribute further to global welfare.
Avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization.
So I actually spend most of my "World 3.0" book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate.
Think of France and the current debate about immigration.
When you ask people in France what percentage of the French population is immigrants, the answer is about 24 percent. That's their guess.
Maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue.
Or to take an even more striking example, when the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations did a survey of Americans, asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid, the guess was 30 percent, which is slightly in excess of the actual level — ("actually about ... 1%") (Laughter) — of U.S. governmental commitments to federal aid.
The reassuring thing about this particular survey was, when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data, some of them — not all of them — seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid.
If you look at the OECD countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person, and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries, the ratio — Branko Milanovic at the World Bank did the calculations — turns out to be about 30,000 to one.
If we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one, we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the Rio Summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on.
So in summary, while radical openness is great, given how closed we are, even incremental openness could make things dramatically better. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
Once upon a time, the world was a big, dysfunctional family.
It was run by the great and powerful parents, and the people were helpless and hopeless naughty children.
If any of the more rowdier children questioned the authority of the parents, they were scolded.
If they went exploring into the parents' rooms, or even into the secret filing cabinets, they were punished, and told that for their own good they must never go in there again.
Then one day, a man came to town with boxes and boxes of secret documents stolen from the parents' rooms.
"Look what they've been hiding from you," he said.
The children looked and were amazed.
And they made mistakes, too, just like the children.
The only difference was, their mistakes were in the secret filing cabinets.
Well, there was a girl in the town, and she didn't think they should be in the secret filing cabinets, or if they were, there ought to be a law to allow the children access.
Well, I'm the girl in that story, and the secret documents that I was interested in were located in this building, the British Parliament, and the data that I wanted to get my hands on were the expense receipts of members of Parliament.
I thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy. (Applause) It wasn't like I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker, or anything like that, but the amount of resistance I got from this Freedom of Information request, you would have thought I'd asked something like this.
So I fought for about five years doing this, and it was one of many hundreds of requests that I made, not -- I didn't -- Hey, look, I didn't set out, honestly, to revolutionize the British Parliament.
That was not my intention. I was just making these requests as part of research for my first book.
But it ended up in this very long, protracted legal battle and there I was after five years fighting against Parliament in front of three of Britain's most eminent High Court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data.
The transparency law they'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else, they tried to keep it so it didn't apply to them.
What they hadn't counted on was digitization, because that meant that all those paper receipts had been scanned in electronically, and it was very easy for somebody to just copy that entire database, put it on a disk, and then just saunter outside of Parliament, which they did, and then they shopped that disk to the highest bidder, which was the Daily Telegraph, and then, you all remember, there was weeks and weeks of revelations, everything from porn movies and bath plugs and new kitchens and mortgages that had never been paid off.
The end result was six ministers resigned, the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign, a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency, 120 MPs stepped down at that election, and so far, four MPs and two lords have done jail time for fraud.
So we are moving to this democratization of information, and I've been in this field for quite a while.
Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down.
I think that was a pretty good indication about my future career as an investigative journalist, and what I've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest, and it's gone mainstream. Everybody, increasingly, around the world, wants to know about what people in power are doing.
They want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money. It's this democratization of information that I think is an information enlightenment, and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment.
No, it's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested.
That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God.
Obviously the Church weren't very happy about this, and they tried to suppress it, but what they hadn't counted on was technology, and then they had the printing press, which suddenly enabled these ideas to spread cheaply, far and fast, and people would come together in coffee houses, discuss the ideas, plot revolution.
In our day, we have digitization. That strips all the physical mass out of information, so now it's almost zero cost to copy and share information.
Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.
We're moving to what I would think of as a fully connected system, and we have global decisions to make in this system, decisions about climate, about finance systems, about resources. And think about it -- if we want to make an important decision about buying a house, we don't just go off. I mean, I don't know about you, but I want to see a lot of houses before I put that much money into it.
And if we're thinking about a finance system, we need a lot of information to take in. It's just not possible for one person to take in the amount, the volume of information, and analyze it to make good decisions.
So that's why we're seeing increasingly this demand for access to information.
That's why we're starting to see more disclosure laws come out, so for example, on the environment, there's the Aarhus Convention, which is a European directive that gives people a very strong right to know, so if your water company is dumping water into your river, sewage water into your river, you have a right to know about it.
And they're all moving to this central system, this fully connected system, all of them except one. Can you guess which one?
It's the system which underpins all these other systems.
It's the system by which we organize and exercise power, and there I'm talking about politics, because in politics, we're back to this system, this top-down hierarchy.
And I think this is largely what's behind the crisis of legitimacy in our different governments right now.
So this is a guy called Seb Bacon. He's a computer programmer, and he built a site called Alaveteli, and what it is, it's a Freedom of Information platform.
It's open-source, with documentation, and it allows you to make a Freedom of Information request, to ask your public body a question, so it takes all the hassle out of it, and I can tell you that there is a lot of hassle making these requests, so it takes all of that hassle out, and you just type in your question, for example, how many police officers have a criminal record?
So that's open-source and it can be used in any country where there is some kind of Freedom of Information law.
So there's a list there of the different countries that have it, and then there's a few more coming on board.
This is Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She's an Icelandic MP.
And quite an unusual MP. In Iceland, she was one of the protesters who was outside of Parliament when the country's economy collapsed, and then she was elected on a reform mandate, and she's now spearheading this project.
It's the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and they've just got funding to make it an international modern media project, and this is taking all of the best laws around the world about freedom of expression, protection of whistleblowers, protection from libel, source protection, and trying to make Iceland a publishing haven.
It's a place where your data can be free, so when we think about, increasingly, how governments want to access user data, what they're trying to do in Iceland is make this safe haven where it can happen.
In my own field of investigative journalism, we're also having to start thinking globally, so this is a site called Investigative Dashboard. And if you're trying to track a dictator's assets, for example, Hosni Mubarak, you know, he's just funneling out cash from his country when he knows he's in trouble, and what you want to do to investigate that is, you need to have access to all of the world's, as many as you can, companies' house registrations databases.
So this is a website that tries to agglomerate all of those databases into one place so you can start searching for, you know, his relatives, his friends, the head of his security services.
But again, when it comes to the decisions which are impacting us the most, perhaps, the most important decisions that are being made about war and so forth, again we can't just make a Freedom of Information request.
It's really difficult. So we're still having to rely on illegitimate ways of getting information, through leaks.
Another rather large investigation is around world diplomacy.
Again, this is all based around leaks, 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, and I was involved in this investigation because I got this leak through a leak from a disgruntled WikiLeaker and ended up going to work at the Guardian.
So I can tell you firsthand what it was like to have access to this leak. It was amazing. I mean, it was amazing.
It reminded me of that scene in "The Wizard of Oz."
They all bitched about each other. I mean, quite gossipy, those cables. Okay, but I thought it was a very important point for all of us to grasp, these are human beings just like us. They don't have special powers.
They're not magic. They are not our parents.
Beyond that, what I found most fascinating was the level of endemic corruption that I saw across all different countries, and particularly centered around the heart of power, around public officials who were embezzling the public's money for their own personal enrichment, and allowed to do that because of official secrecy.
Because that is what Julian Assange did.
That did end up with vulnerable people in Afghanistan being exposed. It also meant that the Belarussian dictator was given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaigners in that country who had spoken to the U.S. government.
Is that radical openness? I say it's not, because for me, what it means, it doesn't mean abdicating power, responsibility, accountability, it's actually being a partner with power. It's about sharing responsibility, sharing accountability. Also, the fact that he threatened to sue me because I got a leak of his leaks, I thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistency in ideology, to be honest, as well. (Laughs) The other thing is that power is incredibly seductive, and you must have two real qualities, I think, when you come to the table, when you're dealing with power, talking about power, because of its seductive capacity.
Skepticism, because you must always be challenging.
I want to see the evidence behind why that's so.
And humility because we are all human. We all make mistakes.
And if you don't have skepticism and humility, then it's a really short journey to go from reformer to autocrat, and I think you only have to read "Animal Farm" to get that message about how power corrupts people.
So what is the solution? It is, I believe, to embody within the rule of law rights to information.
At the moment our rights are incredibly weak.
In a lot of countries, we have Official Secrets Acts, including in Britain here. We have an Official Secrets Act with no public interest test. So that means it's a crime, people are punished, quite severely in a lot of cases, for publishing or giving away official information.
So that -- yes. Yes! My power pose. (Applause) (Laughs) I would like us to work towards that.
So it's not all bad news. I mean, there definitely is progress on the line, but I think what we find is that the closer that we get right into the heart of power, the more opaque, closed it becomes.
So it was only just the other week that I heard London's Metropolitan Police Commissioner talking about why the police need access to all of our communications, spying on us without any judicial oversight, and he said it was a matter of life and death.
He actually said that, it was a matter of life and death.
There was no evidence. He presented no evidence of that.
It was just, "Because I say so.
You have to trust me. Take it on faith."
Well, I'm sorry, people, but we are back to the pre-Enlightenment Church, and we need to fight against that.
So he was talking about the law in Britain which is the Communications Data Bill, an absolutely outrageous piece of legislation.
In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.
You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance.
Well, to go back to our original story, the parents have panicked. They've locked all the doors.
They're watching all of us. They've dug a basement, and they've built a spy center to try and run algorithms and figure out which ones of us are troublesome, and if any of us complain about that, we're arrested for terrorism.
Well, is that a fairy tale or a living nightmare?
Some fairy tales have happy endings. Some don't.
I think we've all read the Grimms' fairy tales, which are, indeed, very grim.
But the world isn't a fairy tale, and it could be more brutal than we want to acknowledge.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
So little Billy goes to school, and he sits down and the teacher says, "What does your father do?"
And little Billy says, "My father plays the piano in an opium den."
So the teacher rings up the parents, and says, "Very shocking story from little Billy today.
Just heard that he claimed that you play the piano in an opium den."
And the father says, "I'm very sorry. Yes, it's true, I lied.
But how can I tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is a politician?" (Laughter) Now, as a politician myself, standing in front of you, or indeed, meeting any stranger anywhere in the world, when I eventually reveal the nature of my profession, they look at me as though I'm somewhere between a snake, a monkey and an iguana, and through all of this, I feel, strongly, that something is going wrong.
And this isn't just a problem in Britain.
It's a problem across the developing world, and in middle income countries too. In Jamaica, for example -- look at Jamaican members of Parliament, you meet them, and they're often people who are Rhodes Scholars, who've studied at Harvard or at Princeton, and yet, you go down to downtown Kingston, and you are looking at one of the most depressing sites that you can see in any middle-income country in the world: a dismal, depressing landscape of burnt and half-abandoned buildings.
And this has been true for 30 years, and the handover in 1979, 1980, between one Jamaican leader who was the son of a Rhodes Scholar and a Q.C. to another who'd done an economics doctorate at Harvard, over 800 people were killed in the streets in drug-related violence.
Ten years ago, however, the promise of democracy seemed to be extraordinary. George W. Bush stood up in his State of the Union address in 2003 and said that democracy was the force that would beat most of the ills of the world. He said, because democratic governments respect their own people and respect their neighbors, freedom will bring peace.
They would bring prosperity, security, overcome sectarian violence, ensure that states would never again harbor terrorists.
Since then, what's happened?
Well, what we've seen is the creation, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, of democratic systems of government which haven't had any of those side benefits.
In Afghanistan, for example, we haven't just had one election or two elections. We've gone through three elections, presidential and parliamentary. And what do we find?
Do we find a flourishing civil society, a vigorous rule of law and good security? No. What we find in Afghanistan is a judiciary that is weak and corrupt, a very limited civil society which is largely ineffective, a media which is beginning to get onto its feet but a government that's deeply unpopular, perceived as being deeply corrupt, and security that is shocking, security that's terrible.
In Pakistan, in lots of sub-Saharan Africa, again you can see democracy and elections are compatible with corrupt governments, with states that are unstable and dangerous.
Well, what is the answer to this? Is the answer to just give up on the idea of democracy?
Well, obviously not. It would be absurd if we were to engage again in the kind of operations we were engaged in, in Iraq and Afghanistan if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a situation in which we were imposing anything other than a democratic system.
Anything else would run contrary to our values, it would run contrary to the wishes of the people on the ground, it would run contrary to our interests.
I remember in Iraq, for example, that we went through a period of feeling that we should delay democracy.
We went through a period of feeling that the lesson learned from Bosnia was that elections held too early enshrined sectarian violence, enshrined extremist parties, so in Iraq in 2003 the decision was made, let's not have elections for two years. Let's invest in voter education. Let's invest in democratization.
What is wrong with the people that we have chosen?
Most remote community, I have never met a villager who does not want a vote.
So we need to acknowledge that despite the dubious statistics, despite the fact that 84 percent of people in Britain feel politics is broken, despite the fact that when I was in Iraq, we did an opinion poll in 2003 and asked people what political systems they preferred, and the answer came back that seven percent wanted the United States, five percent wanted France, three percent wanted Britain, and nearly 40 percent wanted Dubai, which is, after all, not a democratic state at all but a relatively prosperous minor monarchy, democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting. But in order to do so we need to get away from instrumental arguments.
We need to get away from saying democracy matters because of the other things it brings.
We need to get away from feeling, in the same way, human rights matters because of the other things it brings, or women's rights matters for the other things it brings.
Because they're very dangerous. If we set about saying, for example, torture is wrong because it doesn't extract good information, or we say, you need women's rights because it stimulates economic growth by doubling the size of the work force, you leave yourself open to the position where the government of North Korea can turn around and say, "Well actually, we're having a lot of success extracting good information with our torture at the moment," or the government of Saudi Arabia to say, "Well, our economic growth's okay, thank you very much, considerably better than yours, so maybe we don't need to go ahead with this program on women's rights."
It's not about the things that it brings.
The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law.
The point about democracy is intrinsic.
Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government.
But if we're really to make democracy vigorous again, if we're ready to revivify it, we need to get involved in a new project of the citizens and the politicians.
Democracy is not simply a question of structures.
It is a state of mind. It is an activity.
After I speak to you today, I'm going on a radio program called "Any Questions," and the thing you will have noticed about politicians on these kinds of radio programs is that they never, ever say that they don't know the answer to a question. It doesn't matter what it is.
We need to stop that, to stop pretending to be omniscient beings.
Politicians also need to learn, occasionally, to say that certain things that voters want, certain things that voters have been promised, may be things that we cannot deliver or perhaps that we feel we should not deliver.
And the second thing we should do is understand the genius of our societies.
That can mean different things in different countries.
In Britain, it could mean looking to the French, learning from the French, getting directly elected mayors in place in a French commune system.
In Afghanistan, it could have meant instead of concentrating on the big presidential and parliamentary elections, we should have done what was in the Afghan constitution from the very beginning, which is to get direct local elections going at a district level and elect people's provincial governors.
But for any of these things to work, the honesty in language, the local democracy, it's not just a question of what politicians do.
For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest.
If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen.
In other words, if democracy is to be rebuilt, is to become again vigorous and vibrant, it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public.
Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)
If you're in care, legally the government is your parent, loco parentis.
Margaret Thatcher was my mother. (Laughter) Let's not talk about breastfeeding. (Laughter) Harry Potter was a foster child.
Pip from "Great Expectations" was adopted; Superman was a foster child; Cinderella was a foster child; Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, was fostered and institutionalized; Batman was orphaned; Lyra Belacqua from Philip Pullman's "Northern Lights" was fostered; Jane Eyre, adopted; Roald Dahl's James from "James and the Giant Peach;" Matilda; Moses -- Moses! (Laughter) Moses! (Laughter) -- the boys in Michael Morpurgo's "Friend or Foe;" Alem in Benjamin Zephaniah's "Refugee Boy;" Luke Skywalker -- Luke Skywalker! (Laughter) -- Oliver Twist; Cassia in "The Concubine of Shanghai" by Hong Ying; Celie in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."
All of these great fictional characters, all of them who were hurt by their condition, all of them who spawned thousands of other books and other films, all of them were fostered, adopted or orphaned.
It seems that writers know that the child outside of family reflects on what family truly is more than what it promotes itself to be.
And why have we not made the connection, between — How has that happened? — between these incredible characters of popular culture and religions, and the fostered, adopted or orphaned child in our midst? It's not our pity that they need.
It's our respect.
It is that simple.
My own mother — and I should say this here — she same to this country in the late '60s, and she was, you know, she found herself pregnant, as women did in the late '60s. You know what I mean?
They found themselves pregnant.
In the 1960s -- I should give you some context -- in the 1960s, if you were pregnant and you were single, you were seen as a threat to the community.
You were separated from your family by the state.
You were appointed a social worker.
The adoptive parents were lined up.
It was the primary purpose of the social worker, the aim, to get the woman at her most vulnerable time in her entire life, to sign the adoption papers.
So the adoption papers were signed.
The mother and baby's homes were often run by nuns.
The adoption papers were signed, the child was given to the adoptive parents, and the mother shipped back to her community to say that she'd been on a little break.
It's kind of easy to patronize the past, to forego our responsibilities in the present.
What happened then is a direct reflection of what is happening now. Everybody believed themselves to be doing the right thing by God and by the state for the big society, fast-tracking adoption.
So anyway, she comes here, 1967, she's pregnant, and she comes from Ethiopia that was celebrating its own jubilee at the time under the Emperor Haile Selassie, and she lands months before the Enoch Powell speech, the "Rivers of Blood" speech.
She lands months before the Beatles release "The White Album," months before Martin Luther King was killed.
It was a summer of love if you were white.
If you were black, it was a summer of hate.
So she goes from Oxford, she's sent to the north of England to a mother and baby home, and appointed a social worker.
It's her plan. You know, I have to say this in the Houses -- It's her plan to have me fostered for a short period of time while she studies. But the social worker, he had a different agenda.
He found the foster parents, and he said to them, "Treat this as an adoption. He's yours forever.
His name is Norman." (Laughter) Norman! (Laughter) Norman!
So they took me. I was a message, they said.
I was a sign from God, they said.
I was Norman Mark Greenwood.
Now, for the next 11 years, all I know is that this woman, this birth woman, should have her eyes scratched out for not signing the adoption papers. She was an evil woman too selfish to sign, so I spent those 11 years kneeling and praying.
But I would always answer myself, "Yes, of course you can."
(Laughter) And then I was supposed to determine whether that was the voice of God or it was the voice of the Devil.
Who knew? (Laughter) So anyway, two years sort of passed, and they had a child of their own, and then another two years passed, and they had another child of their own, and then another time passed and they had another child that they called an accident, which I thought was an unusual name. (Laughter) And I was on the cusp of, sort of, adolescence, so I was starting to take biscuits from the tin without asking.
They sat me at a table, my foster mom, and she said to me, "You don't love us, do you?" At 11 years old.
They've had three other children. I'm the fourth. The third was an accident.
And I said, "Yeah, of course I do." Because you do.
"I will ask God for forgiveness and His light will shine through me to them. How fantastic." This was an opportunity.
The theology was perfect, the timing unquestionable, and the answer as honest as a sinner could get.
"I mustn't love you," I said to them. "But I will ask God for forgiveness."
Twenty-four hours later, my social worker, this strange man who used to visit me every couple of months, he's waiting for me in the car as I say goodbye to my parents.
You couldn't see it from the street, because the home was surrounded by beech trees.
For doing this, I was incarcerated for a year in an assessment center which was actually a remand center. It was a virtual prison for young people.
By the way, years later, my social worker said that I should never have been put in there.
I wasn't charged for anything. I hadn't done anything wrong.
I'm 17 years old, and they had a padded cell.
They -- I was put in a dormitory with a confirmed Nazi sympathizer.
I have to tell this story.
See, that's what family does.
In creativity I saw light.
In the imagination I saw the endless possibility of life, the endless truth, the permanent creation of reality, the place where anger was an expression in the search for love, a place where dysfunction is a true reaction to untruth.
I've just got to say it to you all: I found all of my family in my adult life. I spent all of my adult life finding them, and I've now got a fully dysfunctional family just like everybody else.
But I'm reporting back to you to say quite simply that you can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats its child.
Thanks very much. It's been an honor. (Applause) (Applause)
In the 17th century, a woman named Giulia Tofana had a very successful perfume business.
For over 50 years she ran it.
It sort of ended abruptly when she was executed — (Laughter) — for murdering 600 men. You see, it wasn't a very good perfume.
In fact, it was completely odorless and tasteless and colorless, but as a poison, it was the best money could buy, so women flocked to her in order to murder their husbands.
It turns out that poisoners were a valued and feared group, because poisoning a human being is a quite difficult thing.
The reason is, we have sort of a built-in poison detector.
This reaction expands into adulthood and becomes sort of a full-blown disgust response, no longer just about whether or not we're about to be poisoned, but whenever there's a threat of physical contamination from some source. But the face remains strikingly similar.
We can understand this process by understanding a little bit about emotions in general. So the basic human emotions, those kinds of emotions that we share with all other human beings, exist because they motivate us to do good things and they keep us away from doing bad things.
So by and large, they are good for our survival.
Take the emotion of fear, for instance. It keeps us away from doing things that are really, really risky.
Just like fear offers us protective benefits, disgust seems to do the same thing, except for what disgust does is keeps us away from not things that might eat us, or heights, but rather things that might poison us, or give us disease and make us sick.
Darwin was probably one of the first scientists to systematically investigate the human emotions, and he pointed to the universal nature and the strength of the disgust response.
This is an anecdote from his travels in South America.
"In Tierro del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat while I was eating ...
and plainly showed disgust at its softness, whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage — (Laughter) — though his hands did not appear dirty."
He later wrote, "It's okay, some of my best friends are naked savages." (Laughter) Well it turns out it's not only old-timey British scientists who are this squeamish. I recently got a chance to talk to Richard Dawkins for a documentary, and I was able to disgust him a bunch of times. Here's my favorite.
Richard Dawkins: "We've evolved around courtship and sex, are attached to deep-rooted emotions and reactions that are hard to jettison overnight."
David Pizarro: So my favorite part of this clip is that Professor Dawkins actually gagged.
He jumps back, and he gags, and we had to do it three times, and all three times he gagged. (Laughter) And he was really gagging. I thought he might throw up on me, actually.
One of the features, though, of disgust, is not just its universality and its strength, but the way that it works through association.
Jews, women, homosexuals, untouchables, lower-class people -- all of those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body."
Let me give you just some examples of how, some powerful examples of how this has been used historically.
This comes from a Nazi children's book published in 1938: "Just look at these guys! The louse-infested beards, the filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes...
Jews often have an unpleasant sweetish odor.
If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews."
A more modern example comes from people who try to convince us that homosexuality is immoral.
This is from an anti-gay website, where they said gays are "worthy of death for their vile ... sex practices."
When we were first investigating the role of disgust in moral judgment, one of the things we became interested in was whether or not these sorts of appeals are more likely to work in individuals who are more easily disgusted.
So while disgust, along with the other basic emotions, are universal phenomena, it just really is true that some people are easier to disgust than others.
It turns out that this score is actually meaningful.
The first time that we set out to collect data on this and associate it with political or moral beliefs, we found a general pattern -- this is with the psychologists Yoel Inbar and Paul Bloom -- that in fact, across three studies we kept finding that people who reported that they were easily disgusted also reported that they were more politically conservative.
Another way to say this, though, is that people who are very liberal are very hard to disgust. (Laughter) In a more recent follow-up study, we were able to look at a much greater sample, a much larger sample. In this case, this is nearly 30,000 U.S. respondents, and we find the same pattern. As you can see, people who are on the very conservative side of answering the political orientation scale are also much more likely to report that they're easily disgusted.
So we were able to control for gender, age, income, education, even basic personality variables, and the result stays the same.
When we actually looked at not just self-reported political orientation, but voting behavior, we were able to look geographically across the nation. What we found was that in regions in which people reported high levels of disgust sensitivity, McCain got more votes.
So it not only predicted self-reported political orientation, but actual voting behavior. And also we were able, with this sample, to look across the world, in 121 different countries we asked the same questions, and as you can see, this is 121 countries collapsed into 10 different geographical regions.
And what they've demonstrated is that people who report being more politically conservative are also more physiologically aroused when you show them disgusting images like the ones that I showed you.
Interestingly, what they also showed in a finding that we kept getting in our previous studies as well was that one of the strongest influences here is that individuals who are very disgust-sensitive not only are more likely to report being politically conservative, but they're also very much more opposed to gay marriage and homosexuality and pretty much a lot of the socio-moral issues in the sexual domain.
So physiological arousal predicted, in this study, attitudes toward gay marriage.
But even with all these data linking disgust sensitivity and political orientation, one of the questions that remains is what is the causal link here? Is it the case that disgust really is shaping political and moral beliefs?
We have to resort to experimental methods to answer this, and so what we can do is actually bring people into the lab and disgust them and compare them to a control group that hasn't been disgusted. It turns out that over the past five years a number of researchers have done this, and by and large the results have all been the same, that when people are feeling disgust, their attitudes shift towards the right of the political spectrum, toward more moral conservatism as well.
So this is whether you use a foul odor, a bad taste, from film clips, from post-hypnotic suggestions of disgust, images like the ones I've shown you, even just reminding people that disease is prevalent and they should be wary of it and wash up, right, to keep clean, these all have similar effects on judgment.
Let me just give you an example from a recent study that we conducted. We asked participants to just simply give us their opinion of a variety of social groups, and we either made the room smell gross or not.
When the room smelled gross, what we saw was that individuals actually reported more negative attitudes toward gay men.
Disgust didn't influence attitudes toward all the other social groups that we asked, including African-Americans, the elderly. It really came down to the attitudes they had toward gay men.
In another set of studies we actually simply reminded people -- this was at a time when the swine flu was going around -- we reminded people that in order to prevent the spread of the flu that they ought to wash their hands.
And what we found was that just taking a questionnaire next to this hand-sanitizing reminder made individuals report being more politically conservative.
And when we asked them a variety of questions about the rightness or wrongness of certain acts, what we also found was that simply being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them more morally conservative.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by harmless but taboo sexual practice. We gave them scenarios.
When his grandmother's away, he has sex with his girlfriend on his grandma's bed.
In another one, we said a woman enjoys masturbating with her favorite teddy bear cuddled next to her. (Laughter) People find these to be more morally abhorrent if they've been reminded to wash their hands. (Laughter) (Laughter) Okay. The fact that emotions influence our judgment should come as no surprise. I mean, that's part of how emotions work.
They not only motivate you to behave in certain ways, but they change the way you think.
It makes less sense that an emotion that was built to prevent me from ingesting poison should predict who I'm going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election.
The question of whether disgust ought to influence our moral and political judgments certainly has to be complex, and might depend on exactly what judgments we're talking about, and as a scientist, we have to conclude sometimes that the scientific method is just ill-equipped to answer these sorts of questions.
But one thing that I am fairly certain about is, at the very least, what we can do with this research is point to what questions we ought to ask in the first place.
Thank you. (Applause)
I was one of those kids that, every time I got in the car, I basically had to roll down the window.
It was usually too hot, too stuffy or just too smelly, and my father would not let us use the air conditioner.
He said that it would overheat the engine.
And you might remember, some of you, how the cars were back then, and it was a common problem of overheating.
Things have changed now. We have cars that we take across country.
So there's no more signal for us to tell us to stop.
Great, right? Well, we have similar problems in buildings.
In the past, before air conditioning, we had thick walls.
Then in about the 1930s, with the advent of plate glass, rolled steel and mass production, we were able to make floor-to-ceiling windows and unobstructed views, and with that came the irreversible reliance on mechanical air conditioning to cool our solar-heated spaces.
Over time, the buildings got taller and bigger, our engineering even better, so that the mechanical systems were massive. They require a huge amount of energy.
They give off a lot of heat into the atmosphere, and for some of you may understand the heat island effect in cities, where the urban areas are much more warm than the adjacent rural areas, but we also have problems that, when we lose power, we can't open a window here, and so the buildings are uninhabitable and have to be made vacant until that air conditioning system can start up again.
Even worse, with our intention of trying to make buildings move towards a net-zero energy state, we can't do it just by making mechanical systems more and more efficient.
So what do we do here? How do we pull ourselves and dig us out of this hole that we've dug?
If we look at biology, and many of you probably don't know, I was a biology major before I went into architecture, the human skin is the organ that naturally regulates the temperature in the body, and it's a fantastic thing.
It has pores, it has sweat glands, it has all these things that work together very dynamically and very efficiently, and so what I propose is that our building skins should be more similar to human skin, and by doing so can be much more dynamic, responsive and differentiated, depending on where it is.
First of all, I guess we call it smart because it requires no controls and it requires no energy, and that's a very big deal for architecture.
You can see that here by the different reflection on this side.
And because it has two different coefficients of expansion, when heated, one side will expand faster than the other and result in a curling action.
So in early prototypes I built these surfaces to try to see how the curl would react to temperature and possibly allow air to ventilate through the system, and in other prototypes did surfaces where the multiplicity of having these strips together can try to make bigger movement happen when also heated, and currently have this installation at the Materials & Applications gallery in Silver Lake, close by, and it's there until August, if you want to see it.
It's called "Bloom," and the surface is made completely out of thermo-bimetal, and its intention is to make this canopy that does two things. One, it's a sun-shading device, so that when the sun hits the surface, it constricts the amount of sun passing through, and in other areas, it's a ventilating system, so that hot, trapped air underneath can actually move through and out when necessary.
You can see here in this time-lapse video that the sun, as it moves across the surface, as well as the shade, each of the tiles moves individually.
And the great thing with that is the fact that we can calibrate each one to be very, very specific to its location, to the angle of the sun, and also how the thing actually curls.
So this kind of proof of concept project has a lot of implications to actual future application in architecture, and in this case, here you see a house, that's for a developer in China, and it's actually a four-story glass box.
It's still with that glass box because we still want that visual access, but now it's sheathed with this thermo-bimetal layer, it's a screen that goes around it, and that layer can actually open and close as that sun moves around on that surface.
In addition to that, it can also screen areas for privacy, so that it can differentiate from some of the public areas in the space during different times of day.
And what it basically implies is that, in houses now, we don't need drapes or shutters or blinds anymore because we can sheath the building with these things, as well as control the amount of air conditioning you need inside that building.
I'm also looking at trying to develop some building components for the market, and so here you see a pretty typical double-glazed window panel, and in that panel, between those two pieces of glass, that double-glazing, I'm trying to work on making a thermo-bimetal pattern system so that when the sun hits that outside layer and heats that interior cavity, that thermo-bimetal will begin to curl, and what actually will happen then is it'll start to block out the sun in certain areas of the building, and totally, if necessary.
And so you can imagine, even in this application, that in a high-rise building where the panel systems go from floor to floor up to 30, 40 floors, the entire surface could be differentiated at different times of day depending on how that sun moves across and hits that surface.
This last project is also of components.
The influence -- and if you have noticed, one of my spheres of influence is biology -- is from a grasshopper.
And grasshoppers have a different kind of breathing system.
They breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles, and they bring the air through and it moves through their system to cool them down, and so in this project, I'm trying to look at how we can consider that in architecture too, how we can bring air through holes in the sides of a building.
And so you see here some early studies of blocks, where those holes are actually coming through, and this is before the thermo-bimetal is applied, and this is after the bimetal is applied. Sorry, it's a little hard to see, but on the surfaces, you can see these red arrows.
So I want to leave you with one last impression about the project, or this kind of work and using smart materials.
When you're tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day, when you're on vacation and there's no one there on the weekends to be turning off and on the controls, or when there's a power outage, and you have no electricity to rely on, these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly, efficiently and endlessly. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state, and I remember when I was six years old, I remember coming home one day to find a cart full of the most delicious sweets at our doorstep.
He was livid, and I still remember how we cried when that cart with our half-eaten sweets was pulled away from us.
Later, I understood why my father got so upset.
Those sweets were a bribe from a contractor who was trying to get my father to award him a government contract.
My father was responsible for building roads in Bihar, and he had developed a firm stance against corruption, even though he was harassed and threatened.
And I experienced this most viscerally when I traveled to remote villages to study poverty.
And as I went village to village, I remember one day, when I was famished and exhausted, and I was almost collapsing in a scorching heat under a tree, and just at that time, one of the poorest men in that village invited me into his hut and graciously fed me.
Only I later realized that what he fed me was food for his entire family for two days.
This profound gift of generosity challenged and changed the very purpose of my life.
Later, I joined the World Bank, which sought to fight such poverty by transferring aid from rich to poor countries.
My initial work focused on Uganda, where I focused on negotiating reforms with the Finance Ministry of Uganda so they could access our loans.
But after we disbursed the loans, I remember a trip in Uganda where I found newly built schools without textbooks or teachers, new health clinics without drugs, and the poor once again without any voice or recourse.
It was Bihar all over again.
Bihar represents the challenge of development: abject poverty surrounded by corruption.
Globally, 1.3 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, and the work I did in Uganda represents the traditional approach to these problems that has been practiced since 1944, when winners of World War II, 500 founding fathers, and one lonely founding mother, gathered in New Hampshire, USA, to establish the Bretton Woods institutions, including the World Bank.
And that traditional approach to development had three key elements. First, transfer of resources from rich countries in the North to poorer countries in the South, accompanied by reform prescriptions.
Second, the development institutions that channeled these transfers were opaque, with little transparency of what they financed or what results they achieved.
And third, the engagement in developing countries was with a narrow set of government elites with little interaction with the citizens, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of development assistance.
Today, each of these elements is opening up due to dramatic changes in the global environment.
Open knowledge, open aid, open governance, and together, they represent three key shifts that are transforming development and that also hold greater hope for the problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar.
You know, developing countries today will not simply accept solutions that are handed down to them by the U.S., Europe or the World Bank.
They get their inspiration, their hope, their practical know-how, from successful emerging economies in the South.
This is the new ecosystem of open-knowledge flows, not just traveling North to South, but South to South, and even South to North, with Mexico's Oportunidades today inspiring New York City.
And just as these North-to-South transfers are opening up, so too are the development institutions that channeled these transfers.
This is the second shift: open aid.
Recently, the World Bank opened its vault of data for public use, releasing 8,000 economic and social indicators for 200 countries over 50 years, and it launched a global competition to crowdsource innovative apps using this data.
Take GeoMapping. In this map from Kenya, the red dots show where all the schools financed by donors are located, and the darker the shade of green, the more the number of out-of-school children.
So this simple mashup reveals that donors have not financed any schools in the areas with the most out-of-school children, provoking new questions. Is development assistance targeting those who most need our help?
In this manner, the World Bank has now GeoMapped 30,000 project activities in 143 countries, and donors are using a common platform to map all their projects.
This is a tremendous leap forward in transparency and accountability of aid.
And this leads me to the third, and in my view, the most significant shift in development: open governance. Governments today are opening up just as citizens are demanding voice and accountability.
From the Arab Spring to the Anna Hazare movement in India, using mobile phones and social media not just for political accountability but also for development accountability.
This is a public budget. (Laughter) And as you can see, it's not really accessible or understandable to an ordinary citizen that is trying to understand how the government is spending its resources.
To tackle this problem, governments are using new tools to visualize the budget so it's more understandable to the public.
In this map from Moldova, the green color shows those districts that have low spending on schools but good educational outcomes, and the red color shows the opposite.
Tools like this help turn a shelf full of inscrutable documents into a publicly understandable visual, and what's exciting is that with this openness, there are today new opportunities for citizens to give feedback and engage with government.
So in the Philippines today, parents and students can give real-time feedback on a website, Checkmyschool.org, or using SMS, whether teachers and textbooks are showing up in school, the same problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar.
And the government is responsive. So for instance, when it was reported on this website that 800 students were at risk because school repairs had stalled due to corruption, the Department of Education in the Philippines took swift action.
And you know what's exciting is that this innovation is now spreading South to South, from the Philippines to Indonesia, Kenya, Moldova and beyond.
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, even an impoverished community was able to use these tools to voice its aspirations.
This is what the map of Tandale looked like in August, 2011. But within a few weeks, university students were able to use mobile phones and an open-source platform to dramatically map the entire community infrastructure.
And what is very exciting is that citizens were then able to give feedback as to which health or water points were not working, aggregated in the red bubbles that you see, which together provides a graphic visual of the collective voices of the poor.
Today, even Bihar is turning around and opening up under a committed leadership that is making government transparent, accessible and responsive to the poor.
But, you know, in many parts of the world, governments are not interested in opening up or in serving the poor, and it is a real challenge for those who want to change the system.
These are the lonely warriors like my father and many, many others, and a key frontier of development work is to help these lonely warriors join hands so they can together overcome the odds.
So for instance, today, in Ghana, courageous reformers from civil society, Parliament and government, have forged a coalition for transparent contracts in the oil sector, and, galvanized by this, reformers in Parliament are now investigating dubious contracts.
These examples give new hope, new possibility to the problems I witnessed in Uganda or that my father confronted in Bihar.
Two years ago, on April 8th, 2010, I called my father.
It was very late at night, and at age 80, he was typing a 70-page public interest litigation against corruption in a road project.
Though he was no lawyer, he argued the case in court himself the next day. He won the ruling, but later that very evening, he fell, and he died.
He fought till the end, increasingly passionate that to combat corruption and poverty, not only did government officials need to be honest, but citizens needed to join together to make their voices heard.
These became the two bookends of his life, and the journey he traveled in between mirrored the changing development landscape.
Today, I'm inspired by these changes, and I'm excited that at the World Bank, we are embracing these new directions, a significant departure from my work in Uganda 20 years ago.
We need to radically open up development so knowledge flows in multiple directions, inspiring practitioners, so aid becomes transparent, accountable and effective, so governments open up and citizens are engaged and empowered with reformers in government.
We need to accelerate these shifts.
If we do, we will find that the collective voices of the poor will be heard in Bihar, in Uganda, and beyond.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I'd like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century, and perhaps in the next 10,000 years.
What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people, who were madly in love, into a functional MRI brain scanner.
17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped.
(Laughter) "What 'tis to love?" Shakespeare said.
I think our ancestors -- I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago.
I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was by looking at the last 45 years of the psychological research and as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love.
The first thing that happens is, a person begins to take on what I call, "special meaning."
As a truck driver once said to me, "The world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne."
"Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another."
(Laughter) And then you just focus on this person.
As Chaucer said, "Love is blind."
In trying to understand romantic love, I decided I would read poetry from all over the world, and I just want to give you one very short poem from eighth-century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman.
He became hooked on a sleeping mat, probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain, just like with you and me.
But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them.
As one Polynesian said, "I felt like jumping in the sky."
You're up all night. You're walking till dawn.
You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly.
Real dependence on this person.
As one businessman in New York said to me, "Anything she liked, I liked."
Simple. Romantic love is very simple.
You know, if you're just sleeping with somebody casually, you don't really care if they're sleeping with somebody else.
But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them.
I think there's a Darwinian purpose to this.
But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally.
The motor in the brain begins to crank, and you want this person.
And last but not least, it is an obsession.
Before I put these people in the MRI machine, I would ask them all kinds of questions.
But my most important question was always the same.
It was: "What percentage of the day and night do you think about this person?"
And indeed, they would say, "All day. All night.
I don't work with people in any kind of traumatic situation.
My final question was always the same.
as if I had asked them to pass the salt.
So we scanned their brains, looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photograph, with a distraction task in between.
So we could look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state.
And we found activity in a lot of brain regions.
In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine.
And indeed, that's exactly what happens.
I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion.
In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low.
But actually, it's a drive.
It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind.
The motor of the brain.
But certainly, around the world, people who are rejected in love will kill for it.
People live for love.
They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends.
In over 175 societies, people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system.
I have come to think it's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.
And I've also come to think that it's one of three basically different brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction.
One is the sex drive: the craving for sexual gratification.
The second of these three brain systems is romantic love: that elation, obsession of early love.
And the third brain system is attachment: that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner.
You can feel it when you're just driving along in your car.
I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy.
And I think that attachment, the third brain system, evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise a child together as a team.
One of the last 10,000 years and the other, certainly of the last 25 years, that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems: lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner.
I've looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations.
Everywhere in the world, 129 out of 130 of them, women are not only moving into the job market -- sometimes very, very slowly, but they are moving into the job market -- and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power, health and education.
It's very slow.
For every trend on this planet, there's a counter-trend.
We all know of them, but nevertheless -- the Arabs say, "The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on."
And, indeed, that caravan is moving on.
Women are moving back into the job market.
For millions of years, on the grasslands of Africa, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables.
They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal.
And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men.
In short, we're really moving forward to the past.
Then, women's worst invention was the plow.
With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful.
Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors, but then with the industrial revolution and the post-industrial revolution they're moving back into the job market.
We are seeing now one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal.
There's a lot of gender differences; anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child.
I don't know why they want to think that men and women are alike.
There's much we have in common, but there's a whole lot that we do not have in common.
We are -- in the words of Ted Hughes, "I think that we are like two feet. We need each other to get ahead."
But we did not evolve to have the same brain.
And we're finding more and more gender differences in the brain.
One of them is women's verbal ability.
Women's ability to find the right word rapidly, basic articulation goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak.
They held that baby in front of their face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words.
And, indeed, they're becoming a very powerful force.
Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they're moving into journalism.
And I think that the television is like the global campfire.
We sit around it and it shapes our minds.
Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producer who calls me, who negotiates what we're going to say, is a woman.
In fact, Solzhenitsyn once said, "To have a great writer is to have another government."
Today 54 percent of people who are writers in America are women.
It's one of many, many characteristics that women have that they will bring into the job market.
They're highly imaginative.
We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long-term planning.
They tend to be web thinkers.
Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes.
Men tend to -- and these are averages -- tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern.
In fact, there's many more male geniuses in the world.
(Laughter) When the male brain works well, it works extremely well.
And what I really think that we're doing is, we're moving towards a collaborative society, a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed.
But in fact, women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life.
Foremost, women are starting to express their sexuality.
(Laughter) And -- basic math!
Anyway.
In the Western world, women start sooner at sex, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners that they do, marry later, have fewer children, leave bad marriages in order to get good ones.
We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression.
And, indeed, once again we're moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago, because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today.
We're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality.
They're now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the "symmetrical marriage," or the "pure marriage," or the "companionate marriage."
This is a marriage between equals, moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit.
We're also seeing a rise of romantic love.
91 percent of American women and 86 percent of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner, if they were not in love with that person.
People around the world, in a study of 37 societies, want to be in love with the person that they marry.
I even think that marriages might even become more stable because of the second great world trend.
The first one being women moving into the job market, the second one being the aging world population.
They're now saying that in America, that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85.
So we're seeing there's a real extension of middle age.
For one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies.
And as it turns out, the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce.
I would even say that with Viagra, estrogen replacement, hip replacements and the incredibly interesting women -- women have never been as interesting as they are now.
Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable.
And so I honestly think that if there really was ever a time in human evolution when we have the opportunity to make good marriages, that time is now.
However, there's always kinds of complications in this.
These three brain systems -- lust, romantic love and attachment -- don't always go together.
That's why casual sex isn't so casual.
With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine.
Dopamine's associated with romantic love, and you can just fall in love with somebody who you're just having casual sex with.
With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin -- those are associated with attachment.
But these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren't always connected to each other.
You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners.
In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else.
It's as if there's a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do.
So I don't think, honestly, we're an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce.
And I think, however, we can make good relationships with each other.
So I want to conclude with two things.
The worry is about antidepressants.
Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States.
And these drugs are going generic.
I know one girl who's been on these antidepressants, SSRIs, serotonin-enhancing antidepressants -- since she was 13.
I've got nothing against people who take them short term, when they're going through something horrible.
They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else.
But more and more people in the United States are taking them long term.
And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit.
Dopamine is associated with romantic love.
And when you kill the sex drive, you kill orgasm.
And when you kill orgasm, you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment.
The things are connected in the brain.
And when you tamper with one brain system, you're going to tamper with another.
So now -- (Applause) Thank you.
I've been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years.
I'm an identical twin; I am interested in why we're all alike.
Why you and I are alike, why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike.
And about a year ago, an Internet dating service, Match.com, came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them.
They said, "Yes."
That's my current project; it will be my next book.
There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another.
Timing is important. Proximity is important.
Mystery is important.
You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love.
You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your "love map," an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up.
And that's what I'm now contributing to this.
I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it, too, the magic of it.
And they were all at a conference in Beijing.
And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain, and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love.
(Laughter) So he decided he'd put science to work.
And sure enough -- I've never been in one, but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks and it's crazy and it's noisy and it's exciting.
He figured that this would drive up the dopamine, and she'd fall in love with him.
An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw, and she throws her hands up and she says, "Wasn't that wonderful?"
And, "Wasn't that rickshaw driver handsome!"
(Laughter) (Applause) There's magic to love!
They're going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called "this mortal coil."
Thank you.
Please don't tell me I'm normal.
Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers.
Remi is 22, tall and very handsome.
Remi knows what love is.
He shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless.
He's not greedy. He doesn't see skin color.
He doesn't care about religious differences, and get this: He has never told a lie.
When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be.
Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome.
He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday.
But most people don't agree.
And in fact, because their minds don't fit into society's version of normal, they're often bypassed and misunderstood.
Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "autism," it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills.
It manifests in each individual differently, hence why Remi is so different from Sam.
And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure.
And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it.
I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life.
And after a few months went by, I realized that he was different.
He didn't want to play like the other babies did, and in fact, he didn't seem very interested in me whatsoever.
And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious.
Extraordinary.
Now, I cannot deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family, moments where I've wished that they were just like me.
Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong.
And if I could communicate just one thing to Remi and to Sam and to you, it would be that you don't have to be normal.
The chance for greatness, for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else.
Please -- don't tell me I'm normal.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Across Europe and Central Asia, approximately one million children live in large residential institutions, usually known as orphanages.
Most people imagine orphanages as a benign environment that care for children.
Others know more about the living conditions there, but still think they're a necessary evil.
But 60 years of research has demonstrated that separating children from their families and placing them in large institutions seriously harms their health and development, and this is particularly true for young babies.
As we know, babies are born without their full muscle development, and that includes the brain.
During the first three years of life, the brain grows to its full size, with most of that growth taking place in the first six months. The brain develops in response to experience and to stimulation.
Every time a young baby learns something new -- to focus its eyes, to mimic a movement or a facial expression, to pick something up, to form a word or to sit up -- new synaptic connections are being built in the brain.
New parents are astonished by the rapidity of this learning.
They are quite rightly amazed and delighted by their children's cleverness.
They communicate their delight to their children, who respond with smiles, and a desire to achieve more and to learn more.
This forming of the powerful attachment between child and parent provides the building blocks for physical, social, language, cognitive and psychomotor development.
It is the model for all future relationships with friends, with partners and with their own children.
It happens so naturally in most families that we don't even notice it. Most of us are unaware of its importance to human development and, by extension, to the development of a healthy society.
In August, 1993, I had my first opportunity to witness on a massive scale the impact on children of institutionalization and the absence of parenting.
Those of us who remember the newspaper reports that came out of Romania after the 1989 revolution will recall the horrors of the conditions in some of those institutions.
I was asked to help the director of a large institution to help prevent the separation of children from their families.
Housing 550 babies, this was Ceausescu's show orphanage, and so I'd been told the conditions were much better.
It was hard to believe there were any children there at all, yet the director showed me into room after room, each containing row upon row of cots, in each of which lay a child staring into space.
In a room of 40 newborns, not one of them was crying.
Yet I could see soiled nappies, and I could see that some of the children were distressed, but the only noise was a low, continuous moan.
The newly admitted babies would cry for the first few hours, but their demands were not met, and so eventually they learned not to bother. Within a few days, they were listless, lethargic, and staring into space like all the others.
The children must be woken at 7 and fed at 7:30.
At 8, their nappies must be changed, so a staff member may have only 30 minutes to feed 10 or 20 children.
Since my first visit to Ceausescu's institution, I've seen hundreds of such places across 18 countries, from the Czech Republic to Sudan.
Across all of these diverse lands and cultures, the institutions, and the child's journey through them, is depressingly similar.
Most of these children will never leave the institution again.
For those without disabilities, at age three, they're transferred to another institution, and at age seven, to yet another. Segregated according to age and gender, they are arbitrarily separated from their siblings, often without even a chance to say goodbye.
There's rarely enough to eat. They are often hungry.
The older children bully the little ones. They learn to survive. They learn to defend themselves, or they go under.
When they leave the institution, they find it really difficult to cope and to integrate into society.
In Moldova, young women raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to be trafficked than their peers, and a Russian study found that two years after leaving institutions, young adults, 20 percent of them had a criminal record, 14 percent were involved in prostitution, and 10 percent had taken their own lives.
But why are there so many orphans in Europe when there hasn't been a great deal of war or disaster in recent years?
In fact, more than 95 percent of these children have living parents, and societies tend to blame these parents for abandoning these children, but research shows that most parents want their children, and that the primary drivers behind institutionalization are poverty, disability and ethnicity.
The institution may be hundreds of miles away from the family home.
Behind each of the million children in institutions, there is usually a story of parents who are desperate and feel they've run out of options, like Natalia in Moldova, who only had enough money to feed her baby, and so had to send her older son to the institution; or Desi, in Bulgaria, who looked after her four children at home until her husband died, but then she had to go out to work full time, and with no support, felt she had no option but to place a child with disabilities in an institution; or the countless young girls too terrified to tell their parents they're pregnant, who leave their babies in a hospital; or the new parents, the young couple who have just found out that their firstborn child has a disability, and instead of being provided with positive messages about their child's potential, are told by the doctors, "Forget her, leave her in the institution, go home and make a healthy one."
Every child has the right to a family, deserves and needs a family, and children are amazingly resilient.
We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays, and go on to lead normal, happy lives.
It's also much cheaper to provide support to families than it is to provide institutions.
One study suggests that a family support service costs 10 percent of an institutional placement, whilst good quality foster care costs usually about 30 percent.
If we spend less on these children but on the right services, we can take the savings and reinvest them in high quality residential care for those few children with extremely complex needs.
Across Europe, a movement is growing to shift the focus and transfer the resources from large institutions that provide poor quality care to community-based services that protect children from harm and allow them to develop to their full potential. When I first started to work in Romania nearly 20 years ago, there were 200,000 children living in institutions, and more entering every day.
Now, there are less than 10,000, and family support services are provided across the country.
In Moldova, despite extreme poverty and the terrible effects of the global financial crisis, the numbers of children in institutions has reduced by more than 50 percent in the last five years, and the resources are being redistributed to family support services and inclusive schools.
Many countries have developed national action plans for change.
But there is still much to be done to end the systematic institutionalization of children.
Awareness-raising is required at every level of society.
People need to know the harm that institutions cause to children, and the better alternatives that exist.
If we know people who are planning to support orphanages, we should convince them to support family services instead.
Together, this is the one form of child abuse that we could eradicate in our lifetime.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a hedge fund to write a play about my family's murder.
(Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a spiritual vision quest.
I was seeking closure to a relationship with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother.
He was my friend's younger brother, a kid from our neighborhood.
My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him."
He broke into our house a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash.
When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene.
Then he realized he forgot his coat.
By the time he came back, my mom had found Jim.
Because he knew that she recognized him, and, to quote him, "Because she wouldn't stop screaming," he shot and killed her too.
He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia.
(Sighs) Over the course of the next seven years, I somehow managed not to hate him, but my grief and trauma did something a little bit weirder.
He wasn't a person, he was the face of all evil.
And as I set down to write the villain of my play and my life, I realized I had a name, some fractured childhood memories, a brief court document and nothing else to go on.
So I went to the source of all answers, Google.
I googled his prisoner ID number.
Two thirds of prisoners in his penitentiary spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in eight-by-ten cells with slats for light.
Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike.
As I scrolled through case after case of human rights violations at this prison, suddenly, he became a person to me again.
I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull.
Not her, just flesh and bones in that black dress we bought at Kohl's the week before.
Those were my most painful memories.
But when I pictured him - beaten, starving, crying out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful.
And I realized it was because we were still connected.
That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not.
And it was with a little horror that I realized that he may have killed them, but I chose to keep us connected.
So after wading through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I realized the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him.
(Laughter) Because the truth was I thought that I already had forgiven him.
I told my friends I forgave him; I told my family I forgave him; I even said "I forgive you" in the national news.
So how do you forgive effectively, once and for all?
That question started another Google rabbit hole, and then the theological rabbit hole, and then the Psychiatric-Journal and medical-journal rabbit hole until finally, my poor husband came home to a frantic wife, feral, just pacing the apartment, spewing statistics about forgiveness, like, "Did you know that there are 62 passages in the Bible with the word forgive and 27 with the word forgiveness?
(Laughter) They just say how great it is!
(Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water."
My husband approached me very cautiously.
(Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how."
Why forgive? Why do it?
That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons.
Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do.
But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim forgives automatically.
Even Jesus, when he talks about turning the other cheek, isn't talking about forgiveness.
He's talking about non-violence.
Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else.
It can come from your friends, from your family, from the media, from mixed up religious messaging.
But the truth is, everyone wants you to forgive quickly so they can feel more comfortable, and they can move on.
You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap.
For me, it was all three reasons.
I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the vulnerable, angry, messy, healing crap.
But it turns out that forgiveness is such a potent force that none of those reasons were strong enough to make it stick.
Just like love.
If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star.
So why do it? Why forgive?
It can't heal you; it won't save you or the other person; it can't make you a good person - at least not all by itself - because that's not what forgiveness is designed to do.
Forgiveness is designed to set you free.
When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did.
It's not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that.
I don't want to hold us captive to this thing anymore.
I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you."
After you say that, and you mean it, then it's just you.
No chains, no prisoners.
That's why the Greeks said that a death by a good man was a good death.
Every time somebody thinks about my mom and my brother, they think about the fact that they're not here, and then they think about the kid who did this.
That one act of violence actually bound the three of them together in people's minds for eternity.
When we choose vengeance, we're actually signing a blood oath to chain our story to our enemies for the rest of time.
Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom.
In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not killed.
They can only forgive the pain, anguish and grief that the loss caused them.
This was a total jackpot moment for me.
I had to compartmentalize my damage: not what happened to mom and Jim, not what happened to my family, not what happened to society, what happened to me.
This is why justice often feels really cold for victims.
It's justice's job to assess what is owed.
And it is the criminal justice system's job to assess what is owed to society.
Not to victims.
You can't forgive your father for beating your mother.
You can only forgive him for how sad, alienated and angry that made you feel.
I couldn't forgive him for killing mom and Jim.
I'm still here.
The way my life was supposed to start at 22, and he broke it.
Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds.
It is way easier to take all of that emotion and channel it into rage at another person.
(Laughter) You thought this would be about forgiveness, huh?
It's an important part of the process.
Anger is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal.
Too much anger, and yes, you'll get third-degree burns.
Without a little bit of heat, you'll never scar over, and you'll never know exactly what happened to you.
If you don't know what happened to you, you can't know what you're forgiving.
But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice.
Sorry, I married a Texan.
(Laughter) So what in justice's name am I owed?
An apology? An explanation?
A front-row seat to their torture chamber?
Nine times out of ten, if you ask for those things, you will get them.
Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations.
Forgiveness is only right when waiting for what we're owed comes at too high a cost.
I went to grad school, I married a wonderful man, I started a career that I honestly really love.
But I did it all a little more slowly, and I wasn't just dragging him along, I was dragging my mother and brother in the process, twisting the three of them up together in those chains.
And one day, losing myself in order to punish him and keep the two of them alive felt like too high a cost to bear.
It was there, in that crossroads, when I knew what had happened to me.
I knew what I was owed, and I decided than choosing myself was more important than being right.
That's when I was ready to forgive.
I told him that what happened on December 19th, 2008, was not okay and would probably never be okay for either of us.
But just because it wasn't okay, that didn't mean he owed me anything - not an apology, not an explanation, not his role as my villain.
I told him that I hated to be reduced to one thing that happened to me one day.
Then, without thinking, I plopped that letter into a mailbox on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Church.
For the first 10 steps, there was this lightness of being, and then that lightness started to feel like a lurch in your stomach, when you hit the spiritual tripwire.
My chest unwound, it burst, and suddenly, I was alone with myself.
I mean, really alone, giving birth to a stranger, saying hello to a girl that I hadn't spoken to in seven years.
(Sighs) Sometimes I miss him.
(Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created.
As long as he was around, mom and Jim were never that far away.
They were characters, just offstage, waiting in the wings, the rest of us on stage, talking about them.
But my story was about the three of them, always.
Once I did that, I found myself alone, center stage, in the spotlight, with endless possibilities.
Real forgiveness has to let go of all expectations.
You can't even expect to know who you're going to be on the other side of it.
Forgiveness is really tricky.
If you're still hemorrhaging in pain, it is too soon to forgive.
If you can't roll up your sleeve and show me your scars and tell me exactly what happened to you, it's still too soon to forgive.
And if you're ready to let it all go - the grief, the pain, the anger, the trauma - and you're open to finding out who you are instead of always trying to prove yourself - I got to be honest with you - all this forgiveness hype is legit!
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning. So magic is an excellent way for staying ahead of the reality curve, to make possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow.
You've probably all heard of Google's Project Glass.
It's new technology. You look through them and the world you see is augmented with data: names of places, monuments, buildings, maybe one day even the names of the strangers that pass you on the street.
So these are my illusion glasses.
And when you look through them, you get a glimpse into the mind of the cyber-illusionist.
Like this. And let me mark it so we can recognize it when we see it again.
And let's put it back into the deck, somewhere in the middle, and let's get started.
Marco Tempest: For those of you who don't play cards, a deck of cards is made up of four different suits: hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades.
The cards are amongst the oldest of symbols, and have been interpreted in many different ways.
Now, some say that the four suits represent the four seasons.
There's spring, summer, autumn and — Voice: My favorite season is winter.MT: Well yeah, mine too.
Winter is like magic. It's a time of change, when warmth turns to cold, water turns to snow, and then it all disappears.
There are 13 cards in each suit. (Music) Voice: Each card represents a phase of the 13 lunar cycles.
MT: So over here is low tide, and over here is high tide, and in the middle is the moon.
Voice: The moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic.
MT: There are two colors in a deck of cards.
There is the color red and the color black, representing the constant change from day to night.
Voice: Marco, I did not know you could do that. (Laughter) MT: And is it a coincidence that there are 52 cards in a deck of cards, just as there are 52 weeks in a year?
MT: Oh, 365, the number of days in a year, the number of days between each birthday.
Make a wish. (Blowing noise) Voice: Don't tell, or it won't come true.
MT: Well, as a matter of fact, it was on my sixth birthday that I received my first deck of cards, and ever since that day, I have traveled around the world performing magic for boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives, even kings and queens. (Applause) Voice: And who are these?MT: Ah, mischief-makers. Watch.
Joker: Whoa.MT: Are you ready for your party piece?
Joker: Ready!MT: Let me see what you've got.
Joker: Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh! (Music) MT: But today, I am performing for a different kind of audience.
I'm performing for you.
Voice: Signed card detected.MT: Well, sometimes people ask me how do you become a magician? Is it a 9-to-5 job?
Of course not! You've got to practice 24/7.
I don't literally mean 24 hours, seven days a week.
24/7 is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it does take practice. Now, some people will say, well, magic, that must be the work of some evil supernatural force. (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) Whoa.
Actually, in German, it's nein nein. (Laughter) Magic isn't that intense. I have to warn you, though, if you ever play with someone who deals cards like this, don't play for money.
Voice: I think you got your birthday wish.MT: And that actually leaves me with the last, and most important card of all: the one with this very significant mark on it.
And unlike anything else we've just seen, virtual or not.Voice: Signed card detected.
MT: Bye bye. (Music) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general.
And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother.
And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time.
I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere.
I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked.
Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak -- a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox.
But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper.
We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less.
But what if it's not about efficiency this time?
If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a man just stared at me, and he was like, "Well, why don't you use the Internet?"
And I thought, "Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller."
Find me when you can."
Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches.
Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family.
We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view, and this world I'm going to talk about is the micro world.
I've found, after doing this for many, many years, that there's a magical world behind reality.
And that can be seen directly through a microscope, and I'm going to show you some of this today.
So let's start off looking at something rather not-so-small, something that we can see with our naked eye, and that's a bee. So when you look at this bee, it's about this size here, it's about a centimeter.
But to really see the details of the bee, and really appreciate what it is, you have to look a little bit closer.
So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope, and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia, and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they're right up close to something, because they can't see in stereo.
As we go smaller, here is a human hair.
A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see.
It's about a tenth of a millimeter.
So you could fit 10 human cells across the diameter of a human hair.
So when we would look at cells, this is how I really got involved in biology and science is by looking at living cells in the microscope.
When I first saw living cells in a microscope, I was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like.
So if you look at the cell like that from the immune system, they're actually moving all over the place.
If you take some heart cells from an animal, and put it in a dish, they'll just sit there and beat.
That's their job. Every cell has a mission in life, and these cells, the mission is to move blood around our body.
These next cells are nerve cells, and right now, as we see and understand what we're looking at, our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now. They're not just static. They're moving around making new connections, and that's what happens when we learn.
As you go farther down this scale here, that's a micron, or a micrometer, and we go all the way down to here to a nanometer and an angstrom. Now, an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
That's how small that is.
And microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms. So these are some pictures of individual atoms. Each bump here is an individual atom.
This is a ring of cobalt atoms.
So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here is called the nano world, and the nano world, the whole micro world that we see, there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that, and the whole -- and that is the world of molecules and atoms.
But I want to talk about this larger world, the world of the micro world.
So if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower, what would that flower look like, if the flower was this big?
So this little ant that's crawling here, it's like it's in a little Willy Wonka land.
It's like a little Disneyland for them. It's not like what we see.
These are little bits of individual grain of pollen there and there, and here is a -- what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen, when you look in a microscope, it's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen.
So this, for example, when you see bees flying around these little plants, and they're collecting pollen, those pollen grains that they're collecting, they pack into their legs and they take it back to the hive, and that's what makes the beehive, the wax in the beehive. And they're also collecting nectar, and that's what makes the honey that we eat.
There's the stamen and the pistil. But look what the stamen and the pistil look like in a microscope. That's the stamen.
So that's thousands of little grains of pollen there, and there's the pistil there, and these are the little things called trichomes. And that's what makes the flower give a fragrance, and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances.
So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
But when you look closer at this, look at what's there.
It's really quite amazing. You have microshells there.
You have things like coral.
And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island, a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the reefs provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow, and when they die, their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand, things like coral and so forth.
So here's, for example, a picture of sand from Maui.
This is from Lahaina, and when we're walking along a beach, we're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history.
So when I first looked at this, I was -- I thought, gee, this is like a little treasure trove here.
Here's what most of the sand in our world looks like.
These are quartz crystals and feldspar, so most sand in the world on the mainland is made of quartz crystal and feldspar. It's the erosion of granite rock.
There are places in Africa where they do the mining of jewels, and you go to the sand where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean, and it's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope.
So every grain of sand is unique. Every beach is different.
Every single grain is different. There are no two grains of sand alike in the world.
Every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere.
They're like a snapshot in time.
Now sand is not only on Earth, but sand is ubiquitous throughout the universe. In fact, outer space is filled with sand, and that sand comes together to make our planets and the Moon.
And you can see those in micrometeorites.
So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand, so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago.
And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes.
This was the first picture I took. It was kind of amazing.
I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting.
Now, the way my microscopes work is, normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time, so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope, keep taking pictures, and then I have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like, and I do that in 3D. So there, you can see, is a left-eye view. There's a right-eye view.
So sort of left-eye view, right-eye view.
Now something's interesting here. This looks very different than any sand on Earth that I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of sand on Earth, believe me. (Laughter) Look at this hole in the middle. That hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon.
And you can see here that that is -- that's sort of vaporized, and that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together.
This is a very small grain of sand, this whole thing.
And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that, and you'd never find that on Earth.
Most of the sand on the Moon, especially -- and you know when you look at the Moon, there's the dark areas and the light areas. The dark areas are lava flows. They're basaltic lava flows, and that's what this sand looks like, very similar to the sand that you would see in Haleakala.
Other sands, when these micrometeorites come in, they vaporize and they make these fountains, these microscopic fountains that go up into the -- I was going to say "up into the air," but there is no air -- goes sort of up, and these microscopic glass beads are formed instantly, and they harden, and by the time they fall down back to the surface of the Moon, they have these beautiful colored glass spherules.
And these are actually microscopic; you need a microscope to see these.
Now here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon, and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there.
This grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old, and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling, air, and so forth. All you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the Sun, has these solar storms, and that's erosion by solar radiation.
So what I've been trying to tell you today is things even as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary if you look closely and if you look from a different and a new point of view.
Thank you. (Applause)
What I want you all to do right now is to think of this mammal that I'm going to describe to you.
The first thing I'm going to tell you about this mammal is that it is essential for our ecosystems to function correctly.
The second thing is that due to the unique sensory abilities of this mammal, if we study this mammal, we're going to get great insight into our diseases of the senses, such as blindness and deafness.
And the third really intriguing aspect of this mammal is that I fully believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies deep within its DNA.
Ah, I can see half the audience agrees with me, and I have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of you.
So I have had the good fortune for the past 20 years to study these fascinating and beautiful mammals.
One fifth of all living mammals is a bat, and they have very unique attributes.
Bats as we know them have been around on this planet for about 64 million years.
One of the most unique things that bats do as a mammal is that they fly.
Now flight is an inherently difficult thing.
Flight within vertebrates has only evolved three times: once in the bats, once in the birds, and once in the pterodactyls.
Bats have learned and evolved how to deal with this.
But one other extremely unique thing about bats is that they are able to use sound to perceive their environment. They use echolocation.
Now, what I mean by echolocation -- they emit a sound from their larynx out through their mouth or through their nose. This sound wave comes out and it reflects and echoes back off objects in their environment, and the bats then hear these echoes and they turn this information into an acoustic image.
And this enables them to orient in complete darkness.
Indeed, they do look very strange. We're humans.
We're a visual species. When scientists first realized that bats were actually using sound to be able to fly and orient and move at night, we didn't believe it.
For a hundred years, despite evidence to show that this is what they were doing, we didn't believe it.
Now, if you look at this bat, it looks a little bit alien.
Indeed, the very famous philosopher Thomas Nagel once said, "To truly experience an alien life form on this planet, you should lock yourself inside a room with a flying, echolocating bat in complete darkness."
And if you look at the actual physical characteristics on the face of this beautiful horseshoe bat, you see a lot of these characteristics are dedicated to be able to make sound and perceive it.
Very big ears, strange nose leaves, but teeny-tiny eyes.
So again, if you just look at this bat, you realize sound is very important for its survival.
However, there are a group that do not use echolocation.
If anybody has ever been lucky enough to be in Australia, you've seen them coming out of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, and if you just look at their face, you can see they have much, much larger eyes and much smaller ears.
So among and within bats is a huge variation in their ability to use sensory perception.
Now this is going to be important for what I'm going to tell you later during the talk.
Now, if the idea of bats in your belfry terrifies you, and I know some people probably are feeling a little sick looking at very large images of bats, that's probably not that surprising, because here in Western culture, bats have been demonized.
Really, of course the famous book "Dracula," written by a fellow Northside Dubliner Bram Stoker, probably is mainly responsible for this.
However, I also think it's got to do with the fact that bats come out at night, and we don't really understand them. We're a little frightened by things that can perceive the world slightly differently than us.
Bats are usually synonymous with some type of evil events.
They are the perpetrators in horror movies, such as this famous "Nightwing."
Also, if you think about it, demons always have bat wings, whereas birds, they typically -- or angels have bird wings.
Now, this is Western society, and what I hope to do tonight is to convince you of the Chinese traditional culture, that they perceive bats as creatures that bring good luck, and indeed, if you walk into a Chinese home, you may see an image such as this.
The Chinese word for "bat" sounds like the Chinese word for "happiness," and they believe that bats bring wealth, health, longevity, virtue and serenity.
And indeed, in this image, you have a picture of longevity surrounded by five bats.
And what I want to do tonight is to talk to you and to show you that at least three of these blessings are definitely represented by a bat, and that if we study bats we will get nearer to getting each of these blessings.
Now as I said before, bats are essential for our ecosystems to function correctly. And why is this?
Bats in the tropics are major pollinators of many plants.
They also feed on fruit, and they disperse the seeds of these fruits. Bats are responsible for pollinating the tequila plant, and this is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. So indeed, we need them for our ecosystems to function properly.
But most bats are voracious insect predators.
It's been estimated in the U.S., in a tiny colony of big brown bats, that they will feed on over a million insects a year, and in the United States of America, right now bats are being threatened by a disease known as white-nose syndrome.
It's working its way slowly across the U.S. and wiping out populations of bats, and scientists have estimated that 1,300 metric tons of insects a year are now remaining in the ecosystems due to the loss of bats.
Bats are also threatened in the U.S.
by their attraction to wind farms. Again, right now bats are looking at a little bit of a problem.
They're going to -- They are very threatened in the United States of America alone.
Now how can this help us?
Well, it has been calculated that if we were to remove bats from the equation, we're going to have to then use insecticides to remove all those pest insects that feed on our agricultural crops.
And for one year in the U.S. alone, it's estimated that it's going to cost 22 billion U.S. dollars, if we remove bats. So indeed, bats then do bring us wealth.
They maintain the health of our ecosystems, and also they save us money.
So again, that's the first blessing. Bats are important for our ecosystems.
And what about the second? What about health?
Inside every cell in your body lies your genome.
Your genome is made up of your DNA, your DNA codes for proteins that enable you to function and interact and be as you are.
Now since the new advancements in modern molecular technologies, it is now possible for us to sequence our own genome in a very rapid time and at a very, very reduced cost.
So I want you to look at the person beside you.
Just have a quick look. And what we need to realize is that every 300 base pairs in your DNA, you're a little bit different.
Well, I believe we just look at nature's experiments.
So through natural selection, over time, mutations, variations that disrupt the function of a protein will not be tolerated over time.
Evolution acts as a sieve. It sieves out the bad variation.
So therefore, if we were to do this, what we'd need to do is sequence that region in all these different mammals and ascertain if it's the same or if it's different. So if it is the same, this indicates that that site is important for a function, so a disease mutation should fall within that site.
So in this case here, if all the mammals that we look at have a yellow-type genome at that site, it probably suggests that purple is bad.
This could be even more powerful if you look at mammals that are doing things slightly differently.
So say, for example, the region of the genome that I was looking at was a region that's important for vision.
If we look at that region in mammals that don't see so well, such as bats, and we find that bats that don't see so well have the purple type, we know that this is probably what's causing this disease.
Three hundred and fourteen million people are visually impaired, and 45 million of these are blind. So blindness is a big problem, and a lot of these blind disorders come from inherited diseases, so we want to try and better understand which mutations in the gene cause the disease.
Again, there's many underlying genetic causes for this.
So what we've been doing in my lab is looking at these unique sensory specialists, the bats, and we have looked at genes that cause blindness when there's a defect in them, genes that cause deafness when there's a defect in them, and now we can predict which sites are most likely to cause disease.
So bats are also important for our health, to enable us to better understand how our genome functions.
So this is where we are right now, but what about the future?
What about longevity?
This is where we're going to go, and as I said before, I really believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies within the bat genome.
So why should we be interested in aging at all?
Well, really, this is a picture drawn from the 1500s of the Fountain of Youth. Aging is considered one of the most familiar, yet the least well-understood, aspects of all of biology, and really, since the dawn of civilization, mankind has sought to avoid it.
But we are going to have to understand it a bit better.
In Europe alone, by 2050, there is going to be a 70 percent increase of individuals over 65, and 170 percent increase in individuals over 80.
So how could the secret of everlasting youth actually lie within the bat genome? Does anybody want to hazard a guess over how long this bat could live for?
This bat is myotis brandtii. It's the longest-living bat.
It lived for up to 42 years, and this bat's still alive in the wild today.
Well, typically, in mammals there is a relationship between body size, metabolic rate, and how long you can live for, and you can predict how long a mammal can live for given its body size.
Think of a mouse. But bats are very different.
As you can see here on this graph, in blue, these are all other mammals, but bats can live up to nine times longer than expected despite having a really, really high metabolic rate, and the question is, how can they do that?
So therefore, they must have something within their DNA that ables them to deal with the metabolic stresses, particularly of flight. They expend three times more energy than a mammal of the same size, but don't seem to suffer the consequences or the effects.
So right now, in my lab, we're combining state-of-the-art bat field biology, going out and catching the long-lived bats, with the most up-to-date, modern molecular technology to understand better what it is that they do to stop aging as we do.
And hopefully in the next five years, I'll be giving you a TEDTalk on that.
Aging is a big problem for humanity, and I believe that by studying bats, we can uncover the molecular mechanisms that enable mammals to achieve extraordinary longevity. If we find out what they're doing, perhaps through gene therapy, we can enable us to do the same thing.
Potentially, this means that we could halt aging or maybe even reverse it.
Just imagine what that would be like.
So really, I don't think we should be thinking of them as flying demons of the night, but more as our superheroes.
And the reality is that bats can bring us so much benefit if we just look in the right place. They're good for our ecosystem, they allow us to understand how our genome functions, and they potentially hold the secret to everlasting youth.
So tonight, when you walk out of here and you look up in the night skies, and you see this beautiful flying mammal, I want you to smile. Thank you. (Applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, and more importantly, Mo Bros and Mo Sistas — (Laughter) — for the next 17 minutes, I'm going to share with you my Movember journey, and how, through that journey, we've redefined charity, we're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world, and I hope, through that process, that I inspire you to create something significant in your life, something significant that will go on and make this world a better place.
So the most common question I get asked, and I'm going to answer it now so I don't have to do it over drinks tonight, is how did this come about?
How did Movember start?
Well, normally, a charity starts with the cause, and someone that is directly affected by a cause.
Not so with Movember. Movember started in a very traditional Australian way. It was on a Sunday afternoon.
I was with my brother and a mate having a few beers, and I was watching the world go by, had a few more beers, and the conversation turned to '70s fashion — (Laughter) — and how everything manages to come back into style.
And a few more beers, I said, "There has to be some stuff that hasn't come back." (Laughter) Then one more beer and it was, whatever happened to the mustache?
Why hasn't that made a comeback? (Laughter) So then there was a lot more beers, and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back. (Laughter) So in Australia, "mo" is slang for mustache, so we renamed the month of November "Movember" and created some pretty basic rules, which still stand today.
My girlfriend at the time, who's no longer my girlfriend — (Laughter) — hated it.
Why is that? Why can't we combine growing a mustache and doing something for men's health?
And I started to research that topic, and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it.
But there was nothing for this cause, so we married growing a mustache with prostate cancer, and then we created our tagline, which is, "Changing the face of men's health."
And that eloquently describes the challenge, changing your appearance for the 30 days, and also the outcome that we're trying to achieve: getting men engaged in their health, having them have a better understanding about the health risks that they face.
So with that model, I then cold-called the CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
And we sat down, and I shared with him my vision of getting men growing mustaches across Australia, raising awareness for this cause, and funds for his organization. And I needed a partnership to legitimately do that.
And I said, "We're going to come together at the end, we're going to have a mustache-themed party, we're going to have DJs, we're going to celebrate life, and we're going to change the face of men's health."
And he just looked at me and laughed, and he said, he said, "Adam, that's a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization.
And we persisted, and we got 450 guys growing mustaches, and together we raised 54,000 dollars, and we donated every cent of that to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, and that represented at the time the single biggest donation they'd ever received.
So from that day forward, my life has become about a mustache.
Every day -- this morning, I wake up and go, my life is about a mustache. (Laughter) Essentially, I'm a mustache farmer. (Laughter) And my season is November. (Applause) (Applause) So in 2005, the campaign got more momentum, was more successful in Australia and then New Zealand, and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point.
It's really interesting when you try and figure a way to fund a fundraising organization built off growing mustaches. (Laughter) Let me tell you that there's not too many people interested in investing in that, not even the Prostate Cancer Foundation, who we'd raised about 1.2 million dollars for at that stage.
So again we persisted, and Foster's Brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship, and that was enough for me to quit my job, I did consulting on the side.
And leading into Movember 2006, we'd run through all the money from Foster's, we'd run through all the money I had, and essentially we had no money left, and we'd convinced all our suppliers -- creative agencies, web development agencies, hosting companies, whatnot -- to delay their billing until December.
So we'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt. So if Movember 2006 didn't happen, the four founders, well, we would've been broke, we would've been homeless, sitting on the street with mustaches. (Laughter) But we thought, you know what, if that's the worst thing that happens, so what?
Then in early 2007, a really interesting thing happened.
Bring this campaign to these countries.
So we thought, why not? Let's do it.
So I cold-called the CEO of Prostate Cancer Canada, and I said to him, "I have this most amazing concept."
(Laughter) "It's going to transform your organization. I don't want to tell you about it now, but will you meet with me if I fly all the way to Toronto?" So I flew here, met down on Front Street East, and we sat in the boardroom, and I said, "Right, here's my vision of getting men growing mustaches all across Canada raising awareness and funds for your organization."
But he said, "We will partner with you, but we're not going to invest in it. You need to figure a way to bring this campaign across here and make it work."
So what we did was, we took some of the money that we raised in Australia to bring the campaign across to this country, the U.S, and the U.K., and we did that because we knew, if this was successful, we could raise infinitely more money globally than we could just in Australia. And that money fuels research, and that research will get us to a cure.
So in 2007, we brought the campaign across here, and it was, it set the stage for the campaign.
It wasn't as successful as we thought it would be.
So that year really taught us the importance of being patient and really understanding the local market before you become so bold as to set lofty targets.
But what I'm really pleased to say is, in 2010, Movember became a truly global movement.
Last year we had 450,000 Mo Bros spread across the world and together we raised 77 million dollars.
(Applause) And that makes Movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world.
Our ribbon is a hairy ribbon. (Laughter) Our ambassadors are the Mo Bros and the Mo Sistas, and I think that's been fundamental to our success.
So now I live in Los Angeles, because the Prostate Cancer Foundation of the U.S. is based there, and I always get asked by the media down there, because it's so celebrity-driven, "Who are your celebrity ambassadors?"
And I say to them, "Last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors."
And they go, "What, what do you mean?"
And it's like, everything single person, every single Mo Bro and Mo Sista that participates in Movember is our celebrity ambassador, and that is so, so important and fundamental to our success.
Now what I want to share with you is one of my most touching Movember moments, and it happened here in Toronto last year, at the end of the campaign.
I was out with a team. It was the end of Movember.
And I said, "Hang on, that is an amazing mustache."
(Laughter) And he said, "I'm doing it for Movember." And I said, "So am I." And I said, "Tell me your Movember story."
And he goes, "Listen, I know it's about men's health, I know it's about prostate cancer, but this is for breast cancer."
And I said, "Okay, that's interesting."
And he goes, "Last year, my mom passed away from breast cancer in Sri Lanka, because we couldn't afford proper treatment for her," and he said, "This mustache is my tribute to my mom."
And we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi, and I didn't tell him who I was, because I didn't think it was appropriate, and I just shook his hand and I said, "Thank you so much.
Your mom would be so proud."
And from that moment I realized that Movember is so much more than a mustache, having a joke.
It's about each person coming to this platform, embracing it in their own way, and being significant in their own life.
For us now at Movember, we really focus on three program areas, and having a true impact: awareness and education, survivor support programs, and research.
Now we always focus, naturally, on how much we raise, because it's a very tangible outcome, but for me, awareness and education is more important than the funds we raise, because I know that is changing and saving lives today, and it's probably best exampled by a young guy that I met at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, at the start of the year.
He came up to me and said, "Thank you for starting Movember."
And I said, "Thank you for doing Movember."
And I looked at him, and I was like, "I'm pretty sure you can't grow a mustache." (Laughter) And I said, "What's your Movember story?"
And he said, "I grew the worst mustache ever." (Laughter) "But I went home for Thanksgiving dinner, and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on." (Laughter) "And we talked -- I talked to them about Movember, and then after that, my dad came up to me, and at the age of 26, for the first time ever, I had a conversation with my dad one on one about men's health. I had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer, and I learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and I was able to share with my dad that he was twice as likely to get that disease, and he didn't know that, and he hadn't been getting screened for it."
So now, that guy is getting screened for prostate cancer.
So those conversations, getting men engaged in this, at whatever age, is so critically important, and in my view so much more important than the funds we raise.
We fund prostate cancer foundations now in 13 countries.
We literally fund hundreds if not thousands of institutions and researchers around the world, and when we looked at this more recently, we realized there's a real lack of collaboration going on even within institutions, let alone nationally, let alone globally, and this is not unique to prostate cancer. This is cancer research the world over.
So what we did was, we created a global action plan, and we're taking 10 percent of what's raised in each country now and putting it into a global fund, and we've got the best prostate cancer scientific minds in the world that look after that fund, and they come together each year and identify the number one priority, and that, last year, was getting a better screening test.
So they identified that as a priority, and then they've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic, essentially the same topic.
So now we're funding them to the tune of about five or six million dollars to collaborate and bringing them together, and that's a unique thing in the cancer world, and we know, through that collaboration, it will accelerate outcomes.
And that's how we're redefining the research world.
So, what I know about my Movember journey is that, with a really creative idea, with passion, with persistence, and a lot of patience, four mates, four mustaches, can inspire a room full of people, and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city, and that city is Melbourne, my home.
Thank you. (Applause)
So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness.
Aristotle called happiness "the chief good," the end towards which all other things aim.
It's that we expect them to bring us happiness.
Now in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want. We're richer.
We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.
The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier.
Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness, there's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself.
People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved.
Well, as with many other domains in life, I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question.
In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot about its demographics, how things like income and education, gender and marriage relate to it.
But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect.
Yes, it's better to make more money rather than less, or to graduate from college instead of dropping out, but the differences in happiness tend to be small.
Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness?
I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet, but I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences.
A few years ago, I came up with a way to study people's happiness moment to moment as they're going about their daily lives on a massive scale all over the world, something we'd never been able to do before. Called trackyourhappiness.org, it uses the iPhone to monitor people's happiness in real time.
How does this work? Basically, I send people signals at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal.
And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group, people from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s, a wide range of incomes, education levels, people who are married, divorced, widowed, etc.
They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries.
As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present.
This guy is sitting here working on his computer, and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month, wondering what he's going to have for dinner.
Maybe he's worried that he's going bald. (Laughter) This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can.
You've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. "Be here now," you've probably heard a hundred times.
Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment.
Maybe these people are right. Maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing.
On the other hand, when our minds wander, they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds.
Since we know people want to be happy, maybe when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place that they're leaving. It would make a lot of sense.
Well, since I'm a scientist, I'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data, and in particular I'd like to present some data to you from three questions that I ask with Track Your Happiness. Remember, this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people's real lives.
There are three questions. The first one is a happiness question: How do you feel, on a scale ranging from very bad to very good? Second, an activity question: What are you doing, on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching TV?
Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering.
So what did we find?
This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis, and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the present, when they're not mind-wandering.
As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they're not.
Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they're mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us.
It's one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet they are substantially happier when they're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else.
So how could this be happening? I think part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things, and they are enormously less happy when they do that, our worries, our anxieties, our regrets, and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral, they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind-wandering at all.
If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars, 20 dollars or one dollar. Right? You'd never want to play. (Laughter) So I've been talking about this, suggesting, perhaps, that mind-wandering causes unhappiness, but all I've really shown you is that these two things are correlated.
It's possible that's the case, but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy, then they mind-wander.
Well, one fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect.
As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy.
In contrast, there's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later.
In other words, mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness.
Well, how often do people's minds wander?
Ten percent of the time people's minds are wandering when they're having sex. (Laughter) But there's something I think that's quite interesting in this graph, and that is, basically with one exception, no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time, which suggests, I think, that mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous.
It pervades basically everything that we do.
In my talk today, I've told you a little bit about mind-wandering, a variable that I think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness.
My hope is that over time, by tracking people's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences in daily life, we'll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness, and then in the end, a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that's not only richer and healthier, but happier as well.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Two years ago, after having served four years in the United States Marine Corps and deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself in Port-au-Prince, leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city, three days after the earthquake.
And coming home, my cofounder and I, we looked at it, and we said, there are two problems.
The first problem is there's inadequate disaster response.
These are actually solutions. And what do I mean by that?
Well, we can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for the veterans coming home.
Recent surveys show that 92 percent of veterans want to continue their service when they take off their uniform.
And we can use veterans to improve disaster response.
Now on the surface, this makes a lot of sense, and in 2010, we responded to the tsunami in Chile, the floods in Pakistan, we sent training teams to the Thai-Burma border.
But it was earlier this year, when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization.
This is Clay Hunt. Clay was a Marine with me.
We served together in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clay was with us in Port-au-Prince. He was also with us in Chile.
Earlier this year, in March, Clay took his own life.
This was a tragedy, but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing.
You know, Clay didn't kill himself because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home.
He lost purpose. He lost his community.
And perhaps most tragically, he lost his self-worth.
And so, as we evaluated, and as the dust settled from this tragedy, we realized that, of those two problems -- in the initial iteration of our organization, we were a disaster response organization that was using veteran service. We had a lot of success, and we really felt like we were changing the disaster response paradigm.
But after Clay, we shifted that focus, and suddenly, now moving forward, we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that's using disaster response.
Because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran.
And tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and then later Hurricane Irene, gave us an opportunity to look at that.
Now I want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri.
He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle.
They send him to Iraq.
Every day he leaves the wire with a mission.
It's to keep the men around him alive.
It's to pacify the village that he works in.
He's got a purpose. But he comes home [to] Kansas City, Missouri, maybe he goes to college, maybe he's got a job, but he doesn't have that same sense of purpose.
You give him a chainsaw. You send him to Joplin, Missouri after a tornado, he regains that.
Going back, that same 18-year-old boy graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri, joins the Army, the Army gives him a rifle, they send him to Iraq.
Every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him.
They've eaten together. They've bled together.
He goes home to Kansas City, Missouri.
He gets out of the military. He takes his uniform off.
He doesn't have that community anymore.
Again, you have an 18-year-old boy who graduates high school in Kansas City.
He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle.
They send him to Iraq.
They pin a medal on his chest. He goes home to a ticker tape parade.
He takes the uniform off. He's no longer Sergeant Jones in his community. He's now Dave from Kansas City.
I think it's very important, because right now somebody needs to step up, and this generation of veterans has the opportunity to do that if they are given the chance.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Today, I'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics.
I'm, among several other things, an electrical engineer, and that means that I spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology, and more specifically designing and building electronics.
So it's a really slow process, it's really expensive, and the outcome of that process, namely electronic circuit boards, are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways.
So they're really small, generally, they're square and flat and hard, and frankly, most of them just aren't very attractive, and so my team and I have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics.
I'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines, and we'll start with this one.
A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC.
Sticker templates.
Speed x 4.
Music: DJ Shadow.
Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller.
Sketching an interface.
(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) Pretty cool, huh? We think so.
So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility.
(Music) (Applause) So the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this, and so the way that we're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools, and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways.
And so sometime soon, you'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way.
So thank you very much. (Applause)
Now, have any of y'all ever looked up this word?
You know, in a dictionary? (Laughter) Yeah, that's what I thought.
How about this word?
Notice -- we're very specific -- that word "compile."
The dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite, out of a lump of rock. It's made up of lots of little bits.
It's little discrete -- that's spelled D-I-S-C-R-E-T-E -- bits.
And those bits are words.
Now one of the perks of being a lexicographer -- besides getting to come to TED -- is that you get to say really fun words, like lexicographical.
Right? It's a fun word to say, and I get to say it a lot.
Now, one of the non-perks of being a lexicographer is that people don't usually have a kind of warm, fuzzy, snuggly image of the dictionary.
Just to let you know, I do not have a lexicographical whistle.
But people think that my job is to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary, and keep the bad words out.
But the thing is, I don't want to be a traffic cop.
And for another, deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy.
And it's not very fun. And when parts of your job are not easy or fun, you kind of look for an excuse not to do them.
So if I had to think of some kind of occupation as a metaphor for my work, I would much rather be a fisherman.
I want to throw my big net into the deep, blue ocean of English and see what marvelous creatures I can drag up from the bottom.
But why do people want me to direct traffic, when I would much rather go fishing?
Well, I blame the Queen.
Why do I blame the Queen?
Well, first of all, I blame the Queen because it's funny.
Our idea of what a dictionary is has not changed since her reign.
The only thing that Queen Victoria would not be amused by in modern dictionaries is our inclusion of the F-word, which has happened in American dictionaries since 1965.
So, there's this guy, right? Victorian era.
James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I do not have that hat. I wish I had that hat.
So he's really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today.
When a guy who looks like that, in that hat, is the face of modernity, you have a problem.
And so, James Murray could get a job on any dictionary today.
Computers! What about computers?
The thing about computers is, I love computers.
I mean, I'm a huge geek, I love computers.
I would go on a hunger strike before I let them take away Google Book Search from me.
It's steampunk. What we have is an electric velocipede.
You know, we have Victorian design with an engine on it. That's all!
The design has not changed.
And OK, what about online dictionaries, right?
Online dictionaries must be different.
This is the Oxford English Dictionary Online, one of the best online dictionaries.
This is my favorite word, by the way.
Very useful word. So, look at that.
Online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen.
This is flat. Look how many links there are in the actual entry: two!
Right? Those little buttons, I had them all expanded except for the date chart.
So there's not very much going on here.
And in fact, online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability.
Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for, because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.
So -- (Laughter) (Applause) -- now, when you think about this, what we have here is a ham butt problem.
Does everyone know the ham butt problem?
Woman's making a ham for a big, family dinner.
So she calls up mom, and she says, "Mom, why'd you cut the butt off the ham, when you're making a ham?"
So they call grandma, and grandma says, "My pan was too small!" (Laughter) So, it's not that we have good words and bad words.
You know, that ham butt is delicious! There's no reason to throw it away.
The bad words -- see, when people think about a place and they don't find a place on the map, they think, "This map sucks!"
When they find a nightspot or a bar, and it's not in the guidebook, they're like, "Ooh, this place must be cool! It's not in the guidebook."
When they find a word that's not in the dictionary, they think, "This must be a bad word." Why? It's more likely to be a bad dictionary.
Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan?
The English language is as big as it is.
So, if you have a ham butt problem, and you're thinking about the ham butt problem, the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counterintuitive: paper is the enemy of words.
Some of my best friends are books.
But the book is not the best shape for the dictionary.
No. There will still be paper dictionaries.
When we had cars -- when cars became the dominant mode of transportation, we didn't round up all the horses and shoot them.
The book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in. And it's not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in.
So, think about it this way: if you've got an artificial constraint, artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview.
What if biologists could only study animals that made people go, "Aww." Right?
What if we made aesthetic judgments about animals, and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study?
And I think this is a problem.
Lexicography is really more about material science.
They think, "OK, if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts, how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers?
How can you say that a sledgehammer is better than a ball-peen hammer?"
They're just the right tools for the job.
And so people say to me, "How do I know if a word is real?"
Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction.
And any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes, is touched, any time you touch a word, you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation, you verb it, you make the mobile move.
You didn't break it. It's just in a new position, and that new position can be just as beautiful.
Now, if you're no longer a traffic cop -- the problem with being a traffic cop is there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection, or the cars get confused. Right?
But if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic, but maybe to count the cars that go by, then more eyeballs are better.
You can ask for help!
If you ask for help, you get more done. And we really need help.
Library of Congress: 17 million books, of which half are in English.
If only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that's not in the dictionary in it, that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries.
Newspaper archive goes back to 1759, 58.1 million newspaper pages. If only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it, it would be an entire other OED.
That's 500,000 more words. So that's a lot.
And I'm not even talking about magazines. I'm not talking about blogs -- and I find more new words on BoingBoing in a given week than I do Newsweek or Time.
There's a lot going on there.
So if you think of the word "set," a set can be a badger's burrow, a set can be one of the pleats in an Elizabethan ruff, and there's one numbered definition in the OED.
The OED has 33 different numbered definitions for set.
Tiny, little word, 33 numbered definitions.
And the thing is, we could ask for help -- asking for help's not that hard.
I mean, lexicography is not rocket science.
See, I just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers, and this is more of a visual explanation.
If that was the map of all the words in American English, we don't know very much.
And we don't even know the shape of the language.
If this was the dictionary -- if this was the map of American English -- look, we have a kind of lumpy idea of Florida, but there's no California!
So again, lexicography is not rocket science.
So, enough scientists in other disciplines are really asking people to help, and they're doing a good job of it.
For instance, there's eBird, where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings.
And then, ornithologists can go and help track populations, migrations, etc.
And there's this guy, Mike Oates. Mike Oates lives in the U.K.
He's a director of an electroplating company.
He's found more than 140 comets.
I don't think he's getting his picture taken there anytime soon.
But he found 140 comets without a telescope.
He downloaded data from the NASA SOHO satellite, and that's how he found them.
If we can find comets without a telescope, shouldn't we be able to find words?
Now, y'all know where I'm going with this.
Because I'm going to the Internet, which is where everybody goes.
And the Internet is great for collecting words, because the Internet's full of collectors.
And this is a little-known technological fact about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm.
And words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography. Isn't that great?
So there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now, but the problem with some of them is that they're not scientific enough.
Where did it come from? Who said it?
If you don't know the provenance or the source of the artifact, it's not science, it's a pretty thing to look at.
You know, it's pretty to look at for a while, but then it dies.
So, this whole time I've been saying, "The dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary."
Doesn't everyone want more meaning in their lives?
It's a format that died because it wasn't useful enough.
It wasn't really what people needed.
If we can do that, then I can spend all my time fishing, and I don't have to be a traffic cop anymore.
Thank you very much for your kind attention.
I would like to talk to you about a very special group of animals.
There are 10,000 species of birds in the world.
Vultures are amongst the most threatened group of birds.
When you see a vulture like this, the first thing that comes to your mind is, these are disgusting, ugly, greedy creatures that are just after your flesh, associated with politicians. (Laughter) (Applause) I want to change that perception. I want to change those feelings you have for these birds, because they need our sympathy. They really do. (Laughter) And I'll tell you why.
When Charles Darwin went across the Atlantic in 1832 on the Beagle, he saw the turkey vulture, and he said, "These are disgusting birds with bald scarlet heads that are formed to revel in putridity." (Laughter) You could not get a worse insult, and that from Charles Darwin. (Laughter) You know, he changed his mind when he came back, and I'll tell you why.
They've also be associated with Disney — (Laughter) — personified as goofy, dumb, stupid characters.
Because MPs do not keep the environment clean. (Laughter) MPs do not help to prevent the spread of diseases.
They are hardly monogamous. (Laughter) (Applause) They are far from being extinct. (Laughter) And, my favorite is, vultures are better looking. (Applause) (Laughter) So there's two types of vultures in this planet.
There are the New World vultures that are mainly found in the Americas, like the condors and the caracaras, and then the Old World vultures, where we have 16 species. From these 16, 11 of them are facing a high risk of extinction.
So why are vultures important? First of all, they provide vital ecological services. They clean up.
They're our natural garbage collectors.
They help to kill all the bacteria. They help absorb anthrax that would otherwise spread and cause huge livestock losses and diseases in other animals.
Recent studies have shown that in areas where there are no vultures, carcasses take up to three to four times to decompose, and this has huge ramifications for the spread of diseases.
Vultures also have tremendous historical significance.
They have been associated in ancient Egyptian culture.
Nekhbet was the symbol of the protector and the motherhood, and together with the cobra, symbolized the unity between Upper and Lower Egypt.
In Hindu mythology, Jatayu was the vulture god, and he risked his life in order to save the goddess Sita from the 10-headed demon Ravana.
In Tibetan culture, they are performing very important sky burials. In places like Tibet, there are no places to bury the dead, or wood to cremate them, so these vultures provide a natural disposal system.
So what is the problem with vultures?
We have eight species of vultures that occur in Kenya, of which six are highly threatened with extinction.
The reason is that they're getting poisoned, and the reason that they're getting poisoned is because there's human-wildlife conflicts. The pastoral communities are using this poison to target predators, and in return, the vultures are falling victim to this.
In South Asia, in countries like India and Pakistan, four species of vultures are listed as critically endangered, which means they have less than 10 or 15 years to go extinct, and the reason is because they are falling prey by consuming livestock that has been treated with a painkilling drug like Diclofenac.
This drug has now been banned for veterinary use in India, and they have taken a stand.
Kenya is going to have one of the largest wind farms in Africa: 353 wind turbines are going to be up at Lake Turkana.
I am not against wind energy, but we need to work with the governments, because wind turbines do this to birds. They slice them in half.
In West Africa, there's a horrific trade of dead vultures to serve the witchcraft and the fetish market.
So what's being done? Well, we're conducting research on these birds. We're putting transmitters on them.
We're working with local communities.
We're talking to them about appreciating vultures, about the need from within to appreciate these wonderful creatures and the services that they provide.
How can you help? You can become active, make noise. You can write a letter to your government and tell them that we need to focus on these very misunderstood creatures. Volunteer your time to spread the word. Spread the word.
When you walk out of this room, you will be informed about vultures, but speak to your families, to your children, to your neighbors about vultures.
They are very graceful. Charles Darwin said he changed his mind because he watched them fly effortlessly without energy in the skies.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
So I grew up in Limpopo, on the border of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, a little town called Motetema.
Water and electricity supply are as unpredictable as the weather, and growing up in these tough situations, at the age of 17, I was relaxing with a couple of friends of mine in winter, and we were sunbathing.
The Limpopo sun gets really hot in winter.
So as we were sunbathing, my best friend next to me says, "Man, why doesn't somebody invent something that you can just put on your skin and then you don't have to bathe?"
And I sat, and I was like, "Man, I would buy that, eh?"
So I went home, and I did a little research, and I found some very shocking statistics.
Over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation.
Various diseases thrive in this environment, the most drastic of which is called trachoma.
Trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt getting into your eye. Multiple infections of trachoma can leave you permanently blind.
Now we need to get this thing into practice.
Fast forward four years later, after having written a 40-page business plan on the cell phone, having written my patent on the cell phone, I'm the youngest patent-holder in the country, and — ("No more bathing!") — I can't say any more than that. (Laughter) I had invented DryBath, the world's first bath-substituting lotion.
(Laughter) So after having tried to make it work in high school with the limited resources I had, I went to university, met a few people, got it into practice, and we have a fully functioning product that's ready to go to the market. It's actually available on the market.
So we learned a few lessons in commercializing and making DryBath available.
One of the things we learned was that poor communities don't buy products in bulk.
After creating that model, we also learned a lot in terms of implementing the product.
After seeing that global impact, we narrowed it down to our key value proposition, which was cleanliness and convenience.
Having put the product into practice, we are actually now on the verge of selling the product onto a multinational to take it to the retail market, and one question I have for the audience today is, on the gravel roads of Limpopo, with an allowance of 50 rand a week, I came up with a way for the world not to bathe.
And another key thing that I learned a lot throughout this whole process, last year Google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world.
I'm also currently the best student entrepreneur in the world, the first African to get that accolade, and one thing that really puzzles me is, I did all of this just because I didn't want to bathe. Thank you.
Let me tell you, it has been a fantastic month for deception.
And I'm not even talking about the American presidential race. (Laughter) We have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism, a young superstar writer whose book involves so many made up quotes that they've pulled it from the shelves; a New York Times exposé on fake book reviews.
Now, of course, not all deception hits the news.
Much of the deception is everyday. In fact, a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day, as Dave suggested.
So it's about 6:30 now, suggests that most of us should have lied.
The other third didn't lie, or perhaps forgot, or you're lying to me about your lying, which is very, very devious. (Laughter) This fits with a lot of the research, which suggests that lying is very pervasive.
It's this pervasiveness, combined with the centrality to what it means to be a human, the fact that we can tell the truth or make something up, that has fascinated people throughout history.
Here we have Diogenes with his lantern.
Does anybody know what he was looking for?
You believed in your principles.
Now my first professional encounter with deception is a little bit later than these guys, a couple thousand years.
I was a customs officer for Canada back in the mid-'90s.
You may think that's a weapon right there. In fact, that's a stamp. I used a stamp to defend Canada's borders. (Laughter) Very Canadian of me. I learned a lot about deception while doing my duty here in customs, one of which was that most of what I thought I knew about deception was wrong, and I'll tell you about some of that tonight.
But even since just 1995, '96, the way we communicate has been completely transformed. We email, we text, we skype, we Facebook. It's insane.
Almost every aspect of human communication's been changed, and of course that's had an impact on deception.
It sounds a little bit like a weird book, but actually they're all new types of lies.
My battery was dead." Your battery wasn't dead.
You weren't in a dead zone.
You just didn't want to respond to that person that time.
But really, you're just bored. You want to talk to somebody else.
Each of these is about a relationship, and this is a 24/7 connected world. Once you get my cell phone number, you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day.
And so these lies are being used by people to create a buffer, like the butler used to do, between us and the connections to everybody else.
But they're very special. They use ambiguity that comes from using technology. You don't know where I am or what I'm doing or who I'm with.
And they're aimed at protecting the relationships.
These aren't just people being jerks. These are people that are saying, look, I don't want to talk to you now, or I didn't want to talk to you then, but I still care about you.
Our relationship is still important.
Now, the Sock Puppet, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. The sock puppet isn't about ambiguity, per se. It's about identity.
Let me give you a very recent example, as in, like, last week.
Here's R.J. Ellory, best-seller author in Britain.
Here's one of his bestselling books.
Here's a reviewer online, on Amazon.
My favorite, by Nicodemus Jones, is, "Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul."
And of course, you might suspect that Nicodemus Jones is R.J. Ellory.
He wrote very, very positive reviews about himself. Surprise, surprise.
Now this Sock Puppet stuff isn't actually that new.
Walt Whitman also did this back in the day, before there was Internet technology. Sock Puppet becomes interesting when we get to scale, which is the domain of the Chinese Water Army.
In North America, we call this Astroturfing, and Astroturfing is very common now. There's a lot of concerns about it.
We see this especially with product reviews, book reviews, everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not.
Now, looking at these three reviews, or these three types of deception, you might think, wow, the Internet is really making us a deceptive species, especially when you think about the Astroturfing, where we can see deception brought up to scale.
But actually, what I've been finding is very different from that.
Now, let's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms, which I'm sure none of you have been in.
I can assure you there's deception there.
And let's put aside the Nigerian prince who's emailed you about getting the 43 million out of the country. (Laughter) Let's forget about that guy, too.
Here's a couple of studies. One of the studies we do are called diary studies, in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days, and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium, and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media.
And it really throws people for a loop because we think, well, there's no nonverbal cues, so why don't you lie more?
The phone, in contrast, the most lies.
Again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most, and perhaps because of the Butler Lie ambiguities I was telling you about.
This tends to be very different from what people expect.
And what we found, to many people's surprise, was that those LinkedIn résumés were more honest on the things that mattered to employers, like your responsibilities or your skills at your previous job.
How about Facebook itself?
You know, we always think that hey, there are these idealized versions, people are just showing the best things that happened in their lives. I've thought that many times.
Well, one study tested this by examining people's personalities.
Then they had strangers, many strangers, judge the person's personality just from Facebook, and what they found was those judgments of the personality were pretty much identical, highly correlated, meaning that Facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality.
All right, well, what about online dating?
I mean, that's a pretty deceptive space.
I'm sure you all have "friends" that have used online dating. (Laughter) And they would tell you about that guy that had no hair when he came, or the woman that didn't look at all like her photo.
Well, we were really interested in it, and so what we did is we brought people, online daters, into the lab, and then we measured them. We got their height up against the wall, we put them on a scale, got their weight -- ladies loved that -- and then we actually got their driver's license to get their age.
And what we found was very, very interesting.
Now, as you see, most of the little dots are below the line.
In fact, they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch, what we say in the lab as "strong rounding up." (Laughter) You get to 5'8" and one tenth, and boom! 5'9".
They are clustering pretty close to the truth. What we found was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie on one of those dimensions, but they always lied by a little bit.
One of the reasons is pretty simple. If you go to a date, a coffee date, and you're completely different than what you said, game over. Right? So people lied frequently, but they lied subtly, not too much. They were constrained.
Well, what explains all these studies? What explains the fact that despite our intuitions, mine included, a lot of online communication, technologically-mediated communication, is more honest than face to face?
That really is strange. How do we explain this?
Well, to do that, one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature.
The first is, we're really bad at detecting deception, really bad. Fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not.
That's really bad. Why is it so bad?
Well it has to do with Pinocchio's nose.
Most of you would say that one of the cues you look at is the eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul.
And you're not alone. Around the world, almost every culture, one of the top cues is eyes. But the research over the last 50 years says there's actually no reliable cue to deception, which blew me away, and it's one of the hard lessons that I learned when I was customs officer.
The eyes do not tell us whether somebody's lying or not.
Strange. The other thing is that just because you can't see me doesn't mean I'm going to lie. It's common sense, but one important finding is that we lie for a reason.
We lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain or for somebody else's gain.
So there are some pathological liars, but they make up a tiny portion of the population. We lie for a reason.
Just because people can't see us doesn't mean we're going to necessarily lie.
But I think there's actually something much more interesting and fundamental going on here. The next big thing for me, the next big idea, we can find by going way back in history to the origins of language.
Most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That's a long time ago.
A lot of humans have lived since then.
We've been talking, I guess, about fires and caves and saber-toothed tigers. I don't know what they talked about, but they were doing a lot of talking, and like I said, there's a lot of humans evolving speaking, about 100 billion people in fact.
What's important though is that writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago. So what that means is that all the people before there was any writing, every word that they ever said, every utterance disappeared. No trace. Evanescent. Gone.
So we've been evolving to talk in a way in which there is no record. In fact, even the next big change to writing was only 500 years ago now, with the printing press, which is very recent in our past, and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until World War II, so even the people of the last two millennia, most of the words they ever said -- poof! -- disappeared.
Let's turn to now, the networked age.
In this room, right now, we've probably recorded more than almost all of human pre-ancient history.
That is crazy. We're entering this amazing period of flux in human evolution where we've evolved to speak in a way in which our words disappear, but we're in an environment where we're recording everything.
In fact, I think in the very near future, it's not just what we write that will be recorded, everything we do will be recorded.
Well, as a social scientist, this is the most amazing thing I have ever even dreamed of. Now, I can look at all those words that used to, for millennia, disappear.
You remember those Astroturfing reviews that we were talking about before? Well, when they write a fake review, they have to post it somewhere, and it's left behind for us.
So one thing that we did, and I'll give you an example of looking at the language, is we paid people to write some fake reviews. One of these reviews is fake.
The other review is real. The person stayed there.
But I want everybody to raise their hand at some point.
All right, how many of you believe that A is the fake?
B is a fake. Well done second group. You dominated the first group. (Laughter) You're actually a little bit unusual. Every time we demonstrate this, it's usually about a 50-50 split, which fits with the research, 54 percent. Maybe people here in Winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out.
All right, so why do I care about this?
Well, what I can do now with my colleagues in computer science is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze the linguistic traces of deception.
Our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing. They also used the first person singular, I, way more than the people that actually stayed there.
They were inserting themselves into the hotel review, kind of trying to convince you they were there.
In contrast, the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there, their bodies actually entered the physical space, they talked a lot more about spatial information.
Our computer algorithm is very accurate, much more accurate than humans can be, and it's not going to be accurate all the time.
This isn't a deception-detection machine to tell if your girlfriend's lying to you on text messaging.
We believe that every lie now, every type of lie -- fake hotel reviews, fake shoe reviews, your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging -- those are all different lies. They're going to have different patterns of language. But because everything's recorded now, we can look at all of those kinds of lies.
Now, as I said, as a social scientist, this is wonderful.
It's transformational. We're going to be able to learn so much more about human thought and expression, about everything from love to attitudes, because everything is being recorded now, but what does it mean for the average citizen?
What does it mean for us in our lives?
And I think we're going to see a lot more of that, where we can reflect on who we are by looking at what we wrote, what we said, what we did.
First, lying online can be very dangerous, right?
But when it comes to lying and what we want to do with our lives, I think we can go back to Diogenes and Confucius. And they were less concerned about whether to lie or not to lie, and more concerned about being true to the self, and I think this is really important.
Now, when you are about to say or do something, we can think, do I want this to be part of my legacy, part of my personal record?
Because in the digital age we live in now, in the networked age, we are all leaving a record.
On my desk in my office, I keep a small clay pot that I made in college. It's raku, which is a kind of pottery that began in Japan centuries ago as a way of making bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony.
But here in the United States, we ramp up the drama a little bit, and we drop our pots into sawdust, which catches on fire, and you take a garbage pail, and you put it on top, and smoke starts pouring out.
I love raku because it allows me to play with the elements.
I can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze, but then I have to let it go to the fire and the smoke, and what's wonderful is the surprises that happen, like this crackle pattern, because it's really stressful on these pots. They go from 1,500 degrees to room temperature in the space of just a minute.
Raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity.
When I sat down to write a book about creativity, I realized that the steps were reversed.
I had to let go at the very beginning, and I had to immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers, and as I listened to these stories, I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you might think, including letting go.
It was supposed to break, but that's okay. (Laughter) (Laughs) That's part of the letting go, is sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, because creativity also grows from the broken places.
The best way to learn about anything is through stories, and so I want to tell you a story about work and play and about four aspects of life that we need to embrace in order for our own creativity to flourish.
So many artists speak about needing to be open, to embrace experience, and that's hard to do when you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus.
The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up in a small town in India. Its name is Bhubaneswar, and here's a picture of one of the temples in her town.
Mira Nair: In this little town, there were like 2,000 temples.
We played cricket all the time. We kind of grew up in the rubble. The major thing that inspired me, that led me on this path, that made me a filmmaker eventually, was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and I would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of, you know, passion, and hashish as well, and it was amazing.
Julie Burstein: Isn't that a wonderful story?
You can see the sort of break in the everyday.
There they are in the school fields, but it's good and evil, and passion and hashish. And Mira Nair was a young girl with thousands of other people watching this performance, but she was ready. She was ready to open up to what it sparked in her, and it led her, as she said, down this path to become an award-winning filmmaker.
So being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace.
Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult.
The novelist Richard Ford speaks about a childhood challenge that continues to be something he wrestles with today. He's severely dyslexic.
Richard Ford: I was slow to learn to read, went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum, and still to this day can't read silently much faster than I can read aloud, but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language: the syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it really slowly, and as I did, lingering on those sentences as I had to linger, I fell heir to language's other qualities, which I think has helped me write sentences.
JB: It's so powerful. Richard Ford, who's won the Pulitzer Prize, says that dyslexia helped him write sentences.
He had to learn from it. He had to learn to hear the music in language.
Artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do, sometimes pushing into what they can't do, helps them focus on finding their own voice.
The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how, as a young artist, he thought he was a painter, and he lived in Florence after graduate school.
While he was there, he traveled to Madrid, where he went to the Prado to see this picture by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez.
As he often did, Velázquez put himself in this painting too.
He's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other.
Richard Serra: I was standing there looking at it, and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me, and I thought, "Oh. I'm the subject of the painting."
I was to the point where I was using a stopwatch and painting squares out of randomness, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back and dumped all my paintings in the Arno, and I thought, I'm going to just start playing around.
JB: Richard Serra says that so nonchalantly, you might have missed it. He went and saw this painting by a guy who'd been dead for 300 years, and realized, "I can't do that," and so Richard Serra went back to his studio in Florence, picked up all of his work up to that point, and threw it in a river.
Richard Serra let go of painting at that moment, but he didn't let go of art. He moved to New York City, and he put together a list of verbs — to roll, to crease, to fold — more than a hundred of them, and as he said, he just started playing around. He did these things to all kinds of material. He would take a huge sheet of lead and roll it up and unroll it. He would do the same thing to rubber, and when he got to the direction "to lift," he created this, which is in the Museum of Modern Art.
Richard Serra had to let go of painting in order to embark on this playful exploration that led him to the work that he's known for today: huge curves of steel that require our time and motion to experience. In sculpture, Richard Serra is able to do what he couldn't do in painting.
He makes us the subject of his art.
So experience and challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish.
There's a fourth embrace, and it's the hardest.
It's the embrace of loss, the oldest and most constant of human experiences.
In order to create, we have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for, looking squarely at rejection, at heartbreak, at war, at death.
That's a tough space to stand in.
The educator Parker Palmer calls it "the tragic gap," tragic not because it's sad but because it's inevitable, and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say, "You can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful."
Joel is a New Yorker, and his studio for many years was in Chelsea, with a straight view downtown to the World Trade Center, and he photographed those buildings in every sort of light.
You know where this story goes.
On 9/11, Joel wasn't in New York. He was out of town, but he raced back to the city, and raced down to the site of the destruction.
Joel Meyerowitz: And like all the other passersby, I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers and Greenwich, and all I could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble, and I raised my camera to take a peek, just to see if there was something to see, and some cop, a lady cop, hit me on my shoulder, and said, "Hey, no pictures!"
And I asked her, "What would happen if I was a member of the press?" And she told me, "Oh, look back there," and back a block was the press corps tied up in a little penned-in area, and I said, "Well, when do they go in?"
I thought, "Oh, if there's no pictures, then there'll be no record. We need a record."
I'll find a way to get in, because I don't want to see this history disappear."
JB: He did. He pulled in every favor he could, and got a pass into the World Trade Center site, where he photographed for nine months almost every day.
Looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when I went home to my family at night.
My office was just a few blocks away.
But some of these photographs are beautiful, and we wondered, was it difficult for Joel Meyerowitz to make such beauty out of such devastation?
JM: Well, you know, ugly, I mean, powerful and tragic and horrific and everything, but it was also as, in nature, an enormous event that was transformed after the fact into this residue, and like many other ruins — you go to the ruins of the Colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace — and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather.
I mean, there were afternoons I was down there, and the light goes pink and there's a mist in the air and you're standing in the rubble, and I found myself recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature and the fact that nature, as time, is erasing this wound.
It gets further and further away from the day, and light and seasons temper it in some way, and it's not that I'm a romantic. I'm really a realist.
JB: You have to take a picture. That sense of urgency, of the need to get to work, is so powerful in Joel's story.
The first time I told these stories, a man in the audience raised his hand and said, "All these artists talk about their work, not their art, which has got me thinking about my work and where the creativity is there, and I'm not an artist." He's right. We all wrestle with experience and challenge, limits and loss.
Creativity is essential to all of us, whether we're scientists or teachers, parents or entrepreneurs.
I want to leave you with another image of a Japanese tea bowl. This one is at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C.
This bowl is more beautiful now, having been broken, than it was when it was first made, and we can look at those cracks, because they tell the story that we all live, of the cycle of creation and destruction, of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces and making something new.
Thank you. (Applause)
So I tried to do a small good thing for my wife.
It makes me to stand here, the fame, the money I got out of it.
So what I did, I'd gone back to my early marriage days.
What you did in the early marriage days, you tried to impress your wife. I did the same.
My wife replied, "None of your business."
Then, being her husband, I ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth.
I don't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler.
Then I immediately asked her, why are you [using] that unhygienic method?
She replied, I also know about [sanitary pads], but myself and my sisters, if they start using that, we have to cut our family milk budget.
I tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads.
I went to a local shop, I tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet.
Then I took that pad. I want to see that. What is inside it?
Then I made a sanitary pad and handed it to Shanti -- my wife's name is Shanti.
"Close your eyes. Whatever I give, it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring, even a chocolate, I will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it.
Close your eyes."
Because I tried to make it intimate.
Because it's an arranged marriage, not a love marriage.
(Laughter) So one day she said, openly, I'm not going to support this research.
Then other victims, they got into my sisters.
That's why I am always jealous with the saints in India.
They also refused. Finally, I decide, use sanitary pad myself.
Armstrong. Then Tenzing [and] Hillary, in Everest, like that Muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe.
But here the problem is, one company is making napkin out of cotton. It is working well.
That makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research.
Why is this? I used medical college girls.
She suspects I am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls.
In this machine, any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant, anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall.
That is my invention.
So after that, what I did, usually if anyone got a patent or an invention, immediately you want to make, convert into this.
A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating.
What if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one?
That's why I am giving this machine only in rural India, for rural women, because in India, [you'll be] surprised, only two percent of women are using sanitary pads. The rest, they're using a rag cloth, a leaf, husk, [saw] dust, everything except sanitary pads.
It is the same in the 21st century. That's why I am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across India.
So far, 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries.
That makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all IIMs.
(Applause) Play video one.
(Video) Arunachalam Muruganantham: The thing I saw in my wife's hand, "Why are you using that nasty cloth?"
She replied immediately, "I know about napkins, but if I start using napkins, then we have to cut our family milk budget."
So I decided I'm going to sell this new machine only for Women Self Help Groups.
Already 600 installations. What is my mission?
I'm going to make India [into] a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime.
That's why I'm not running after this bloody money.
I'm doing something serious.
Mahalakshmi is chasing me, I am keeping in the back pocket.
Not in front pocket. I'm a back pocket man.
That's all. A school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad.
I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe. That's why I put all the details on public domain like an open software.
Thank you very much. Bye!
(Applause)
It's a bit funny, because I did write that humans will become digital, but I didn't think it will happen so fast and that it will happen to me.
But here I am, as a digital avatar, and here you are, so let's start.
And let's start with a question.
How many fascists are there in the audience today?
(Laughter) Well, it's a bit difficult to say, because we've forgotten what fascism is.
People now use the term "fascist" as a kind of general-purpose abuse.
Or they confuse fascism with nationalism.
So let's take a few minutes to clarify what fascism actually is, and how it is different from nationalism.
The milder forms of nationalism have been among the most benevolent of human creations.
Nations are communities of millions of strangers who don't really know each other.
For example, I don't know the eight million people who share my Israeli citizenship.
But thanks to nationalism, we can all care about one another and cooperate effectively.
Some people, like John Lennon, imagine that without nationalism, the world will be a peaceful paradise.
But far more likely, without nationalism, we would have been living in tribal chaos.
If you look today at the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world, countries like Sweden and Switzerland and Japan, you will see that they have a very strong sense of nationalism.
In contrast, countries that lack a strong sense of nationalism, like Congo and Somalia and Afghanistan, tend to be violent and poor.
So what is fascism, and how is it different from nationalism?
Well, nationalism tells me that my nation is unique, and that I have special obligations towards my nation.
Fascism, in contrast, tells me that my nation is supreme, and that I have exclusive obligations towards it.
Usually, of course, people have many identities and loyalties to different groups.
For example, I can be a good patriot, loyal to my country, and at the same time, be loyal to my family, my neighborhood, my profession, humankind as a whole, truth and beauty.
Of course, when I have different identities and loyalties, it sometimes creates conflicts and complications.
But, well, who ever told you that life was easy?
Life is complicated.
Fascism is what happens when people try to ignore the complications and to make life too easy for themselves.
If my nation demands that I sacrifice my family, then I will sacrifice my family.
If the nation demands that I kill millions of people, then I will kill millions of people.
And if my nation demands that I betray truth and beauty, then I should betray truth and beauty.
How does a fascist decide whether a movie is a good movie or a bad movie?
Well, it's very, very, very simple.
There is really just one yardstick: if the movie serves the interests of the nation, it's a good movie; if the movie doesn't serve the interests of the nation, it's a bad movie.
That's it.
Similarly, how does a fascist decide what to teach kids in school?
Again, it's very simple.
Now, the horrors of the Second World War and of the Holocaust remind us of the terrible consequences of this way of thinking.
But usually, when we talk about the ills of fascism, we do so in an ineffective way, because we tend to depict fascism as a hideous monster, without really explaining what was so seductive about it.
It's a bit like these Hollywood movies that depict the bad guys -- Voldemort or Sauron or Darth Vader -- as ugly and mean and cruel.
They're cruel even to their own supporters.
When I see these movies, I never understand -- why would anybody be tempted to follow a disgusting creep like Voldemort?
The problem with evil is that in real life, evil doesn't necessarily look ugly.
It can look very beautiful.
This is something that Christianity knew very well, which is why in Christian art, as [opposed to] Hollywood, Satan is usually depicted as a gorgeous hunk.
This is why it's so difficult to resist the temptations of Satan, and why it is also difficult to resist the temptations of fascism.
Fascism makes people see themselves as belonging to the most beautiful and most important thing in the world -- the nation.
And then people think, "Well, they taught us that fascism is ugly.
But when I look in the mirror, I see something very beautiful, so I can't be a fascist, right?"
That's the problem with fascism.
When you look in the fascist mirror, you see yourself as far more beautiful than you really are.
In the 1930s, when Germans looked in the fascist mirror, they saw Germany as the most beautiful thing in the world.
If today, Russians look in the fascist mirror, they will see Russia as the most beautiful thing in the world.
And if Israelis look in the fascist mirror, they will see Israel as the most beautiful thing in the world.
This does not mean that we are now facing a rerun of the 1930s.
Fascism and dictatorships might come back, but they will come back in a new form, a form which is much more relevant to the new technological realities of the 21st century.
In ancient times, land was the most important asset in the world.
Politics, therefore, was the struggle to control land.
And dictatorship meant that all the land was owned by a single ruler or by a small oligarch.
And in the modern age, machines became more important than land.
Politics became the struggle to control the machines.
And dictatorship meant that too many of the machines became concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite.
Now data is replacing both land and machines as the most important asset.
Politics becomes the struggle to control the flows of data.
And dictatorship now means that too much data is being concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite.
The greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient than democracies.
In the 20th century, democracy and capitalism defeated fascism and communism because democracy was better at processing data and making decisions.
Given 20th-century technology, it was simply inefficient to try and concentrate too much data and too much power in one place.
But it is not a law of nature that centralized data processing is always less efficient than distributed data processing.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it might become feasible to process enormous amounts of information very efficiently in one place, to take all the decisions in one place, and then centralized data processing will be more efficient than distributed data processing.
And then the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century -- their attempt to concentrate all the information in one place -- it will become their greatest advantage.
Another technological danger that threatens the future of democracy is the merger of information technology with biotechnology, which might result in the creation of algorithms that know me better than I know myself.
And once you have such algorithms, an external system, like the government, cannot just predict my decisions, it can also manipulate my feelings, my emotions.
A dictator may not be able to provide me with good health care, but he will be able to make me love him and to make me hate the opposition.
Democracy will find it difficult to survive such a development because, in the end, democracy is not based on human rationality; it's based on human feelings.
During elections and referendums, you're not being asked, "What do you think?"
And if somebody can manipulate your emotions effectively, democracy will become an emotional puppet show.
So what can we do to prevent the return of fascism and the rise of new dictatorships?
The number one question that we face is: Who controls the data?
If you are an engineer, then find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands.
And find ways to make sure the distributed data processing is at least as efficient as centralized data processing.
This will be the best safeguard for democracy.
As for the rest of us who are not engineers, the number one question facing us is how not to allow ourselves to be manipulated by those who control the data.
They hack our feelings.
Not our emails, not our bank accounts -- they hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy democracy from within.
But now, the enemies of democracy are using this very method to sell us fear and hate and vanity.
They cannot create these feelings out of nothing.
So they get to know our own preexisting weaknesses.
And then use them against us.
And it is therefore the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure that they do not become a weapon in the hands of the enemies of democracy.
Getting to know our own weaknesses will also help us to avoid the trap of the fascist mirror.
As we explained earlier, fascism exploits our vanity.
It makes us see ourselves as far more beautiful than we really are.
But if you really know yourself, you will not fall for this kind of flattery.
If somebody puts a mirror in front of your eyes that hides all your ugly bits and makes you see yourself as far more beautiful and far more important than you really are, just break that mirror.
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Yuval, thank you.
So, if I understand you right, you're alerting us to two big dangers here.
I wonder if there's a third concern that some people here have already expressed, which is where, not governments, but big corporations control all our data.
Yuval Noah Harari: Well, in the end, there isn't such a big difference between the corporations and the governments, because, as I said, the questions is: Who controls the data?
This is the real government.
If you call it a corporation or a government -- if it's a corporation and it really controls the data, this is our real government.
So the difference is more apparent than real.
I mean, if consumers just decide that the company is no longer operating in their interest, it does open the door to another market.
It seems easier to imagine that than, say, citizens rising up and taking down a government that is in control of everything.
YNH: Well, we are not there yet, but again, if a corporation really knows you better than you know yourself -- at least that it can manipulate your own deepest emotions and desires, and you won't even realize -- you will think this is your authentic self.
So in theory, yes, in theory, you can rise against a corporation, just as, in theory, you can rise against a dictatorship.
But in practice, it is extremely difficult.
CA: So in "Homo Deus," you argue that this would be the century when humans kind of became gods, either through development of artificial intelligence or through genetic engineering.
Has this prospect of political system shift, collapse impacted your view on that possibility?
YNH: Well, I think it makes it even more likely, and more likely that it will happen faster, because in times of crisis, people are willing to take risks that they wouldn't otherwise take.
And people are willing to try all kinds of high-risk, high-gain technologies.
So these kinds of crises might serve the same function as the two world wars in the 20th century.
The two world wars greatly accelerated the development of new and dangerous technologies.
And the same thing might happen in the 21st century.
I mean, you need to be a little crazy to run too fast, let's say, with genetic engineering.
But now you have more and more crazy people in charge of different countries in the world, so the chances are getting higher, not lower.
CA: So, putting it all together, Yuval, you've got this unique vision.
Roll the clock forward 30 years.
Or not?
And especially if you look at liberal democracy and you think things are bad now, just remember how much worse things looked in 1938 or in 1968.
So this is really nothing, this is just a small crisis.
But you can never know, because, as a historian, I know that you should never underestimate human stupidity.
(Laughter) (Applause) It is one of the most powerful forces that shape history.
CA: Yuval, it's been an absolute delight to have you with us.
Thank you for making the virtual trip.
Have a great evening there in Tel Aviv.
Yuval Harari!
YNH: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Living with a physical disability isn't easy anywhere in the world, but if you live in a country like the United States, there's certain appurtenances available to you that do make life easier.
So if you're in a building, you can take an elevator.
If you're crossing the street, you have sidewalk cutouts.
And if you have to travel some distance farther than you can do under your own power, there's accessible vehicles, and if you can't afford one of those, there's accessible public transportation.
But in the developing world, things are quite different.
There's 40 million people who need a wheelchair but don't have one, and the majority of these people live in rural areas, where the only connections to community, to employment, to education, are by traveling long distances on rough terrain often under their own power.
And the devices usually available to these people are not made for that context, break down quickly, and are hard to repair.
I started looking at wheelchairs in developing countries in 2005, when I spent the summer assessing the state of technology in Tanzania, and I talked to wheelchair users, wheelchair manufacturers, disability groups, and what stood out to me is that there wasn't a device available that was designed for rural areas, that could go fast and efficiently on many types of terrain.
So being a mechanical engineer, being at MIT and having lots of resources available to me, I thought I'd try to do something about it.
And if you want to go faster, say on pavement, you can shift to a high gear, and you get less torque, but higher speeds.
So the logical evolution here is to just make a wheelchair with mountain bike components, which many people have done.
But these are two products available in the U.S. that would be difficult to transfer into developing countries because they're much, much too expensive.
And the context I'm talking about is where you need to have a product that is less than 200 dollars.
But when you get home or want to go indoors at your work, it's got to be small enough and maneuverable enough to use inside.
And furthermore, if you want it to last a long time out in rural areas, it has to be repairable using the local tools, materials and knowledge in those contexts.
So the real crux of the problem here is, how do you make a system that's a simple device but gives you a large mechanical advantage?
How do you make a mountain bike for your arms that doesn't have the mountain bike cost and complexity?
So as is the case with simple solutions, oftentimes the answer is right in front of your face, and for us it was levers.
We use levers all the time, in tools, doorknobs, bicycle parts.
And that moment of inspiration, that key invention moment, was when I was sitting in front of my design notebook and I started thinking about somebody grabbing a lever, and if they grab near the end of the lever, they can get an effectively long lever and produce a lot of torque as they push back and forth, and effectively get a low gear.
And as they slide their hand down the lever, they can push with a smaller effective lever length, but push through a bigger angle every stroke, which makes a faster rotational speed, and gives you an effective high gear.
So what's exciting about this system is that it's really, really mechanically simple, and you could make it using technology that's been around for hundreds of years.
So seeing this in practice, this is the Leveraged Freedom Chair that, after a few years of development, we're now going into production with, and this is a full-time wheelchair user -- he's paralyzed -- in Guatemala, and you see he's able to traverse pretty rough terrain.
It's the person that's sliding his hands up and down the levers, so the mechanism itself can be very simple and composed of bicycle parts you can get anywhere in the world.
Because those bicycle parts are so ubiquitously available, they're super-cheap.
They're made by the gazillions in China and India, and we can source them anywhere in the world, build the chair anywhere, and most importantly repair it, even out in a village with a local bicycle mechanic who has local tools, knowledge and parts available.
Now, when you want to use the LFC indoors, all you have to do is pull the levers out of the drivetrain, stow them in the frame, and it converts into a normal wheelchair that you can use just like any other normal wheelchair, and we sized it like a normal wheelchair, so it's narrow enough to fit through a standard doorway, it's low enough to fit under a table, and it's small and maneuverable enough to fit in a bathroom and this is important so the user can get up close to a toilet, and be able to transfer off just like he could in a normal wheelchair.
The first is that this product works well because we were effectively able to combine rigorous engineering science and analysis with user-centered design focused on the social and usage and economic factors important to wheelchair users in the developing countries.
So because we tested it with wheelchair users, with wheelchair manufacturers, we got that feedback from them, not just articulating their problems, but articulating their solutions, and worked together to go back to the drawing board and make a new design, which we brought back to East Africa in '09 that worked a lot better than a normal wheelchair on rough terrain, but it still didn't work well indoors because it was too big, it was heavy, it was hard to move around, so again with that user feedback, we went back to the drawing board, came up with a better design, 20 pounds lighter, as narrow as a regular wheelchair, tested that in a field trial in Guatemala, and that advanced the product to the point where we have now that it's going into production.
Now also being engineering scientists, we were able to quantify the performance benefits of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, so here are some shots of our trial in Guatemala where we tested the LFC on village terrain, and tested people's biomechanical outputs, their oxygen consumption, how fast they go, how much power they're putting out, both in their regular wheelchairs and using the LFC, and we found that the LFC is about 80 percent faster going on these terrains than a normal wheelchair.
It's also about 40 percent more efficient than a regular wheelchair, and because of the mechanical advantage you get from the levers, you can produce 50 percent higher torque and really muscle your way through the really, really rough terrain.
Now the second lesson that we learned in this is that the constraints on this design really push the innovation, because we had to hit such a low price point, because we had to make a device that could travel on many, many types of terrain but still be usable indoors, and be simple enough to repair, we ended up with a fundamentally new product, a new product that is an innovation in a space that really hasn't changed in a hundred years.
Why not in countries like the U.S. too?
So we teamed up with Continuum, a local product design firm here in Boston to make the high-end version, the developed world version, that we'll probably sell primarily in the U.S. and Europe, but to higher-income buyers.
And the final point I want to make is that I think this project worked well because we engaged all the stakeholders that buy into this project and are important to consider in bringing the technology from inception of an idea through innovation, validation, commercialization and dissemination, and that cycle has to start and end with end users.
These are the people that define the requirements of the technology, and these are the people that have to give the thumbs-up at the end, and say, "Yeah, it actually works. It meets our needs."
So people like me in the academic space, we can do things like innovate and analyze and test, create data and make bench-level prototypes, but how do you get that bench-level prototype to commercialization?
So we need gap-fillers like Continuum that can work on commercializing, and we started a whole NGO to bring our chair to market -- Global Research Innovation Technology -- and then we also teamed up with a big manufacturer in India, Pinnacle Industries, that's tooled up now to make 500 chairs a month and will make the first batch of 200 next month, which will be delivered in India.
And then finally, to get this out to the people in scale, we teamed up with the largest disability organization in the world, Jaipur Foot.
Now what's powerful about this model is when you bring together all these stakeholders that represent each link in the chain from inception of an idea all the way to implementation in the field, that's where the magic happens.
You can connect with stakeholders like the manufacturers and talk with them face-to-face and leverage their local knowledge of manufacturing practices and their clients and combine that knowledge with our engineering knowledge to create something greater than either of us could have done alone.
And then you can also engage the end user in the design process, and not just ask him what he needs, but ask him how he thinks it can be achieved.
And this picture was taken in India in our last field trial, where we had a 90-percent adoption rate where people switched to using our Leveraged Freedom Chair over their normal wheelchair, and this picture specifically is of Ashok, and Ashok had a spinal injury when he fell out of a tree, and he had been working at a tailor, but once he was injured he wasn't able to transport himself from his house over a kilometer to his shop in his normal wheelchair.
But the day after he got an LFC, he hopped in it, rode that kilometer, opened up his shop and soon after landed a contract to make school uniforms and started making money, started providing for his family again.
Ashok: You also encouraged me to work.
I rested for a day at home.
The next day I went to my shop.
Now everything is back to normal.
Amos Winter: And thank you very much for having me today.
(Applause)
Everything I do, and everything I do professionally -- my life -- has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa.
From 1971 to 1977 -- I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) -- I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.
I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed.
And I was distraught.
I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa.
Instead, everything we touched we killed.
Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food.
So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and ...
And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter) And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture.
But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." (Laughter) "Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation."
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully.
And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, "Look how easy agriculture is."
When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. (Laughter) And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!"
And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." (Laughter) "Why didn't you tell us?""You never asked."
Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.
You should see the rubbish — (Applause) -- You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people.
You want to read the book, read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist.
The book was published in 2009.
We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years.
I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done.
Just go and read her book.
We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic.
The two words come from the Latin root "pater," which means "father."
But they mean two different things.
Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. "I love you so much."
That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss.
I was given a slap in the face reading a book, "Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone.
This should be the first principle of aid.
The first principle of aid is respect.
This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, "Can we -- can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial?"
I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person.
So what you do -- you shut up.
We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub.
And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do.
The most important thing is passion.
You can give somebody an idea.
If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do?
The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing.
And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone.
The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available.
Let me tell you a secret.
So planning has this blind spot.
The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings.
What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist.
I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia.
And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, "You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?"
And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, "Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?"
In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, "How can you do that?
I shut up, and listen to them." (Laughter) So — (Applause) — So the government says, "Do it again." (Laughter) We've done it in 300 communities around the world.
We have helped to start 40,000 businesses.
There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude.
Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago.
Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy."
Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.
So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy.
You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you.
You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves.
In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients.
Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion?
Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning?
Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded.
We are at the end of the first industrial revolution -- nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing -- and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable.
The internal combustion engine is not sustainable.
What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way.
Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it!
It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now.
There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago.
There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860.
And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years.
Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with.
They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter) So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York.
So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies -- 1,001.
Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.
However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs.
First, you have to offer them confidentiality.
Otherwise they don't come and talk to you.
Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them.
And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship.
The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management.
Guess what?
We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money.
It doesn't exist.
This person has never been born.
We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world -- Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo.
There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person.
He wasn't alone when he started.
Nobody started a company alone. No one.
We activate communities.
We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people.
Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a brain scientist, and as a brain scientist, I'm actually interested in how the brain learns, and I'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter, better and faster.
This is in this context I'm going to tell you about video games. When we say video games, most of you think about children.
It's true. Ninety percent of children do play video games.
But let's be frank.
Most of you. The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old, and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults. (Laughter) So video [gaming] is pervasive throughout our society.
It is clearly here to stay. It has an amazing impact on our everyday life. Consider these statistics released by Activision. After one month of release of the game "Call Of Duty: Black Ops," it had been played for 68,000 years worldwide, right?
So what we are asking in the lab is, how can we leverage that power?
Now I want to step back a bit.
(Shooting noises) The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you, right?
And I'm almost sure most of you have thought, "Oh, come on, can't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies?"
I'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing sudoku or your boy reading Shakespeare. Right?
Most parents would find that great.
Well, I'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health.
There's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you, right? You're all bombarded with that.
I'd like to put this kind of Friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab.
What we do in the lab is actually measure directly, in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain.
And so I'm going to take a few examples from our work.
That's a statement about vision.
There may be vision scientists among you.
We actually know how to test that statement.
Well, guess what? People that don't play a lot of action games, that don't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens, have normal, or what we call corrective-to-normal vision. That's okay.
The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week, 10 hours per week, 15 hours per week.
Guess what? Their vision is really, really good.
Imagine you're driving in a fog. That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident, or getting into an accident.
So we're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision, and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better.
Clearly, when it comes to action video games, screen time doesn't make your eyesight worse.
Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability.
Okay, we know how to measure attention in the lab.
Right? So this is the first example.
["Chair"] Orange, good. ["Table"] Green.
["Board"] Audience: Red.Daphne Bavelier: Red.
["Horse"] DB: Yellow. Audience: Yellow.
["Yellow"] DB: Red. Audience: Yellow.
Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color.
What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games, they actually resolve the conflict faster.
So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems.
Actually, those action video game players have many other advantages in terms of attention, and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world.
In the lab, we get people to come to the lab, sit in front of a computer screen, and we give them little tasks that I'm going to get you to do again.
You're going to see yellow happy faces and a few sad blue faces. These are children in the schoolyard in Geneva during a recess during the winter. Most kids are happy. It's actually recess.
But a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat.
Was it yellow initially or blue?
Yellow or blue?
Audience: Yellow.DB: Good.
So your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention.
That's what we just did. Your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention, which is what is shown in this video here.
That's for you guys, action video game players.
A bit more challenging, right? (Laughter) Yellow or blue? Blue. We have some people that are serious out there. Yeah. (Laughter) Good. So in the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people's behavior, we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain, and we do find many changes, but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention. So one part is the parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention.
The other one is the frontal lobe, which controls how we sustain attention, and another one is the anterior cingulate, which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict.
Now, when we do brain imaging, we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games.
This actually leads me to a rather counterintuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain.
You all know about multitasking. You all have been faulty of multitasking when you're driving and you pick up your cellphone. Bad idea. Very bad idea.
Why? Because as your attention shifts to your cell phone, you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you, and so you're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident.
Now, we can measure that kind of skills in the lab.
We obviously don't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they have. That would be a little costly proposition. But we design tasks on the computer where we can measure, to millisecond accuracy, how good they are at switching from one task to another.
When we do that, we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really, really good.
They switch really fast, very swiftly. They pay a very small cost.
Now I'd like you to remember that result, and put it in the context of another group of technology users, a group which is actually much revered by society, which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking.
What is multimedia-tasking? It's the fact that most of us, most of our children, are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they're doing search on the web at the same time as they're chatting on Facebook with their friends.
That's a multimedia-tasker.
Right? So these kinds of results really makes two main points.
The first one is that not all media are created equal.
You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention.
Even within video games, I'm telling you right now about these action-packed video games.
Different video games have a different effect on your brains.
So we actually need to step into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game.
The other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight.
I showed that to you already, like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time, those action gamers have a lot of very good vision, etc.
So you show them their data, you show them they are bad and they're like, "Not possible." You know, they have this sort of gut feeling that, really, they are doing really, really good.
That's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain.
Now in a sense, when we think about the effect of video games on the brain, it's very similar to the effect of wine on the health.
There are some very poor uses of wine. There are some very poor uses of video games. But when consumed in reasonable doses, and at the right age, wine can be very good for health. There are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy.
So it's the same way, like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc., and so we need and we're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games, either for education or for rehabilitation of patients.
That's the point of rehabilitation or education.
Most of the kids don't go to school saying, "Great, two hours of math!"
And one more step is to do training studies.
So let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation.
Mental rotation is a task where I'm going to ask you, and again you're going to do the task, to look at this shape. Study it, it's a target shape, and I'm going to present to you four different shapes.
Okay, I'll help you. Fourth one.
One more. Get those brains working. Come on.
Third. Good! This is hard, right?
It doesn't really feel like playing mindless action video games.
Well, what we do in these training studies is, people come to the lab, they do tasks like this one, we then force them to play 10 hours of action games.
They don't play 10 hours of action games in a row.
Then, once they are done with the training, they come back a few days later and they are tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task. So this is work from a colleague in Toronto. What they showed is that, initially, you know, subjects perform where they are expected to perform given their age. After two weeks of training on action video games, they actually perform better, and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training. That's really, really important.
Now, at this point, a number of you are probably wondering well, what are you waiting for, to put on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother and that she would actually enjoy, or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has amblyopia, for example?
Well, we're working on it, but here is a challenge.
There are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects, and that's what I'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation.
That's the chocolate side of the equation.
The issue is we need to put the two together, and it's a little bit like with food.
Who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli?
None of you. (Laughter) And you probably have had that feeling, right, picking up an education game and sort of feeling, hmm, you know, it's not really fun, it's not really engaging. So what we need is really a new brand of chocolate, a brand of chocolate that is irresistible, that you really want to play, but that has all the ingredients, the good ingredients that are extracted from the broccoli that you can't recognize but are still working on your brains. And we're working on it, but it takes brain scientists to come and to get together, people that work in the entertainment software industry, and publishers, so these are not people that usually meet every day, but it's actually doable, and we are on the right track.
Tommy Mizzone: Tonight we're going to play you two songs.
We're three brothers from New Jersey, and the funny thing is that, believe it or not, we are hooked on bluegrass and we're excited to play it for you tonight.
(Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you, thank you.
I'm Robbie Mizzone. I'm 13, and I play the fiddle.
And on guitar is my 14-year-old brother, Tommy.
(Applause) We call ourselves the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys.
(Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you.
JM: Thank you all.
TM: Thank you very much.
I would like to tell you about a project which I started about 16 years ago.
It's about making new forms of life.
And these are made of this kind of tube -- electricity tube, we call it in Holland.
And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time.
(Video) Narrator: Eventually, these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches.
Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution.
Learning to live on their own -- and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own.
The beast walks sideways on the wet sand of the beach, with its nose pointed into the wind.
Evolution has generated many species.
(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) TJ: This is a herd, and it is built according to genetic codes.
This is a new generation, a new family, which is able to store the wind.
So, the wings pump up air in lemonade bottles, which are on top of that.
(Laughter) I could show you this animal.
(Applause) Thank you.
There are 11 numbers, which I call The 11 Holy Numbers.
In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel.
The axis of a wheel stays on the same level, and this hip is staying on the same level as well.
In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do.
So 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel, we have a new wheel.
I will show you, in the next video -- can you start it, please? -- that very heavy loads can be moved.
It's 3.2 tons.
OK. Good.
So, they have to survive all the dangers of the beach, and one of the big dangers is the sea.
This is the sea.
So, imagine that the animal is walking towards the sea.
As soon as it touches the water -- you should hear a sound of running air.
Here we have the brain of the animal.
It's a binary step counter.
It says, well, there's the sea, there are dunes, and I'm here.
So it's a sort of imagination of the simple world of the beach animal.
Thank you.
When the nose of the animal is fixed, the whole animal is fixed.
So when the storm is coming up, it drives a pin into the ground.
The nose is fixed, the whole animal is fixed.
Now, another couple of years, and these animals will survive on their own.
I still have to help them a lot.
(Applause)
Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon.
It exists in basically all of the cities all around the world, which is a little bit surprising when you think about it.
I mean, you have the typical European cities, with a dense urban core, good public transportation mostly, not a lot of road capacity.
But then, on the other hand, you have the American cities.
Anyway, the American cities: lots of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation.
And then you have the emerging world cities, with a mixed variety of vehicles, mixed land-use patterns, also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core.
But all of these attempts have one thing in common.
They're basically attempts at figuring out what people should do instead of rush hour car driving.
They're essentially, to a point, attempts at planning what other people should do, planning their life for them.
Now, planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do, and let me tell you a story.
And the urban planner in London goes, "What do you mean, who's in charge of London's — I mean, no one is in charge."
I mean, it's a very complicated system. Someone must control all of this."
It basically organizes itself."
It organizes itself.
That's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing, and this is a very deep insight.
When you try to solve really complex social problems, the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives.
And let's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion.
This is a map of Stockholm, my hometown.
Now, Stockholm is a medium-sized city, roughly two million people, but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges -- narrow bridges, old bridges -- which means lots of road congestion.
And these red dots show the most congested parts, which are the bridges that lead into the inner city.
And then someone came up with the idea that, apart from good public transport, apart from spending money on roads, let's try to charge drivers one or two euros at these bottlenecks.
Now, one or two euros, that isn't really a lot of money, I mean compared to parking charges and running costs, etc., so you would probably expect that car drivers wouldn't really react to this fairly small charge.
One or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours.
Now, 20 percent, well, that's a fairly huge figure, you might think, but you've still got 80 percent left of the problem, right?
Because you still have 80 percent of the traffic.
Now, that's also wrong, because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon, meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really, really rapidly.
But fortunately, it also works the other way around.
If you can reduce traffic even somewhat, then congestion will go down much faster than you might think.
Now, congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3, 2006, and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm, one of the typical streets, January 2.
The first day with the congestion charges looked like this.
This is what happens when you take away 20 percent of the cars from the streets.
You really reduce congestion quite substantially.
But, well, as I said, I mean, car drivers adapt, right?
But you see, there's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007.
Well, the thing is that, the congestion charges, they were introduced first as a trial, so they were introduced in January and then abolished again at the end of July, followed by a referendum, and then they were reintroduced again in 2007, which of course was a wonderful scientific opportunity.
I mean, this was a really fun experiment to start with, and we actually got to do it twice.
And personally, I would like to do this every once a year or so, but they won't let me do that.
But it was fun anyway.
This is the last day with the congestion charges, July 31, and you see the same street but now it's summer, and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year, and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this.
The first day they all came back.
This shows public support for congestion pricing of Stockholm, and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of Spring 2006, people were fiercely against it.
Seventy percent of the population didn't want this.
But what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect, that people hated it more and more.
Well, think about it this way. Who changed?
Well, so we did this huge interview survey with lots of travel services, and tried to figure out who changed, and where did they go?
And it turned out that they don't know themselves. (Laughter) For some reason, the car drivers are -- they are confident they actually drive the same way that they used to do.
Each day, people make new decisions, and people change and the world changes around them, and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour car driving in a way that people don't even notice.
And the other question, who changed their mind?
Who changed their opinion, and why?
So we did another interview survey, tried to figure out why people changed their mind, and what type of group changed their minds?
And after analyzing the answers, it turned out that more than half of them believe that they haven't changed their minds.
Which means that we are now in a position where we have reduced traffic across this toll cordon with 20 percent, and reduced congestion by enormous numbers, and people aren't even aware that they have changed, and they honestly believe that they have liked this all along.
This is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problems, and when you do that, you shouldn't try to tell people how to adapt.
And if you do it right, people will actually embrace the change, and if you do it right, people will actually even like it.
Thank you. (Applause)
Life is about opportunities -- creating them and embracing them.
And for me, that was the Olympic dream.
That's what defined me. That was my bliss.
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team headed towards the Winter Olympics, I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates.
As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney, it was the perfect autumn day: sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream.
Life was good.
I got up off the seat of my bike and I started pumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air, I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked up to see the sun shining in my face.
And then everything went black.
Where was I? What was happening?
My body was consumed by pain.
I was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney.
I had extensive and life-threatening injuries.
I'd broken my neck and my back in six places.
I broke five ribs on my left side.
I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone.
I broke some bones in my feet.
My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel.
My head was cut open across the front, lifted back, exposing the skull underneath.
In fact, I lost about five liters of blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold.
By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing.
I was having a really bad day.
(Laughter) For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions.
I had an awareness of being in my body, but also being out of my body, somewhere else, watching from above, as if it was happening to someone else.
But this voice kept calling me: "Come on, stay with me."
"No, it's too hard."
"No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me."
"Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together."
I was at a crossroads.
I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever.
It was the fight of my life.
After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body.
The next concern was whether I would walk again, because I was paralyzed from the waist down.
They said to my parents that the neck break was a stable fracture, but the back was completely crushed: the vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut, stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces.
They'd have to operate.
They went in. They put me on a beanbag.
They cut me -- literally cut me in half.
They took out two of my broken ribs and they rebuilt my back -- L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib, they fused T12, L1 and L2 together.
I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success, because at that stage, I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes, and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!"
(Laughter) I had no idea.
That's the sort of thing that happens to someone else, not me, surely.
But the damage is permanent.
The central nervous system nerves -- there is no cure.
You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life.
You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life.
And then she said, "Janine, you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life, because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before."
(Gasps) I tried to grasp what she was saying.
I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done.
And the question I asked myself is: If I couldn't do that, then who was I?
They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal.
I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed.
I had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots.
I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and I saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head.
I shared the ward with five other people, and the amazing thing is, because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like.
How often in life do you get to make friendships, judgment-free, purely based on spirit?
And there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears, and our hopes for life after the spinal ward.
I remember one night, one of the nurses came in, Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws.
He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said, "Start threading them together."
(Laughter) And when we'd finished, he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward.
And we did. And he said, "Right ...
And as we held on and we breathed as one, we knew we weren't on this journey alone.
there were moments of incredible depth and richness, of authenticity and connection that I had never experienced before.
And each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward, we would never be the same.
I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair, wrapped in a plaster body cast, and feeling the sun on my face for the first time.
I soaked it up and I thought, "How could I ever have taken this for granted?"
I felt so incredibly grateful for my life.
But before I left hospital, the head nurse had said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready, because when you get home, something's going to happen."
And I said, "What?"
And she said, "You're going to get depressed."
She said, "You are, because, see, it happens to everyone.
In the spinal ward, that's normal. You're in a wheelchair. That's normal.
I realized Sister Sam was right.
I was in my wheelchair.
I'd lost so much weight in hospital, I now weighed about 80 pounds.
And I wanted to give up.
All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door.
I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back.
And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed and saying, "I wonder if life will ever be good again."
Because I've lost everything that I valued, everything that I'd worked towards.
And the question I asked was, "Why me? Why me?"
And then I remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward, particularly Maria.
Maria was in a car accident, and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic, had no movement from the neck down, had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk.
They told me, "We're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her."
I was worried. I didn't know how I'd react to being next to her.
I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing, because Maria always smiled.
She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again, albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once.
And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance.
And I realized that this wasn't just my life; it was life itself.
I realized that this wasn't just my pain; it was everybody's pain.
And then I stopped asking, "Why me?"
And I started to ask, "Why not me?"
And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start.
I was an athlete; my body was a machine.
But now I was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do: that of rebuilding a life.
And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom.
I was no longer tied to a set path.
I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities.
And that realization was about to change my life.
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast, an airplane flew overhead.
I looked up, and I thought to myself, "That's it!
(Laughter) I said, "Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly."
She said, "That's nice, dear."
(Laughter) I said, "Pass me the yellow pages."
They said, "When do you want to come out?"
I said, "Well, I have to get a friend to drive me because I can't drive.
I made a booking, and weeks later, my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport, all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls.
(Laughter) I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot's license.
(Laughter) I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand.
I said, "Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson."
They get me out on the tarmac, and there was this red, white and blue airplane -- it was beautiful.
They had to slide me up on the wing to put me in the cockpit.
They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere.
Andrew got in the front, started the plane, and said, "Would you like to have a go at taxiing?"
That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground.
He went, "Oh."
So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power.
And as we took off down the runway, and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne, I had the most incredible sense of freedom.
And Andrew said to me, as we got over the training area, "You see that mountain over there?"
And I said, "Yeah."
And he said, "Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain."
And as I looked up, I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains, where the journey had begun.
(Laughter) But I'd worry about that later, because right now, I had a dream.
So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan.
And Mom said she was forever following me, wiping off my fingerprints.
(Laughter) But at least she always knew where I was.
(Laughter) So while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again, I went on with my theory study.
And then eventually, amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical, and that was my green light to fly.
And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school, way out of my comfort zone, all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots, you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast, and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls, my bag of medication and catheters and my limp.
And sometimes I thought that, too.
And little goals kept me going along the way, and eventually I got my private pilot's license.
Then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia.
And then I learned to fly an airplane with two engines and I got my twin-engine rating.
And then I got my commercial pilot's license.
And then I found myself back at that same school where I'd gone for that very first flight, teaching other people how to fly ...
(Applause) (Applause ends) And then I thought, "Why stop there?
(Laughter) And I did, and I learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor.
The philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "When you let go of what you are, you become what you might be."
I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I was that I was able to create a completely new life.
It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should have ...
that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me.
I now know that my real strength never came from my body.
And I also know that you're not yours.
And then it no longer matters what you look like, where you come from, or what you do for a living.
All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are, because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws.
And if we are to move towards our collective bliss ...
it's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart.
So raise your straws if you'll join me.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
I'm a designer and an educator.
I'm a multitasking person, and I push my students to fly through a very creative, multitasking design process.
But how efficient is, really, this multitasking?
Look at that.
This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter) So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS, and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue.
But what about ourselves, and what about our reality?
When's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend?
So this is a project I'm working on, and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super, hyper — (Laughter) (Applause) to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function.
Another example: Have you ever been to Venice?
How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island.
But our multitasking reality is pretty different, and full of tons of information.
So what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure?
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge, but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task, or maybe turning your digital senses totally off.
Why not? So find your monotask spot within the multitasking world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
To the vast majority of practicing Muslims, jihad is an internal struggle for the faith.
It is a struggle within, a struggle against vice, sin, temptation, lust, greed.
In that original idea, the concept of jihad is as important to Muslims as the idea of grace is to Christians.
It's a very powerful word, jihad, if you look at it in that respect, and there's a certain almost mystical resonance to it.
And that's the reason why, for hundreds of years, Muslims everywhere have named their children Jihad, their daughters as much as their sons, in the same way that, say, Christians name their daughters Grace, and Hindus, my people, name our daughters Bhakti, which means, in Sanskrit, spiritual worship.
But there have always been, in Islam, a small group, a minority, who believe that jihad is not only an internal struggle but also an external struggle against forces that would threaten the faith, or the faithul.
And some of these people believe that in that struggle, it is sometimes okay to take up arms.
And so the thousands of young Muslim men who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation of a Muslim country, in their minds they were fighting a jihad, they were doing jihad, and they named themselves the Mujahideen, which is a word that comes from the same root as jihad.
And we forget this now, but back then the Mujahideen were celebrated in this country, in America.
America gave them weapons, gave them money, gave them support, encouragement.
But within that group, a tiny, smaller group, a minority within a minority within a minority, were coming up with a new and dangerous conception of jihad, and in time this group would come to be led by Osama bin Laden, and he refined the idea.
His idea of jihad was a global war of terror, primarily targeted at the far enemy, at the crusaders from the West, against America.
And the things he did in the pursuit of this jihad were so horrendous, so monstrous, and had such great impact, that his definition was the one that stuck, not just here in the West.
We just assumed that if this insane man and his psychopathic followers were calling what they did jihad, then that's what jihad must mean.
But it wasn't just us. Even in the Muslim world, his definition of jihad began to gain acceptance.
A year ago I was in Tunis, and I met the imam of a very small mosque, an old man.
Fifteen years ago, he named his granddaughter Jihad, after the old meaning. He hoped that a name like that would inspire her to live a spiritual life.
But he told me that after 9/11, he began to have second thoughts.
He worried that if he called her by that name, especially outdoors, outside in public, he might be seen as endorsing bin Laden's idea of jihad.
They had heard bin Laden say that that was jihad, and claimed victory for it. And so the old imam worried that his words were falling on deaf ears. No one was paying attention.
He was wrong. Some people were paying attention, but for the wrong reasons.
The United States, at this point, was putting pressure on all its Arab allies, including Tunisia, to stamp out extremism in their societies, and this imam found himself suddenly in the crosshairs of the Tunisian intelligence service.
They had never paid him any attention before -- old man, small mosque -- but now they began to pay visits, and sometimes they would drag him in for questions, and always the same question: "Why did you name your granddaughter Jihad?
Why do you keep using the word jihad in your Friday sermons?
Do you hate Americans?
What is your connection to Osama bin Laden?"
So to the Tunisian intelligence agency, and organizations like it all over the Arab world, jihad equaled extremism, Bin Laden's definition had become institutionalized.
That was the power of that word that he was able to do.
And it filled this old imam, it filled him with great sadness.
He told me that, of bin Laden's many crimes, this was, in his mind, one that didn't get enough attention, that he took this word, this beautiful idea.
He didn't so much appropriate it as kidnapped it and debased it and corrupted it and turned it into something it was never meant to be, and then persuaded all of us that it always was a global jihad.
But the good news is that the global jihad is almost over, as bin Laden defined it.
It was dying well before he did, and now it's on its last legs.
Opinion polls from all over the Muslim world show that there is very little interest among Muslims in a global holy war against the West, against the far enemy.
The supply of young men willing to fight and die for this cause is dwindling.
The wealthy fanatics who were previously sponsoring this kind of activity are now less generous.
What does that mean for us in the West?
No. Disengagement is not an option, because if you let local jihad survive, it becomes international jihad.
In Somalia, in Mali, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, there are groups that claim to be the inheritors of the legacy of Osama bin Laden.
There are other groups -- in Nigeria, Boko Haram, in Somalia, al Shabaab -- and they all pay homage to Osama bin Laden.
But if you look closely, they're not fighting a global jihad.
They're fighting battles over much narrower issues.
Usually it has to do with ethnicity or race or sectarianism, or it's a power struggle.
More often than not, it's a power struggle in one country, or even a small region within one country.
Occasionally they will go across a border, from Iraq to Syria, from Mali to Algeria, from Somalia to Kenya, but they're not fighting a global jihad against some far enemy.
But that doesn't mean that we can relax.
I was in Yemen recently, where -- it's the home of the last al Qaeda franchise that still aspires to attack America, attack the West.
It's old school al Qaeda.
They are the ones who tried to send the underwear bomber here, and they were using the Internet to try and instigate violence among American Muslims.
But they have been distracted recently.
Last year, they took control over a portion of southern Yemen, and ran it, Taliban-style.
And then the Yemeni military got its act together, and ordinary people rose up against these guys and drove them out, and since then, most of their activities, most of their attacks have been directed at Yemenis.
So I think we've come to a point now where we can say that, just like all politics, all jihad is local.
And even before the fizz had gone out of our celebratory champagne, the Taliban had taken over in Kabul, and we said, "Local jihad, not our problem."
And then the Taliban gave the keys of Kandahar to Osama bin Laden. He made it our problem.
Local jihad, if you ignore it, becomes global jihad again.
We know how to fight it now.
What are those lessons? We know who killed bin Laden: SEAL Team Six.
Do we know, do we understand, who killed bin Ladenism?
There lie the answers to the solution to local jihad.
Who killed bin Ladenism? Let's start with bin Laden himself.
He probably thought 9/11 was his greatest achievement.
In reality, it was the beginning of the end for him.
He killed 3,000 innocent people, and that filled the Muslim world with horror and revulsion, and what that meant was that his idea of jihad could never become mainstream.
9/11 didn't empower him; it doomed him.
Who killed bin Ladenism? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed it.
He was the especially sadistic head of al Qaeda in Iraq who sent hundreds of suicide bombers to attack not Americans but Iraqis. Muslims. Sunni as well as Shiites.
Any claim that al Qaeda had to being protectors of Islam against the Western crusaders was drowned in the blood of Iraqi Muslims.
Who killed Osama bin Laden? The SEAL Team Six.
Who killed bin Ladenism? Al Jazeera did, Al Jazeera and half a dozen other satellite news stations in Arabic, because they circumvented the old, state-owned television stations in a lot of these countries which were designed to keep information from people.
Who killed bin Ladenism? The Arab Spring did, because it showed a way for young Muslims to bring about change in a manner that Osama bin Laden, with his limited imagination, could never have conceived.
Who defeated the global jihad? The American military did, the American soldiers did, with their allies, fighting in faraway battlefields.
So all these factors, and many more besides, we don't even fully understand some of them yet, these came together to defeat a monstrosity as big as bin Ladenism, the global jihad, you needed this group effort.
The American military is not going to march into Nigeria to take on Boko Haram, and it's unlikely that SEAL Team Six will rappel into the homes of al Shabaab's leaders and take them out.
But many of these other factors that were in play are now even stronger than before. Half the work is already done.
The notion of violent jihad in which more Muslims are killed than any other kind of people is already thoroughly discredited.
Satellite television and the Internet are informing and empowering young Muslims in exciting new ways.
And the Arab Spring has produced governments, many of them Islamist governments, who know that, for their own self-preservation, they need to take on the extremists in their midsts.
Some of the other things that they need we're not very good at giving. Maybe nobody is.
Time, patience, subtlety, understanding -- these are harder to give.
I live in New York now. Just this week, posters have gone up in subway stations in New York that describe jihad as savage.
But in all the many years that I have covered the Middle East, I have never been as optimistic as I am today that the gap between the Muslim world and the West is narrowing fast, and one of the many reasons for my optimism is that, because I know there are millions, hundreds of millions of people, Muslims like that old imam in Tunis, who are reclaiming this word and restoring to its original, beautiful purpose.
Bin Laden is dead. Bin Ladenism has been defeated.
Thank you. (Applause)
B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future.
He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight, and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision.
He'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter) It was my first week in federal prison, and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV.
But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days.
For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive.
It's a lot harder than you might think.
Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life.
You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it.
And it's hard for a couple of reasons.
I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job, unloading trucks at a food warehouse, for $5.25, not an hour, but per month.
So how do you survive?
Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles.
There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell.
You want a dirty magazine?
So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity.
Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barber shops, personal training businesses.
And then, when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background.
So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years.
Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it.
The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back.
Thank you. (Applause)
My suede Starters jacket says Raiders on the back.
My leather Adidas baseball cap matches my fake Gucci backpack. (Laughter) Ain't nobody who looks as good as me, but this costs money, it sure ain't free, and I gots no job, no money at all, but it's easy to steal all this from the mall.
Got to do what I can to make sure I look good, and the reason I have to look real good, well, to tell you the truth, man, I don't know why. Guess it makes me feel special inside.
When I'm wearing fresh gear I don't have to hide, and I really must get some new gear soon or my ego will pop like a 10-cent balloon.
But security is tight at all the shops. Every day there are more and more cops.
My crew is laughing at me because I'm wearing old gear.
School's almost over. Summer is near.
I need something new. Only one thing left to do.
Cut school Friday, catch the subway downtown, check out my victims hangin' around.
Got to get some new gear. There's no other way.
The red emblem of Michael looked as if it could fly.
Not one spot of dirt. The Airs were brand new.
Had my pistol and knew just what to do.
Waited until it was just the right time, followed him very closely behind.
He made a left turn on Houston, I pulled out my gun, and I said, 'Gimme them Jordans!' And the punk tried to run.
Took off fast, didn't get far. I fired,'Pow!' Fool fell between two parked cars.
He was coughing, crying, blood spilled on the street.
And I snatched them Air Jordans off of his feet.
While laying there dying, all he could say was, "Please man, don't take my Air Jordans away."
As I took off with his sneakers, there was tears in his eyes.
Very next day, I bopped into school with my brand new Air Jordans, man, I was cool.
I killed to get 'em, but hey, I don't care, because now I needs a new jacket to wear."
Thank you. (Applause) For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world.
The hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?
Because I'm an extension of my work, and if they love me, then they will love my work, and if they love my work, then they will love poetry, and if they love poetry, then I will have done my job, which is to transcend it to the world.
And in 1996, I found the answer in principles in a master spoken-word artist named Reg E. Gaines, who wrote the famous poem, "Please Don't Take My Air Jordans."
"Yo' wack.
Now I could have quit. I should have quit.
I mean, I thought poetry was just self-expression.
I didn't know you actually have to have creative control.
I would wake him up at, like, 6:30 in the morning to ask him who's the best poet.
Then one day I told him, "Reg E., what is subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration?" (Laughter) And he handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named Etheridge Knight and the oral nature of poetry, and from that point, Reggie stopped becoming the best to me, because what Etheridge Knight taught me was that I could make my words sound like music, even my small ones, the monosyllables, the ifs, ands, buts, whats, the gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear, and from then on, I started chasing Etheridge Knight.
I wanted to know which poet he read, and I landed on a poem called ["Dark Prophecy: Sing of Shine"], a toast signifying that got me on the biggest stage a poet could ever be: Broadway, baby.
But that wasn't the biggest lesson I ever learned.
The biggest lesson I learned was many years later when I went to Beverly Hills and I ran into a talent agent who looked at me up and down and said I don't look like I have any experience to be working in this business.
And I said to him, "Listen, punk fool, you're a failed actor who became an agent, and you know why you failed as an actor?
Because people like me took your job.
People have bought tickets to my experience and used them as refrigerator magnets to let them know that the revolution is near, so stock up.
I'm so experienced that when you went to a privileged school to learn a Shakespearean sonnet, I was getting those beats kicked and shoved into me.
I can master shock of "The Crying Game" with the awe of a child being called an AIDS victim by a bully who didn't know that it was his father who gave it to my mother, and that's a double entendre.
Sanford Meisner was my Uncle Artie yelling silently to himself, "Something's always wrong when nothing's always right."
Method acting is nothing but a mixture of multiple personalities, believing your own lies are reality, like in high school cool Kenny telling me he wanted to be a cop.
Dude, you go to Riker's Island Academy.
I could make David Mamet psychoanalyze my attack on dialogue, Stanislavski be as if he were Bruce Lee kicking your roster of talentless students up and down Crenshaw.
So what, your actors studied guerrilla theater at the London Rep?
Let me tell you an ancient Chinese Saturday afternoon kung fu secret.
You think black entertainers have it hard finding work in this business? I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right.
Forget the American ghetto. I've cracked stages in Soweto, buried abortion babies in potter's field and still managed to keep a smile on my face, so whatever you curse at me to your caddyshack go-for-this, go-for-that assistant when I walk out that door, whatever slander you send my way, your mother.
Thank you. (Applause)
I'd like to show you a video of some of the models I work with.
They're all the perfect size, and they don't have an ounce of fat.
And they're scientific models? (Laughs) As you might have guessed, I'm a tissue engineer, and this is a video of some of the beating heart that I've engineered in the lab.
And one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body.
Well, let's think about the drug screening process for a moment.
You go from drug formulation, lab testing, animal testing, and then clinical trials, which you might call human testing, before the drugs get to market.
It costs a lot of money, a lot of time, and sometimes, even when a drug hits the market, it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people.
It all boils down to two issues. One, humans are not rats, and two, despite our incredible similarities to one another, actually those tiny differences between you and I have huge impacts with how we metabolize drugs and how those drugs affect us.
So what if we had better models in the lab that could not only mimic us better than rats but also reflect our diversity?
Let's see how we can do it with tissue engineering.
One of the key technologies that's really important is what's called induced pluripotent stem cells.
They were developed in Japan pretty recently.
Okay, induced pluripotent stem cells.
They're a lot like embryonic stem cells except without the controversy.
We induce cells, okay, say, skin cells, by adding a few genes to them, culturing them, and then harvesting them.
So they're skin cells that can be tricked, kind of like cellular amnesia, into an embryonic state.
So we can make a model of your heart, your brain on a chip.
Generating tissues of predictable density and behavior is the second piece, and will be really key towards getting these models to be adopted for drug discovery.
And this is a schematic of a bioreactor we're developing in our lab to help engineer tissues in a more modular, scalable way.
Going forward, imagine a massively parallel version of this with thousands of pieces of human tissue.
It would be like having a clinical trial on a chip.
But another thing about these induced pluripotent stem cells is that if we take some skin cells, let's say, from people with a genetic disease and we engineer tissues out of them, we can actually use tissue-engineering techniques to generate models of those diseases in the lab.
Here's an example from Kevin Eggan's lab at Harvard.
He generated neurons from these induced pluripotent stem cells from patients who have Lou Gehrig's Disease, and he differentiated them into neurons, and what's amazing is that these neurons also show symptoms of the disease.
So with disease models like these, we can fight back faster than ever before and understand the disease better than ever before, and maybe discover drugs even faster.
This is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa.
This is a degeneration of the retina.
It's a disease that runs in my family, and we really hope that cells like these will help us find a cure.
So some people think that these models sound well and good, but ask, "Well, are these really as good as the rat?"
A drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver, and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat.
These systems are really hard to build, but we're just starting to be able to get there, and so, watch out.
But that's not even all of it, because once a drug is approved, tissue engineering techniques can actually help us develop more personalized treatments.
This is an example from Karen Burg's lab, where they're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments.
And some of our colleagues at Tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next, and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies.
And so thinking about the models that we've just discussed, you can see, going forward, that tissue engineering is actually poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path: disease models making for better drug formulations, massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing, reduce animal testing and human testing in clinical trials, and individualized therapies that disrupt what we even consider to be a market at all.
Essentially, we're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body.
Our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology, helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster, more cheaply and more effectively.
Thank you. (Applause)
In 2002, a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane.
The Wright Brothers, in the beginning of the last century, had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly.
They also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane.
They were not the only ones.
That was common practice in the industry, and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right.
This actually wasn't so great for the development of the aviation industry, and this was at a time that in particular the U.S. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes.
The U.S. government decided to take action, and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes.
So what has this got to do with this?
In 2002, Nelson Otwoma, a Kenyan social scientist, discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment.
AIDS, he heard, was lethal, and treatment was not offered. This was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries.
AIDS had become a chronic disease.
Not so for Nelson. He wasn't rich enough, and not so for his three-year-old son, who he discovered a year later also had HIV.
Nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups.
Prices for ARVs, the drugs needed to treat HIV, cost about 12,000 [dollars] per patient per year.
The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available.
Luckily, those patents did not exist everywhere.
There were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents, such as India, and Indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions, low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines, and make them available in the developing world, and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year, and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year, and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines.
Treatment programs became possible, funding became available, and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly.
Today, eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs.
Never has this number been so high, but actually this is good news, because what it means is people stop dying.
So what's the problem?
Well, things have changed.
First of all, the rules have changed.
Today, all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years.
This is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization.
So what India did is no longer possible.
Second, the practice of patent-holding companies have changed.
Here you see the patent practices before the World Trade Organization's rules, before '95, before antiretroviral drugs.
This is what you see today, and this is in developing countries, so what that means is, unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now, we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis, because new drugs are developed, new drugs go to market, but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries.
It isn't only the number of drugs that are patented.
There's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away.
Again, deliberate action is needed.
So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes, we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
And we did.
In 2010, UNITAID established the Medicines Patent Pool for HIV.
And this is how it works: Patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions, but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents.
Those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them, to treatment programs that need access to them.
They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders, so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property.
There is one key difference with the airplane patent pool.
The Medicines Patent Pool is a voluntary mechanism.
They were forced to do so.
That is something that the Medicines Patent Pool cannot do.
It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use.
He has access to antiretroviral drugs.
His son will soon be 14 years old.
Nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the Medicines Patent Pool, and he told me not so long ago, "Ellen, we rely in Kenya and in many other countries on the Medicines Patent Pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us, that new medicines, without delay, become available to us."
Already, I'll give you an example.
In August of this year, the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication.
The company, Gilead, that holds the patents, has licensed the intellectual property to the Medicines Patent Pool.
The pool is already working today, two months later, with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed. This is unprecedented.
This has never been done before.
The rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries, if at all.
Nelson's expectations are very high, and quite rightly so. He and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next, throughout their lifetime, so that he and many others in Kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy, active lives.
Now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen. We count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest, not only in the interest of the global good, but also in their own interest, to move from conflict to collaboration, and through the Medicines Patent Pool they can make that happen.
They can also choose not to do that, but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the Wright brothers ended up with early last century, facing forcible measures by government. So they'd better jump now.
Thank you. (Applause)
This is poo, and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you, which might be quite difficult, but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo.
So this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice, and yet it can do things that you and I couldn't possibly entertain the idea of doing.
So the question is, where do we start this story?
And it seems appropriate to start at the end, because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals, but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living, and so dung beetles eat dung, and their larvae are also dung-feeders.
Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles.
So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good.
And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort.
So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball.
It's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction, and at the same time it's got to deal with the heat.
This is Africa. It's hot.
So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems.
But it doesn't flinch. It knows exactly where it wants to go, and it heads off in that particular direction.
So our next question then was, how are they doing this?
It was that every now and then they'd climb on top of the ball and they'd take a look at the world around them.
And what do you think they could be looking at as they climb on top of the ball?
What are the obvious cues that this animal could use to direct its movement? And the most obvious one is to look at the sky, and so we thought, now what could they be looking at in the sky?
What we're going to do now is shade the sun with a board and then move the sun with a mirror to a completely different position.
And look at what the beetle does.
It does a little double dance, and then it heads back in exactly the same direction it went in the first place.
What happens now? So clearly they're looking at the sun.
The sun is a very important cue in the sky for them.
The thing is the sun is not always available to you, because at sunset it disappears below the horizon.
What is happening in the sky here is that there's a great big pattern of polarized light in the sky that you and I can't see. It's the way our eyes are built.
But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon, say it's over on this side, there is a north-south, a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can't see that the beetles can see.
So how do we test that? Well, that's easy.
What we do is we get a great big polarization filter, pop the beetle underneath it, and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky.
The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn, because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in.
So obviously beetles can see polarized light.
How are they doing it? Well, they're rolling them in a straight line.
Well, they're looking at celestial cues in the sky, some of which you and I can't see.
But how do they pick up those celestial cues?
So what are they doing when they do this dance?
And in this experiment here, what we did was we forced them into a channel, and you can see he wasn't particularly forced into this particular channel, and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in, in the first place.
And let's see what his reaction is as he's headed through 90 degrees here, and now he's going to -- when he ends up down here, he's going to be 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
And see what his response is.
He does a little dance, he turns around, and heads back in this. He knows exactly where he's going.
He knows exactly what the problem is, and he knows exactly how to deal with it, and the dance is this transition behavior that allows them to reorientate themselves.
So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior.
Every now and then, when they climb on top of the ball, they wipe their face.
And you see him do it again.
And we thought that it could be a thermoregulatory behavior.
So what we did was design a couple of arenas.
one was hot, one was cold.
And then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera.
So the background here is around about 50 degrees centigrade.
The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade, so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld.
It's about the same as yours and mine.
But if we contrast now what happens in a hot environment, look at the temperature of the soil.
Watch how often the beetle dances.
So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across.
And what we did then was put little boots on these legs, because this was a way to test if the legs were involved in sensing the temperature of the soil.
And if you look over here, with boots they climb onto the ball far less often when they had no boots on.
So we described these as cool boots.
It was a dental compound that we used to make these boots.
And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball.
So this is called stilting. It's a thermal behavior that you and I do if we cross the beach, we jump onto a towel, somebody has this towel -- "Sorry, I've jumped onto your towel." -- and then you scuttle across onto somebody else's towel, and that way you don't burn your feet.
And that's exactly what the beetles are doing here.
However, there's one more story I'd like to share with you, and that's this particular species.
It's from a genus called Pachysoma.
There are 13 species in the genus, and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting.
This is a dung beetle. Watch what he's doing.
Can you spot the difference?
This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior.
There's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle's behavior that we found quite fascinating, and that's that it forages and provisions a nest.
So watch this individual here, and what he's trying to do is set up a nest.
And what's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot, it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food, and then when it finds food, it heads straight home. It knows exactly where its home is.
Now there's two ways it could be doing that, and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it's at the foraging site.
So let's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment.
So here's our cunning experimenter.
So let's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test.
Shame.
So we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around, and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it. (Laughter) So what we're looking at here are a group of animals that use a compass, and they use the sun as a compass to find their way around, and they have some sort of system for measuring that distance, and we know that these species here actually count the steps. That's what they use as an odometer, a step-counting system, to find their way back home.
We don't know yet what dung beetles use.
So what have we learned from these animals with a brain that's the size of a grain of rice?
Well, we know that they can roll balls in a straight line using celestial cues.
So for a small animal dealing with a fairly revolting substance we can actually learn an awful lot from these things doing behaviors that you and I couldn't possibly do.
Thank you. (Applause)
Hello, Doha. Hello!
I love coming to Doha. It's such an international place.
It feels like the United Nations here.
You go to the hotel and you check in. There's a Lebanese.
Yeah? And then a Swedish guy showed me my room.
I said, "Where are the Qataris?"
(Laughter) (Applause) They said, "No, no, it's too hot. They come out later. They're smart."
"They know."
You know, like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well, but they don't know it that well.
My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, "No problem, sir."
And then we sat there for two minutes.
I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "One problem, sir."
(Laughter) I said, "What?" He goes, "Where is it?"
(Laughter) I go, "You're the driver, you should know."
I go, "You just arrived at the W?" "No, I just arrived in Doha, sir."
(Laughter) "I was on my way home from the airport, I got a job. I'm working already."
(Laughter) "I don't know where we're going."
"Neither do I. It will be an adventure, sir."
(Laughter) The Middle East has been an adventure the past couple of years.
It is going crazy with the Arab Spring and revolution and all this.
Are there any Lebanese here tonight, by applause?
You know the Middle East is going crazy when Lebanon is the most peaceful place in the region.
(Laughter) (Applause) Who would have thought?
Some people don't want to talk about them. I'm here to talk about them tonight.
When we see each other, when we say hello, how many kisses are we going to do?
I was in Lebanon, I got used to three.
I went to Egypt. I went to say hello to this one Egyptian guy, I went, one, two. I went for three -- He wasn't into it.
(Laughter) I told him, I said, "No, no, I was just in Lebanon."
He goes, "I don't care where you were. You just stay where you are, please."
(Laughter) (Applause) I went to Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 -- (Laughter) Next time you see a Saudi, look closely.
(Laughter) "Abdul, are you okay?"
(Laughter) Qataris, you guys do the nose to nose.
(Laughter) "Habibi, it's so hot. Just come here for a second. Say hello.
Hello, Habibi. Just don't move. Just stay there, please.
I need to rest."
(Laughter) Iranians, sometimes we do two, sometimes we do three.
(Laughter) After the revolution, three.
So with Iranians, you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you.
(Laughter) "With your three kisses."
(Laughter) But no, guys, really, it is exciting to be here, and like I said, you guys are doing a lot culturally, you know, and it's amazing, and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West.
A lot of Americans don't know a lot about us, about the Middle East.
I'm Iranian and American. I'm there. I know, I've traveled here.
People don't know we laugh.
When I did the Axis of Evil comedy tour, it came out on Comedy Central, I went online to see what people were saying.
(Laughter) "I will kill you in the name of Allah, wuhahahahaha."
(Laughter) We like to laugh. We like to celebrate life.
And I wish more Americans would travel here.
I always encourage my friends: "Travel, see the Middle East, there's so much to see, so many good people."
And it's vice versa, and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening.
For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane.
Some passengers overheard them, somehow misconstrued that as terrorist talk, got them kicked off the plane.
As a Middle Eastern male, I know there's certain things I'm not supposed to say on an airplane in the US, right?
(Laughter) Even if I'm there with my friend named Jack, I say, "Greetings, Jack. Salutations, Jack."
Never "Hi, Jack."
(Laughter) But now, apparently we can't even talk about the safest place to sit on an airplane.
(Laughter) The next time you're on an airplane in the US, just speak your mother tongue.
If you're walking down the aisle speaking Arabic, you might freak them out -- (Imitating Arabic) They might say, "What's he talking about?"
The key, to my Arab brothers and sisters, is to throw in random good words to put people at ease as you're walking down the aisle.
(Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Rainbow!
(Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Tutti Frutti!
(Laughter) "I think he's going to hijack the plane with some ice cream."
Thank you very much. Have a good night.
Thank you, TED.
We're holding hands, staring at the door.
My siblings and I were waiting for my mother to come back from the hospital.
She was there because my grandmother had cancer surgery that day.
Finally, the doors opened, and she said, "She's gone.
She started sobbing and immediately said, "We must make arrangements.
Your grandmother's dying wish was to be buried back home in Korea."
I was barely 12 years old, and when the shock wore off, my mother's words were ringing in my ears.
We had moved from Korea to Argentina six years prior, without knowing any Spanish, or how we were going to make a living.
And upon arrival, we were immigrants who had lost everything, so we had to work really hard to rebuild our lives.
It made me ponder where I would want to be buried someday, where home was for me, and the answer was not obvious.
And this really bothered me.
So this episode launched a lifelong quest for my identity.
I was born in Korea -- the land of kimchi; raised in Argentina, where I ate so much steak that I'm probably 80 percent cow by now; and I was educated in the US, where I became addicted to peanut butter.
(Laughter) During my childhood, I felt very much Argentinian, but my looks betrayed me at times.
I remember on the first day of middle school, my Spanish literature teacher came into the room.
She scanned all of my classmates, and she said, "You -- you have to get a tutor, otherwise, you won't pass this class."
But by then I was fluent in Spanish already, so it felt as though I could be either Korean or Argentinian, but not both.
So when I was 18, I decided to go to Korea, hoping that finally I could find a place to call home.
But there people asked me, "Why do you speak Korean with a Spanish accent?"
And so it turns out that I was too Korean to be Argentinian, but too Argentinian to be Korean.
And this was a pivotal realization to me.
But how many Japanese-looking Koreans who speak with a Spanish accent -- or even more specific, Argentinian accent -- do you think are out there?
Perhaps this could be an advantage.
So I stopped looking for that 100 percent commonality with the people that I met.
Instead, I realized that oftentimes, I was the only overlap between groups of people that were usually in conflict with each other.
So with this realization in mind, I decided to embrace all of the different versions of myself -- even allow myself to reinvent myself at times.
So for example, in high school, I have to confess I was a mega-nerd.
That's the truth.
But once at university, I was able to find a new identity for myself, and the nerd became a popular girl.
(Laughter) I switched majors so many times that my advisors joked that I should get a degree in "random studies."
(Laughter) I told this to my kids.
And then over the years, I have gained a lot of different identities.
I started as an inventor, entrepreneur, social innovator.
Then I became an investor, a woman in tech, a teacher.
And most recently, I became a mom, or as my toddler says repeatedly, "Mom!" day and night.
(Laughter) But reinventing yourself can be very hard.
You can face a lot of resistance at times.
I was in Silicon Valley, and so writing a thesis in the basement didn't seem as interesting as starting my own company.
So I went to my very traditional Korean parents, who are here today, with the task of letting them know that I was going to drop out from my PhD program.
You see, my siblings and I are the first generation to go to university, so for a family of immigrants, this was kind of a big deal.
You can imagine how this conversation was going to go.
But fortunately, I had a secret weapon with me, which was a chart that had the average income of all of the graduates from Stanford PhD programs, and then the average income of all the dropouts from Stanford graduate programs.
(Laughter) I must tell you -- this chart was definitely skewed by the founders of Google.
(Laughter) But my mom looked at the chart, and she said, "Oh, for you -- follow your passion."
(Laughter) Hi, Mom.
Now, today my identity quest is no longer to find my tribe.
It's more about allowing myself to embrace all of the possible permutations of myself and cultivating diversity within me and not just around me.
My boys now are three years and five months old today, and they were already born with three nationalities and four languages.
I should mention now that my husband is actually from Denmark -- just in case I don't have enough culture shocks in my life, I decided to marry a Danish guy.
In fact, I think my kids will be the first Vikings who will have a hard time growing a beard when they become older.
(Laughter) Yeah, we'll have to work on that.
And most importantly, I really hope that they find tremendous joy in going through these uncharted territories, because I know I have.
Now, as for my grandmother, her last wish was also her last lesson to me.
It was about resting next to her son, who had died long before she moved to Argentina.
What mattered to her was not the ocean that divided her past and new world; it was about finding common ground.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp, have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are, where we've come from and the times we live in.
During the twentieth century, we witnessed the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda and other genocides, and even though the twenty-first century is only seven years old, we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in Darfur and the daily horrors of Iraq.
This has led to a common understanding of our situation, namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence, and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from, to our peril.
We teach it to our children. We hear it on television and in storybooks. Now, the original title of this session was, "Everything You Know Is Wrong," and I'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong, that, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.
Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously.
It's especially evident in the West, beginning with England and Holland around the time of the Enlightenment.
Let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 -- from the millennium scale to the year scale -- to try to persuade you of this. Until 10,000 years ago, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, without permanent settlements or government. And this is the state that's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony. But the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers, which is our best source of evidence about this way of life, has shown a rather different conclusion.
Here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging, or hunting and gathering societies.
The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea Highlands and the Amazon Rainforest.
And they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man to, in the case of the Gebusi, only a 15 percent chance. The tiny, little blue bar in the lower left-hand corner plots the corresponding statistic from United States and Europe in the twentieth century, and includes all the deaths of both World Wars. If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million.
Also at the millennium scale, we can look at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described in the Bible. And in this supposed source of our moral values, one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare, such as the following from Numbers 31: "And they warred against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses, and they slew all the males. And Moses said unto them, 'Have you saved all the women alive? Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him, but all the women children that have not know a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.'" In other words, kill the men; kill the children; if you see any virgins, then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them.
Also in the Bible, one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, talking back to your parents -- (Laughter) -- and picking up sticks on the Sabbath.
Well, let's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude, and look at the century scale.
Although we don't have statistics for warfare throughout the Middle Ages to modern times, we know just from conventional history -- the evidence was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence.
For example, any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of criminal punishment. The kind of infraction today that would give you a fine, in those days would result in your tongue being cut out, your ears being cut off, you being blinded, a hand being chopped off and so on.
The death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non-violent crimes: criticizing the king, stealing a loaf of bread. Slavery, of course, was the preferred labor-saving device, and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment. Perhaps the most vivid example was the practice of cat burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire, and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat, howling in pain, was burned to death.
What about one-on-one murder? Well, there, there are good statistics, because many municipalities recorded the cause of death.
The criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured all of the historical records across Europe for homicide rates in any village, hamlet, town, county that he could find, and he supplemented them with national data, when nations started keeping statistics.
He plotted on a logarithmic scale, going from 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year, which was approximately the rate of homicide in the Middle Ages. And the figure plummets down to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year in seven or eight European countries. Then, there is a slight uptick in the 1960s. The people who said that rock 'n' roll would lead to the decline of moral values actually had a grain of truth to that.
According to non-governmental organizations that keep such statistics, since 1945, in Europe and the Americas, there has been a steep decline in interstate wars, in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms, and in military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, there's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars. The yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year from 1950 to the present.
And, as you can see, the death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in this decade, as horrific as it is.
This is from the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics. You can see that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the '50s and the '60s, then it soared upward for several decades, and began a precipitous decline, starting in the 1990s, so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960.
President Clinton, if you're here, thank you.
(Laughter) So the question is, why are so many people so wrong about something so important? I think there are a number of reasons.
One of them is we have better reporting. The Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the Earth than sixteenth-century monks were.
There's a cognitive illusion. We cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability that you assign to it.
Things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old age. There are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets: no one ever attracted observers, advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better.
(Laughter) There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.
And of course, our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior. One of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time.
That's a process that seems to be continuing, but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day, things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards. So today, we get exercised -- and rightly so -- if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We don't consider that a couple of hundred years ago, they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes, and indeed, that that would have been repeated over and over again. Today, we look at capital punishment as evidence of how low our behavior can sink, rather than how high our standards have risen.
Well, why has violence declined? No one really knows, but I have read four explanations, all of which, I think, have some grain of plausibility. The first is, maybe Thomas Hobbes got it right. He was the one who said that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Not because, he argued, humans have some primordial thirst for blood or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative, but because of the logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, there's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively, before they invade you. More recently, Thomas Schelling gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement. Being a good American, he has a pistol in the nightstand, pulls out his gun, and walks down the stairs.
Maybe I had better shoot him, before he shoots me, especially since, even if he doesn't want to kill me, he's probably worrying right now that I might kill him before he kills me." And so on.
Hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought, and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first.
Now, one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence.
Life becomes an episode of "The Sopranos." Hobbes' solution, the "Leviathan," was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence was vested in a single democratic agency -- a leviathan -- then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack, because any kind of aggression will be punished, leaving its profitability as zero. That would remove the temptation to invade preemptively, out of fear of them attacking you first.
It removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation to make your deterrent threat credible. And therefore, it would lead to a state of peace. Eisner -- the man who plotted the homicide rates that you failed to see in the earlier slide -- argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in Europe coincided with the rise of centralized states.
So that's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory.
Also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence in zones of anarchy, in failed states, collapsed empires, frontier regions, mafias, street gangs and so on.
The second explanation is that in many times and places, there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap.
In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common in one's own life, one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. And as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant, one puts a higher value on life in general.
This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne.
A third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game, and was worked out in the book "Nonzero" by the journalist Robert Wright. Wright points out that in certain circumstances, cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties in an interaction, such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses and both come out ahead, or when two parties lay down their arms and split the so-called peace dividend that results in them not having to fight the whole time.
Wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in, by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people.
The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead, and violence declines for selfish reasons. As Wright put it, "Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van."
(Laughter) The fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book called "The Expanding Circle," by the philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy, an ability to treat other peoples' interests as comparable to one's own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family.
People outside that circle are treated as sub-human, and can be exploited with impunity. But, over history, the circle has expanded. One can see, in historical record, it expanding from the village, to the clan, to the tribe, to the nation, to other races, to both sexes, and, in Singer's own arguments, something that we should extend to other sentient species. The question is, if this has happened, what has powered that expansion?
And there are a number of possibilities, such as increasing circles of reciprocity in the sense that Robert Wright argues for.
The logic of the golden rule -- the more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs, at least not if you want them to listen to you. You can't say that my interests are special compared to yours, anymore than you can say that the particular spot that I'm standing on is a unique part of the universe because I happen to be standing on it that very minute.
Because we have been doing something right, and it sure would be good to find out what it is.
Thank you very much.
(Applause).
Steven Pinker: Very much. It would fit both in Wright's theory, that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation over larger and larger circles. But also, I think it helps us imagine what it's like to be someone else. I think when you read these horrific tortures that were common in the Middle Ages, you think, how could they possibly have done it, how could they have not have empathized with the person that they're disemboweling? But clearly, as far as they're concerned, this is just an alien being that does not have feelings akin to their own. Anything, I think, that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration to that other person.
I've been a journalist now since I was about 17, and it's an interesting industry to be in at the moment, because as you all know, there's a huge amount of upheaval going on in media, and most of you probably know this from the business angle, which is that the business model is pretty screwed, and as my grandfather would say, the profits have all been gobbled up by Google.
So it's a really interesting time to be a journalist, but the upheaval that I'm interested in is not on the output side.
And that's changed, because we've had a huge shift in the balance of power from the news organizations to the audience.
And that's changed irrevocably.
My first connection with the news media was in 1984, the BBC had a one-day strike.
So I wrote a letter.
And it's a very effective way of ending your hate mail: "Love Markham, Aged 4." Still works.
I'm not sure if I had any impact on the one-day strike, but what I do know is that it took them three weeks to get back to me.
And that's changed now because, as journalists, we interact in real time. We're not in a position where the audience is reacting to news.
They're helping us find the news. They're helping us figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear.
So it's a real-time thing. It's much quicker. It's happening on a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up.
To give an example of how we rely on the audience, on the 5th of September in Costa Rica, an earthquake hit.
It was a 7.6 magnitude. It was fairly big.
And 60 seconds is the amount of time it took for it to travel 250 kilometers to Managua.
So the ground shook in Managua 60 seconds after it hit the epicenter.
Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying "temblor," which means earthquake.
So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel.
Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world, hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua.
And that happened because this one person had a documentary instinct, which was to post a status update, which is what we all do now, so if something happens, we put our status update, or we post a photo, we post a video, and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream.
It's actually staggering. When you look at the numbers, every minute there are 72 more hours of video on YouTube.
So that's, every second, more than an hour of video gets uploaded.
And in photos, Instagram, 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second.
So by the time I'm finished talking here, there'll be 864 more hours of video on Youtube than there were when I started, and two and a half million more photos on Facebook and Instagram than when I started.
So it's an interesting position to be in as a journalist, because we should have access to everything.
And nowhere was this brought home more than during Hurricane Sandy. So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time, hitting the iPhone capital of the universe -- (Laughter) -- and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before.
And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes, so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted.
We had to deal with composite images that were merging photos from previous storms.
We had to deal with images from films like "The Day After Tomorrow." (Laughter) And we had to deal with images that were so realistic it was nearly difficult to tell if they were real at all.
They weren't really sure. It was filtered in Instagram.
The lighting was questioned. Everything was questioned about it.
And it turned out to be true. It was from Avenue C in downtown Manhattan, which was flooded.
And the reason that they could tell that it was real was because they could get to the source, and in this case, these guys were New York food bloggers.
They were well respected. They were known.
So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove.
And that was the job of the journalist. It was filtering all this stuff.
And you were, instead of going and finding the information and bringing it back to the reader, you were holding back the stuff that was potentially damaging.
And finding the source becomes more and more important -- finding the good source -- and Twitter is where most journalists now go.
It's like the de facto real-time newswire, if you know how to use it, because there is so much on Twitter.
As a non-Arabic speaker, as someone who was looking from the outside, from Dublin, Twitter lists, and lists of good sources, people we could establish were credible, were really important.
And how do you build a list like that from scratch?
Well, it can be quite difficult, but you have to know what to look for.
This visualization was done by an Italian academic.
And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation, but what you get is hints at who is more interesting and who is worth investigating.
Let's see who they are."
Now in the deluge of information, this is where the real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself, because we have more tools than ever to do that kind of investigation.
And when you start digging into the sources, you can go further and further than you ever could before.
Sometimes you come across a piece of content that is so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it, but you're not 100 percent sure if you can because you don't know if the source is credible.
And this video, which I'm going to let run through, was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago.
(Rain and wind sounds) (Explosion) Oh, shit!
Markham Nolan: Okay, so now if you're a news producer, this is something you'd love to run with, because obviously, this is gold.
So we set about going to work on this video, and the only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account.
There was only one video posted to that account, and the username was Rita Krill.
And we didn't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name.
But we started looking, and we used free Internet tools to do so.
The first one was called Spokeo, which allowed us to look for Rita Krills.
So we looked all over the U.S. We found them in New York, we found them in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Florida.
So we went and we looked for a second free Internet tool called Wolfram Alpha, and we checked the weather reports for the day in which this video had been uploaded, and when we went through all those various cities, we found that in Florida, there were thunderstorms and rain on the day.
So we went to the white pages, and we found, we looked through the Rita Krills in the phonebook, and we looked through a couple of different addresses, and that took us to Google Maps, where we found a house.
And we found a house with a swimming pool that looked remarkably like Rita's. So we went back to the video, and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference.
So if you look in the video, there's the big umbrella, there's a white lilo in the pool, there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool, and there's two trees in the background.
And we went back to Google Maps, and we looked a little bit closer, and sure enough, there's the white lilo, there are the two trees, there's the umbrella. It's actually folded in this photo.
Little bit of trickery. And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool.
So we were able to call Rita, clear the video, make sure that it had been shot, and then our clients were delighted because they were able to run it without being worried.
Syria has been really interesting for us, because obviously a lot of the time you're trying to debunk stuff that can be potentially war crime evidence, so this is where YouTube actually becomes the most important repository of information about what's going on in the world.
So this video, I'm not going to show you the whole thing, because it's quite gruesome, but you'll hear some of the sounds.
This is from Hama.
Video: (Shouting) And what this video shows, when you watch the whole thing through, is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truck and thrown off a bridge.
So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been back and forth with on Twitter, and we asked them about this, and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify.
Three different sources said three different things about the bridge.
Another one said the bridge does exist, but it's not in Hama. It's somewhere else.
And the third one said, "I think the bridge does exist, but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed, so the river should actually have been dry, so this doesn't make sense."
So that was the only one that gave us a clue.
We looked through the video for other clues.
We looked at the curbs. The curbs were throwing shadows south, so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river.
It had black-and-white curbs.
As we looked at the river itself, you could see there's a concrete stone on the west side. There's a cloud of blood.
That's blood in the river. So the river is flowing south to north. That's what that tells me.
So onto Google Maps we go, and we start looking through literally every single bridge.
We go to the dam that we talked about, we start just literally going through every time that road crosses the river, crossing off the bridges that don't match.
And we get to Hama. We get all the way from the dam to Hama and there's no bridge.
So we go a bit further. We switch to the satellite view, and we find another bridge, and everything starts to line up.
The bridge looks like it's crossing the river east to west.
So this could be our bridge. And we zoom right in.
We start to see that it's got a median, so it's a two-lane bridge.
And it's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video, and as we click through it, you can see someone's uploaded photos to go with the map, which is very handy, so we click into the photos. And the photos start showing us more detail that we can cross-reference with the video.
And we keep going through it until we're certain that this is our bridge.
So what does that tell me? I've got to go back now to my three sources and look at what they told me: the one who said the bridge didn't exist, the one who said the bridge wasn't in Hama, and the one guy who said, "Yes, the bridge does exist, but I'm not sure about the water levels."
And that's part of the joy of this. Although the web is running like a torrent, there's so much information there that it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day, if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information.
But what it tells me is that, at a time when there's more -- there's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been, it's harder to filter, we have greater tools.
We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before, and computers that are quicker than ever before.
But here's the thing. Algorithms are rules. They're binary.
Truth is never binary. Truth is a value.
Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human.
No matter how quick we get with computers, no matter how much information we have, you'll never be able to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise, because in the end, it is a uniquely human trait.
Thanks very much. (Applause)
After all, if it is being done somewhere by someone, and we can participate virtually, then why bother leaving the house?"
I'm usually introduced as a polar explorer.
And in my nature, I guess, I am a doer of things more than I am a spectator or a contemplator of things, and it's that dichotomy, the gulf between ideas and action that I'm going to try and explore briefly.
In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt. Everest.
He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest, more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary.
No one knows if he got to the top. It's still a mystery.
But he was credited with coining the phrase, "Because it's there."
Now I'm not actually sure that he did say that.
There's very little evidence to suggest it, but what he did say is actually far nicer, and again, I've printed this. I'm going to read it out.
"The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this: What is the use of climbing Mt. Everest?
If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go.
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy, and joy, after all, is the end of life.
We don't live to eat and make money.
We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life.
That is what life means, and that is what life is for."
Mallory's argument that leaving the house, embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun, however, doesn't tally that neatly with my own experience.
The furthest I've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004. I still don't know exactly what came over me, but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean.
I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada.
No one had ever done this. I was 26 at the time.
A lot of experts were saying it was impossible, and my mum certainly wasn't very keen on the idea.
I sat there wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into.
There was a bit of fun, a bit of joy.
I was 26. I remember sitting there looking down at my sledge. I had my skis ready to go, I had a satellite phone, a pump-action shotgun in case I was attacked by a polar bear.
I remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter.
We were both thundering through this incredible Siberian dawn, and part of me felt a bit like a cross between Jason Bourne and Wilfred Thesiger. Part of me felt quite proud of myself, but mostly I was just utterly terrified.
And that journey lasted 10 weeks, 72 days.
I didn't see anyone else. We took this photo next to the helicopter.
Beyond that, I didn't see anyone for 10 weeks.
The North Pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea, so I'm traveling over the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean.
NASA described conditions that year as the worst since records began.
I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies, about 400 pounds. The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35. Minus 50 was the coldest.
The ice is always moving, breaking up, drifting around, refreezing, so the scenery that I saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me. No one else will ever, could ever, possibly see the views, the vistas, that I saw for 10 weeks.
Mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain, and I wonder if that's the case whether there's something in the challenge itself, in the endeavor, and particularly in the big, unfinished, chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us, and in my experience that's certainly the case.
Many of you will know the story.
This is a photo of Captain Scott and his team.
Scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the South Pole.
No one knew what was there. It was utterly unmapped at the time. We knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of Antarctica.
Scott, as many of you will know, was beaten to it by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, who used dogs and dogsleds. Scott's team were on foot, all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges, and they arrived at the pole to find the Norwegian flag already there, I'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized.
All five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey.
There is a sort of misconception nowadays that it's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure.
When I talk about Antarctica, people often say, "Hasn't, you know, that's interesting, hasn't that Blue Peter presenter just done it on a bike?"
Or, "That's nice. You know, my grandmother's going on a cruise to Antarctica next year. You know.
No one has ever walked from the very coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again.
It is, arguably, the most audacious endeavor of that Edwardian golden age of exploration, and it seemed to me high time, given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels, that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job.
This time next year, in October, I'm leading a team of three.
It will take us about four months to make this return journey.
That's the scale. The red line is obviously halfway to the pole.
I'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting. You'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before.
And our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been. There certainly isn't much call for explorers nowadays. My career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option.
And yet, if I've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places, it is that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Twelve years ago, I founded Zipcar.
Zipcar buys cars and parks them throughout dense metropolitan areas for people to use, by the hour and by the day, instead of owning their own cars.
Each Zipcar replaces 15 personal cars, and each driver drives about 80 percent less because they're now paying the full cost, all at once, in real time.
But what Zipcar really did was make sharing the norm.
Now, a decade later, it's really time to push the envelope a little bit, and so a couple years ago I moved to Paris with my husband and youngest child, and we launched Buzzcar a year ago.
Buzzcar lets people rent out their own cars to their friends and neighbors.
We bring the power of a corporation to individuals who add their cars to the network.
Some people call this peer-to-peer.
This does express the humanity of what's going on, and the personal relationships, but that is also like saying that it's the same thing as a yard sale or a bake sale or babysitting.
That's peer-to-peer.
But what's really happening is that we've got the power of a free and open Internet, and on top of that we're putting a platform for participation, and the peers are now in partnership with the company, creating shared value on shared values, and each strengthening the other, and doing what the other can't do.
The incorporated side, the company, is doing things that it does really well.
It's natural for me. Me and my friends, I can connect to them easily.
And it also delivers really fabulous innovation, and I'll talk about that later.
The two of these are delivering the best of both worlds.
Some of my favorite examples: in transportation, Carpooling.com. Ten years old, three and a half million people have joined up, and a million rides are shared every day.
It's a phenomenal thing. It's the equivalent of 2,500 TGV trains, and just think, they didn't have to lay a track or buy a car.
This is all happening with excess capacity.
And it's not just with transportation, my love, but of course in other realms. Here's Fiverr.com.
I met these founders just weeks after they had launched, and now, in two years, what would you do for five dollars?
This Peers, Inc. concept is in a very difficult and complex realm.
TopCoder has 400,000 engineers who are delivering complex design and engineering services.
He said, "We have a community that owns its own company."
And then my all-time favorite, Etsy.
Etsy is providing goods that people make themselves and they're selling it in a marketplace.
It just celebrated its seventh anniversary, and after seven years, last year it delivered 530 million dollars' worth of sales to all those individuals who have been making those objects.
I see this incredible speed and scale.
You mean all I have to do is build a platform and all these people are going to put their stuff on top and I sit back and roll it in?"
I think of the difference of Google Video versus YouTube.
Who would have thought that two young guys and a start-up would beat out Google Video? Why?
I actually have no idea why. I didn't talk to them.
But I'm thinking, you know, they probably had the "share" button a little bit brighter and to the right, and so it was easier and more convenient for the two sides that are always participating on these networks.
Every single decision, I have to think about what is right for both sides.
It took me a year and a half to get the insurance just right.
Way too much money, I just can't even go there, with lawyers, trying to figure out how this is different, who's responsible to whom, and the result was that we were able to provide owners protection for their own driving records and their own history.
They need a low deductible, and 24-hour roadside assistance.
So now I want to take you to the moment of -- When you're an entrepreneur, and you've started a new company, there's the, here's all the stuff we do beforehand, and then the service launches. What happens?
All the drivers are becoming members. It's excellent.
You can earn 60 euros. Isn't that great? Yes or no?"
So I thought, "Duh, Robin, this is the difference between industrial production and peer production."
And Zipcar provides a very nice, consistent service that works fabulously.
We can flag that and we can put it to the side, and people who are buyers and consumers don't have to deal with it.
That is the diversity of what's going on.
You have these different fabulous owners and their different cars, different prices, different locations. (Laughter) They dress differently, and they look different, and, really, I love these photos every time I look at them.
And after a year, we have 1,000 cars that are parked across France and 6,000 people who are members and eager to drive them.
Back to this spectrum.
And I can tell you two great stories.
type of thing that's happening here, because individuals, if you're a company, what happens is you might have 10 people who are in charge of innovation, or 100 people who are in charge of innovation.
What happens in Peer, Inc. companies is that you have tens and hundreds and thousands and even millions of people who are creating experiments on this model, and so out of all that influence and that effort, you are having this exceptional amount of innovation that is coming out.
So one of the reasons, if we come back to why did I call it Buzzcar? I wanted to remind all of us about the power of the hive, and its incredible facility to create this platform that individuals want to participate and innovate on.
And for me, when I think about our future, and all of those problems that seem incredibly large, the scale is impossible, the urgency is there, Peers, Inc. provides the speed and scale and the innovation and the creativity that is going to answer these problems.
So over the last decade, we've been reveling in the power of the Internet and how it's empowered individuals, and for me, what Peers, Inc. does is it takes it up a notch. We're now bringing the power of the company and the corporation and supercharging individuals.
So for me, it's a collaboration.
Together, we can. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a neuroscientist, and I study decision-making.
I do experiments to test how different chemicals in the brain influence the choices we make.
I'm here to tell you the secret to successful decision-making: a cheese sandwich.
That's right. According to scientists, a cheese sandwich is the solution to all your tough decisions.
How do I know? I'm the scientist who did the study.
A few years ago, my colleagues and I were interested in how a brain chemical called serotonin would influence people's decisions in social situations.
So we did an experiment.
We manipulated people's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain.
This is the amino acid tryptophan.
So what we found was, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to take revenge when they're treated unfairly.
That's the study we did, and here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards.
("A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision-making") ("What a friend we have in cheeses") ("Eating Cheese and Meat May Boost Self-Control") At this point, you might be wondering, did I miss something?
("Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy") Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from?
We gave people this horrible-tasting drink that affected their tryptophan levels.
But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate.
And of course when science says cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well, that's sure to grab people's attention.
When this happened, a part of me thought, well, what's the big deal?
So the media oversimplified a few things, but in the end, it's just a news story.
And I think a lot of scientists have this attitude.
But the problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time, and it affects not just the stories you read in the news but also the products you see on the shelves.
Or would I go on television to demonstrate, in front of a live audience, that comfort foods really do make you feel better?
I think these folks meant well, but had I taken them up on their offers, I would have been going beyond the science, and good scientists are careful not to do this.
But nevertheless, neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing.
Here's one example: Neuro drinks, a line of products, including Nuero Bliss here, which according to its label helps reduce stress, enhances mood, provides focused concentration, and promotes a positive outlook.
So when this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims.
So I went to the company's website looking to find some controlled trials of their products.
And it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties.
For half the people, the article included a brain image, and for the other half, it was the same article but it didn't have a brain image.
And this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image.
Now let me pause here and take a moment to say that neuroscience has advanced a lot in the last few decades, and we're constantly discovering amazing things about the brain.
Like, just a couple of weeks ago, neuroscientists at MIT figured out how to break habits in rats just by controlling neural activity in a specific part of their brain.
But the promise of neuroscience has led to some really high expectations and some overblown, unproven claims.
So the first unproven claim is that you can use brain scans to read people's thoughts and emotions.
Here's a study published by a team of researchers as an op-ed in The New York Times.
The headline? "You Love Your iPhone. Literally."
It quickly became the most emailed article on the site.
So how'd they figure this out?
They put 16 people inside a brain scanner and showed them videos of ringing iPhones.
The brain scans showed activation in a part of the brain called the insula, a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion.
Sure, it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion, but it's also involved in tons of other processes, like memory, language, attention, even anger, disgust and pain.
So based on the same logic, I could equally conclude you hate your iPhone.
So speaking of love and the brain, there's a researcher, known to some as Dr. Love, who claims that scientists have found the glue that holds society together, the source of love and prosperity.
This time it's not a cheese sandwich.
No, it's a hormone called oxytocin.
You've probably heard of it.
So, Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people's oxytocin, this increases their trust, empathy and cooperation.
So he's calling oxytocin "the moral molecule."
Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy. It increases gloating.
Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups.
So based on these studies, I could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule, and call myself Dr. Strangelove.
(Laughter) So we've seen neuro-flapdoodle all over the headlines.
We see it in supermarkets, on book covers.
What about the clinic?
SPECT imaging is a brain-scanning technology that uses a radioactive tracer to track blood flow in the brain.
For the bargain price of a few thousand dollars, there are clinics in the U.S. that will give you one of these SPECT scans and use the image to help diagnose your problems.
These scans, the clinics say, can help prevent Alzheimer's disease, solve weight and addiction issues, overcome marital conflicts, and treat, of course, a variety of mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety to ADHD.
Some of these clinics are pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year in business.
There's just one problem.
The broad consensus in neuroscience is that we can't yet diagnose mental illness from a single brain scan.
But these clinics have treated tens of thousands of patients to date, many of them children, and SPECT imaging involves a radioactive injection, so exposing people to radiation, potentially harmful.
I am more excited than most people, as a neuroscientist, about the potential for neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe to make us better and smarter.
And if one day we can say that cheese and chocolate help us make better decisions, count me in.
But we're not there yet.
We haven't found a "buy" button inside the brain, we can't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans, and we can't turn sinners into saints with hormones.
Maybe someday we will, but until then, we have to be careful that we don't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that's playing a much longer game.
The answers shouldn't be simple, because the brain isn't simple.
But that's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway.
Thank you. (Applause)
In fact, most of them were taken by random tourists.
My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th.
We happened to be back in New York exactly a year later, so we decided to take the same picture.
Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, "Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual?"
You know, it's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger.
Back then, we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives.
It's really become sacred to us.
This one was taken just weeks after 9/11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand.
So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip.
They're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, and not just physically, but in every way.
This very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year.
And she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot.
And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York.
And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories.
So I want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories.
I don't know about you, but aside from these 15 shots, I'm not in many of the family photos.
Thank you. (Applause)
On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook.
This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag.
And the client was saying, no, it's 10,000 a day.
(Laughter) ("10,000 missiles") This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel.
It's like every year it's the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran.
It's like, if we don't act now, it's too late forever, for 10 years now.
So at some point it became, you know, to me, I'm a graphic designer, so I made posters about it and I posted the one I just showed you before.
Most of the time, I make posters, I post them on Facebook, my friends like it, don't like it, most of the time don't like it, don't share it, don't nothing, and it's another day.
So I went to sleep, and that was it for me.
And later on in the night, I woke up because I'm always waking up in the night, and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots, you know, on Facebook, which I've never seen before.
(Laughter) And I was like, "What's going on?"
Because you have to understand, in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran.
And now people from Iran are talking to me.
So I start answering this girl, and she's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don't have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they're all sitting in the living room crying.
So I'm like, whoa.
People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry.
And everybody's crying now. (Laughter) So I don't know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I'd just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that's how it started.
But more seriously, I was like, okay, these ones work, but it's not just about me, it's about people from Israel who want to say something.
So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster.
And that's how it started. And that's how, really, it's unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it.
It's not just one dude making one poster, it's -- we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, "Make me a poster. Post it.
Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too."
It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense.
I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn't have the time.
It was a huge amount of pictures.
So for a few days, that's how my living room was.
And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images, but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran.
And we took these messages and we made posters out of it, because I know people: They don't read, they see images.
So here are a few of them.
The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters.
They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter) Crazy, crazy.
So you can see they are still shy, they don't want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message.
They want to respond. They want to say the same thing.
It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other.
("My Israeli Friends. I don't hate you. I don't want War.") This never happened before, and this is two people supposed to be enemies, we're on the verge of a war, and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say, "I like this guy. I love those guys."
And it became really big at some point.
And then it became news.
Because when you're seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news.
And suddenly, there is something that was happening that was good news. So the guys on the news, they say, "Okay, let's talk about this."
And they just came, and it was so much, I remember one day, Michal, she was talking with the journalist, and she was asking him, "Who's gonna see the show?"And he said, "Everybody."
They said, "Syria?" "Syria."
"Lebanon?""Lebanon."
At some point, he just said, "40 million people are going to see you today.
And we were just at the beginning of the story.
I give you Iran-Loves-Israel."
You have Lebanon that just -- a few days ago.
We really changed how people see the Middle East.
And for a few days you got those images.
Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know, commented on one of the photos.
So for five months now, that's what we are doing, me, Michal, a few of my friends, are just making images.
We're showing a new reality by just making images because that's how the world perceives us.
They see images of us, and they see bad images.
So we're working on making good images. End of story.
Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page.
This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran. This is not my page.
This is the enemy.
What?
("Our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in Bulgaria") And it's going both ways.
It's like, we are showing respect, one to each other.
And we're understanding. And you show compassion.
And you become friends.
And at some point, you become friends on Facebook, and you become friends in life.
You can go and travel and meet people.
And I was in Munich a few weeks ago.
I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time. And we just shake hands, and have a coffee and a nice discussion, and we talk about food and basketball.
At some point we met in real life, and we became friends.
And it goes the other way around.
Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran, lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us, decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel, and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says, "Okay, not that big a deal."
And again, something amazing happened, something that we didn't have on the first wave of the campaign.
Crazy, yes?
So -- (Applause) So you may ask yourself, who is this dude?
And I'm not that naive, because a lot of the time I've been asked, many times I've been asked, "Yeah, but, this is really naive, sending flowers over, I mean — " I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers for three years, and I know how it looks from the ground.
So to me, this is the courageous thing to do, to try to reach the other side before it's too late, because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late.
And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes, but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it.
And really, we can be our own ambassadors.
And maybe that image will help us change something.
And I'm just going to take a picture of it, and I'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of "Israelis for peace" or something.
Oh my God.
Don't cry.
Thank you guys.
(Applause)
One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater.
They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull.
As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats.
These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land.
In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water.
These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick."
Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then.
No search party was coming to look for these men.
So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what it's like to be afraid.
We know how fear feels, but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean.
As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates.
Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists.
So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself.
"Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic."
In English, fear is something we conquer.
It's something we fight. It's something we overcome.
But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way?
What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself?
It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid.
When I was a child, I lived in California, which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live, but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary.
I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping.
And what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination.
But at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up.
We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down.
But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults.
So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children?
Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment, to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex.
Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship.
The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options.
In his fascinating account of the disaster, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth.
The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away.
They'd been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals.
Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was afraid they'd be struck by severe storms.
Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America.
Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name.
Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it.
It's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.
They have the same architecture.
In our fears, the characters are us.
You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails.
Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel.
Picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over a fire.
Fears also have suspense.
Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense.
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
In other words, our fears make us think about the future.
And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling.
In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another.
When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles," I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down.
And then it was only later that I realized how very similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night.
If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family?
And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story.
So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories.
But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.
Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others.
I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs, and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called "productive paranoia," which meant that these people, instead of dismissing their fears, these people read them closely, they studied them, and then they translated that fear into preparation and action.
So that way, if their worst fears came true, their businesses were ready.
And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true.
That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear.
Once in a while, our fears can predict the future.
After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision.
Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America.
After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land.
When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism.
But," as Melville put it, "they dreaded cannibals."
So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation?
Looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading.
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the scientific.
A good reader has an artist's passion, a willingness to get caught up in the story, but just as importantly, the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist, which acts to temper and complicate the reader's intuitive reactions to the story.
They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios.
The problem was that they listened to the wrong story.
Of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals.
But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests.
Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate.
Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest.
Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.
Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing -- the truth.
Thank you. (Applause)
So a friend of mine who's a political scientist, he told me several months ago exactly what this month would be like.
Both parties absolutely need to resolve it, but neither party wants to be seen as the first to resolve it.
Neither party has any incentive to solve it a second before it's due, so he said, December, you're just going to see lots of angry negotiations, negotiations breaking apart, reports of phone calls that aren't going well, people saying nothing's happening at all, and then sometime around Christmas or New Year's, we're going to hear, "Okay, they resolved everything."
He told me that a few months ago. He said he's 98 percent positive they're going to resolve it, and I got an email from him today saying, all right, we're basically on track, but now I'm 80 percent positive that they're going to resolve it.
And it made me think. I love studying these moments in American history when there was this frenzy of partisan anger, that the economy was on the verge of total collapse.
This economy won't work," and Thomas Jefferson saying, "The people won't trust that.
They just fought off a king. They're not going to accept some central authority."
This battle defined the first 150 years of the U.S. economy, and at every moment, different partisans saying, "Oh my God, the economy's about to collapse," and the rest of us just going about, spending our bucks on whatever it is we wanted to buy.
So the fiscal cliff, I was told that that's too partisan a thing to say, although I can't remember which party it's supporting or attacking.
So I just call it the self-imposed, self-destructive arbitrary deadline about resolving an inevitable problem.
And this is what the inevitable problem looks like.
So this is a projection of U.S. debt as a percentage of our overall economy, of GDP.
The light blue dotted line represents the Congressional Budget Office's best guess of what will happen if Congress really doesn't do anything, and as you can see, sometime around 2027, we reach Greek levels of debt, somewhere around 130 percent of GDP, which tells you that some time in the next 20 years, if Congress does absolutely nothing, we're going to hit a moment where the world's investors, the world's bond buyers, are going to say, "We don't trust America anymore. We're not going to lend them any money, except at really high interest rates."
And at that moment our economy collapses.
We're there in 20 years. We have lots and lots of time to avoid that crisis, and the fiscal cliff was just one more attempt at trying to force the two sides to resolve the crisis.
The dark blue line is how much the government spends.
And as you can see, for most of recent history, except for a brief period, we have consistently spent more than we take in. Thus the national debt.
But as you can also see, projected going forward, the gap widens a bit and raises a bit, and this graph is only through 2021.
It gets really, really ugly out towards 2030.
And this graph sort of sums up what the problem is.
The Democrats, they say, well, this isn't a big deal.
The Republicans say, hey, no, no, we've got a better idea.
Why don't we lower government spending and lower government taxes, and then we'll be on an even more favorable long-term deficit trajectory?
And behind this powerful disagreement between how to close that gap, there's the worst kind of cynical party politics, the worst kind of insider baseball, lobbying, all of that stuff, but there's also this powerfully interesting, respectful disagreement between two fundamentally different economic philosophies.
And I like to think, when I picture how Republicans see the economy, what I picture is just some amazingly well-engineered machine, some perfect machine.
And this view generally believes that there is a role for government, a small role, to set the rules so people aren't lying and cheating and hurting each other, maybe, you know, have a police force and a fire department and an army, but to have a very limited reach into the mechanisms of this machinery.
And when I picture how Democrats and Democratic-leaning economists picture this economy, most Democratic economists are, you know, they're capitalists, they believe, yes, that's a good system a lot of the time.
It's good to let markets move resources to their more productive use.
But that system has tons of problems.
Wealth piles up in the wrong places.
Wealth is ripped away from people who shouldn't be called unproductive.
That machine doesn't care about the environment, about racism, about all these issues that make this life worse for all of us, and so the government does have a role to take resources from more productive uses, or from richer sources, and give them to other sources.
And when you think about the economy through these two different lenses, you understand why this crisis is so hard to solve, because the worse the crisis gets, the higher the stakes are, the more each side thinks they know the answer and the other side is just going to ruin everything.
But here's what I learned.
The American people, taken as a whole, when it comes to these issues, to fiscal issues, are moderate, pragmatic centrists.
And I know that's hard to believe, that the American people are moderate, pragmatic centrists.
When you look at how the federal government spends money, so this is the battle right here, 55 percent, more than half, is on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a few other health programs, 20 percent defense, 19 percent discretionary, and six percent interest.
So when we're talking about cutting government spending, this is the pie we're talking about, and Americans overwhelmingly, and it doesn't matter what party they're in, overwhelmingly like that big 55 percent chunk.
They like Social Security. They like Medicare.
They even like Medicaid, even though that goes to the poor and indigent, which you might think would have less support.
Social Security is fairly easy to fix.
The rumors of its demise are always greatly exaggerated.
So gradually raise Social Security retirement age, maybe only on people not yet born.
Americans are about 50/50, whether they're Democrats or Republicans.
Reduce Medicare for very wealthy seniors, seniors who make a lot of money. Don't even eliminate it. Just reduce it.
Everyone hates that equally, but Republicans and Democrats hate that together.
Now there is one issue that is hyper-partisan, and where there is one party that is just spend, spend, spend, we don't care, spend some more, and that of course is Republicans when it comes to military defense spending.
That's 20 percent of the budget, and that presents a more difficult issue.
I should also note that the [discretionary] spending, which is about 19 percent of the budget, that is Democratic and Republican issues, so you do have welfare, food stamps, other programs that tend to be popular among Democrats, but you also have the farm bill and all sorts of Department of Interior inducements for oil drilling and other things, which tend to be popular among Republicans.
Now when it comes to taxes, there is more disagreement.
That's a more partisan area.
You have Democrats overwhelmingly supportive of raising the income tax on people who make 250,000 dollars a year, Republicans sort of against it, although if you break it out by income, Republicans who make less than 75,000 dollars a year like this idea.
So basically Republicans who make more than 250,000 dollars a year don't want to be taxed.
Raising taxes on investment income, you also see about two thirds of Democrats but only one third of Republicans are comfortable with that idea.
This brings up a really important point, which is that we tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans and think there's this little group over there called independents that's, what, two percent?
If you add Democrats, you add Republicans, you've got the American people.
But that is not the case at all.
And it has not been the case for most of modern American history.
Roughly a third of Americans say that they are Democrats.
Around a quarter say that they are Republicans.
So most Americans are not partisan, and most of the people in the independent camp fall somewhere in between, so even though we have tremendous overlap between the views on these fiscal issues of Democrats and Republicans, we have even more overlap when you add in the independents.
Now we get to fight about all sorts of other issues.
And in fact, there's this other group of people who are not as divided as people might think, and that group is economists.
I talk to a lot of economists, and back in the '70s and '80s it was ugly being an economist.
You were in what they called the saltwater camp, meaning Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, or you were in the freshwater camp, University of Chicago, University of Rochester.
You were a free market capitalist economist or you were a Keynesian liberal economist, and these people didn't go to each other's weddings, they snubbed each other at conferences.
It's still ugly to this day, but in my experience, it is really, really hard to find an economist under 40 who still has that kind of way of seeing the world.
The vast majority of economists -- it is so uncool to call yourself an ideologue of either camp.
The phrase that you want, if you're a graduate student or a postdoc or you're a professor, a 38-year-old economics professor, is, "I'm an empiricist.
And the data is very clear.
None of these major theories have been completely successful.
I've spent a lot of the fall talking to the three major organizations that survey American political attitudes: Pew Research, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, and the most important but the least known is the American National Election Studies group that is the world's longest, most respected poll of political attitudes.
They've been doing it since 1948, and what they show consistently throughout is that it's almost impossible to find Americans who are consistent ideologically, who consistently support, "No we mustn't tax, and we must limit the size of government," or, "No, we must encourage government to play a larger role in redistribution and correcting the ills of capitalism."
Those groups are very, very small.
The vast majority of people, they pick and choose, they see compromise and they change over time when they hear a better argument or a worse argument.
And that part of it has not changed.
What has changed is how people respond to vague questions.
If you ask people vague questions, like, "Do you think there should be more government or less government?"
Or, "Do you think the government should redistribute?"
And they've captured the process through familiar ways, through a primary system which encourages that small group of people's voices, because that small group of people, the people who answer all yeses or all noes on those ideological questions, they might be small but every one of them has a blog, every one of them has been on Fox or MSNBC in the last week.
They don't represent what our views are.
And that gets me back to the dollar, and it gets me back to reminding myself that we know this experience.
We know what it's like to have these people on TV, in Congress, yelling about how the end of the world is coming if we don't adopt their view completely, because it's happened about the dollar ever since there's been a dollar.
We had the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton.
In 1913, we had this ugly battle over the Federal Reserve, when it was created, with vicious, angry arguments over how it would be constituted, and a general agreement that the way it was constituted was the worst possible compromise, a compromise guaranteed to destroy this valuable thing, this dollar, but then everyone agreeing, okay, so long as we're on the gold standard, it should be okay.
The Fed can't mess it up so badly.
But then we got off the gold standard for individuals during the Depression and we got off the gold standard as a source of international currency coordination during Richard Nixon's presidency.
Each of those times, we were on the verge of complete collapse.
And this long-term fiscal picture that we're in right now, I think what is most maddening about it is, if Congress were simply able to show not that they agree with each other, not that they're able to come up with the best possible compromise, but that they are able to just begin the process towards compromise, we all instantly are better off.
The fear is that the longer we delay any solution, the more the world will look to the U.S.
not as the bedrock of stability in the global economy, but as a place that can't resolve its own fights, and the longer we put that off, the more we make the world nervous, the higher interest rates are going to be, the quicker we're going to have to face a day of horrible calamity.
And so just the act of compromise itself, and sustained, real compromise, would give us even more time, would allow both sides even longer to spread out the pain and reach even more compromise down the road.
So I'm in the media. I feel like my job to make this happen is to help foster the things that seem to lead to compromise, to not talk about this in those vague and scary terms that do polarize us, but to just talk about it like what it is, not an existential crisis, not some battle between two fundamentally different religious views, but a math problem, a really solvable math problem, one where we're not all going to get what we want and one where, you know, there's going to be a little pain to spread around.
Thank you. (Applause)
The filmmaker Georges Méliès was first a magician.
Now movies proved to be the ultimate medium for magic.
With complete control of everything the audience can see, moviemakers had developed an arsenal of techniques to further their deceptions.
Motion pictures are themselves an illusion of life, produced by the sequential projection of still frames, and they astonished the Lumière brothers' early audiences.
Even today's sophisticated moviegoers still lose themselves to the screen, and filmmakers leverage this separation from reality to great effect.
Now imaginative people have been having fun with this for over 400 years.
Giambattista della Porta, a Neapolitan scholar in the 16th century, examined and studied the natural world and saw how it could be manipulated.
Playing with the world, and our perception of it, really is the essence of visual effects.
So digging deeper into this with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reveals some truth behind the trickery.
Now a fourth factor really becomes an obsession, which is, never betray the illusion.
And that last point has made visual effects a constant quest for perfection.
So from the hand-cranked jump cut early days of cinema to last Sunday's Oscar winner, what follows are some steps and a few repeats in the evolution of visual effects.
I hope you will enjoy.
Isabelle: "The filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams."
(Music) ["'A Trip to the Moon' (1902)"] ["2011 Restoration of the Original Hand-Tinted Color"] ["'2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968)"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'Avatar' (2009)"] First doctor: How are you feeling, Jake?
Jake: Hey guys.
["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] Second doctor: Welcome to your new body, Jake.First doctor: Good.
Second doctor: We're gonna take this nice and easy, Jake.First doctor: Well, do you want to sit up? That's fine.
Second doctor: And good, just take it nice and slow, Jake.
Well, no truncal ataxia, that's good.First doctor: You feeling light-headed or dizzy at all?
["'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1972)"] Alice: What's happening to me?
["'Alice in Wonderland' (2010)"] ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["'The Lost World' (1925)"] ["Stop Motion Animation"] ["'Jurassic Park' (1993)"] [Dinosaur roars] ["CG Animation"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'The Smurfs' (2011)"] ["Autodesk Maya Software - Key Frame Animation"] ["'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' (2011)"] Chimpanzee: No! ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["'Metropolis' (1927)"] (Music) ["'Blade Runner' (1982)"] ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["'The Rains Came' (1939)"] Rama Safti: Well, it's all over.
["CG Destruction"] ["'Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' (2003)"] ["Massive Software - Crowd Generation"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ' (1925)"] ["Miniatures and Puppets Bring the Crowd to Life"] ["'Gladiator' (2000)"] ["CG Coliseum and Digital Crowds"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2' (2011)"] ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["Produced in conjunction with the Academy's Science and Technology Council."] (Applause) ["'It is today possible to realize the most impossible and improbable things.' — Georges Méliès"] Don Levy: Thank you.
He is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform, befitting the role of the French Academy as legislating the correct usage in French and perpetuating the language.
The French Academy has two main tasks: it compiles a dictionary of official French.
They're now working on their ninth edition, which they began in 1930, and they've reached the letter P.
The World Wide Web, the French are told, ought to be referred to as "la toile d'araignee mondiale" -- the Global Spider Web -- recommendations that the French gaily ignore.
But anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit, that language, rather, emerges from human minds interacting from one another.
And this is visible in the unstoppable change in language -- the fact that by the time the Academy finishes their dictionary, it will already be well out of date.
We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon, of the historical change in languages, in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages.
So language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature, so much as a window onto human nature.
In a book that I'm currently working on, I hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature, including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction.
And I'm going to say a few words about each one this morning.
It's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted.
An intransitive verb, such as "dine," for example, can't take a direct object.
A transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there: "Sam devoured the pizza." You can't just say, "Sam devoured."
There are dozens or scores of verbs of this type, each of which shapes its sentence.
You can say, "Give a muffin to a mouse," the prepositional dative.
Or, "Give a mouse a muffin," the double-object dative.
Hundreds of verbs can go both ways.
You've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences.
This would be an example of how to do that.
Unfortunately, there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions.
You can say, "Biff drove the car to Chicago," but not, "Biff drove Chicago the car."
Well, in both cases, the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object, the noun after the verb.
So, when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere -- where you're doing something to the muffin -- you say, "Give the muffin to the mouse."
Only humans can possess things.
So why should anyone care?
Well, there are a number of interesting conclusions, I think, from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of English verbs.
First, there's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure, which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence, that governs our use of language.
You can think of this as the language of thought, or "mentalese."
These are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that Immanuel Kant argued are the basic framework for human thought, and it's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these Kantian categories.
An additional twist is that all of the constructions in English are used not only literally, but in a quasi-metaphorical way.
For example, this construction, the dative, is used not only to transfer things, but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas, as when we say, "She told a story to me" or "told me a story," "Max taught Spanish to the students" or "taught the students Spanish."
It evokes the container metaphor of communication, in which we conceive of ideas as objects, sentences as containers, and communication as a kind of sending.
As when we say we "gather" our ideas, to "put" them "into" words, and if our words aren't "empty" or "hollow," we might get these ideas "across" to a listener, who can "unpack" our words to "extract" their "content."
It's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor.
For example, you can use the verb "go" and the prepositions "to" and "from" in a literal, spatial sense.
"The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul."
You can also say, "Biff went from sick to well."
Second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways, such as "cause something to go to someone" and "causing someone to have something," I think is a fundamental feature of human thought, and it's the basis for much human argumentation, in which people don't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed.
And I think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts -- such as objects, space, time, causation and intention -- which are useful in a social, knowledge-intensive species, whose evolution you can well imagine, and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content -- space, time and force -- and apply them to new abstract domains, therefore allowing a species that evolved to deal with rocks and tools and animals, to conceptualize mathematics, physics, law and other abstract domains.
Well, I said I'd talk about two windows on human nature -- the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world, and now I'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction, again, as reflected in language.
And I'll start out with a puzzle, the puzzle of indirect speech acts.
Now, I'm sure most of you have seen the movie "Fargo."
And you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer, is asked to show his driver's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet.
And he says, "I was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in Fargo," which everyone, including the audience, interprets as a veiled bribe.
For example, in polite requests, if someone says, "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome," we know exactly what he means, even though that's a rather bizarre concept being expressed.
(Laughter) "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?"
I think most people understand the intent behind that.
So the puzzle is, why are bribes, polite requests, solicitations and threats so often veiled?
Both parties know exactly what the speaker means, and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows, etc., etc.
I think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships, and human relationships fall into a number of types.
There's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist Alan Fiske, in which relationships can be categorized, more or less, into communality, which works on the principle "what's mine is thine, what's thine is mine," the kind of mindset that operates within a family, for example; dominance, whose principle is "don't mess with me;" reciprocity, "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours;" and sexuality, in the immortal words of Cole Porter, "Let's do it."
Now, relationship types can be negotiated.
For example, communality applies most naturally within family or friends, but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it.
Now, mismatches -- when one person assumes one relationship type, and another assumes a different one -- can be awkward.
If you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss' plate, for example, that would be an awkward situation.
Or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal, that would be rather awkward as well.
In less blatant cases, there's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on.
In the workplace, for example, there's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss, or refer to him or her on a first-name basis.
If two friends have a reciprocal transaction, like selling a car, it's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness.
In dating, the transition from friendship to sex can lead to, notoriously, various forms of awkwardness, and as can sex in the workplace, in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship "sexual harassment."
Well, what does this have to do with language?
Well, language, as a social interaction, has to satisfy two conditions.
You have to convey the actual content -- here we get back to the container metaphor.
The solution, I think, is that we use language at two levels: the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener, whereas the implicated content -- the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform -- allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context, which possibly initiates a changed relationship.
The simplest example of this is in the polite request.
On the other hand, you want the damn guacamole.
By expressing it as an if-then statement, you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around.
And in a more subtle way, I think, this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability: the bribes, threats, propositions, solicitations and so on.
One way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language -- where it could only be used literally.
And you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix.
Put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer.
There's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer.
If you don't bribe the officer, then you will get a traffic ticket -- or, as is the case of "Fargo," worse -- whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
In that case, the consequences are rather severe.
On the other hand, if you extend the bribe, if the officer is dishonest, you get a huge payoff of going free.
On the other hand, with indirect language, if you issue a veiled bribe, then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe, in which case you get the payoff of going free.
So you get the best of both worlds.
And a similar analysis, I think, can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation, and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset.
So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
We live in an incredibly busy world.
The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something.
So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing?
And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing.
So that's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading.
I see a lot of very blank faces.
The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life.
This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do.
In fact, we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we -- okay, maybe not our hair, (Laughter) but you see where I'm going.
And the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we're no longer present in the world in which we live.
So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class.
And trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her.
I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time.
Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind.
I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about 20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with.
It was a really very stressful time.
I guess we all deal with stress in different ways.
Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support.
My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk.
So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studying meditation.
Well, obviously it changed things.
But it was more than that.
It taught me -- it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment.
By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present.
There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time.
47 percent.
At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness.
Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted.
And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life.
But we need to know how to do it.
We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful.
That's essentially what meditation is.
It's familiarizing ourselves with the present moment.
It's more about stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind.
Now in life, and in meditation, there'll be times when the focus becomes a little bit too intense, and life starts to feel a bit like this.
Of course in meditation -- (Snores) we're going to end up falling asleep.
So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement.
Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought.
You go back to it, repeat it.
"Oh, I am worried.
(Laughter) You know, this is crazy.
We do this all the time, even on an everyday level.
But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds?
(Mumbling) It does hurt.
And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do it all the time.
And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind.
But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way, you might see many different patterns.
You might find a mind that's really restless and -- the whole time.
Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that.
Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round your mind.
Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear.
We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it.
That's the potential of meditation, of mindfulness.
You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor.
All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.
Thank you very much.
Now, when you talk about dangerous animals, most people might think of lions or tigers or sharks.
But of course the most dangerous animal is the mosquito.
The mosquito has killed more humans than any other creature in human history.
In fact, probably adding them all together, the mosquito has killed more humans.
And the mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague.
And you would think, would you not, that with all our science, with all our advances in society, with better towns, better civilizations, better sanitation, wealth, that we would get better at controlling mosquitos, and hence reduce this disease.
If it was the case, we wouldn't have between 200 and 300 million cases of malaria every year, and we wouldn't have a million and a half deaths from malaria, and we wouldn't have a disease that was relatively unknown 50 years ago now suddenly turned into the largest mosquito-borne virus threat that we have, and that's called dengue fever.
So 50 years ago, pretty much no one had heard of it, no one certainly in the European environment.
But dengue fever now, according to the World Health Organization, infects between 50 and 100 million people every year, so that's equivalent to the whole of the population of the U.K. being infected every year.
In the last 50 years, the incidence of dengue has grown thirtyfold.
Now let me tell you a little bit about what dengue fever is, for those who don't know.
Now let's assume you go on holiday.
Let's assume you go to the Caribbean, or you might go to Mexico. You might go to Latin America, Asia, Africa, anywhere in Saudi Arabia.
You might go to India, the Far East.
It doesn't really matter. It's the same mosquito, and it's the same disease. You're at risk.
And let's assume you're bitten by a mosquito that's carrying that virus.
Well, you could develop flu-like symptoms.
They could be quite mild.
You could develop nausea, headache, your muscles could feel like they're contracting, and you could actually feel like your bones are breaking.
And that's the nickname given to this disease.
It's called breakbone fever, because that's how you can feel.
Now the odd thing is, is that once you've been bitten by this mosquito, and you've had this disease, your body develops antibodies, so if you're bitten again with that strain, it doesn't affect you.
But it's not one virus, it's four, and the same protection that gives you the antibodies and protects you from the same virus that you had before actually makes you much more susceptible to the other three.
So the next time you get dengue fever, if it's a different strain, you're more susceptible, you're likely to get worse symptoms, and you're more likely to get the more severe forms, hemorrhagic fever or shock syndrome.
So you don't want dengue once, and you certainly don't want it again.
So why is it spreading so fast?
And the answer is this thing.
This is Aedes aegypti.
Now this is a mosquito that came, like its name suggests, out of North Africa, and it's spread round the world.
Now, in fact, a single mosquito will only travel about 200 yards in its entire life. They don't travel very far.
What they're very good at doing is hitchhiking, particularly the eggs.
They will lay their eggs in clear water, any pool, any puddle, any birdbath, any flower pot, anywhere there's clear water, they'll lay their eggs, and if that clear water is near freight, it's near a port, if it's anywhere near transport, those eggs will then get transported around the world.
And that's what's happened. Mankind has transported these eggs all the way around the world, and these insects have infested over 100 countries, and there's now 2.5 billion people living in countries where this mosquito resides.
To give you just a couple of examples how fast this has happened, in the mid-'70s, Brazil declared, "We have no Aedes aegypti," and currently they spend about a billion dollars now a year trying to get rid of it, trying to control it, just one species of mosquito.
Two days ago, or yesterday, I can't remember which, I saw a Reuters report that said Madeira had had their first cases of dengue, about 52 cases, with about 400 probable cases.
That's two days ago.
Interestingly, Madeira first got the insect in 2005, and here we are, a few years later, first cases of dengue.
So we must be good at killing mosquitos.
Now in an urban environment, that's extraordinarily difficult.
It's just not practical.
The second way you can do it is actually trying to kill the insects as they fly around.
Here what someone is doing is mixing up chemical in a smoke and basically spreading that through the environment.
You could do the same with a space spray.
Having said that, actually, your best form of protection and my best form of protection is a long-sleeve shirt and a little bit of DEET to go with it.
So let's start again. Let's design a product, right from the word go, and decide what we want.
Well we clearly need something that is effective at reducing the mosquito population.
Clearly the product you've got has got to be safe to humans.
We are going to use it in and around humans.
It has to be safe.
We don't want to have a lasting impact on the environment.
We don't want to do anything that you can't undo.
Maybe a better product comes along in 20, 30 years.
We want something that's relatively cheap, or cost-effective, because there's an awful lot of countries involved, and some of them are emerging markets, some of them emerging countries, low-income.
And finally, you want something that's species-specific.
You want to get rid of this mosquito that spreads dengue, but you don't really want to get all the other insects.
Some are quite beneficial. Some are important to your ecosystem.
And most of the time, you'll find this insect lives in and around your home, so this -- whatever we do has got to get to that insect.
Now there are two features of mosquito biology that really help us in this project, and that is, firstly, males don't bite.
It's only the female mosquito that will actually bite you.
And the second is a phenomenon that males are very, very good at finding females.
If there's a male mosquito that you release, and if there's a female around, that male will find the female.
A single female will lay about up to 100 eggs at a time, up to about 500 in her lifetime.
Now if that male is carrying a gene which causes the death of the offspring, then the offspring don't survive, and instead of having 500 mosquitos running around, you have none.
And if you can put more, I'll call them sterile, that the offspring will actually die at different stages, but I'll call them sterile for now.
If you put more sterile males out into the environment, then the females are more likely to find a sterile male than a fertile one, and you will bring that population down.
If they don't find a female, then they'll die anyway.
They only live a few days.
And that's exactly where we are.
So this is technology that was developed in Oxford University a few years ago.
The company itself, Oxitec, we've been working for the last 10 years, very much on a sort of similar development pathway that you'd get with a pharmaceutical company.
So we've done field trials now in the Cayman Islands, a small one in Malaysia, and two more now in Brazil.
Well, the result has been very good.
In about four months of release, we've brought that population of mosquitos — in most cases we're dealing with villages here of about 2,000, 3,000 people, that sort of size, starting small — we've taken that mosquito population down by about 85 percent in about four months.
And in fact, the numbers after that get, those get very difficult to count, because there just aren't any left.
So that's been what we've seen in Cayman, it's been what we've seen in Brazil in those trials.
And now what we're doing is we're going through a process to scale up to a town of about 50,000, so we can see this work at big scale.
And we've got a production unit in Oxford, or just south of Oxford, where we actually produce these mosquitos.
It's not very expensive, because it's a coffee cup -- something the size of a coffee cup will hold about three million eggs.
So freight costs aren't our biggest problem. (Laughter) So we've got that. You could call it a mosquito factory.
And for Brazil, where we've been doing some trials, the Brazilian government themselves have now built their own mosquito factory, far bigger than ours, and we'll use that for scaling up in Brazil.
There you are. We've sent mosquito eggs.
The males have been put in little pots and the truck is going down the road and they are releasing males as they go.
So you take a Google Map, you divide it up, work out how far they can fly, and make sure you're releasing such that you get coverage of the area, and then you go back, and within a very short space of time, you're bringing that population right the way down.
So that's where we stand at the moment, and I've just got a few final thoughts, which is that this is another way in which biology is now coming in to supplement chemistry in some of our societal advances in this area, and these biological approaches are coming in in very different forms, and when you think about genetic engineering, we've now got enzymes for industrial processing, enzymes, genetically engineered enzymes in food.
And although the techniques are similar, the outcomes are very, very different, and if you take our approach, for example, and you compare it to, say, G.M. crops, both techniques are trying to produce a massive benefit.
Both have a side benefit, which is that we reduce pesticide use tremendously.
So for the mosquito, it's a dead end.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
So if you've been following the news, you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the United States, all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years.
Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal.
That actually wouldn't be such a problem, because if we were really all going to die, we would put aside our differences, we'd spend whatever it took, and we'd find a way to deflect them.
Last March, I went to the TED conference, and I saw Jim Hansen speak, the NASA scientist who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s, and it seems that the predictions he made back then are coming true.
This is where we're headed in terms of global temperature rises, and if we keep on going the way we're going, we get a four- or five-degree-Centigrade temperature rise by the end of this century.
Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels.
Hansen closed his talk by saying, "Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
Of course, the left wants to take action, but the right denies that there's any problem.
All right, so I go back from TED, and then the following week, I'm invited to a dinner party in Washington, D.C., where I know that I'll be meeting a number of conservative intellectuals, including Yuval Levin, and to prepare for the meeting, I read this article by Levin in National Affairs called "Beyond the Welfare State."
Levin writes that all over the world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable, dependent upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.
All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid, but look at these graphs that Levin showed.
This graph shows the national debt as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see, if you go all the way back to the founding, we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War.
Borrow a lot of money, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, get down to near zero, and bang! -- World War I.
Once again, the same process repeats.
Now then we get the Great Depression and World War II.
We rise to an astronomical level, around 118 percent of GDP, really unsustainable, really dangerous.
It's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded, but it's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending, especially Medicare.
We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II, and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet, and when they do, this is what will happen.
This is data from the Congressional Budget Office showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen if current situations and expectations and trends are extended.
All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes, or in terms of the data they present, but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing.
Let me translate for you.
"We are doomed unless we start acting now.
We can deflect both of these asteroids.
These problems are both technically solvable.
Our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, "Look, there's an asteroid," means that the other side's going to say, "Huh? What?
To understand why this is happening to us, and what we can do about it, we need to learn more about moral psychology.
So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality, and one of the most important principles of morality is that morality binds and blinds.
It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
Think of it like this.
Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet.
There are only a few species that can do it.
That's a beehive. That's a termite mound, a giant termite mound.
And when you find this in other animals, it's always the same story.
They rise or fall, they live or die, as one.
There's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship, and that, of course, is us.
This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon, and this is Tenochtitlan.
Now how did we do this? How did we go from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years?
It's miraculous, and part of the explanation is this ability to circle around sacred values.
As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations.
It's a sacred rock, and when people circle something together, they unite, they can trust each other, they become one.
It's as though you're moving an electrical wire through a magnetic field that generates current.
We circle around flags, and then we can trust each other.
We can fight as a team, as a unit.
It causes them to distort reality.
But it is a gross distortion of reality.
You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress.
This is a graph that shows the degree to which voting in Congress falls strictly along the left-right axis, so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is, you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues.
And what you can see is that, in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, as you would expect, about as high as can be.
This was a golden age of bipartisanship, at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together and solve grand national problems.
But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on.
Polarization rises.
It used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals could all work together in Congress.
They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees, but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up, the force field increased, Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart.
It became much harder for them to socialize, much harder for them to cooperate.
Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates, Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie?
Do you know why they do this?
Nobody doubts that this is happening in Washington.
Well, in the last 12 years it's become much more apparent that it is.
So, how warm or cold do you feel about, you know, Native Americans, or the military, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, all sorts of groups in American life.
The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel about Democrats, and they like them.
Republicans like Republicans. That's not a surprise.
That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations, they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible.
It drifts downwards very slightly, but now look what happens under George W. Bush and Obama.
It plummets. Something is going on here.
The moral electromagnet is turning back on, and nowadays, just very recently, Democrats really dislike Republicans.
Republicans really dislike the Democrats. We're changing.
It's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too.
It's like put out in the two oceans and it's pulling the whole country apart, pulling left and right into their own territories like the Bloods and the Crips.
We will never again have a political class that was forged by the experience of fighting together in World War II against a common enemy.
We will never get back to those low levels of polarization, I believe.
But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better, because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution.
These changes are detailed in many books.
These are two that I strongly recommend, and they list a whole bunch of reforms.
So if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional, hyper-polarized institution, well, the first step is, do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place, and when you have closed party primaries, and only the most committed Republicans and Democrats are voting, you're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans.
From my experience, and from what I've heard from Congressional insiders, most of the people going to Congress are good, hard-working, intelligent people who really want to solve problems, but once they get there, they find that they are forced to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship and that punishes independent thinking.
So there are a lot of reforms we could do that will counteract this.
But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change the nature of social relationships in Congress.
The politicians I've met are generally very extroverted, friendly, very socially skillful people, and that's the nature of politics. You've got to make relationships, make deals, you've got to cajole, please, flatter, you've got to use your personal skills, and that's the way politics has always worked.
But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week.
Nowadays, Congressmen fly in on Tuesday morning, they do battle for two days, then they fly home Thursday afternoon.
They don't move their families to the District.
And trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil.
Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up and descends into paralysis and polarization?
A simple change to the legislative calendar, such as having business stretch out for three weeks and then they get a week off to go home, that would change the fundamental relationships in Congress.
So there's a lot we can do, but who's going to push them to do it?
There are a number of groups that are working on this.
No Labels and Common Cause, I think, have very good ideas for changes we need to do to make our democracy more responsive and our Congress more effective.
But I'd like to supplement their work with a little psychological trick, and the trick is this.
Nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy, unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart.
Sometimes a single threat can polarize us, as we saw.
But what if the situation we face is not a single threat but is actually more like this, where there's just so much stuff coming in, it's just, "Start shooting, come on, everybody, we've got to just work together, just start shooting."
Because actually, we do face this situation.
So here's another asteroid.
Rising inequality like this is associated with so many problems for a democracy.
Especially, it destroys our ability to trust each other, to feel that we're all in the same boat, because it's obvious we're not.
Some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts.
We're not all in the same boat, and that means nobody's willing to sacrifice for the common good.
The left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now, and the right says, "Huh, what? Hmm? No problem. No problem."
Well, one of the largest causes, after globalization, is actually this fourth asteroid, rising non-marital births.
This graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s.
Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers.
Whites are headed that way too.
Within a decade or two, most American children will be born into homes with no father.
This means that there's much less money coming into the house.
But it's not just money. It's also stability versus chaos.
As I know from working with street children in Brazil, Mom's boyfriend is often a really, really dangerous person for kids.
Now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s, and the left has been saying, "It's not a problem. It's not a problem."
The left has been very reluctant to say that marriage is actually good for women and for children.
Now let me be clear. I'm not blaming the women here.
I'm actually more critical of the men who won't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children.
But even if you blame nobody, it still is a national problem, and one side has been more concerned about it than the other.
The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last July showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality.
We are becoming a nation of just two classes.
When Americans go to college and marry each other, they have very low divorce rates.
They earn a lot of money, they invest that money in their kids, some of them become tiger mothers, the kids rise to their full potential, and the kids go on to become the top two lines in this graph.
And then there's everybody else: the children who don't benefit from a stable marriage, who don't have as much invested in them, who don't grow up in a stable environment, and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph.
So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing.
But if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders, we'd see that these two problems actually are best addressed together.
Because if you really care about income inequality, you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage.
But then you're going to run smack into the problem that women don't generally want to marry someone who doesn't have a job.
So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way.
Please raise your hands.
Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members of the Asteroids Club, which is a club for all Americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point.
In the Asteroids Club, we don't start by looking for common ground.
Common ground is often very hard to find.
No, we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground.
Now, am I being naive? Is it naive to think that people could ever lay down their swords, and left and right could actually work together?
I don't think so, because it happens, not all that often, but there are a variety of examples that point the way.
This is something we can do.
Americans on both sides care about global poverty and AIDS, and on so many humanitarian issues, liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies, and at times they really have worked together to solve these problems.
And most surprisingly to me, they sometimes can even see eye to eye on criminal justice.
For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980.
Now this is a social disaster, and liberals are very concerned about this.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system that's just sucking in more and more poor young men.
But are conservatives happy about this?
Well, Grover Norquist isn't, because this system costs an unbelievable amount of money.
And so, because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls, groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives have come together to form a group called Right on Crime.
And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane.
Let us therefore go to battle stations, not to fight each other, but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids.
And let our first mission be to press Congress to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation.
Thank you. (Applause)
I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world.
When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom.
It was like having an enormous new toy.
I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again.
But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people's reaction completely changed towards me.
They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair.
When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like "limitation," "fear," "pity" and "restriction."
I realized I'd internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level.
A part of me had become alienated from myself.
I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people's responses to me.
As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience, new narratives to reclaim my identity.
["Finding Freedom: 'By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do 'official' narratives.' — Davis 2009, TEDx Women"] I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair -- a power chair -- to negotiate the world.
I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images.
The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with.
When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people.
It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift.
It showed that an arts practice can remake one's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar.
So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different to people's responses to the wheelchair.
So I thought, "I wonder what'll happen if I put the two together?" (Laughter) (Applause) And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years.
So to give you an idea of what that's like, I'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you what an amazing journey it's taken me on.
(Music) (Applause) It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other things I've experienced in life.
And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too.
Their eyes literally light up, and they say things like, "I want one of those," or, "If you can do that, I can do anything."
And I'm thinking, it's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think in a completely new way.
And I think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people's lives.
For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation.
In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair "Portal," because it's literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness.
And the other thing is, that because nobody's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind.
You're all part of the artwork too.
(Applause)
Hello. My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living.
So I use my imagination as my full-time job.
But well before my imagination was my vocation, my imagination saved my life.
When I was a kid, I loved to draw, and the most talented artist I knew was my mother, but my mother was addicted to heroin.
And when your parent is a drug addict, it's kind of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, because as much as you want to love on that person, as much as you want to receive love from that person, every time you open your heart, you end up on your back.
So throughout my childhood, my mother was incarcerated and I didn't have my father because I didn't even learn his first name until I was in the sixth grade.
But I had my grandparents, my maternal grandparents Joseph and Shirley, who adopted me just before my third birthday and took me in as their own, after they had already raised five children.
So two people who grew up in the Great Depression, there in the very, very early '80s took on a new kid.
I was the Cousin Oliver of the sitcom of the Krosoczka family, the new kid who came out of nowhere.
And I would like to say that life was totally easy with them.
They each smoked two packs a day, each, nonfiltered, and by the time I was six, I could order a Southern Comfort Manhattan, dry with a twist, rocks on the side, the ice on the side so you could fit more liquor in the drink.
But they loved the hell out of me. They loved me so much.
And they supported my creative efforts, because my grandfather was a self-made man.
He ran and worked in a factory.
But here was this kid who loved Transformers and Snoopy and the Ninja Turtles, and the characters that I read about, I fell in love with, and they became my friends.
So my best friends in life were the characters I read about in books.
I went to Gates Lane Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I had wonderful teachers there, most notably in first grade Mrs. Alisch.
And I just, I can just remember the love that she offered us as her students.
When I was in the third grade, a monumental event happened.
An author visited our school, Jack Gantos.
And afterwards, we all went back to our classrooms and we drew our own renditions of his main character, Rotten Ralph.
But he stopped next to my desk, and he tapped on my desk, and he said, "Nice cat." (Laughter) And he wandered away.
Two words that made a colossal difference in my life.
When I was in the third grade, I wrote a book for the first time, "The Owl Who Thought He Was The Best Flyer." (Laughter) We had to write our own Greek myth, our own creation story, so I wrote a story about an owl who challenged Hermes to a flying race, and the owl cheated, and Hermes, being a Greek god, grew angry and bitter, and turned the owl into a moon, so the owl had to live the rest of his life as a moon while he watched his family and friends play at night.
Yeah. (Laughter) My book had a title page.
I was clearly worried about my intellectual property when I was eight.
(Laughter) And it was a story that was told with words and pictures, exactly what I do now for a living, and I sometimes let the words have the stage on their own, and sometimes I allowed the pictures to work on their own to tell the story.
My favorite page is the "About the author" page.
(Laughter) So I learned to write about myself in third person at a young age.
So I love that last sentence: "He liked making this book."
And I liked making that book because I loved using my imagination, and that's what writing is.
Writing is using your imagination on paper, and I do get so scared because I travel to so many schools now and that seems like such a foreign concept to kids, that writing would be using your imagination on paper, if they're allowed to even write now within the school hours.
So I loved writing so much that I'd come home from school, and I would take out pieces of paper, and I would staple them together, and I would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because I loved using my imagination.
And so these characters would become my friends.
Now when I was in sixth grade, the public funding all but eliminated the arts budgets in the Worcester public school system.
I had art.
So he walked into my room one evening, and he sat on the edge of my bed, and he said, "Jarrett, it's up to you, but if you'd like to, we'd like to send you to the classes at the Worcester Art Museum."
And I was so thrilled.
So from sixth through 12th grade, once, twice, sometimes three times a week, I would take classes at the art museum, and I was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw, other kids who shared a similar passion.
Now my publishing career began when I designed the cover for my eighth grade yearbook, and if you're wondering about the style of dress I put our mascot in, I was really into Bell Biv DeVoe and MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice at the time. (Laughter) And to this day, I still can do karaoke to "Ice, Ice Baby" without looking at the screen.
So I get shipped off to private school, K through eight, public schools, but for some reason my grandfather was upset that somebody at the local high school had been stabbed and killed, so he didn't want me to go there.
He wanted me to go to a private school, and he gave me an option.
You can go to Holy Name, which is coed, or St. John's, which is all boys.
Very wise man, because he knew I would, I felt like I was making the decision on my own, and he knew I wouldn't choose St. John's, so I went to Holy Name High School, which was a tough transition because, like I said, I didn't play sports, and it was very focused on sports, but I took solace in Mr. Shilale's art room.
I just couldn't wait to get to that classroom every day.
So how did I make friends?
I drew funny pictures of my teachers -- (Laughter) -- and I passed them around.
Well, in English class, in ninth grade, my friend John, who was sitting next to me, laughed a little bit too hard.
Mr. Greenwood was not pleased.
(Laughter) He instantly saw that I was the cause of the commotion, and for the first time in my life, I was sent to the hall, and I thought, "Oh no, I'm doomed.
My grandfather's just going to kill me."
And he came out to the hallway and he said, "Let me see the paper."
And I thought, "Oh no. He thinks it's a note."
And so I took this picture, and I handed it to him.
Just stop drawing in my class."
So my parents never found out about it.
I didn't get in trouble. I was introduced to Mrs. Casey, who ran the school newspaper, and I was for three and a half years the cartoonist for my school paper, handling such heavy issues as, seniors are mean, freshmen are nerds, the prom bill is so expensive. I can't believe how much it costs to go to the prom.
And I took the headmaster to task and then I also wrote an ongoing story about a boy named Wesley who was unlucky in love, and I just swore up and down that this wasn't about me, but all these years later it was totally me.
But it was so cool because I could write these stories, I could come up with these ideas, and they'd be published in the school paper, and people who I didn't know could read them.
And I loved that thought, of being able to share my ideas through the printed page.
On my 14th birthday, my grandfather and my grandmother gave me the best birthday present ever: a drafting table that I have worked on ever since.
Here I am, 20 years later, and I still work on this table every day.
On the evening of my 14th birthday, I was given this table, and we had Chinese food.
And this was my fortune: "You will be successful in your work."
I taped it to the top left hand of my table, and as you can see, it's still there.
Well, two things: Rusty, who was a great hamster and lived a great long life when I was in fourth grade.
(Laughter) And a video camera.
I just wanted a video camera.
And after begging and pleading for Christmas, I got a second-hand video camera, and I instantly started making my own animations on my own, and all throughout high school I made my own animations.
I convinced my 10th grade English teacher to allow me to do my book report on Stephen King's "Misery" as an animated short. (Laughter) And I kept making comics.
I kept making comics, and at the Worcester Art Museum, I was given the greatest piece of advice by any educator I was ever given.
Mark Lynch, he's an amazing teacher and he's still a dear friend of mine, and I was 14 or 15, and I walked into his comic book class halfway through the course, and I was so excited, I was beaming.
And all the color just drained from his face, and he looked at me, and he said, "Forget everything you learned."
Celebrate your own style. Don't draw the way you're being told to draw.
Draw the way you're drawing and keep at it, because you're really good."
And when I was 17, I met my father for the first time, upon which I learned I had a brother and sister I had never known about.
And on the day I met my father for the first time, I was rejected from the Rhode Island School of Design, my one and only choice for college.
But it was around this time I went to Camp Sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids, kids with leukemia, and this kid Eric changed my life.
Eric didn't live to see his sixth birthday, and Eric lives with me every day.
and I started writing books for young readers when I was a senior in high school.
Well, I eventually got to the Rhode Island School of Design.
I transferred to RISD as a sophomore, and it was there that I took every course that I could on writing, and it was there that I wrote a story about a giant orange slug who wanted to be friends with this kid.
The kid had no patience for him.
And I sent this book out to a dozen publishers and it was rejected every single time, but I was also involved with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, an amazing camp for kids with all sorts of critical illnesses, and it's those kids at the camp that read my stories, and I read to them, and I saw that they responded to my work.
I graduated from RISD. My grandparents were very proud, and I moved to Boston, and I set up shop.
I set up a studio and I tried to get published.
And my grandfather would call me every week, and he would say, "Jarrett, how's it going? Do you have a job yet?"
Because he had just invested a significant amount of money in my college education.
And I said, "Yes, I have a job. I write and illustrate children's books."
And he said, "Well, who pays you for that?"
But I know it's going to happen."
Now, I used to work the weekends at the Hole in the Wall off-season programming to make some extra money as I was trying to get my feet off the ground, and this kid who was just this really hyper kid, I started calling him "Monkey Boy," and I went home and wrote a book called "Good Night, Monkey Boy."
And I received an email from an editor at Random House with a subject line, "Nice work!" Exclamation point.
"Dear Jarrett, I received your postcard.
I liked your art, so I went to your website and I'm wondering if you ever tried writing any of your own stories, because I really like your art and it looks like there are some stories that go with them.
And this was from an editor at Random House Children's Books.
So the next week I "happened" to be in New York.
(Laughter) And I met with this editor, and I left New York for a contract for my first book, "Good Night, Monkey Boy," which was published on June 12, 2001.
They sold out of all of their books.
My friend described it as a wake, but happy, because everyone I ever knew was there in line to see me, but I wasn't dead. I was just signing books.
My grandparents, they were in the middle of it.
They were so happy. They couldn't have been more proud.
I got my first piece of significant fan mail, where this kid loved Monkey Boy so much that he wanted to have a Monkey Boy birthday cake.
For a two-year-old, that is like a tattoo. (Laughter) You know? You only get one birthday per year.
And for him, it's only his second.
And I got this picture, and I thought, "This picture is going to live within his consciousness for his entire life. He will forever have this photo in his family photo albums."
So that photo, since that moment, is framed in front of me while I've worked on all of my books.
"Punk Farm," "Baghead," "Ollie the Purple Elephant."
I just finished the ninth book in the "Lunch Lady" series, which is a graphic novel series about a lunch lady who fights crime.
And I travel the country visiting countless schools, letting lots of kids know that they draw great cats.
And I got to see my name in lights because kids put my name in lights.
Twice now, the "Lunch Lady" series has won the Children's Choice Book of the Year in the third or fourth grade category, and those winners were displayed on a jumbotron screen in Times Square.
I've seen people have "Punk Farm" birthday parties, people have dressed up as "Punk Farm" for Halloween, a "Punk Farm" baby room, which makes me a little nervous for the child's well-being in the long term.
And I get the most amazing fan mail, and I get the most amazing projects, and the biggest moment for me came last Halloween.
The doorbell rang and it was a trick-or-treater dressed as my character. It was so cool.
Now my grandparents are no longer living, so to honor them, I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can't afford the classes.
And she responded with, "I'm here." (Laughter) That's true. You are alive, and that's pretty good right now.
So the biggest moment for me, though, my most important job now is I am a dad myself, and I have two beautiful daughters, and my goal is to surround them by inspiration, by the books that are in every single room of our house to the murals I painted in their rooms to the moments for creativity where you find, in quiet times, by making faces on the patio to letting her sit in the very desk that I've sat in for the past 20 years.
Thank you. (Applause)
I'd like to share with you the story of one of my patients called Celine.
Celine is a housewife and lives in a rural district of Cameroon in west Central Africa.
Six years ago, at the time of her HIV diagnosis, she was recruited to participate in the clinical trial which was running in her health district at the time.
When I first met Celine, a little over a year ago, she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral therapy, and she was very ill.
She told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the 35-kilometer distance.
Now during the clinical trial, she'd been given all her antiretroviral drugs free of charge, and her transportation costs had been covered by the research funds.
She was unable to tell me the names of the drugs she'd received during the trial, or even what the trial had been about.
I didn't bother to ask her what the results of the trial were because it seemed obvious to me that she would have no clue.
Now, I have shared this story with you as an example of what can happen to participants in the clinical trial when it is poorly conducted.
Maybe it would inform clinicians around the world on how to improve on the clinical management of HIV patients.
But it would have done so at a price to hundreds of patients who, like Celine, were left to their own devices once the research had been completed.
I do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting HIV clinical trials in developing countries is bad.
On the contrary, clinical trials are extremely useful tools, and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries.
However, the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation, especially in the context of externally-funded research.
I'm sure you must be asking yourselves what makes developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, so attractive for these HIV clinical trials?
Well, in order for a clinical trial to generate valid and widely applicable results, they need to be conducted with large numbers of study participants and preferably on a population with a high incidence of new HIV infections.
Sub-Saharan Africa largely fits this description, with 22 million people living with HIV, an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide.
Also, research within the continent is a lot easier to conduct due to widespread poverty, endemic diseases and inadequate health care systems.
A clinical trial that is considered to be potentially beneficial to the population is more likely to be authorized, and in the absence of good health care systems, almost any offer of medical assistance is accepted as better than nothing.
Even more problematic reasons include lower risk of litigation, less rigorous ethical reviews, and populations that are willing to participate in almost any study that hints at a cure.
As funding for HIV research increases in developing countries and ethical review in richer countries become more strict, you can see why this context becomes very, very attractive.
The high prevalence of HIV drives researchers to conduct research that is sometimes scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable.
How then can we ensure that, in our search for the cure, we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected by the pandemic?
I invite you to consider four areas I think we can focus on in order to improve the way in which things are done.
The first of these is informed consent.
Now, in order for a clinical trial to be considered ethically acceptable, participants must be given the relevant information in a way in which they can understand, and must freely consent to participate in the trial.
This is especially important in developing countries, where a lot of participants consent to research because they believe it is the only way in which they can receive medical care or other benefits.
Consent procedures that are used in richer countries are often inappropriate or ineffective in a lot of developing countries.
For example, it is counterintuitive to have an illiterate study participant, like Celine, sign a lengthy consent form that they are unable to read, let alone understand.
Local communities need to be more involved in establishing the criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials, as well as the incentives for participation.
The information in these trials needs to be given to the potential participants in linguistically and culturally acceptable formats.
The second point I would like for you to consider is the standard of care that is provided to participants within any clinical trial.
Now, this is subject to a lot of debate and controversy.
Should the control group in the clinical trial be given the best current treatment which is available anywhere in the world?
Or should they be given an alternative standard of care, such as the best current treatment available in the country in which the research is being conducted?
Is it fair to evaluate a treatment regimen which may not be affordable or accessible to the study participants once the research has been completed?
Now, in a situation where the best current treatment is inexpensive and simple to deliver, the answer is straightforward.
However, the best current treatment available anywhere in the world is often very difficult to provide in developing countries.
That brings us to the third point I want you think about: the ethical review of research.
An effective system for reviewing the ethical suitability of clinical trials is primordial to safeguard participants within any clinical trial.
Unfortunately, this is often lacking or inefficient in a lot of developing countries.
Local governments need to set up effective systems for reviewing the ethical issues around the clinical trials which are authorized in different developing countries, and they need to do this by setting up ethical review committees that are independent of the government and research sponsors.
Public accountability needs to be promoted through transparency and independent review by nongovernmental and international organizations as appropriate.
The final point I would like for you to consider tonight is what happens to participants in the clinical trial once the research has been completed.
I think it is absolutely wrong for research to begin in the first place without a clear plan for what would happen to the participants once the trial has ended.
Now, researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed.
In addition, they should be able to consider the possibility of introducing and maintaining effective treatments in the wider community once the trial ends.
If, for any reason, they feel that this might not be possible, then I think they should have to ethically justify why the clinical trial should be conducted in the first place.
Now, fortunately for Celine, our meeting did not end in my office.
I was able to get her enrolled into a free HIV treatment program closer to her home, and with a support group to help her cope.
Her story has a positive ending, but there are thousands of others in similar situations who are much less fortunate.
Although she may not know this, my encounter with Celine has completely changed the way in which I view HIV clinical trials in developing countries, and made me even more determined to be part of the movement to change the way in which things are done.
I believe that every single person listening to me tonight can be part of that change.
If you are a researcher, I hold you to a higher standard of moral conscience, to remain ethical in your research, and not compromise human welfare in your search for answers.
If you work for a funding agency or pharmaceutical company, I challenge you to hold your employers to fund research that is ethically sound.
If you come from a developing country like myself, I urge you to hold your government to a more thorough review of the clinical trials which are authorized in your country.
Thank you.
I was sitting with my girls, and Joy said, "Dang, I wish he'd get off my back.
"I haven't heard from my dad in years."
At this moment, I knew the girls needed a way to connect with their fathers.
At Camp Diva, my non-profit organization, we have these types of conversations all the time as a way to help girls of African descent prepare for their passage into womanhood.
So I asked the girls, "How can we help other girls develop healthy relationships with their fathers?"
"Let's have a dance," one girl shouted, and all the girls quickly backed her up.
They started dreaming about the decorations, invitations, the dresses they were going to wear, and what their fathers could and could not wear. (Laughter) It was off and running before I could even blink my eyes, but even if I could have slowed down those girls, I wouldn't have, because one thing that I have learned from over a decade of working with girls is that they already know what they need.
The wisdom lives inside of them.
So we had a dance, and girls and their fathers came in multitudes.
They really enjoyed each other's company.
It was a huge success.
And the girls decided to make it an annual event.
"Why not?" the girls asked.
"Because he's in jail," she bravely admitted.
At this moment, I saw an opportunity for the girls to rise to the occasion and to become their own heroes.
So I asked, "What do you think we should do about this?
We want every girl to experience the dance, right?"
So the girls thought for a moment, and one girl suggested, "Why don't we just take the dance in the jail?"
Most of the girls doubted the possibility of that, and said, "Are you crazy?
Who is going to allow a bunch of little girls, dressed up — " (Laughter) " — to come inside a jail and dance with their daddies in Spongebob suits?"
So a letter was written to the Richmond City Sheriff, signed collectively by each girl, and I would have to say, he is a very special sheriff.
He contacted me immediately and said, whenever there is an opportunity to bring families inside, his doors are always open.
Because one thing he did know, that when fathers are connected to their children, it is less likely that they will return.
So, 16 inmates and 18 girls were invited.
The girls were dressed in their Sunday best, and the fathers traded in their yellow and blue jumpsuits for shirts and ties.
They hugged.
They shared a full catered meal of chicken and fish.
They laughed together.
It was beautiful.
Even the guards cried.
So we needed to create something that they could take with them.
So we brought in Flip cams, and we had them look at the Flip cams and just interview each other -- their messages, their thoughts.
This was going to be used as a touchstone so when they started to miss each other and feel disconnected, they could reconnect through this image.
I'll never forget that one girl looked in her father's eyes with that camera and said, "Daddy, when you look at me, what do you see?"
I know that very well, because I was one of the lucky girls.
I have had my father in my life always.
He's even here today.
(Applause) And that is why it is extremely special for me to make sure that these girls are connected to their fathers, especially those who are separated because of barbed wires and metal doors.
We have just created a form for girls who have heavy questions on their heart to be in a position to ask their fathers those questions and given the fathers the freedom to answer.
Because a father is locked in does not mean he should be locked out of his daughter's life.
(Applause)
Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model.
And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress.
(Laughter) So luckily, I brought an outfit change.
If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter.
So, why did I do that?
That was awkward.
(Laughter) Well -- (Laughter) Hopefully not as awkward as that picture.
Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial.
I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds.
And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life.
I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair.
So today, for me, being fearless means being honest.
And I am on this stage because I am a model.
I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry, we call that a sexy girl.
So the first question is, how do you become a model?
I always just say, "Oh, I was scouted," but that means nothing.
The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy.
Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin.
And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are like, "Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen."
And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive.
(Laughter) But unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white.
The next question people always ask is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?"
But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, "Why? You know? You can be anything.
You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardiothoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one."
(Laughter) If, after this amazing list, they still are like, "No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model," well, then I say, "Be my boss."
Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H&M, or the next Steven Meisel.
Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up.
It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path.
So, if the photographer is right there, the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, "We want a walking shot," this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times.
That was -- I don't know what happened there.
Unfortunately, after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, "Underwear Model: 10 years," people give you a funny look.
And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening.
This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet.
I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl.
Here's me on the same day as this shoot.
Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine.
And here's me today.
They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this.
I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free.
And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are.
When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17.
So, the last question people ask me is, "What is it like to be a model?"
We say, "It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people."
And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure."
And if you ever are wondering, "If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?"
But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries.
Thank you.
So, before I became a dermatologist, I started in general medicine, as most dermatologists do in Britain.
At the end of that time, I went off to Australia, about 20 years ago.
What you learn when you go to Australia is the Australians are very competitive.
I could accept that.
And of course, they were right.
Australians have about a third less heart disease than we do -- less deaths from heart attacks, heart failure, less strokes -- they're generally a healthier bunch.
And of course they said this was because of their fine moral standing, their exercise, because they're Australians and we're weedy pommies, and so on.
But it's not just Australia that has better health than Britain.
Within Britain, there is a gradient of health -- and this is what's called standardized mortality, basically your chances of dying.
Comparing your rates of dying 50 degrees north -- that's the South, that's London and places -- by latitude, and 55 degrees -- the bad news is that's here, Glasgow.
(Laughter) So what accounts for this horrible space here between us up here in southern Scotland and the South?
Now, we know about smoking, deep-fried Mars bars, chips -- the Glasgow diet.
But this graph is after taking into account all of these known risk factors.
This is after accounting for smoking, social class, diet, all those other known risk factors.
We are left with this missing space of increased deaths the further north you go.
And vitamin D has had a great deal of press, and a lot of people get concerned about it.
And we need vitamin D. It's now a requirement that children have a certain amount.
My grandmother grew up in Glasgow, back in the 1920s and '30s when rickets was a real problem and cod liver oil was brought in.
And that really prevented the rickets that used to be common in this city.
And I as a child was fed cod liver oil by my grandmother.
But an association: The higher people's blood levels of vitamin D are, the less heart disease they have, the less cancer.
There seems to be a lot of data suggesting that vitamin D is very good for you.
But if you give people vitamin D supplements, you don't change that high rate of heart disease.
So what I'm going to suggest is that vitamin D is not the only story in town.
It's not the only reason preventing heart disease.
High vitamin D levels, I think, are a marker for sunlight exposure, and sunlight exposure, in methods I'm going to show, is good for heart disease.
Anyway, I came back from Australia, and despite the obvious risks to my health, I moved to Aberdeen.
(Laughter) Now, in Aberdeen, I started my dermatology training.
But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide.
Now these three guys up here, Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad, won the Nobel Prize for medicine back in 1998.
What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure.
It also dilates the coronary arteries, so it stops angina.
And what was remarkable about it was in the past when we think of chemical messengers within the body, we thought of complicated things like estrogen and insulin, or nerve transmission.
Very complex processes with very complex chemicals that fit into very complex receptors.
And here's this incredibly simple molecule, a nitrogen and an oxygen that are stuck together, and yet these are hugely important for [unclear] our low blood pressure, for neurotransmission, for many, many things, but particularly cardiovascular health.
And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide.
It arises in the skin.
And I was interested in these really complex systems.
We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things.
And I first off started work in cell culture, growing cells, and then I was using knockout mouse models -- mice that couldn't make the gene.
It's a species close to human, with several advantages over mice: They're free, you don't shave them, they feed themselves, and nobody pickets your office saying, "Save the lab medical student."
So they're really an ideal model.
It seemed we couldn't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans.
We put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it, we injected things. We couldn't turn off the nitric oxide.
And these are more stable, and your skin has got really large stores of NO.
And we then thought to ourselves, with those big stores, I wonder if sunlight might activate those stores and release them from the skin, where the stores are about 10 times as big as what's in the circulation.
Well, I'm an experimental dermatologist, so what we did was we thought we'd have to expose our experimental animals to sunlight.
And so what we did was we took a bunch of volunteers and we exposed them to ultraviolet light.
Now, what we were careful to do was, vitamin D is made by ultraviolet B rays and we wanted to separate our story from the vitamin D story.
So we used ultraviolet A, which doesn't make vitamin D.
When we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in Edinburgh, what we produced was, we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide.
Not by much, as an individual level, but enough at a population level to shift the rates of heart disease in a whole population.
So this seems to be a feature of ultraviolet rays hitting the skin.
Now, we're still collecting data.
I'm not sure exactly how much.
One of the subjects here was my mother-in-law, and clearly I do not know her age.
But certainly in people older than my wife, this appears to be a more marked effect.
And the other thing I should mention was there was no change in vitamin D.
This is separate from vitamin D.
So vitamin D is good for you -- it stops rickets, it prevents calcium metabolism, important stuff.
But this is a separate mechanism from vitamin D.
Now, one of the problems with looking at blood pressure is your body does everything it can to keep your blood pressure at the same place.
That is an absolutely fundamental physiological principle.
In the arm, you can measure blood flow in the arm by how much it swells up as some blood flows into it.
But the active irradiation, during the UV and for an hour after it, there is dilation of the blood vessels.
This is the mechanism by which you lower blood pressure, by which you dilate the coronary arteries also, to let the blood be supplied with the heart.
So here, further data that ultraviolet -- that's sunlight -- has benefits on the blood flow and the cardiovascular system.
Different wavelengths of light have different activities of doing that.
So you can look at the wavelengths of light that do that.
And you can look -- So, if you live on the equator, the sun comes straight overhead, it comes through a very thin bit of atmosphere.
In winter or summer, it's the same amount of light.
If you live up here, in summer the sun is coming fairly directly down, but in winter it's coming through a huge amount of atmosphere, and much of the ultraviolet is weeded out, and the range of wavelengths that hit the Earth are different from summer to winter.
So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation.
Now, if you're on the equator here -- that's these two lines here, the red line and the purple line -- the amount of nitric oxide that's released is the area under the curve, it's the area in this space here.
So if you're on the equator, December or June, you've got masses of NO being released from the skin.
So Ventura is in southern California.
Ventura mid-winter, well, there's still a decent amount.
Edinburgh in summer, the area beneath the curve is pretty good, but Edinburgh in winter, the amount of NO that can be released is next to nothing, tiny amounts.
So what do we think?
We're still working at this story, we're still developing it, we're still expanding it.
We think it's very important.
We think that the skin -- well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms.
We suspect a lot of these come from diet, green leafy vegetables, beetroot, lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin.
We think they're then stored in the skin, and we think the sunlight releases this where it has generally beneficial effects.
My day job is saying to people, "You've got skin cancer, it's caused by sunlight, don't go in the sun."
Yes, sunlight is the major alterable risk factor for skin cancer, but deaths from heart disease are a hundred times higher than deaths from skin cancer.
And I think that we need to be more aware of, and we need to find the risk-benefit ratio.
How much sunlight is safe, and how can we finesse this best for our general health?
(Applause)
What I want to do this afternoon is something a little different than what's scheduled.
This was last Wednesday afternoon at a school in Brooklyn, New York, at Cristo Rey High School, run by the Jesuits.
And I was talking to this group of students, and take a look at them.
And there are about 300 kids in this school, and the school's been going now for four years, and they're about to graduate their first class.
They all come from homes where there is, for the most part, just one person in the home, usually the mother or the grandmother, and that's it, and they come here for their education and for their structure.
And then they said, "But he looks good." (Laughter) He does look good, because kids need structure, and the trick I play in all of my school appearances is that when I get through with my little homily to the kids, I then invite them to ask questions, and when they raise their hands, I say, "Come up," and I make them come up and stand in front of me.
Put your arms straight down at your side, look up, open your eyes, stare straight ahead, and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear.
No slouching, no pants hanging down, none of that stuff.
(Laughter) And this young man, his name is -- his last name Cruz -- he loved it. That's all over his Facebook page and it's gone viral.
(Laughter) So people think I'm being unkind to this kid.
And the thing about it, I've done this for years, the younger they are, the more fun it is.
When I get six- and seven-year-olds in a group, I have to figure out how to keep them quiet.
And so I play a little game with them before I make them stand at attention.
Do you understand?"
"Huh!" (Laughter) "Yes, General. Yes, General."
Try it with your kids. See if it works. (Laughter) I don't think so.
But anyway, it's a game I play, and it comes obviously from my military experience.
Because for the majority of my adult life, I worked with young kids, teenagers with guns, I call them.
It gives them structure.
And then we introduce them to somebody who they come to hate immediately, the drill sergeant.
And they hate him.
And the drill sergeant starts screaming at them, and telling them to do all kinds of awful things.
But then the most amazing thing happens over time.
I'm your worst nightmare. I'm your daddy and your mommy.
Don't start telling me why you didn't do something.
It's yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir."
"You didn't shave.""But sir —" "No, don't tell me how often you scraped your face this morning.
I'm telling you you didn't shave."
"No excuse, sir.""Attaboy, you're learning fast."
But you'd be amazed at what you can do with them once you put them in that structure.
In 18 weeks, they have a skill. They are mature.
And you know what, they come to admire the drill sergeant and they never forget the drill sergeant.
They come to respect him.
And so we need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children.
I spend a lot of time with youth groups, and I say to people, "When does the education process begin?"
We're always talking about, "Let's fix the schools.
Let's do more for our teachers. Let's put more computers in our schools.
That isn't the whole answer. It's part of the answer.
When does the learning process begin? Does it begin in first grade?
No, no, it begins the first time a child in a mother's arms looks up at the mother and says, "Oh, this must be my mother.
She's the one who feeds me.
It's her language I will learn."
And at that moment they shut out all the other languages that they could be learning at that age, but by three months, that's her.
That's when love begins. That's when structure begins.
That's when you start to imprint on the child that "you are special, you are different from every other child in the world.
And we're going to read to you."
A child who doesn't know his or her colors or doesn't know how to tell time, doesn't know how to tie shoes, doesn't know how to do those things, and doesn't know how to do something that goes by a word that was drilled into me as a kid: mind.
This is the way children are raised properly.
And I watched my own young grandchildren now come along and they're, much to the distress of my children, they are acting just like we did. You know? You imprint them.
And that's what you have to do to prepare children for education and for school.
And I'm working at all the energy I have to sort of communicate this message that we need preschool, we need Head Start, we need prenatal care.
The education process begins even before the child is born, and if you don't do that, you're going to have difficulty.
And we are having difficulties in so many of our communities and so many of our schools where kids are coming to first grade and their eyes are blazing, they've got their little knapsack on and they're ready to go, and then they realize they're not like the other first graders who know books, have been read to, can do their alphabet.
And by the third grade, the kids who didn't have that structure and minding in the beginning start to realize they're behind, and what do they do?
It's predictable.
If you're not at the right reading level at third grade, you are a candidate for jail at age 18, and we have the highest incarceration rate because we're not getting our kids the proper start in life.
The last chapter in my book is called "The Gift of a Good Start."
I was not a great student.
I was a public school kid in New York City, and I didn't do well at all.
I wanted to see if my memory was correct, and, my God, it was. (Laughter) Straight C everywhere.
And I finally bounced through high school, got into the City College of New York with a 78.3 average, which I shouldn't have been allowed in with, and then I started out in engineering, and that only lasted six months. (Laughter) And then I went into geology, "rocks for jocks." This is easy.
And then I found ROTC.
I found something that I did well and something that I loved doing, and I found a group of youngsters like me who felt the same way.
And so my whole life then was dedicated to ROTC and the military.
That's what's going on. And that's what I found.
Now the authorities at CCNY were getting tired of me being there.
And so they said, "But he does so well in ROTC.
Look, he gets straight A's in that but not in anything else."
And so they said, "Look, let's take his ROTC grades and roll them into his overall GPA and see what happens."
Give him to the army. We'll never see him again. We'll never see him again."
So they shipped me off to the army, and lo and behold, many years later, I'm considered one of the greatest sons the City College of New York has ever had. (Laughter) So, I tell young people everywhere, it ain't where you start in life, it's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life, and you are blessed to be living in a country that, no matter where you start, you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself, you believe in the society and the country, and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along.
And that's the key to success.
But it begins with the gift of a good start.
If we don't give that gift to each and every one of our kids, if we don't invest at the earliest age, we're going to be running into difficulties.
It's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas, because they're not getting the gift of a good start.
My gift of a good start was not only being in a nice family, a good family, but having a family that said to me, "Now listen, we came to this country in banana boats in 1920 and 1924.
We worked like dogs down in the garment industry every single day.
They stuck into our hearts like a dagger a sense of shame: "Don't you shame this family."
Sometimes I would get in trouble, and my parents were coming home, and I was in my room waiting for what's going to happen, and I would sit there saying to myself, "Okay, look, take the belt and hit me, but, God, don't give me that 'shame the family' bit again."
And I also had this extended network.
Children need a network. Children need to be part of a tribe, a family, a community.
In my case it was aunts who lived in all of these tenement buildings.
They never left. (Laughter) I, so help me God, I grew up walking those streets, and they were always there.
They never went to the bathroom. They never cooked. (Laughter) They never did anything.
But what they did was keep us in play.
They kept us in play.
"Don't give us any of that self-actualization stuff.
And then you can support us. That's the role of you guys."
And so, it's so essential that we kind of put this culture back into our families, all families.
And it is so important that all of you here today who are successful people, and I'm sure have wonderful families and children and grandchildren, it's not enough. You've got to reach out and back and find kids like Mr. Cruz who can make it if you give them the structure, if you reach back and help, if you mentor, if you invest in boys and girls clubs, if you work with your school system, make sure it's the best school system, and not just your kid's school, but the school uptown in Harlem, not just downtown Montessori on the West Side.
And we're not just investing in the kids.
We're investing in our future.
We're going to be a minority-majority country in one more generation.
Those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority.
We have to make sure they're ready to be the leaders of this great country of ours, a country that is like no other, a country that amazes me every single day, a country that's fractious. We're always arguing with each other.
That's how the system's supposed to work.
It's a country of such contrasts, but it's a nation of nations.
We are a nation of immigrants.
That's why we need sound immigration policy.
It's ridiculous not to have a sound immigration policy to welcome those who want to come here and be part of this great nation, or we can send back home with an education to help their people rise up out of poverty.
One of the great stories I love to tell is about my love of going to my hometown of New York and walking up Park Avenue on a beautiful day and admiring everything and seeing all the people go by from all over the world.
But what I always have to do is stop at one of the corners and get a hot dog from the immigrant pushcart peddler.
Gotta have a dirty water dog. (Laughter) And no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I've got to do that.
I even did it when I was Secretary of State.
In those days, I had five bodyguards around me and three New York City police cars would roll alongside to make sure nobody whacked me while I was going up Park Avenue. (Laughter) And I would order the hot dog from the guy, and he'd start to fix it, and then he'd look around at the bodyguards and the police cars -- "I've got a green card! I've got a green card!" (Laughter) "It's okay, it's okay."
But now I'm alone. I'm alone.
But I gotta have my hot dog.
I did it just last week. It was on a Tuesday evening down by Columbus Circle.
And the scene repeats itself so often.
I'll go up and ask for my hot dog, and the guy will fix it, and as he's finishing, he'll say, "I know you. I see you on television.
You're, well, you're General Powell."
"Yes, yes.""Oh ... " I hand him the money.
"No, General. You can't pay me. I've been paid.
America has paid me. I never forget where I came from.
I accept the generosity, continue up the street, and it washes over me, my God, it's the same country that greeted my parents this way 90 years ago.
So we are still that magnificent country, but we are fueled by young people coming up from every land in the world, and it is our obligation as contributing citizens to this wonderful country of ours to make sure that no child gets left behind.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So, where are the robots?
Very soon they'll be doing everything for us.
So what can we do about that? What can we say?
So I want to give a little bit of a different perspective of how we can perhaps look at these things in a little bit of a different way.
And this is an x-ray picture of a real beetle, and a Swiss watch, back from '88. You look at that -- what was true then is certainly true today.
We can make the circuitry of the right computational power, but we can't actually put them together to make something that will actually work and be as adaptive as these systems.
So let's try to look at it from a different perspective.
Let's summon the best designer, the mother of all designers.
Let's see what evolution can do for us.
A very simple task, and it's interesting to see what kind of things came out of that.
So if you look, you can see a lot of different machines come out of this. They all move around.
They all crawl in different ways, and you can see on the right, that we actually made a couple of these things, and they work in reality. These are not very fantastic robots, but they evolved to do exactly what we reward them for: for moving forward. So that was all done in simulation, but we can also do that on a real machine.
Here's a physical robot that we actually have a population of brains, competing, or evolving on the machine.
And you can see these robots are not ready to take over the world yet, but they gradually learn how to move forward, and they do this autonomously.
So in these two examples, we had basically machines that learned how to walk in simulation, and also machines that learned how to walk in reality.
But I want to show you a different approach, and this is this robot over here, which has four legs.
It has eight motors, four on the knees and four on the hip.
It has also two tilt sensors that tell the machine which way it's tilting.
But this machine doesn't know what it looks like.
You look at it and you see it has four legs, the machine doesn't know if it's a snake, if it's a tree, it doesn't have any idea what it looks like, but it's going to try to find that out.
This is the last cycle, and you can see it's pretty much figured out what its self looks like. And once it has a self-model, it can use that to derive a pattern of locomotion.
But when you look at that, you have to remember that this machine did not do any physical trials on how to move forward, nor did it have a model of itself.
That's what happened when the robots actually are rewarded for doing something.
The cube can swivel, or flip on its side, and we just throw 1,000 of these cubes into a soup -- this is in simulation --and don't reward them for anything, we just let them flip. We pump energy into this and see what happens in a couple of mutations.
But after a very short while, you can see these blue things on the right there begin to take over.
They begin to self-replicate. So in absence of any reward, the intrinsic reward is self-replication.
And we've actually built a couple of these, and this is part of a larger robot made out of these cubes.
It's an accelerated view, where you can see the robot actually carrying out some of its replication process.
So you're feeding it with more material -- cubes in this case -- and more energy, and it can make another robot.
So of course, this is a very crude machine, but we're working on a micro-scale version of these, and hopefully the cubes will be like a powder that you pour in.
OK, so what can we learn? These robots are of course not very useful in themselves, but they might teach us something about how we can build better robots, and perhaps how humans, animals, create self-models and learn.
And one of the things that I think is important is that we have to get away from this idea of designing the machines manually, but actually let them evolve and learn, like children, and perhaps that's the way we'll get there. Thank you.
(Applause)
You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch.
I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch "The Wizard of Oz" together.
It totally dominated her imagination for months.
Her favorite character was Glinda, of course.
But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is.
Now we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex.
Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy's guards.
Do you know what I'm talking about? (Laughter) Yeah.
Now, there's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between "The Wizard of Oz" and all the movies we watch today.
One is there's very little violence in "The Wizard of Oz."
The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees.
But I think if "The Wizard of Oz" were made today, the wizard would say, "Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold.
Use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the Wicked Witch."
Another thing that's really unique about "The Wizard of Oz" to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female.
Now I started to notice this when I actually showed "Star Wars" to my daughter, which was years later, and the situation was different.
At that point I also had a son.
He was only three at the time.
He was not invited to the screening. He was too young for that.
But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted. (Laughter) So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don't think he understands what's going on, but he is sure soaking in it.
Is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty?
Is he picking up on the fact that Luke joins an army to overthrow the government?
Is he picking up on the fact that there are only boys in the universe except for Aunt Beru, and of course this princess, who's really cool, but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe, which he does by the magic that he was born with?
Compare this to 1939 with "The Wizard of Oz."
How does Dorothy win her movie?
By making friends with everybody and being a leader.
I know from my own experience that Princess Leia did not provide the adequate context that I could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed. (Laughter) I think there was a first-kiss moment when I really expected the credits to start rolling because that's the end of the movie, right?
Why are you still standing there?
I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
The movies are very, very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward, and there's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys.
It's almost as though if you're a boy, you are a dopey animal, and if you are a girl, you should bring your warrior costume.
But they do send a message to boys, that they are not, the boys are not really the target audience.
They are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy, but they are not necessarily showing boys how they're supposed to defend against the patriarchy.
And we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids, and as three-dimensional and delightful as Hermione and Katniss are, these are still war movies.
I recommend it to all of you. It's on demand now.
Do you remember what the critics said when "Brave" came out?
"Aw, I can't believe Pixar made a princess movie."
I don't know if you've heard of this.
Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid-'80s, she recorded this conversation she'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw.
And do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie?
And is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like? (Laughter) Right? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much.
It does happen. I've seen it, and yet I very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love.
In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, "Argo."
Right? Oscar buzz, doing great at the box office, a consensus idea of what a quality Hollywood film is.
And I don't think it should, because a lot of the movie, I don't know if you've seen it, but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis.
We've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep, angst-ridden conversations in this hideout, and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say, "Are you coming to bed, honey?"
That's Hollywood for you.
So let's look at the numbers.
2011, of the 100 most popular movies, how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists?
Eleven. It's not bad.
It's not as many percent as the number of women we've just elected to Congress, so that's good.
One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life.
I don't think kids' movies have anything to do with that.
I don't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that, but something is going wrong, and when I hear that statistic, one of the things I think of is that's a lot of sexual assailants.
Are they absorbing the story that a male hero's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward, which is a woman who has no friends and doesn't speak?
You know, as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing, we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them.
We have tools at our disposal like "girl power," and we hope that that will help, but I gotta wonder, is girl power going to protect them if, at the same time, actively or passively, we are training our sons to maintain their boy power?
I mean, I think the Netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important, and I'm talking mainly to the dads here.
I think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood.
You've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner.
They're throwing it up in the air.
And I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel Test, if we can find them, and to seek out the heroines who are there, who show real courage, who bring people together, and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say, "I want to be on their team," because they're going to be on their team.
When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in "Star Wars," do you know what she said?
Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda.
What do these two have in common?
I think these people are experts.
I think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else, and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential.
Now, they are leaders.
I like that kind of quest for my daughter, and I like that kind of quest for my son.
I want more quests like that.
Thank you.
One day you're living your ordinary life, you're planning to go to a party, you're taking your children to school, you're making a dentist appointment.
Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation.
She was walking to work one day in April, 1992, in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank.
She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party.
And suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path.
She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not.
And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin, in her high heels and her miniskirt.
The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century.
I learned about compassion.
I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes.
I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie.
Most of all, I learned about love.
I learned so much about myself.
Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, "You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility."
Last April, I went back to a very strange -- what I called a deranged high school reunion.
What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word "anniversary," because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party.
It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves.
And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children.
I now cover Syria, and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done.
And when I first arrived in Damascus, I saw this strange moment where people didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend, and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes.
People don't want to believe it's coming, so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can.
And then war and chaos descend.
In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda.
Between April and August, 1994, one million people were slaughtered.
And that was just a small percentage of the dead.
And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes.
So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing.
Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women, which is fantastic, and there's also within the national constitution now, you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi.
And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story, or I find it beautiful.
There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next.
There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi, you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother, you might have killed my father.
They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation, and I find this remarkable.
So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why.
When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day.
And that's pretty much why I do it.
In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born.
But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old, my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards, and I remember getting on the plane in tears, crying to be separated from my son, and while I was there, a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me, "What are you doing here?
Why aren't you home with Luca?"
And I said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq, "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here.
And he said, "Go home, because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself.
But there will always be another war."
And I am deluding myself if I think, as a journalist, as a reporter, as a writer, what I do can stop them. I can't.
I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war.
He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it.
I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them.
My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless.
And that's what I try to do.
I'm not always successful, and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating, because you feel like you're writing into a void, or you feel like no one cares.
Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia?
Who cares about the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, all of these strings of places that I will remember for the rest of my life?
And all I can really do is hope, not to policymakers or politicians, because as much as I'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something, I don't delude myself.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So I want to talk to you about two things tonight.
Number one: Teaching surgery and doing surgery is really hard.
And second, that language is one of the most profound things that separate us all over the world.
And in my little corner of the world, these two things are actually related, and I want to tell you how tonight.
Did you want it?
In particular, nobody wants an operation with tools like these through large incisions that cause a lot of pain, that cause a lot of time out of work or out of school, that leave a big scar.
But if you have to have an operation, what you really want is a minimally invasive operation.
That's what I want to talk to you about tonight -- how doing and teaching this type of surgery led us on a search for a better universal translator.
Now, this type of surgery is hard, and it starts by putting people to sleep, putting carbon dioxide in their abdomen, blowing them up like a balloon, sticking one of these sharp pointy things into their abdomen -- it's dangerous stuff -- and taking instruments and watching it on a TV screen.
So this is gallbladder surgery.
This is the real thing. There's no blood.
And you can see how focused the surgeons are, how much concentration it takes.
You can see it in their faces.
It's hard to teach, and it's not all that easy to learn.
All right, you've all heard the term: "He's a born surgeon."
Let me tell you, surgeons are not born.
Surgeons are trained one step at a time.
It starts with a foundation, basic skills.
We build on that and we take people, hopefully, to the operating room where they learn to be an assistant.
Then we teach them to be a surgeon in training.
Now that foundation is so important that a number of us from the largest general surgery society in the United States, SAGES, started in the late 1990s a training program that would assure that every surgeon who practices minimally invasive surgery would have a strong foundation of knowledge and skills necessary to go on and do procedures.
Now the science behind this is so potent that it became required by the American Board of Surgery in order for a young surgeon to become board certified.
It's hard.
Now just this past year, one of our partners, the American College of Surgeons, teamed up with us to make an announcement that all surgeons should be FLS (Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery)-certified before they do minimally invasive surgery.
And are we talking about just people here in the U.S. and Canada?
No, we just said all surgeons.
SAGES does surgery all over the world, teaching and educating surgeons.
So we have a problem, and one of the problems is distance.
We need to make the world a smaller place.
And I think that we can develop some tools to do so.
And one of the tools I like personally is using video.
So I was inspired by a friend.
And he proved that you could actually teach people to do surgery using video conferencing.
Even people who say they speak English, only 14 percent pass.
Because for them it's not a surgery test, it's an English test.
I work at the Cambridge Hospital.
It's the primary Harvard Medical School teaching facility.
We have more than 100 translators covering 63 languages, and we spend millions of dollars just in our little hospital.
It's a big labor-intensive effort.
We need to employ technology to assist us in this quest.
At our hospital we see everybody from Harvard professors to people who just got here last week.
And you have no idea how hard it is to talk to somebody or take care of somebody you can't talk to.
We need a universal translator.
One of the things that I want to leave you with as you think about this talk is that this talk is not just about us preaching to the world.
We have a lot to learn.
Here in the United States we spend more money per person for outcomes that are not better than many countries in the world.
Maybe we have something to learn as well.
So I'm passionate about teaching these FLS skills all over the world.
This past year I've been in Latin America, I've been in China, talking about the fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery.
And everywhere I go the barrier is: "We want this, but we need it in our language."
So here's what we think we want to do: Imagine giving a lecture and being able to talk to people in their own native language simultaneously.
I want to talk to the people in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe seamlessly, accurately and in a cost-effective fashion using technology.
They have to be able to teach us something as well.
A lexicon is a body of words that describes a domain.
So let me show you what we're doing.
We're working with the folks at IBM Research from the Accessibility Center to string together technologies to work towards the universal translator.
But we don't have the words yet, so we add a third technology.
We get the words up in a window and then apply the magic.
We work with a fourth technology.
More to come as we think about trying to make the world a smaller place.
Narrator: Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery.
Module five: manual skills practice.
Students may display captions in their native language.
Steven Schwaitzberg: If you're in Latin America, you click the "I want it in Spanish" button and out it comes in real time in Spanish.
If you remember what I told you about FLS at the beginning, it's knowledge and skills.
Allan Okrainec: Today we're going to practice suturing.
This is how you hold the needle.
Grab the needle at the tip.
Aim for the black dots.
Orient your loop this way.
Very good Oscar. I'll see you next week.
SS: So that's what we're working on in our quest for the universal translator.
We have a need to learn as well as to teach.
I can think of a million uses for a tool like this.
As we think about intersecting technologies -- everybody has a cell phone with a camera -- we could use this everywhere, whether it be health care, patient care, engineering, law, conferencing, translating videos.
In order to break down our barriers, we have to learn to talk to people, to demand that people work on translation.
We need it for our everyday life, in order to make the world a smaller place.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
The theme of my talk today is, "Be an artist, right now."
Most people, when this subject is brought up, get tense and resist it: "Art doesn't feed me, and right now I'm busy.
I have to go to school, get a job, send my kids to lessons ... " You think, "I'm too busy. I don't have time for art."
There are hundreds of reasons why we can't be artists right now.
Why do people instantly resist the idea of associating themselves with art?
Perhaps you think art is for the greatly gifted or for the thoroughly and professionally trained.
We are all born artists.
If you have kids, you know what I mean.
Almost everything kids do is art.
They draw with crayons on the wall.
They dance to Son Dam Bi's dance on TV, but you can't even call it Son Dam Bi's dance -- it becomes the kids' own dance.
So they dance a strange dance and inflict their singing on everyone.
Perhaps their art is something only their parents can bear, and because they practice such art all day long, people honestly get a little tired around kids.
Kids will sometimes perform monodramas -- playing house is indeed a monodrama or a play.
Usually parents remember the very first time their kid lies.
They're shocked.
"Now you're showing your true colors," Mom says. She thinks, "Why does he take after his dad?"
She questions him, "What kind of a person are you going to be?"
But you shouldn't worry.
They are talking about things they didn't see.
Parents should celebrate.
For example, a kid says, "Mom, guess what? I met an alien on my way home."
Roland Barthes once said of Flaubert's novels, "Flaubert did not write a novel.
The eros between sentences, that is the essence of Flaubert's novel."
And you continue to make connections.
Take a look at this sentence: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."
Yes, it's the first sentence of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."
Writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it, Kafka's work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature.
Kafka did not show his work to his father.
He was not on good terms with his father.
Had he shown his father, "My boy has finally lost it," he would've thought.
And that's right. Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence, which is not much different from what a kid does.
A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller.
Kids do art.
They don't get tired and they have fun doing it.
I was in Jeju Island a few days ago.
When kids are on the beach, most of them love playing in the water.
But some of them spend a lot of time in the sand, making mountains and seas -- well, not seas, but different things -- people and dogs, etc.
But parents tell them, "It will all be washed away by the waves."
But kids don't mind.
They have fun in the moment and they keep playing in the sand.
Kids don't do it because someone told them to.
When you were little, I bet you spent time enjoying the pleasure of primitive art.
When I ask my students to write about their happiest moment, many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid.
Or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera.
They talk about these kinds of experiences.
The French writer Michel Tournier has a famous saying.
"Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired."
But kids, usually they do art for fun. It's playing.
They don't draw to sell the work to a client or play the piano to earn money for the family.
Of course, there were kids who had to.
You know this gentleman, right?
He had to tour around Europe to support his family -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- but that was centuries ago, so we can make him an exception.
Unfortunately, at some point our art -- such a joyful pastime -- ends.
Kids have to go to lessons, to school, do homework and of course they take piano or ballet lessons, but they aren't fun anymore.
If you're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall, you'll surely get in trouble with your mom.
Besides, if you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure -- people will question your actions and ask you to act properly.
"Why are you using only black?"
And I explained, "It's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch."
But such a teacher is seldom found.
Later, I grew up and went to Europe's galleries -- I was a university student -- and I thought this was really unfair.
Look what I found. (Laughter) Works like this were hung in Basel while I was punished and stood in front of the palace with my drawing in my mouth.
Look at this. Doesn't it look just like wallpaper?
Anyways, contemporary art in the 20th century is about doing something weird and filling the void with explanation and interpretation -- essentially the same as I did.
Of course, my work was very amateur, but let's turn to more famous examples.
This is Picasso's.
He stuck handlebars into a bike seat and called it "Bull's Head." Sounds convincing, right?
Next, a urinal was placed on its side and called "Fountain".
That was Duchamp.
So filling the gap between explanation and a weird act with stories -- that's indeed what contemporary art is all about.
Picasso even made the statement, "I draw not what I see but what I think."
I wish I knew what Picasso said back then. I could have argued better with my teacher.
Unfortunately, the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art.
That's our tragedy.
So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed?
We want to express, to reveal ourselves, but with the artist dead, the artistic desire reveals itself in dark form.
In karaoke bars, there are always people who sing "She's Gone" or "Hotel California," miming the guitar riffs.
Usually they sound awful. Awful indeed.
Some people turn into rockers like this.
Or some people dance in clubs.
People who would have enjoyed telling stories end up trolling on the Internet all night long.
That's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side.
Sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids playing with Legos or putting together plastic robots.
The kid has already lost interest and is doing something else, but the dad alone builds castles.
This shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed, not gone.
But they can often reveal themselves negatively, in the form of jealousy.
So we start to envy them.
We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV.
"He just can't act." "You call that singing? She can't hit the notes."
We get jealous, not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us.
Right this minute, we can turn off TV, log off the Internet, get up and start to do something.
Where I teach students in drama school, there's a course called Dramatics.
In this course, all students must put on a play.
However, acting majors are not supposed to act.
They can write the play, for example, and the writers may work on stage art.
In school, the military or even in a mental institution, once you make people do it, they enjoy it.
I have students like you in the class -- many who don't major in writing.
Some major in art or music and think they can't write.
So I give them blank sheets of paper and a theme.
It can be a simple theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood.
There's one condition: You must write like crazy. Like crazy!
They only get to think for the first five minutes.
The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind, the artistic devil creeps in.
This devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can't write: "People will laugh at you. This is not good writing!
What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!"
You have to run fast so the devil can't catch up.
The students go into a kind of trance.
After 30 or 40 minutes, they write without knowing what they're writing.
So I can say this: It's not the hundreds of reasons why one can't be an artist, but rather, the one reason one must be that makes us artists.
Most artists became artists because of the one reason.
When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art, enemies appear on the outside.
Mostly, they have the faces of our parents. (Laughter) Sometimes they look like our spouses, but they are not your parents or spouses.
They came to Earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists.
And they have a magic question.
The magic question is, "What for?"
Art is the ultimate goal.
It saves our souls and makes us live happily.
It helps us express ourselves and be happy without the help of alcohol or drugs.
"Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry for having fun without you," is what you should say. "I'll just go ahead and do it anyway."
The ideal future I imagine is where we all have multiple identities, at least one of which is an artist.
So I asked the driver, "What is this?"
He said it was his profile. "Then what are you?" I asked. "An actor," he said.
He was a cabby and an actor. I asked, "What roles do you usually play?"
He proudly said he played King Lear.
King Lear.
"Who is it that can tell me who I am?" -- a great line from King Lear.
That's the world I dream of.
In 1990, Martha Graham, the legend of modern dance, came to Korea.
The great artist, then in her 90s, arrived at Gimpo Airport and a reporter asked her a typical question: "What do you have to do to become a great dancer?
Any advice for aspiring Korean dancers?"
Now, she was the master. This photo was taken in 1948 and she was already a celebrated artist.
In 1990, she was asked this question.
And here's what she answered: "Just do it."
Only those three words and she left the airport. That's it.
So what should we do now?
Just do it!
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm here today to talk about a disturbing question, which has an equally disturbing answer.
My topic is the secrets of domestic violence, and the question I'm going to tackle is the one question everyone always asks: Why does she stay?
I'm not a psychiatrist, a social worker or an expert in domestic violence.
I'm just one woman with a story to tell.
I was 22. I had just graduated from Harvard College.
I had moved to New York City for my first job as a writer and editor at Seventeen magazine.
I had my first apartment, my first little green American Express card, and I had a very big secret.
My secret was that I had this gun loaded with hollow-point bullets pointed at my head by the man who I thought was my soulmate, many, many times.
The man who I loved more than anybody on Earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember.
I'm here to tell you the story of crazy love, a psychological trap disguised as love, one that millions of women and even a few men fall into every year.
It may even be your story.
I don't look like a typical domestic violence survivor.
I've spent most of my career working for Fortune 500 companies including Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett and The Washington Post.
I've been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together.
My dog is a black lab, and I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan.
(Laughter) So my first message for you is that domestic violence happens to everyone -- all races, all religions, all income and education levels.
It's everywhere.
And my second message is that everyone thinks domestic violence happens to women, that it's a women's issue.
Not exactly.
Over 85 percent of abusers are men, and domestic abuse happens only in intimate, interdependent, long-term relationships, in other words, in families, the last place we would want or expect to find violence, which is one reason domestic abuse is so confusing.
I was 22, and in the United States, women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages, and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners, boyfriends, and husbands in the United States.
I was also a very typical victim because I knew nothing about domestic violence, its warning signs or its patterns.
He sat next to me on the New York City subway, and he started chatting me up.
He told me two things.
One was that he, too, had just graduated from an Ivy League school, and that he worked at a very impressive Wall Street bank.
But what made the biggest impression on me that first meeting was that he was smart and funny and he looked like a farm boy.
He did this especially at the beginning by idolizing me.
We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I'd gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job.
He wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams.
And he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us by confessing his secret, which was that, as a very young boy starting at age four, he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather, and the abuse had gotten so bad that he had had to drop out of school in eighth grade, even though he was very smart, and he'd spent almost 20 years rebuilding his life.
Which is why that Ivy League degree and the Wall Street job and his bright shiny future meant so much to him.
I didn't know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim.
I also didn't know that the second step is to isolate the victim.
Now, the last thing I wanted to do was leave New York, and my dream job, but I thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate, so I agreed, and I quit my job, and Conor and I left Manhattan together.
I had no idea I was falling into crazy love, that I was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.
The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts.
And here's where those guns come in.
As soon as we moved to New England -- you know, that place where Connor was supposed to feel so safe -- he bought three guns.
He kept one in the glove compartment of our car.
He kept one under the pillows on our bed, and the third one he kept in his pocket at all times.
And he said that he needed those guns because of the trauma he'd experienced as a young boy.
He needed them to feel protected.
But those guns were really a message for me, and even though he hadn't raised a hand to me, my life was already in grave danger every minute of every day.
It was 7 a.m. I still had on my nightgown.
Despite what had happened, I was sure we were going to live happily ever after, because I loved him, and he loved me so much.
And he was very, very sorry.
He had just been really stressed out by the wedding and by becoming a family with me.
It was an isolated incident, and he was never going to hurt me again.
It happened twice more on the honeymoon.
The first time, I was driving to find a secret beach and I got lost, and he punched me in the side of my head so hard that the other side of my head repeatedly hit the driver's side window.
And then a few days later, driving home from our honeymoon, he got frustrated by traffic, and he threw a cold Big Mac in my face.
I was mistaken in thinking that I was unique and alone in this situation.
One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life, and the CDC reports that 15 million children are abused every year, 15 million.
So actually, I was in very good company.
Back to my question: Why did I stay?
I didn't know he was abusing me.
The other question everybody asks is, why doesn't she just leave?
To me, this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask, because we victims know something you usually don't: It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser.
Because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her.
Over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship, after she's gotten out, because then the abuser has nothing left to lose.
Other outcomes include long-term stalking, even after the abuser remarries; denial of financial resources; and manipulation of the family court system to terrify the victim and her children, who are regularly forced by family court judges to spend unsupervised time with the man who beat their mother.
I was able to leave, because of one final, sadistic beating that broke through my denial.
I realized that the man who I loved so much was going to kill me if I let him.
So I broke the silence.
We tend to stereotype victims as grisly headlines, self-destructive women, damaged goods.
The question, "Why does she stay?"
Because it turns out that I'm actually a very typical domestic violence victim and a typical domestic violence survivor.
I remarried a kind and gentle man, and we have those three kids.
I have that black lab, and I have that minivan.
What I will never have again, ever, is a loaded gun held to my head by someone who says that he loves me.
I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves.
Abuse could be affecting your daughter, your sister, your best friend right now.
I was able to end my own crazy love story by breaking the silence.
It's my way of helping other victims, and it's my final request of you.
Talk about what you heard here.
Abuse thrives only in silence.
You have the power to end domestic violence simply by shining a spotlight on it.
We need every one of you to understand the secrets of domestic violence.
Show abuse the light of day by talking about it with your children, your coworkers, your friends and family.
Recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene, deescalate it, show victims a safe way out.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But I'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just might not be learning anything.
This happens one day: I'd just assigned my class to read this textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology: viruses and how they attack.
There's silence.
Finally, my favorite student, she looks me straight in the eye, and she says, "The reading sucked."
It's boring, who cares, and it sucks."
I'm totally clueless.
I have no idea what to do next.
The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses.
These guys are blown up a couple million times.
The real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick.
But what a lot of people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick."
Now, the story that I start telling my kids, it starts out like a horror story.
Don't get too attached to him.
Maybe he ate something bad for lunch.
And then things get really horrible, as his skin rips apart, and he sees a virus coming out from his insides.
If you see this, and you're a bacterium, this is like your worst nightmare.
But if you're a virus and you see this, you cross those little legs of yours and you think, "We rock."
Because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium.
A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it.
And now that we've gotten rid of the bacteria DNA, the virus DNA takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses.
Because, you see, DNA is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make.
So this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots.
The workers still come the next day, they do their job, but they're following different instructions.
So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses -- that is, until it's so filled with viruses that it bursts.
But that's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria.
(Laughter) When a secret agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little espionage.
Here, this cloaked, secret agent virus is slipping his DNA into the bacterial cell, but here's the kicker: It doesn't do anything harmful -- not at first.
Instead, it silently slips into the bacteria's own DNA, and it just stays there like a terrorist sleeper cell, waiting for instructions.
So now we have a whole extended bacteria family, filled with virus sleeper cells.
They're just happily living together until a signal happens and bam! -- all of the DNA pops out.
It takes control of these cells, turns them into virus-making factories, and they all burst, a huge, extended bacteria family, all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts, the viruses taking over the bacterium.
So now you understand how viruses can attack cells.
There are two ways: On the left is what we call the lytic way, where the viruses go right in and take over the cells.
So this stuff is not that hard, right?
And now all of you understand it.
But if you've graduated from high school, I can almost guarantee you've seen this information before.
But I bet it was presented in a way that it didn't exactly stick in your mind.
So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so much?
Well, there were a couple of reasons.
First of all, I can guarantee you you that their textbooks didn't have secret agent viruses, and they didn't have horror stories.
You know, in the communication of science, there is this obsession with seriousness.
It kills me. I'm not kidding.
I used to work for an educational publisher, and as a writer, I was always told never to use stories or fun, engaging language, because then my work might not be viewed as "serious" and "scientific."
And then we have, of course, as any good scientist has to have ...
explosions!
But if a textbook seems too much fun, it's somehow unscientific.
If we want to summarize that story that I told you earlier, we could start by saying, "These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium."
The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: "Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium."
For example, I told you that viruses have DNA.
They have something called RNA instead.
Then it would be accurate, but it would be completely impossible to understand.
You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it's like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can't just tell a story.
It's like science has become that horrible storyteller that we all know who gives us all the details nobody cares about, where you're like, "Oh, I met my friend for lunch the other day, and she was wearing these ugly jeans.
Or even worse, science education is becoming like that guy who always says, "Actually."
You want to be like, "Oh, dude, we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in total darkness."
And that guy's like, "Actually, it was 87.3 miles."
And you're like, "Actually, shut up! I'm just trying to tell a story."
Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection.
We have to convince our audience that what we're talking about matters.
But just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that the main point still comes across.
I'm reminded of what the architect Mies van der Rohe said, and I paraphrase, when he said that sometimes, you have to lie in order to tell the truth.
I think this sentiment is particularly relevant to science education.
That's not true at all.
I'm currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds.
If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their chances of success in science.
But if a young learner can't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success.
This needs to stop ...
But I think that's unlikely.
There's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple, understandable ways.
I dream of a Wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler can understand.
And I myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that I put on YouTube.
The feedback that I get is sometimes misspelled and it's often written in LOLcats, (Laughter) but nonetheless, it's so appreciative, so thankful that I know this is the right way we should be communicating science.
Pick up a camera, start to write a blog, whatever, but leave out the seriousness, leave out the jargon.
Thank you.
This is about a hidden corner of the labor market.
So think, for instance, of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition, or somebody who's caring for a dependent adult, or a parent with complex child care needs.
Their availability for work can be such that it's, "A few hours today.
Maybe I can work tomorrow, but I don't know if and when yet."
And it's extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly.
Imagine that you run a cafe.
In reality, no recruitment agency wants to handle that sort of business, so you are going to muddle by, understaffed.
And it's not just caterers, it's hoteliers, it's retailers, it's anyone who provides services to the public or businesses.
They do exist. Here's how they work.
So in this example, a distribution company has said, we've got a rush order that we've got to get out of the warehouse tomorrow morning.
Everybody on this screen is genuinely available at those specific hours tomorrow.
Of course, they're all trained to work in warehouses.
You can select as many of them as you want.
They're from multiple agencies.
It's calculated the charge rate for each person for this specific booking.
And it's monitoring their reliability.
They're likely to be more expensive.
In an alternative view of this pool of local, very flexible people, here's a market research company, and it's inducted maybe 25 local people in how to do street interviewing.
And they've got a new campaign. They want to run it next week.
And they'll then decide when to do their street interviews.
But is there more that could be done for this corner of the labor market?
Imagine that a young woman -- base of the economic pyramid, very little prospect of getting a job -- what economic activity could she theoretically engage in?
Well, she might be willing to work odd hours in a call center, in a reception area, in a mail room.
She may be interested in providing local services to her community: babysitting, local deliveries, pet care.
She may have possessions that she would like to trade at times she doesn't need them.
She might have a bike, a video games console she only uses occasionally.
And you're probably thinking -- because you're all very web-aware -- yes, and we're in the era of collaborative consumption, so she can go online and do all this.
These are good sites, but I believe we can go a step further.
And the key to that is a philosophy that we call modern markets for all.
If you're a Wall Street trader, you now take it for granted that you sell your financial assets in a system of markets that identifies the most profitable opportunities for you in real time, executes on that in microseconds within the boundaries you've set.
It manages counterparty risk in incredibly sophisticated ways.
What have we gained at the bottom of the economy in terms of markets in the last 20 years?
Basically classified adverts with a search facility.
So why do we have this disparity between these incredibly sophisticated markets at the top of the economy that are increasingly sucking more and more activity and resource out of the main economy into this rarefied level of trading, and what the rest of us have?
A modern market is more than a website; it's a web of interoperable marketplaces, back office mechanisms, regulatory regimes, settlement mechanisms, liquidity sources and so on.
In the early days of this modern markets technology, the financial institutions worked out how they could leverage their buying power, their back office processes, their relationships, their networks to shape these new markets that would create all this new activity.
But throughout the economy, there are facilities that could likewise leverage a new generation of markets for the benefit of all of us.
And those facilities -- I'm talking about things like the mechanisms that prove our identity, the licensing authorities that know what each of us is allowed to do legally at any given time, the processes by which we resolve disputes through official channels.
And the policymakers who sit on top of them are, I suggest, simply not thinking about how those facilities could be used to underpin a whole new era of markets.
Like everyone else, those policymakers are taking it for granted that modern markets are the preserve of organizations powerful enough to create them for themselves.
Suppose tomorrow morning the prime minister of Britain or the president of the U.S., or the leader of any other developed nation, woke up and said, "I'm never going to be able to create all the jobs I need in the current climate.
Our government didn't design the national lottery, it didn't fund the national lottery, it doesn't operate the national lottery.
This act defines what a national lottery will look like.
I believe we could.
So imagine that policymakers outlined a facility.
Let's call it national e-markets, NEMs for short.
Think of it as a regulated public utility.
And government has certain benefits it can uniquely bestow on these markets.
It's about public spending going through these markets to buy public services at the local level.
So, taxi journeys might be one example.
And there are certain obligations that should go with those benefits to be placed on the operators, and the key one is, of course, that the operators pay for everything, including all the interfacing into the public sector.
So imagine that the operators make their return by building a percentage markup into each transaction.
Imagine that there's a concession period defined of maybe 15 years in which they can take all these benefits and run with them.
And imagine that the consortia who bid to run it are told, whoever comes in at the lowest percentage markup on each transaction to fund the whole thing will get the deal.
This is now in the hands of the consortium.
It doesn't bother the taxpayer necessarily.
And there would be no constraints on alternative markets.
But it could be very different, because having access to those state-backed facilities could incentivize this consortium to seriously invest in the service.
So this is a local person potentially deciding whether to enter the babysitting market.
This kind of data can become routine.
And this data can be used by investors.
So if there's a problem with a shortage of babysitters in some parts of the country and the problem is nobody can afford the vetting and training, an investor can pay for it and the system will tithe back the enhanced earnings of the individuals for maybe the next two years.
This is a world of atomized capitalism.
That's what a lot of people said about turbo trading in financial exchanges 20 years ago.
Do not underestimate the transformative power of truly modern markets.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I thought, why don't I make her an interactive Mother's Day card using the Scratch software that I'd been developing with my research group at the MIT Media Lab?
We developed it so that people could easily create their own interactive stories and games and animations, and then share their creations with one another.
So I thought, this would be an opportunity to use Scratch to make an interactive card for my mom.
Before making my own Mother's Day card, I thought I would take a look at the Scratch website.
So over the last several years, kids around the world ages 8 and up, have shared their projects, and I thought, I wonder if, of those three million projects, whether anyone else has thought to put up Mother's Day cards.
So in the search box I typed in "Mother's Day," and I was surprised and delighted to see a list of dozens and dozens of Mother's Day cards that showed up on the Scratch website, many of them just in the past 24 hours by procrastinators just like myself.
(Music) In this one, the creator told a narrative about how she had Googled to find out when Mother's Day was happening.
(Typing) And then once she found out when Mother's Day was happening, she delivered a special Mother's Day greeting of how much she loved her mom.
So I really enjoyed looking at these projects and interacting with these projects.
In fact, I liked it so much that, instead of making my own project, I sent my mom links to about a dozen of these projects. (Laughter) And actually, she reacted exactly the way that I hoped that she would.
She wrote back to me and she said, "I'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make Mother's Day cards for their mothers."
So my mom was happy, and that made me happy, but actually I was even happier for another reason.
As they created their interactive Mother's Day cards, you could see that they were really becoming fluent with new technologies.
What do I mean by fluent?
I mean that they were able to start expressing themselves and to start expressing their ideas.
When you become fluent with language, it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend.
And it's similar with new technologies.
By writing, be creating these interactive Mother's Day cards, these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies.
Now maybe you won't be so surprised by this, because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology.
I mean, all of us have heard young people referred to as "digital natives."
But actually I'm sort of skeptical about this term.
I'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives.
When you really look at it, how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies?
You often see them in situations like this, or like this, and there's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming.
But that doesn't really make you fluent.
So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies.
And I'm really interested in seeing, how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies?
And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs, or code.
So, increasingly, people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code.
You know, in recent years, there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code.
You look online, you'll see places like Codecademy and events like CoderDojo and sites like Girls Who Code, or Black Girls Code.
You know, just at the beginning of this year, at the turn of the new year, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012.
A few months later, the country of Estonia decided that all of its first graders should learn to code.
about whether all the children there should learn to code.
When many people think of coding, they think of it as something that only a very narrow sub-community of people are going to be doing, and they think of coding looking like this.
And in fact, if this is what coding is like, it will only be a narrow sub-community of people with special mathematical skills and technological background that can code.
Let me show you about what it's like to code in Scratch.
So in Scratch, to code, you just snap blocks together.
In this case, you take a move block, snap it into a stack, and the stacks of blocks control the behaviors of the different characters in your game or your story, in this case controlling the big fish.
After you've created your program, you can click on "share," and then share your project with other people, so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well.
So, of course, making a fish game isn't the only thing you can do with Scratch.
Of the millions of projects on the Scratch website, there's everything from animated stories to school science projects to anime soap operas to virtual construction kits to recreations of classic video games to political opinion polls to trigonometry tutorials to interactive artwork, and, yes, interactive Mother's Day cards.
So I think there's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this, to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world.
And it doesn't just stay on the screen.
You can also code to interact with the physical world around you.
Here's an example from Hong Kong, where some kids made a game and then built their own physical interface device and had a light sensor, so the light sensor detects the hole in the board, so as they move the physical saw, the light sensor detects the hole and controls the virtual saw on the screen and saws down the tree.
We're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us.
This is an example from a new version of Scratch that we'll be releasing in the next few months, and we're looking again to be able to push you in new directions.
Here's an example.
So it's a little bit like Microsoft Kinect, where you interact with gestures in the world.
But instead of just playing someone else's game, you get to create the games, and if you see someone else's game, you can just say "see inside," and you can look at the stacks of blocks that control it.
So there's a new block that says how much video motion there is, and then, if there's so much video motion, it will then tell the balloon to pop.
The same way that this uses the camera to get information into Scratch, you can also use the microphone.
Here's an example of a project using the microphone.
So I'm going to let all of you control this game using your voices.
(Crickets chirping) (Shouts) (Chomping) (Laughter) (Applause) As kids are creating projects like this, they're learning to code, but even more importantly, they're coding to learn.
Because as they learn to code, it enables them to learn many other things, opens up many new opportunities for learning.
Again, it's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing.
When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things.
When you learn to read, you can then read to learn.
And it's the same thing with coding.
If you learn to code, you can code to learn.
Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious.
You learn more about how computers work.
But that's just where it starts.
When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things.
Let me show you an example.
Here's another project, and I saw this when I was visiting one of the computer clubhouses.
These are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies.
So this was a game where the big fish eats the little fish, but he wanted to keep score, so that each time the big fish eats the little fish, the score would go up and it would keep track, and he didn't know how to do that.
So I showed him.
In Scratch, you can create something called a variable.
And that creates some new blocks for you, and also creates a little scoreboard that keeps track of the score, so each time I click on "change score," it increments the score.
So I showed this to the clubhouse member -- let's call him Victor -- and Victor, when he saw that this block would let him increment the score, he knew exactly what to do.
He took the block and he put it into the program exactly where the big fish eats the little fish.
So then, each time the big fish eats the little fish, he will increment the score, and the score will go up by one.
And it's in fact working.
And he saw this, and he was so excited, he reached his hand out to me, and he said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
And what went through my mind was, how often is it that teachers are thanked by their students for teaching them variables? (Laughter) It doesn't happen in most classrooms, but that's because in most classrooms, when kids learn about variables, they don't know why they're learning it.
When you learn ideas like this in Scratch, you can learn it in a way that's really meaningful and motivating for you, that you can understand the reason for learning variables, and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better.
Victor had, I'm sure, been taught about variables in schools, but he really didn't -- he wasn't paying attention.
Now he had a reason for learning variables.
So when you learn through coding, and coding to learn, you're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things.
So as kids like Victor are creating projects like this, they're learning important concepts like variables, but that's just the start.
As Victor worked on this project and created the scripts, he was also learning about the process of design, how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged, functioning project like you see here.
So he was learning many different core principles of design, about how to experiment with new ideas, how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts, how to collaborate with other people on your projects, about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong, how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things aren't working well.
Now those are important skills that aren't just relevant for coding.
Now, who knows if Victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist?
It's probably not so likely, but regardless of what he does, he'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned.
Again, it's useful to think about this analogy with language.
When you become fluent with reading and writing, it's not something that you're doing just to become a professional writer.
Very few people become professional writers.
Again, the same thing with coding.
Most people won't grow up to become professional computer scientists or programmers, but those skills of thinking creatively, reasoning systematically, working collaboratively -- skills you develop when you code in Scratch -- are things that people can use no matter what they're doing in their work lives.
And it's not just about your work life.
Coding can also enable you to express your ideas and feelings in your personal life.
Let me end with just one more example.
So this is an example that came from after I had sent the Mother's Day cards to my mom, she decided that she wanted to learn Scratch.
So she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday Scratch card.
Now this project is not going to win any prizes for design, and you can rest assured that my 83-year-old mom is not training to become a professional programmer or computer scientist.
But working on this project enabled her to make a connection to someone that she cares about and enabled her to keep on learning new things and continuing to practice her creativity and developing new ways of expressing herself.
If you're interested in giving it a try, I'd encourage you to go to the Scratch website.
It's scratch.mit.edu, and give a try at coding.
Thanks very much. (Applause)
What's your name? Where are you from?
Have you ever been divorced?
What gender do you like to sleep with?
We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves.
We bond together based on anything that we can -- music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.
We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices.
can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little box and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it.
The boxes are too narrow.
And this can get really dangerous.
So here's a disclaimer about me, though, before we get too deep into this.
I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s, two blocks from the epicenter of punk music.
I was shielded from the pains of bigotry and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing.
Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo.
So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy.
I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them.
They said they wouldn't let girls play.
So I went home, and I shaved my head, and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy."
I mean, who knows, right?
I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't.
So this is me when I was 11.
I was playing a kid named Walter in a movie called "Julian Po."
See, I was also a child actor, which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity, because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy.
In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl -- not my teachers at school, not my friends, not the directors that I worked with.
Kids would often come up to me in class and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple or grab my crotch to check what I was working with.
At sleepovers I would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me without outing myself.
It's worth mentioning though that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia.
I felt like I was performing this elaborate act.
I wouldn't have qualified as transgender.
If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy, they probably would have diagnosed me as something like gender dysmorphic and put me on hormones to stave off puberty.
But in my particular case, I just woke up one day when I was 14, and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again.
Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant, and I was ready to figure out who I actually was.
No one is exactly shocked.
(Laughter) But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents.
When I was 15, and I called my father to tell him that I had fallen in love, it was the last thing on either of our minds to discuss what the consequences were of the fact that my first love was a girl.
Three years later, when I fell in love with a man, neither of my parents batted an eyelash either.
See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood that I wasn't ever asked to define myself as any one thing at any point.
I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment.
So four, almost five years ago, Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate, was raising a lot of dust around this country.
But I was struck by the fact that America, a country with such a tarnished civil rights record, could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly.
And I remember watching the discussion on television and thinking how interesting it was that the separation of church and state was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country, between places where people believed in it and places where people didn't.
If this was a war with two disparate sides, I, by default, fell on team gay, because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight.
At the time I was just beginning to emerge from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag that saw me go from being a boy to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy, over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was, a tomboyish girl who liked both boys and girls depending on the person.
I loved these people, and I admired their freedom, but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble exploded into these raging debates where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television.
And this powerful awareness rolled in over me that I was a minority, and in my own home country, based on one facet of my character.
And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination?
Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was?
And then it occurred to me, perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship it might make it harder for them to do.
It might give them pause.
Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off.
For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it's about exposing the viewer to something new, a place they haven't gone before, but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of.
Life magazine introduced generations of people to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures.
So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits, mugshots if you will.
(Laughter) So this was a very large undertaking, and to do it we needed some help.
So I ran out in the freezing cold, and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to in February of about two years ago.
And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help.
And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York.
(Music) Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today.
My aim is to take a simple portrait of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way.
My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face.
(Music) "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
It's written in the Declaration of Independence.
We are failing as a nation to uphold the morals upon which we were founded.
There is no equality in the United States.
The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage.
Today in 29 states, more than half of this country, you can legally be fired just for your sexuality.
["Who is responsible for equality?"] I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer: "We are all responsible for equality."
So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City.
And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign.
I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people.
This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation.
I challenge you to look into the faces of these people and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being.
(Music) ["Self evident truths"] ["4,000 faces across America"] (Music) (Applause) iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that.
Almost 85,000 people watched that video, and then they started emailing us from all over the country, asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces.
And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated.
So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces.
That video was made in the spring of 2011, and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people.
Because if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary.
Visibility really is key.
Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy.
Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family, you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it or explore a new perspective on it.
Of course, in my travels I met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight, but I also met people who were Southern Baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian.
Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths.
But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting: Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us.
In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them.
At some point I realized that my mission to photograph "gays" was inherently flawed, because there were a million different shades of gay.
Here I was trying to help, and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid -- yet another box.
At some point I added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of one to 100 percent gay.
(Laughter) People didn't know what to do because they had never been presented with the option before.
Can you quantify your openness?
Once they got over the shock, though, by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks.
Let me be clear though -- and this is very important -- in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist.
And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative, because if any of you happen to be of the belief that sexual orientation is a choice, I invite you to go out and try to be grey.
(Laughter) What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional.
Because, for example, if you pass a law that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior, where exactly do you draw the line?
Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen?
After traveling so much and meeting so many people, let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens and every other polarization you can possibly think of within the LGBT community as there are within the human race.
Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs, and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle, just being other than straight doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common.
So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming, as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms, bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers, perhaps in watching this procession of humanity, something interesting and useful will begin to happen.
Hopefully these categories, these binaries, these over-simplified boxes will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away.
At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights.
It's too late.
So please don't greet us as strangers, greet us as your fellow human beings, period.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I have never, ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile: "Son, resist Gaddafi. Fight him.
Almost two years have passed since the Libyan Revolution broke out, inspired by the waves of mass mobilization in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions.
I joined forces with many other Libyans inside and outside Libya to call for a day of rage and to initiate a revolution against the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi.
Young Libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime, raising slogans of freedom, dignity, social justice.
They have shown an exemplary bravery in confronting the brutal dictatorship of Gaddafi.
They have shown a great sense of solidarity from the far east to the far west to the south.
Eventually, after a period of six months of brutal war and a toll rate of almost 50,000 dead, we managed to liberate our country and to topple the tyrant.
(Applause) However, Gaddafi left behind a heavy burden, a legacy of tyranny, corruption and seeds of diversions.
For four decades Gaddafi's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of Libyan society.
Aware of the devastation and the challenges, I was keen among many other women to rebuild the Libyan civil society, calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy and national reconciliation.
Almost 200 organizations were established in Benghazi during and immediately after the fall of Gaddafi -- almost 300 in Tripoli.
After a period of 33 years in exile, I went back to Libya, and with unique enthusiasm, I started organizing workshops on capacity building, on human development of leadership skills.
With an amazing group of women, I co-founded the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace, a movement of women, leaders, from different walks of life, to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace.
I met a very difficult environment in the pre-elections, an environment which was increasingly polarized, an environment which was shaped by the selfish politics of dominance and exclusion.
I led an initiative by the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace to lobby for a more inclusive electoral law, a law that would give every citizen, no matter what your background, the right to vote and run, and most importantly to stipulate on political parties the alternation of male and female candidates vertically and horizontally in their lists, creating the zipper list.
Women won 17.5 percent of the National Congress in the first elections ever in 52 years.
(Applause) However, bit by bit, the euphoria of the elections, and of the revolution as a whole, was fading out -- for every day we were waking up to the news of violence.
One day we wake up to the news of the desecration of ancient mosques and Sufi tombs.
On another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the American ambassador and the attack on the consulate.
On another day we wake up to the news of the assassination of army officers.
And every day, every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law.
Our society, shaped by a revolutionary mindset, became more polarized and has driven away from the ideals and the principles -- freedom, dignity, social justice -- that we first held.
Intolerance, exclusion and revenge became the icons of the [aftermath] of the revolution.
I'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice, made the wrong decision.
For elections did not bring peace and stability and security in Libya.
Did the zipper list and the alternation between female and male candidates bring peace and national reconciliation?
No, it didn't.
What is it, then?
Why does our society continue to be polarized and dominated with selfish politics of dominance and exclusion, by both men and women?
Maybe what was missing was not the women only, but the feminine values of compassion, mercy and inclusion.
Our society needs national dialogue and consensus-building more than it needed the elections, which only reinforced polarization and division.
We need to start acting as agents of compassion and mercy.
We need to develop a feminine discourse that not only honors but also implements mercy instead of revenge, collaboration instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion.
These are the ideals that a war-torn Libya needs desperately in order to achieve peace.
For peace has an alchemy, and this alchemy is about the intertwining, the alternation between the feminine and masculine perspectives.
That's the real zipper.
And we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically.
According to a Quranic verse "Salam" -- peace -- "is the word of the all-merciful God, raheem."
In turn, the word "raheem," which is known in all Abrahamic traditions, has the same root in Arabic as the word "rahem" -- womb -- symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female, from which all tribes, all peoples, have emanated from.
Thus we are told that "My mercy encompasses all things."
Thus we are told that "My mercy takes precedence over my anger."
May we all be granted a grace of mercy.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Welcome to Doha.
That is my job for the next two years, to design an entire master plan, and then for the next 10 years to implement it -- of course, with so many other people.
And of course, most of you have had three meals today, and probably will continue to have after this event.
So going in, what was Qatar in the 1940s?
We were about 11,000 people living here.
There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that.
Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages, fishing, or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water.
None of the glamour that you see today existed.
Resources weren't there to develop them.
Most people died around the age of 50.
So let's move to chapter two: the oil era.
1939, that's when they discovered oil.
What did it do?
It changed the face of this country, as you can see today and witness.
You might find this strange, but in my family we have different accents.
My mother has an accent that is so different to my father, and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country.
There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak.
And when the resources came, be it oil, we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration.
People started to get to know each other.
And we realized that there are some differences in accents.
So that is the chapter two: the oil era.
This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha.
So what's the population today?
It's 1.7 million people.
That is in less than 60 years.
The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years.
Lifespan has increased to 78.
Water consumption has increased to 430 liters.
From having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree, higher than any other nation.
I don't know if this was a reaction to lack of water.
But what is interesting about the story that I've just said?
Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water.
Not only cities that we're building, but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors.
Build a nice home, bring the architect, design my house.
These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn't.
So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain.
The question is how.
We have no water whatsoever.
Simply because of this gigantic, mammoth machine called desalination.
Energy is the key factor here. It changed everything.
So that is our lake, if you can see it.
That is our river.
That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water.
This is the best technology that this region could ever have: desalination.
So what are the risks?
I would say, perhaps if you look at the global facts, you will realize, of course I have to worry.
There is growing demand, growing population.
And there's predictions that we'll be nine billion by 2050.
There's also changing diets.
By elevating to a higher socio-economic level, they also change their diet.
They start eating more meat and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors.
This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know.
We only have two days of water reserve.
We import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land.
So we also face risks.
These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity.
The question is, is there a solution?
Is there a sustainable solution?
Indeed there is.
This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we've been working on over the past two years.
Let's start with the water.
So we know very well -- I showed you earlier -- that we need this energy.
So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy?
Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy?
And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need.
And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water.
And that is a lot of water.
That water will go then to the farmers, and the farmers will be able to water their plants, and they will be able then to supply society with food.
But in order to sustain the horizontal line -- because these are the projects, these are the systems that we will deliver -- we need to also develop the vertical line: system sustenance, high-level education, research and development, industries, technologies, to produce these technologies for application, and finally markets.
Without it we can't do anything.
So that's what we are planning to do.
Our objective is to be a millennium city, just like many millennium cities around: Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, Damascus, Cairo.
We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever as a city, to live in peace.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Organic chemists make molecules, very complicated molecules, by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering.
Well to start to do this, we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware.
And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time, we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry.
Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a cell that's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time, and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way.
So how are we doing this in the lab?
Well it requires software, it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks.
And so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software.
So what could this mean?
And this is what we're doing in the lab at the moment.
But to take baby steps to get there, first of all we want to look at drug design and production, or drug discovery and manufacturing.
Because if we can manufacture it after we've discovered it, we could deploy it anywhere.
We can download new diagnostics.
But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells, with your genes and your environment, and you print your own personal medicine.
Beam me up, Scotty.
(Applause)
So, I'm an artist.
I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends, and I found myself never having time for all the projects that I wanted to work on on my own.
And one day I was at work and I saw a talk by Stefan Sagmeister on TED, and it was called "The power of time off," and he spoke about how every seven years, he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired, and I just said, "I have to do that. I have to take a year off.
I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas."
So the first of those projects ended up being something I called "One Second Every Day."
Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life, chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until, you know, I can't record them anymore.
The purpose of this project is, one: I hate not remembering things that I've done in the past.
There's all these things that I've done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think, "Oh yeah, that's something that I did."
And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting, I would probably forget to record the video.
So the day -- the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me, because it's something that I really wanted to -- from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted to keep this project going until forever, and having missed that one second, I realized, it just kind of created this thing in my head where I never forgot ever again.
So if I live to see 80 years of age, I'm going to have a five-hour video that encapsulates 50 years of my life.
When I turn 40, I'll have a one-hour video that includes just my 30s.
Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that, as the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that, and visualization is the way to trigger memory.
You know, this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that I've done.
It's difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second.
On a good day, I'll have maybe three or four seconds that I really want to choose, but I'll just have to narrow it down to one, but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway.
It's also kind of a protest, a personal protest, against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert, and they're disturbing you.
They're watching the concert through their cell phone.
I was on a three-month road trip this summer.
It was something that I've been dreaming about doing my whole life, just driving around the U.S. and Canada and just figuring out where to go the next day, and it was kind of outstanding.
I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that I had to take my year off, so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time with friends working on a really neat project.
One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family, and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law, her intestine suddenly strangled one day, and we took her to the emergency room, and she was, she was in really bad shape.
We almost lost her a couple of times, and I was there with my brother every day.
It helped me realize something else during this project, is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult.
It's not -- we tend to take our cameras out when we're doing awesome things.
Or we're, "Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture."
But we rarely do that when we're having a bad day, and something horrible is happening.
It really helps you appreciate the good times.
It's not always a good day, so when you have a bad one, I think it's important to remember it, just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days.
The way to really remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it.
Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are, wouldn't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this?
I turned 31 last week, which is there.
I think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this.
I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it.
I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day.
Personally, I'm tired of forgetting, and this is a really easy thing to do.
And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities, and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day, so you can never forget that that day, you lived.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In my previous life, I was an artist.
I still paint. I love art.
I love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities, and I try to bring something of the artist in me in my politics, and I see part of my job today, the reason for being here, not just to campaign for my party, but for politics, and the role it can play for the better in our lives.
For 11 years, I was mayor of Tirana, our capital.
We faced many challenges.
But this use of colors was not just an artistic act.
Rather, it was a form of political action in a context when the city budget I had available after being elected amounted to zero comma something.
When we painted the first building, by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray of a facade, something unimaginable happened.
There was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident, or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star.
The French E.U. official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting.
"Because the colors you have ordered do not meet European standards," he replied.
And if you do not let us continue with our work, I will hold a press conference here, right now, right in this road, and we will tell people that you look to me just like the censors of the socialist realism era."
But I told him no, I'm sorry, compromise in colors is gray, and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime.
(Applause) So it's time for change.
The rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost.
The pride of people about their own place of living, and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal, barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space.
And when colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people.
And we made a poll, the most fascinating poll I've seen in my life.
Thirty-seven said no, we don't like it.
One day I remember walking along a street that had just been colored, and where we were in the process of planting trees, when I saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop.
"Why did you throw away the shutters?" I asked him.
"Well, because the street is safer now," they answered.
You can see it for yourself. There are colors, streetlights, new pavement with no potholes, trees. So it's beautiful; it's safe."
And indeed, it was beauty that was giving people this feeling of being protected.
And this was not a misplaced feeling.
The paint on the walls did not feed children, nor did it tend the sick or educate the ignorant, but it gave hope and light, and helped to make people see there could be a different way of doing things, a different spirit, a different feel to our lives, and that if we brought the same energy and hope to our politics, we could build a better life for each other and for our country.
We demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city, up to eight stories high, the tallest of them.
We planted 55,000 trees and bushes in the streets.
We established a green tax, and then everybody accepted it and all businessmen paid it regularly.
International organizations have invested a lot in Albania during these 20 years, not all of it well spent.
When I told the World Bank directors that I wanted them to finance a project to build a model reception hall for citizens precisely in order to fight endemic daily corruption, they did not understand me.
But people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks.
They were paying in order to skip the queue, the long queue.
The reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole, and, on the other hand, a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe.
We could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks, every week, but we could not change this corrupt practice.
"I'm convinced," I told a German official with the World Bank, "that it would be impossible for them to be bribed if they worked in Germany, in a German administration, just as I am convinced that if you put German officials from the German administration in those holes, they would be bribed just the same."
(Applause) It's not about genes.
It's also about environment and respect.
We built the bright new reception hall that made people, Tirana citizens, think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests.
The corruption in the state administration of countries like Albania -- it's not up to me to say also like Greece -- can be fought only by modernization.
Reinventing the government by reinventing politics itself is the answer, and not reinventing people based on a ready-made formula that the developed world often tries in vain to impose to people like us.
They take it for granted that, come what may, people have to follow them, while politics, more and more, fails to offer answers for their public concerns or the exigencies of the common people.
Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation.
Seen from those stairs, all politicians today seem the same, and politics has come to resemble a sport that inspires more aggressiveness and pessimism than social cohesion and the desire for civic protaganism.
Barack Obama won — (Applause) — because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks.
He did not know each and every one of them, but with an admirable ingenuity, he managed to transform them into activists by giving them all the possibility to hold in their hands the arguments and the instruments that each would need to campaign in his name by making his own campaign.
This is politics, not from top down, but from the bottom up, and sideways, and allowing everybody's voice to be heard is exactly what we need.
Politics is not just about leaders.
It's not just about politicians and laws.
It is about how people think, how they view the world around them, how they use their time and their energy.
When people say all politicians are the same, ask yourself if Obama was the same as Bush, if François Hollande is the same as Sarkozy.
When people say nothing can change, just stop and think what the world was like 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago.
Our world is defined by the pace of change.
We can all change the world.
I gave you a very small example of how one thing, the use of color, can make change happen.
President Roosevelt, he said, "Believe you can, and you are halfway there."
(Applause)
It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as today, when it's raining a lot.
And especially if you then ride with your bicycle, and pass these cars, then that's not very nice.
Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise.
The solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt.
Porous asphalt, a material that we use now in most of the highways in the Netherlands, it has pores and water can just rain through it, so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides, and you have a road that's easy to drive on, so no splash water anymore.
Also the noise will disappear in these pores.
Because it's very hollow, all the noise will disappear, so it's a very silent road.
First you get one stone, then several more, and more and more and more and more, and then they -- well, I will not do that. (Laughter) But they can damage your windshield, so you're not happy with that.
Sometimes you can create potholes with that.
Ha. He's ready.
Potholes, of course, that can become a problem, but we have a solution.
Here you see actually how the damage appears in this material.
It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones.
To solve this problem, we thought of self-healing materials.
If we can make this material self-healing, then probably we have a solution.
Then you need a machine, like you see here, that you can use for cooking -- an induction machine.
Induction can heat, especially steel; it's very good at that.
So a microwave is a similar system.
So I put the specimen in, which I'm now going to take out to see what happened.
So I said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens.
We tested a lot of specimens there, and then the government, they actually saw our results, and they thought, "Well, that's very interesting. We have to try that."
So they donated to us a piece of highway, 400 meters of the A58, where we had to make a test track to test this material.
So that's what we did here. You see where we were making the test road, and then of course this road will last several years without any damage. That's what we know from practice.
So we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab.
So actually, the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine -- this is the big version we have made to go on the real road -- if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road, which of course saves a lot of money.
And now you're of course curious if it also worked.
So we still have the specimen here. It's quite warm.
Let's see. Yeah, it worked.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was 11, I remember waking up one morning to the sound of joy in my house.
My father was listening to BBC News on his small, gray radio.
There was a big smile on his face which was unusual then, because the news mostly depressed him.
"The Taliban are gone!" my father shouted.
I didn't know what it meant, but I could see that my father was very, very happy.
"You can go to a real school now," he said.
A morning that I will never forget.
A real school.
You see, I was six when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and made it illegal for girls to go to school.
So for the next five years, I dressed as a boy to escort my older sister, who was no longer allowed to be outside alone, to a secret school.
It was the only way we both could be educated.
Each day, we took a different route so that no one would suspect where we were going.
We would cover our books in grocery bags so it would seem we were just out shopping.
The school was in a house, more than 100 of us packed in one small living room.
It was cozy in winter but extremely hot in summer.
We all knew we were risking our lives -- the teacher, the students and our parents.
We always wondered what they knew about us.
Do they know where we live?
We were scared, but still, school was where we wanted to be.
I was very lucky to grow up in a family where education was prized and daughters were treasured.
My grandfather was an extraordinary man for his time.
A total maverick from a remote province of Afghanistan, he insisted that his daughter, my mom, go to school, and for that he was disowned by his father.
But my educated mother became a teacher.
She retired two years ago, only to turn our house into a school for girls and women in our neighborhood.
And my father -- that's him -- he was the first ever in his family to receive an education.
There was no question that his children would receive an education, including his daughters, despite the Taliban, despite the risks.
To him, there was greater risk in not educating his children.
During Taliban years, I remember there were times I would get so frustrated by our life and always being scared and not seeing a future.
I would want to quit, but my father, he would say, "Listen, my daughter, you can lose everything you own in your life.
So do you still not want to continue?"
I was raised in a country that has been destroyed by decades of war.
Fewer than six percent of women my age have made it beyond high school, and had my family not been so committed to my education, I would be one of them.
Instead, I stand here a proud graduate of Middlebury College.
(Applause) When I returned to Afghanistan, my grandfather, the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters, was among the first to congratulate me.
He not only brags about my college degree, but also that I was the first woman, and that I am the first woman to drive him through the streets of Kabul.
(Applause) My family believes in me.
I dream big, but my family dreams even bigger for me.
That's why I am a global ambassador for 10x10, a global campaign to educate women.
That's why I cofounded SOLA, the first and perhaps only boarding school for girls in Afghanistan, a country where it's still risky for girls to go to school.
And I see their parents and their fathers who, like my own, advocate for them, despite and even in the face of daunting opposition.
Like Ahmed. That's not his real name, and I cannot show you his face, but Ahmed is the father of one of my students.
Less than a month ago, he and his daughter were on their way from SOLA to their village, and they literally missed being killed by a roadside bomb by minutes.
As he arrived home, the phone rang, a voice warning him that if he sent his daughter back to school, they would try again.
"Kill me now, if you wish," he said, "but I will not ruin my daughter's future because of your old and backward ideas."
It's not to say that our mothers aren't key in our success.
In fact, they're often the initial and convincing negotiators of a bright future for their daughters, but in the context of a society like in Afghanistan, we must have the support of men.
Under the Taliban, girls who went to school numbered in the hundreds -- remember, it was illegal.
But today, more than three million girls are in school in Afghanistan.
(Applause) Afghanistan looks so different from here in America.
I fear that these changes will not last much beyond the U.S. troops' withdrawal.
But when I am back in Afghanistan, when I see the students in my school and their parents who advocate for them, who encourage them, I see a promising future and lasting change.
To me, Afghanistan is a country of hope and boundless possibilities, and every single day the girls of SOLA remind me of that.
Like me, they are dreaming big.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Radical openness is still a distant future in the field of school education.
We have such a hard time figuring out that learning is not a place but an activity.
But I want to tell you the story of PISA, OECD's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world, and it's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat as an affair of domestic policy.
Look at how the world looked in the 1960s, in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school.
You can see the United States ahead of everyone else, and much of the economic success of the United States draws on its long-standing advantage as the first mover in education.
But in the 1970s, some countries caught up.
In the 1980s, the global expansion of the talent pool continued.
And the world didn't stop in the 1990s.
So in the '60s, the U.S. was first.
In the '90s, it was 13th, and not because standards had fallen, but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere.
Korea shows you what's possible in education.
So this tells us that, in a global economy, it is no longer national improvement that's the benchmark for success, but the best performing education systems internationally.
The trouble is that measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they have got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do.
Look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets, while employers say they cannot find the people with the skills they need.
And that tells you that better degrees don't automatically translate into better skills and better jobs and better lives.
So with PISA, we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly.
We were less interested in whether students can simply reproduce what they have learned in school, but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge in novel situations.
Now, some people have criticized us for this.
They say, you know, such a way of measuring outcomes is terribly unfair to people, because we test students with problems they haven't seen before.
In our latest assessment in 2009, we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy.
This chart shows you the performance of countries.
In red, sort of below OECD average.
You can see Shanghai, Korea, Singapore in Asia; Finland in Europe; Canada in North America doing really well.
You can also see that there is a gap of almost three and a half school years between 15-year-olds in Shanghai and 15-year-olds in Chile, and the gap grows to seven school years when you include the countries with really poor performance.
There's a world of difference in the way in which young people are prepared for today's economy.
With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity, in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances.
And we see that in some countries, the impact of social background on learning outcomes is very, very strong.
Opportunities are unequally distributed.
A lot of potential of young children is wasted.
We all want to be there, in the upper right quadrant, where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed.
Nobody, and no country, can afford to be there, where performance is poor and there are large social disparities.
But actually, if you look at how countries come out on this picture, you see there are a lot of countries that actually are combining excellence with equity.
These countries have moved on from providing excellence for just some to providing excellence for all, a very important lesson.
And that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems that believe they are mainly there to sort people.
And ever since those results came out, policymakers, educators, researchers from around the world have tried to figure out what's behind the success of those systems.
But let's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started PISA, and I'm giving them a colored bubble now.
And I'm making the size of the bubble proportional to the amount of money that countries spent on students.
If money would tell you everything about the quality of learning outcomes, you would find all the large bubbles at the top, no?
Spending per student only explains about, well, less than 20 percent of the performance variation among countries, and Luxembourg, for example, the most expensive system, doesn't do particularly well.
What you see is that two countries with similar spending achieve very different results.
You also see -- and I think that's one of the most encouraging findings -- that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries, and poor and badly-educated ones, a very, very important lesson.
The red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country's wealth.
One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well, and you can see Korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession.
And Korea also invests into long school days, which drives up costs further.
Last but not least, Koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop.
They invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things.
How can Korea afford all of this?
The answer is, students in Korea learn in large classes.
This is the blue bar which is driving costs down.
You go to the next country on the list, Luxembourg, and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for Korea, so Luxembourg spends the same per student as Korea does.
And basically, teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching.
So you can see two countries spent their money very differently, and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education.
Let's go back to the year 2000.
Remember, that was the year before the iPod was invented.
The first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller, no?
But there are some countries which have seen impressive improvements.
Germany, my own country, in the year 2000, featured in the lower quadrant, below average performance, large social disparities.
And remember, Germany, we used to be one of those countries that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees.
Very disappointing results.
And for the very first time, the public debate in Germany was dominated for months by education, not tax, not other kinds of issues, but education was the center of the public debate.
And then policymakers began to respond to this.
The federal government dramatically raised its investment in education.
A lot was done to increase the life chances of students with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage.
And what's really interesting is that this wasn't just about optimizing existing policies, but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying German education.
For example, traditionally, the education of the very young children was seen as the business of families, and you would have cases where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to kindergarten.
PISA has transformed that debate, and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in Germany.
A lot of change.
And the good news is, nine years later, you can see improvements in quality and equity.
Or take Korea, at the other end of the spectrum.
In the year 2000, Korea did already very well, but the Koreans were concerned that only a small share of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence.
They took up the challenge, and Korea was able to double the proportion of students achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading.
Well, if you only focus on your brightest students, you know what happens is disparities grow, and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction, but still, an impressive improvement.
A major overhaul of Poland's education helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools, turn around many of the lowest-performing schools, and raise performance by over half a school year.
And you can see other countries as well.
Portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system, raise quality and improve equity, and so did Hungary.
You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture.
And all that raises, of course, the question: What can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity, high levels of performance, and raised outcomes?
And, of course, the question is, can what works in one context provide a model elsewhere?
Of course, you can't copy and paste education systems wholesale, but these comparisons have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share.
Everybody agrees that education is important.
But the test of truth is, how do you weigh that priority against other priorities?
How do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers?
Would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer?
How do the media talk about schools and teachers?
And you know what's interesting? You won't believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school.
Those things really exist.
The other part is the belief that all children are capable of success.
You have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages.
You know, students are divided up, reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards.
But usually that is linked to very strong social disparities.
If you go to Japan in Asia, or Finland in Europe, parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed, and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior.
If I'm not born as a genius in math, I'd better study something else.
Nine out of 10 Japanese students say that it depends on my own investment, on my own effort, and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them.
In the past, different students were taught in similar ways.
High performers on PISA embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices.
They realize that ordinary students have extraordinary talents, and they personalize learning opportunities.
High-performing systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum.
Every student knows what matters.
Every student knows what's required to be successful.
And nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of its teachers.
They watch how they improve the performances of teachers in difficulties who are struggling, and how they structure teacher pay.
They provide an environment also in which teachers work together to frame good practice.
And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers.
In bureaucratic school systems, teachers are often left alone in classrooms with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching.
Now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom.
They enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy.
High-performing systems have made teachers and school principals inventive.
The high-performing systems have helped teachers and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher, the next school around their lives.
And the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems is that they achieve high performance across the entire system.
You've seen Finland doing so well on PISA, but what makes Finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools.
This is where success is systemic.
And how do they do that?
They invest resources where they can make the most difference.
They attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools, and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom.
That's also clear, and that's where some of the limits of international comparisons of PISA are.
And the example of PISA shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems.
You know, some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards.
You just can't rely on the people out there to help you with this. (Laughter) But PISA has shown what's possible in education.
And it has helped countries to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world's leaders.
Thank you.
(Applause)
"When the crisis came, the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models immediately became apparent."
"There is also a strong belief, which I share, that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis."
Now, you've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism.
But this is different.
The first quote is from Jean-Claude Trichet when he was governor of the European Central Bank.
The second quote is from the head of the UK Financial Services Authority.
Are these people implying that we don't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies?
"We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe, while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace."
What's happening here? How can this be possible?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes.
But there's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity.
To explain what this means and what this thing is, please let me quickly take a couple of steps back.
It was a random encounter when I was young, and since then, I've often wondered about the amazing success of physics in describing the reality we wake up in every day.
So you take a chunk of reality you want to understand and you translate it into mathematics.
Then, predictions can be made and tested.
We're actually really lucky that this works, because no one really knows why the thoughts in our heads should actually relate to the fundamental workings of the universe.
Despite the success, physics has its limits.
As Dirk Helbing pointed out in the last quote, we don't really understand the complexity that relates to us, that surrounds us.
This paradox is what got me interested in complex systems.
So these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts: swarms of birds or fish, ant colonies, ecosystems, brains, financial markets.
These are just a few examples.
So what do we know about complex systems?
Well, it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction.
This means you can forget about the equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the interactions, so you can actually forget about the equations and you just start to look at the interactions.
And it gets even better, because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence.
So this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts to show a behavior which cannot be understood or predicted by looking at the components of the system.
So the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts.
And all of this also means that you can forget about the individual parts of the system, how complex they are.
So if it's a cell or a termite or a bird, you just focus on the rules of interaction.
As a result, networks are ideal representations of complex systems.
The nodes in the network are the system's components, and the links are given by the interactions.
So what equations are for physics, complex networks are for the study of complex systems.
This approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics, biology, computer science, the social sciences, but what about economics?
Where are economic networks?
This is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature.
The study we published last year, called "The Network of Global Corporate Control," was the first extensive analysis of economic networks.
Similar data has been around for quite some time.
So here the nodes are companies, people, governments, foundations, etc.
And the links represent the shareholding relations, so shareholder A has x percent of the shares in company B.
So ownership networks reveal the patterns of shareholding relations.
In this little example, you can see a few financial institutions with some of the many links highlighted.
Now, you may think that no one looked at this before because ownership networks are really, really boring to study.
Well, as ownership is related to control, as I shall explain later, looking at ownership networks actually can give you answers to questions like, who are the key players?
How are they organized? Are they isolated?
Are they interconnected?
I think this is an interesting question.
And it has implications for systemic risk.
This is a measure of how vulnerable a system is overall.
A high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability, because then the stress can spread through the system like an epidemic.
Scientists have sometimes criticized economists who believe ideas and concepts are more important than empirical data, because a foundational guideline in science is: Let the data speak. OK. Let's do that.
So we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007.
This is a lot of data, and because we wanted to find out "who rules the world," we decided to focus on transnational corporations, or "TNCs," for short.
These are companies that operate in more than one country, and we found 43,000.
In the next step, we built the network around these companies, so we took all the TNCs' shareholders, and the shareholders' shareholders, etc., all the way upstream, and we did the same downstream, and ended up with a network containing 600,000 nodes and one million links.
This is the TNC network which we analyzed.
So you have a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all the players, and in the center, there's this tiny but dominant core which is made up of highly interconnected companies.
To give you a better picture, think about a metropolitan area.
So you have the suburbs and the periphery, you have a center, like a financial district, then the core will be something like the tallest high-rise building in the center.
And we already see signs of organization going on here.
OK, so now we analyzed the structure, so how does this relate to the control?
Well, ownership gives voting rights to shareholders.
This is the normal notion of control.
And there are different models which allow you to compute the control you get from ownership.
If you have more than 50 percent of the shares in a company, you get control, but usually, it depends on the relative distribution of shares.
About 10 years ago, Mr. Tronchetti Provera had ownership and control in a small company, which had ownership and control in a bigger company.
This ended up giving him control in Telecom Italia with a leverage of 26.
So this means that, with each euro he invested, he was able to move 26 euros of market value through the chain of ownership relations.
Now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the TNCs' value.
This allowed us to assign a degree of influence to each shareholder.
If you want to compute the flow in an ownership network, this is what you have to do.
It's actually not that hard to understand.
Let me explain by giving you this analogy.
So think about water flowing in pipes, where the pipes have different thickness.
So similarly, the control is flowing in the ownership networks and is accumulating at the nodes.
So what did we find after computing all this network control?
Now remember, we started out with 600,000 nodes, so these 737 top players make up a bit more than 0.1 percent.
They're mostly financial institutions in the US and the UK.
And it gets even more extreme.
What should you take home from all of this?
The high degree of interconnectivity of the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to the global economy.
And we could easily reproduce the TNC network with a few simple rules.
This means that its structure is probably the result of self-organization.
It's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system, so it's probably not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy.
Our study "is an impression of the moon's surface.
It's not a street map."
So you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt, yet it "gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of finance."
We hope to have opened the door for more such research in this direction, so the remaining unknown terrain will be charted in the future.
We're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view.
But this journey has only just begun, so we will have to wait before we see the first results.
Now there is still a big problem, in my opinion.
Ideas relating to finance, economics, politics, society, are very often tainted by people's personal ideologies.
I really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found.
Reality is so complex, we need to move away from dogma.
But this is just my own personal ideology.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever?
And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief?
Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have?
That's the million-dollar question, right?
And why is the forbidden so erotic?
And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples?
(Laughter) It's kind of the fatal erotic blow, isn't it?
And when you love, how does it feel?
These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love.
So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire.
A crisis of desire, as in owning the wanting -- desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity -- desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies.
You know, this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty.
So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult?
And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think, is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs.
On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence.
But we also have an equally strong need -- men and women -- for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise -- you get the gist.
So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms.
Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship.
But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long.
Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one.
Give me comfort, give me edge.
Give me novelty, give me familiarity.
Give me predictability, give me surprise.
(Laughter) (Applause) So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right?
Because I think, in some way -- and I'll come back to that -- but the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination.
So why does good sex so often fade?
How do they relate, and how do they conflict?
Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
So if there is a verb, for me, that comes with love, it's "to have."
And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is "to want."
In love, we want to have, we want to know the beloved.
We want to neutralize the tensions.
In desire, we want an Other, somebody on the other side that we can go visit, that we can go spend some time with, that we can go see what goes on in their red-light district.
Or in other words, I sometimes say, fire needs air.
Desire needs space.
And when it's said like that, it's often quite abstract.
And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with "Mating in Captivity," and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner?
And across culture, across religion, and across gender -- except for one -- there are a few answers that just keep coming back.
Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire.
But then the second group is even more interesting.
Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident.
Probably the biggest turn-on across the board.
I look at this person -- by the way, in desire people rarely talk about it, when we are blended into one, five centimeters from each other.
It's when I'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance, where this person that is already so familiar, so known, is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious, somewhat elusive.
And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan, lies that movement toward the other.
Because sometimes, as Proust says, mystery is not about traveling to new places, but it's about looking with new eyes.
Nobody needs anybody.
Needing them is a shot down and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge.
(Laughter) For good reasons, right?
And then the third group of answers usually would be: when I'm surprised, when we laugh together, as somebody said to me in the office today, when he's in his tux, so I said, you know, it's either the tux or the cowboy boots.
But basically it's when there is novelty.
But novelty isn't about new positions.
Novelty is, what parts of you do you bring out?
Because in some way one could say sex isn't something you do, eh?
Sex is a place you go.
It's a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others.
So where do you go in sex?
What parts of you do you connect to?
What do you seek to express there?
Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union?
Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything?
And it's the poetic of that language that I'm interested in, which is why I began to explore this concept of erotic intelligence.
You know, animals have sex.
We are the only ones who have an erotic life, which means that it's sexuality transformed by the human imagination.
We are the only ones who can make love for hours, have a blissful time, multiple orgasms, and touch nobody, just because we can imagine it.
The ability to imagine it, as if it's happening, to experience it as if it's happening, while nothing is happening and everything is happening, at the same time.
So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex.
And if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate.
What are the ingredients?
Imagination, playfulness, novelty, curiosity, mystery.
But the central agent is really that piece called the imagination.
And I looked at it, looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community, there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life.
Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death.
They knew how to keep themselves alive.
And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, "I want more sex," but generally, people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of Eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them.
"I turn off my desires when ..."
And then I began to ask the reverse question.
(Laughter) So I turn myself on when, I turn on my desires, I wake up when ...
Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love -- mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other -- are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct.
(Laughter) But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another.
So I want to draw that little image for you, because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs, we are born with that.
Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore.
That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory need, curiosity, discovery.
And then at some point they turn around and they look at you.
And if you tell them, "Hey kiddo, the world's a great place.
But if on this side there is somebody who says, "I'm worried. I'm anxious. I'm depressed.
My partner hasn't taken care of me in so long.
Don't we have everything you need together, you and I?"
then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize.
Some of us will come back, came back a long time ago, and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other.
I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection.
And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won't know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself.
Translate this into adult language.
It starts very young.
Are you going to be angry with me?"
And those are often the people that will tell you, "In the beginning, it was super hot."
Because in the beginning, the growing intimacy wasn't yet so strong that it actually led to the decrease of desire.
So in this dilemma about reconciling these two sets of fundamental needs, there are a few things that I've come to understand erotic couples do.
One, they have a lot of sexual privacy.
They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them.
Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm.
It's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc., maybe where you leave the Agile program -- (Laughter) And you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible.
They don't really do well together.
Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes.
It's pretty much like the moon.
But what they know is they know how to resurrect it.
They know how to bring it back.
Committed sex is premeditated sex.
It's focus and presence.
Merry Valentine's.
(Applause)
The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology and biology, in the last 10 years, are really extraordinary -- to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine.
But there was something else that I've noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm ... yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy.
The science writers and editors -- I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science -- and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works.
And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly.
And that's what I want to talk about today. (Laughter) Ah, you laugh, you fools. (Laughter) (Voice: Can we finish up a little early?) (Laughter) Yeah, we need the time!
Stephen Petranek: At first, it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11 happened, and I thought, ah, God, I can't go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is going to end.
Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago.
President George W. Bush: Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it.
SP: I agree with the president.
He wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a two-trillion-dollar federal budget, which will land us back into deficit spending real fast.
But terrorists aren't the only threat we face.
I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget -- which is two one hundredths of that budget -- and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I'm going to talk to you about, the vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So, I hope you find this both fascinating -- I'm fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit -- to me these are Richard's cockroaches.
So let's start. Number 10: we lose the will to survive.
We live in an incredible age of modern medicine.
We are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago.
The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed.
And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced.
Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal lifespan.
A female child born tomorrow, on average -- median -- will live to age 83.
Now the problem with all of this, getting older, is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide.
We don't really have mental health insurance in this country, and it's -- (Applause) -- it's really a crime.
But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills.
Pills alone don't do it, especially in clinically depressed people.
Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with.
Moving on. Number nine -- don't laugh -- aliens invade Earth.
Ten years ago, you couldn't have found an astronomer -- well, very few astronomers -- in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system.
1995, we found three. The count now is up to 80 -- we're finding about two or three a month.
All of the ones we've found, by the way, are in this little, teeny, tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe.
In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect.
It's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea.
Although every time I go to Pompeii, I'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald's on every street corner, too.
So, I don't know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there's a great likelihood. I really believe this, and I don't believe in aliens, and I don't believe there are any aliens on the Earth or anything like that. But there's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own.
Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen?
And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it.
We can look at our own history. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, "Advanced Western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization."
If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization.
It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them.
How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species?
Secondly -- and you're going to hear more from me about this -- we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation.
If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way.
And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point.
(Applause) It'll also help us a lot, if we meet an advanced civilization along the way, if we're trying to be an advanced civilization. Number eight -- (Voice: Steve, that's what I'm doing after TED.) (Laughter) (Applause) SP: You've got it! You've got the job.
Number eight: the ecosystem collapses.
Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article.
It wasn't really a research report; it was a screed.
We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000.
California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years.
Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree.
You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem.
And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So, what do we do about this? What are the solutions?
The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble until it's almost too late.
National Science Foundation needs to say -- you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another.
There are people at the National Science Foundation who get to say, this is the most important thing.
This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about.
Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around.
There's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the Georges Bank, or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It's a no-take fishing zone.
Let it recover, before we start logging again.
(Applause) Number seven: particle accelerator mishap.
You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber?
One of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world.
A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought.
This spring -- there's a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island -- this spring, it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes.
They are expecting to create little, tiny black holes.
They expect them to evaporate. (Laughter) I hope they're right. (Laughter) Other collider experiments -- there's one that's going to take place next summer at CERN -- have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like antimatter. Whenever they hit other matter, they destroy it and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they're probably right.
But, all around the world, in Japan, in Canada, there's talk about this, of reviving this in the United States.
But there's talk of building very big accelerators.
We need to -- we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments.
We have an electromagnetic field around the Earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles, like protons.
And in my opinion, we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth.
Bt corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn borer.
You may of heard of it -- heard it called StarLink, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago.
But the thing that's alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where Bt corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found Bt corn genes in wild corn plants.
Now, corn originated, we think, in Mexico.
This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world, from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world's food supply in very short order.
So, what do we do about that?
We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants.
It's that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field.
When the StarLink disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn't get it straightened out for months. That's kind of crazy.
Number five, one of my favorites: reversal of the Earth's magnetic field.
Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history.
North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa.
But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the Earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are -- well, basically, we're gonna fry. (Laughter) (Voice: Steve, I have some additional hats downstairs.) SP: So, what can we do about this? Oh, by the way, we're overdue.
It's been 780,000 years since this happened.
So, it should have happened about 480,000 years ago.
Oh, and here's one other thing.
Scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent.
One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have -- you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer.
So, there's a fairly simple solution to this.
It's not hard: it's just three oxygen atoms.
If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the Earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch.
We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth's ozone layer.
(Applause) Number four: giant solar flares.
Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the Sun that bombard the Earth with high-speed subatomic particles.
So far, our atmosphere has done, and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this.
Occasionally, we get a flare from the Sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity.
But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our Sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our Sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long.
Obviously, we don't want one of those. (Laughter) There's a flip side to it. In studying stars like our Sun, we've found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent.
One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here.
So, what can we do about this?
(Laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects.
I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993.
This is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science.
Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there.
And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen.
The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum.
In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people.
That was back when the population was around 100 million people.
The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans.
We've all learned what -- the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax.
And we know staph can do amazing things.
So, what can we do about it?
It is nuts. We give antibiotics -- (Applause) -- every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all.
This is like being at war and giving somebody your secret code.
We're telling the germs out there how to fight us.
Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster.
You know, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, really, you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, "You know, there's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy," and they're going to hoot you off the stage.
And now, if you went into one of those conventions and you said, "Well, I don't think black holes are out there," they'd hoot you off the stage.
We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone, our galaxy.
And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes. And they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can't see them.
Most of them should be in orbit around something.
But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit.
And also, space is incredibly vast.
So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote.
But it only has to get close, about a billion miles away, one of these things.
And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180.
For three months out of the year, they go to 50 below zero.
Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race.
And finally, number one: biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth.
The important thing to remember here -- this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big.
In 1908, just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles.
It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs.
Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years.
In 1989, a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from Earth.
Nothing to worry about, right?
It passed directly through Earth's orbit. We were in that that spot six hours earlier.
A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up -- Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing.
An asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions.
Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which -- some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, it's in the Kuiper belt.
There's also something a little farther out, called the Oort cloud.
There are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock -- comets, really -- out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin, in towards the Sun and pass reasonably close to us.
Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter.
So you say, yeah, well, what are really the chances of this happening?
This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman at the Southwest Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago.
We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don't die in airplane accidents, and we're not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable.
We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold.
NASA's spending three million dollars a year, three million bucks -- that is like pocket change -- to search for asteroids.
Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that's out there, and if it might hit Earth, and when it might hit Earth.
And they're trying to do that.
But it's going to take them 10 years, at spending three million dollars a year, and even then, they claim they'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued.
We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive.
We really need a dedicated observatory.
You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of, amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs.
We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets.
Part two of the solutions: we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now, a year ago, we did an amazing thing.
We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.
And these guys orbited a 30 -- or no, about a 22-mile long asteroid called Eros.
And then, of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things, where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything, and then, at the last minute, they landed.
When the mission was over, they actually landed on the thing.
We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It's not a big deal.
Now, the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing is that you don't have anything to push against in space, because there's no air.
A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don't really have anything big enough to melt a 22-mile long asteroid, or vaporize it, would be more like it.
But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we've done our math right, would keep it from hitting Earth.
This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it.
We know about this stuff.
Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now.
Knowledge is power.
The worst thing we can do is say, jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. (Laughter) That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future.
Thank you.
The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that's actually one of the oldest questions in economics, dating back to at least before Adam Smith.
And that is, why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior?
Now, many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question, and as a field we've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this.
What I'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that I've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save.
Let's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD, or the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
OECD countries, by and large, you should think about these as the richest, most industrialized countries in the world.
And by joining the OECD, they were affirming a common commitment to democracy, open markets and free trade.
So all the way over on the left of this graph, what you see is many OECD countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year, and some OECD countries saving over a third of their GDP per year.
It should be noted, of course, that the United States and the U.K. are the next in line.
Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates, how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences?
Let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ.
Linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now.
Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm Chinese.
I grew up in the Midwest of the United States.
And something I realized quite early on was that the Chinese language forced me to speak about and -- in fact, more fundamentally than that -- ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways.
Suppose I were talking with you and I was introducing you to my uncle.
You understood exactly what I just said in English.
All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn't let me ignore it.
Now, that fascinated me endlessly as a child, but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time.
So for example, if I'm speaking in English, I have to speak grammatically differently if I'm talking about past rain, "It rained yesterday," current rain, "It is raining now," or future rain, "It will rain tomorrow."
Why? Because I have to consider that and I have to modify what I'm saying to say, "It will rain," or "It's going to rain."
A Chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an English speaker's ears.
They can say, "Yesterday it rain," "Now it rain," "Tomorrow it rain."
In some deep sense, Chinese doesn't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly.
Is this difference in languages only between very, very distantly related languages, like English and Chinese?
So many of you know, in this room, that English is a Germanic language.
What you may not have realized is that English is actually an outlier.
It is the only Germanic language that requires this.
For example, most other Germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying, "Morgen regnet es," quite literally to an English ear, "It rain tomorrow."
This led me, as a behavioral economist, to an intriguing hypothesis.
Could how you speak about time, could how your language forces you to think about time, affect your propensity to behave across time?
You speak English, a futured language.
And what that means is that every time you discuss the future, or any kind of a future event, grammatically you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different.
If that's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that's going to make it harder to save.
If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically.
Well, what I did with that was to access the linguistics literature.
Just to give you a hint of that, let's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about.
What is the average difference here?
Now while these findings are suggestive, countries can be different in so many different ways that it's very, very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences.
What I'm going to show you, though, is something that I've been engaging in for a year, which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists, and I'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences, hoping to get this relationship to break.
One way to imagine that is I gather large datasets from around the world.
So for example, there is the Survey of Health, [Aging] and Retirement in Europe.
From this dataset you actually learn that retired European families are extremely patient with survey takers.
(Laughter) So imagine that you're a retired household in Belgium and someone comes to your front door.
How about blowing into this tube so I can measure your lung capacity?"
(Laughter) Combine that with a Demographic and Health Survey collected by USAID in developing countries in Africa, for example, which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the HIV status of families living in, for example, rural Nigeria.
Combine that with a world value survey, which measures the political opinions and, fortunately for me, the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world.
Take all of that data, combine it, and this map is what you get.
And what I'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that I can measure, and then I'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels.
It turns out there are six different ways to be married in Europe.
There are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself.
Now effectively everything I'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families.
It's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in Brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions, but one of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French; or two families that live in a rural district in Nigeria, one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom speaks Igbo.
Now even after all of this granular level of control, do futureless language speakers seem to save more?
Yes, futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year.
Does this have cumulative effects?
Yes, by the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings.
Can we push this data even further?
Yes, because I just told you, we actually collect a lot of health data as economists.
Now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings?
Well, think about smoking, for example.
Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings.
If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite.
What we should expect then is the opposite effect.
And that's exactly what we find.
I could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find.
My linguistics and economics colleagues at Yale and I are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman.
We are always chasing storms.
We want to see and measure storms -- brainstorms, that is.
And we all talk about brainstorms in our daily lives, but we rarely see or listen to one.
So I always like to start these talks by actually introducing you to one of them.
Actually, the first time we recorded more than one neuron -- a hundred brain cells simultaneously -- we could measure the electrical sparks of a hundred cells in the same animal, this is the first image we got, the first 10 seconds of this recording.
So we got a little snippet of a thought, and we could see it in front of us.
I always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer, because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe.
And we hope to understand something fundamental about our human nature.
Because, if you don't know yet, everything that we use to define what human nature is comes from these storms, comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for the future.
Everything that we ever do, everything that every human has ever done, do or will do, requires the toil of populations of neurons producing these kinds of storms.
My son calls this "making popcorn while listening to a badly-tuned A.M. station."
This is a brain.
This is what happens when you route these electrical storms to a loudspeaker and you listen to a hundred brain cells firing, your brain will sound like this -- my brain, any brain.
And what we want to do as neuroscientists in this time is to actually listen to these symphonies, these brain symphonies, and try to extract from them the messages they carry.
In particular, about 12 years ago we created a preparation that we named brain-machine interfaces.
And you have a scheme here that describes how it works.
And if we can actually provide feedback, sensory signals that go back from this robotic, mechanical, computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain, back to the brain, how the brain deals with that, of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery.
And that's exactly what we did 10 years ago.
We started with a superstar monkey called Aurora that became one of the superstars of this field.
And Aurora liked to play video games.
As you can see here, she likes to use a joystick, like any one of us, any of our kids, to play this game.
And as a good primate, she even tries to cheat before she gets the right answer.
So even before a target appears that she's supposed to cross with the cursor that she's controlling with this joystick, Aurora is trying to find the target, no matter where it is.
And if she's doing that, because every time she crosses that target with the little cursor, she gets a drop of Brazilian orange juice.
And I can tell you, any monkey will do anything for you if you get a little drop of Brazilian orange juice.
Actually any primate will do that.
Think about that.
Well, while Aurora was playing this game, as you saw, and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice, we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that Aurora was making.
Because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have Aurora play the game just by thinking, without interference of her body.
Her brainstorms would control an arm that would move the cursor and cross the target.
And to our shock, that's exactly what Aurora did.
She played the game without moving her body.
And Aurora kept playing the game, kept finding the little target and getting the orange juice that she wanted to get, that she craved for.
Well, she did that because she, at that time, had acquired a new arm.
The robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later, after the first video that I showed to you, is under the control of Aurora's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target.
And Aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm, but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases.
She can scratch her back, she can scratch one of us, she can play another game.
By all purposes and means, Aurora's brain has incorporated that artificial device as an extension of her body.
Well, we did that 10 years ago.
Just fast forward 10 years.
Just last year we realized that you don't even need to have a robotic device.
And you can actually use it for our monkeys to either interact with them, or you can train them to assume in a virtual world the first-person perspective of that avatar and use her brain activity to control the movements of the avatar's arms or legs.
And what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world.
And these objects are visually identical, but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects, they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey's brain, informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching.
And in just four weeks, the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway -- like a new sense.
And you truly liberate the brain now because you are allowing the brain to send motor commands to move this avatar.
And the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin.
So what you see here is this is the design of the task.
You're going to see an animal basically touching these three targets.
And that's exactly what they do.
This is a complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body and the motor in a perceptual task.
The animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets.
And the brain is deciding what is the texture associated with the reward.
So when we look at the brains of these animals, on the top panel you see the alignment of 125 cells showing what happens with the brain activity, the electrical storms, of this sample of neurons in the brain when the animal is using a joystick.
And that's a picture that every neurophysiologist knows.
The basic alignment shows that these cells are coding for all possible directions.
The bottom picture is what happens when the body stops moving and the animal starts controlling either a robotic device or a computational avatar.
As fast as we can reset our computers, the brain activity shifts to start representing this new tool, as if this too was a part of that primate's body.
So that suggests to us that our sense of self does not end at the last layer of the epithelium of our bodies, but it ends at the last layer of electrons of the tools that we're commanding with our brains.
Our violins, our cars, our bicycles, our soccer balls, our clothing -- they all become assimilated by this voracious, amazing, dynamic system called the brain.
Well, in an experiment that we ran a few years ago, we took this to the limit.
What happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to Japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to Duke, so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her.
Funny thing, that round trip around the globe took 20 milliseconds less than it takes for that brainstorm to leave its head, the head of the monkey, and reach its own muscle.
This is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously.
This is CB1 fulfilling its dream in Japan under the control of the brain activity of a primate.
So where are we taking all this?
What are we going to do with all this research, besides studying the properties of this dynamic universe that we have between our ears?
Well the idea is to take all this knowledge and technology and try to restore one of the most severe neurological problems that we have in the world.
Millions of people have lost the ability to translate these brainstorms into action, into movement.
Although their brains continue to produce those storms and code for movements, they cannot cross a barrier that was created by a lesion on the spinal cord.
So our idea is to create a bypass, is to use these brain-machine interfaces to read these signals, larger-scale brainstorms that contain the desire to move again, bypass the lesion using computational microengineering and send it to a new body, a whole body called an exoskeleton, a whole robotic suit that will become the new body of these patients.
This is a nonprofit consortium called the Walk Again Project that is putting together scientists from Europe, from here in the United States, and in Brazil together to work to actually get this new body built -- a body that we believe, through the same plastic mechanisms that allow Aurora and other monkeys to use these tools through a brain-machine interface and that allows us to incorporate the tools that we produce and use in our daily life.
So I was told about 10 years ago that this would never happen, that this was close to impossible.
And I can only tell you that as a scientist, I grew up in southern Brazil in the mid-'60s watching a few crazy guys telling [us] that they would go to the Moon.
And I was five years old, and I never understood why NASA didn't hire Captain Kirk and Spock to do the job; after all, they were very proficient -- but just seeing that as a kid made me believe, as my grandmother used to tell me, that "impossible is just the possible that someone has not put in enough effort to make it come true."
Thank you.
(Applause)
These people are tall.
They jump high. They wear red.
And they kill lions.
You might be wondering, who are these people?
These are the Maasais.
And you know what's cool? I'm actually one of them.
The Maasais, the boys are brought up to be warriors.
The girls are brought up to be mothers.
My mother, my grandmother, my aunties, they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by.
And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12.
My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood.
I went to school not because the Maasais' women or girls were going to school.
Why did she say that?
My father worked as a policeman in the city.
He came home once a year.
We didn't see him for sometimes even two years.
And whenever he came home, it was a different case.
My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat.
She reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us.
But when my father came, he would sell the cows, he would sell the products we had, and he went and drank with his friends in the bars.
And if my mother ever questioned him, he beat her, abused her, and really it was difficult.
When I went to school, I had a dream.
I wanted to become a teacher.
Teachers looked nice.
They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes.
(Laughter) But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board -- not hard work, that's what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm.
So I wanted to become a teacher.
In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it's a rite of passage to womanhood.
And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school.
Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass.
I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done.
I told my father, "I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school."
So he figured out. "Well," he said, "okay, you'll go to school after the ceremony."
And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we were dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep.
The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in. Yes, we danced and danced.
They were all in a circle.
And as we danced and danced, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there.
I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down.
And I sat down, and I opened my legs.
As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife.
And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut it off.
I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don't do.
Three days later, after everybody has left the home, my mom went and brought a nurse.
Three weeks later, I was healed, and I was back in high school.
Well, while I was in high school, something happened.
I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon.
This man was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, camera, white sneakers -- and I'm talking about white sneakers.
There is something about clothes, I think, and shoes.
And he told me, "Well, what do you mean, you want to go?
Don't you have a husband waiting for you?"
And I told him, "Don't worry about that part.
Just tell me how to get there."
This gentleman, he helped me.
While I was in high school also, my dad was sick.
He got a stroke, and he was really, really sick, so he really couldn't tell me what to do next.
So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn't come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket.
I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here.
But I needed the support of the village, and here again, when the men heard, and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said, "What a lost opportunity.
This should have been given to a boy. We can't do this."
So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition.
There's a belief among our people that morning brings good news.
So I had to come up with something to do with the morning, because there's good news in the morning.
And in the village also, there is one chief, an elder, who if he says yes, everybody will follow him.
So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose.
The first thing he sees when he opens his door is, it's me.
"My child, what are you doing here?"
I promised him that I would be the best girl, I will come back, anything they wanted after that, I will do it for them.
He said, "Well, but I can't do it alone."
He gave me a list of another 15 men that I went -- 16 more men -- every single morning I went and visited them.
The village, the women, the men, everybody came together to support me to come to get an education.
I arrived in America. As you can imagine, what did I find?
I found snow!
I found Wal-Marts, vacuum cleaners, and lots of food in the cafeteria.
I enjoyed myself, but during that moment while I was here, I discovered a lot of things.
I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation.
I learned that it was against the law in Kenya.
I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right.
I learned that my mom had a right to own property.
I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman.
I wanted to do something.
As I went back, every time I went, I found that my neighbors' girls were getting married.
As I went back, I started talking to the men, to the village, and mothers, and I said, "I want to give back the way I had promised you that I would come back and help you. What do you need?"
As I spoke to the women, they told me, "You know what we need? We really need a school for girls."
Because there had not been any school for girls.
And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she's walking to school, the mother is blamed for that.
As we moved, and I went to talk to the fathers, the fathers, of course, you can imagine what they said: "We want a school for boys."
Why can't they build a school for boys, and I'll build a school for girls?"
That made sense. And they agreed.
And I told them, I wanted them to show me a sign of commitment.
And they did. They donated land where we built the girls' school.
We have.
I want you to meet one of the girls in that school.
She's an orphan. Yes, we could have taken her for that.
But she was older. She was 12 years old, and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade.
Angeline had been moving from one place -- because she's an orphan, she has no mother, she has no father -- moving from one grandmother's house to another one, from aunties to aunties. She had no stability in her life.
And I looked at her, I remember that day, and I saw something beyond what I was seeing in Angeline.
We gave her the opportunity to come to the class.
Five months later, that is Angeline.
A transformation had begun in her life.
Angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference.
She was not the top student when we took her.
Now she's the best student, not just in our school, but in the entire division that we are in.
That's Sharon. That's five years later.
That's Evelyn. Five months later, that is the difference that we are making.
As a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening.
This is the thing that we are doing, giving them opportunities where they can rise.
As we speak right now, women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we've started in our community.
(Applause) I want to challenge you today.
You are listening to me because you are here, very optimistic.
You are somebody who is so passionate.
You are somebody who wants to see a better world.
You are somebody who wants to see that war ends, no poverty.
You are somebody who wants to make a difference.
You are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better.
I want to challenge you today that to be the first, because people will follow you.
Be bold. Stand up. Be fearless. Be confident.
We are making a difference, so if you change your world, you are going to change your community, you are going to change your country, and think about that. If you do that, and I do that, aren't we going to create a better future for our children, for your children, for our grandchildren?
And we will live in a very peaceful world. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Okay, this morning I'm speaking on the question of corruption.
And corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself -- or, in the case of our context, your friends, your family or your financiers.
But we need to understand what we understand about corruption, and we need to understand that we have been miseducated about it, and we have to admit that.
We have to have the courage to admit that to start changing how we deal with it.
When we get together with friends and family and we discuss crime in our country, crime in Belmont or crime in Diego or crime in Marabella, nobody's speaking about corruption.
That's the honest truth.
When the Commissioner of Police comes on TV to talk about crime, he isn't speaking about corruption.
And we know for sure when the Minister of National Security is speaking about crime, he's not talking about corruption either.
The point I'm making is that it is a crime.
It is an economic crime, because we're involving the looting of taxpayers' money.
Public and private corruption is a reality.
As somebody who comes from the private sector, I can tell you there's a massive amount of corruption in the private sector that has nothing to do with government.
Today, I'm focusing on public sector corruption, which the private sector also participates in.
The second important myth to understand -- because we have to destroy these myths, dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them -- the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem -- if it is a problem, it's only a small problem, that in fact it's only a little 10 or 15 percent, it's been going on forever, it probably will continue forever, and there's no point passing any laws, because there's little we can do about it.
And I want to demonstrate that that, too, is a dangerous myth, very dangerous.
And I want to speak a little bit, take us back about 30 years.
We call them petrodollars. The treasury was bursting with money.
And it's ironic, because we're standing today in the Central Bank.
You see, history's rich in irony.
We're standing today in the Central Bank, and the Central Bank is responsible for a lot of the things I'm going to be speaking about.
Okay? We're talking about irresponsibility in public office.
(Applause) The first thing I want to talk about is that when all of this money flowed into our country about 40 years ago, we embarked, the government of the day embarked on a series of government-to-government arrangements to have rapidly develop the country.
And some of the largest projects in the country were being constructed through government-to-government arrangements with some of the leading countries in the world, the United States and Britain and France and so on and so on.
As I said, even this building we're standing in -- that's one of the ironies -- this building was part of that series of complexes, what they called the Twin Towers.
The then-Prime Minister went to Parliament to give a budget speech, and he said some things that I'll never forget.
And he said that, in fact — Let me see if this thing works.
He told us that, in fact, two out of every three dollars of our petrodollars that we spent, the taxpayers' money, was wasted or stolen.
Okay? Two thirds of the money stolen or wasted.
I don't like to bring up embarrassing secrets to an international audience, but I have to.
Four months ago, we suffered a constitutional outrage in this country.
They are the Piarco Airport accused.
Our highest institution in our country was perverted.
We are dealing with perverts here of an economic and financial nature.
Do you get how serious this problem is?
There was massive protest. A lot of us in this room took part in the protest in different forms.
So that is the kind of outrage of the thing.
But what were they accused of?
We were trying to build, or reconstruct largely, an airport that had grown outdated.
The entire project cost about 1.6 billion dollars, Trinidad and Tobago dollars, and in fact, we had a lot of bid-rigging and suspicious activity, corrupt activity took place.
And he's telling us that for the $1.6 billion cost of the project, one billion dollars has been traced to offshore bank accounts.
One billion dollars of our taxpayers' money has been located in offshore bank accounts.
I'm going to pause here and bring in something I saw in November last year at Wall Street. I was at Zuccotti Park.
It was autumn. It was cool. It was damp. It was getting dark.
And I was walking around with the protesters looking at the One Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street movement walking around.
And there was a lady with a sign, a very simple sign, a kind of battered-looking blonde lady, and the sign was made out of Bristol board, as we say in these parts, and it was made with a marker.
If you're not outraged by all of this, you haven't been paying attention.
My brain started thinking.
Now, the previous two examples I gave were to do with construction sector corruption, okay?
And I have the privilege at this time to lead the Joint Consultative Council, which is a not-for-profit.
We're at jcc.org.tt, and we have the -- we are the leaders in the struggle to produce a new public procurement system about how public money is transacted.
CL Financial is the Caribbean's largest ever conglomerate, okay?
And without getting into all of the details, it is said to have collapsed — I'm using my words very carefully — it's said to have collapsed in January of '09, which is just coming up to nearly four years.
People are telling us it's just like Wall Street. It's not just like Wall Street.
Trinidad and Tobago is like a place with different laws of physics or biology or something.
I'm serious now.
They've had bailouts in Europe.
It's interesting to parallel how the Nigerian experience has -- how they've treated it, and they've treated it very well compared to us.
Only here. So what was the reason for the generosity?
Is our government that generous? And maybe they are.
So I started digging and writing and so and so on, and that work can be found, my personal work can be found at AfraRaymond.com, which is my name.
As we say in Trinidad and Tobago, who is who and what is what?
And I made a Freedom of Information application in May this year to the Ministry of Finance.
The Ministry of Finance is the next tower over.
The Ministry of Finance, we are told, is subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
So in fact, you can't ask them anything, and they don't have to answer anything.
That is the law since 1999.
So I plunged into this struggle, and I asked four questions.
It's like that joke: I want whatever he's drinking.
And they wrote back and said to me, well what do you really mean?
Second point: I want to see who are the creditors of the group who have been repaid?
Let me pause here to point out to you all that 24 billion dollars of our money has been spent on this.
And that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his political cause.
The point is, that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his cause.
And the most famous case was what we came to call the Secret Scholarship Scandal, where in fact there was about 60 million dollars in government money that had been dispersed in a series of scholarships, and the scholarships hadn't been advertised, and so and so on and so on.
And he was able to get the court, using that act of Parliament, Freedom of Information Act, to release the information, and I thought that was excellent.
But you see, the question is this: If it's right and proper for us to use the Freedom of Information Act and to use the court to force a disclosure about 60 million dollars in public money, it must be right and proper for us to force a disclosure about 24 billion dollars.
You see? This is what we're dealing with, okay?
So here we have it. We have a situation where the basic safeguards of integrity and accountability and transparency have all been discarded.
The sort of thing that motivated us around Section 34, we need to continue to work on that. We can't forget it.
I have defined this as the single largest expenditure in the country's history.
It's also the single largest example of public corruption according to this equation.
And this is my reality check.
Where you have an expenditure of public money and it is without accountability and it's without transparency, it will always be equal to corruption, whether you're in Russia or Nigeria or Alaska, it will always be equal to corruption, and that is what we are dealing with here.
If it is I have to go to court personally, I will do that.
We will continue to work within JCC.
But I want to step back from the Trinidad and Tobago context and bring something new to the table in terms of an international example.
We had the journalist [Heather] Brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption, and she introduced me to this website, Alaveteli.com.
We can work on it together. We need to build a collective database and a collective understanding of where we are to go to the next point.
IPaidABribe.com is really important, a good one to log on to and see.
Discard the first myth; it is a crime.
Discard the second myth; it is a big thing.
It's a huge problem. It's an economic crime.
And let us continue working together to betterment in this situation, stability and sustainability in our society. Thank you.
I grew up watching Star Trek. I love Star Trek.
Star Trek made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world.
But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth.
And what I do is I study insects.
I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight.
I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life.
Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants.
Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks.
(Laughter) Now, David and Hidehiko and Ketaki gave a very compelling story about the similarities between fruit flies and humans, and there are many similarities, and so you might think that if humans are similar to fruit flies, the favorite behavior of a fruit fly might be this, for example -- (Laughter) but in my talk, I don't want to emphasize on the similarities between humans and fruit flies, but rather the differences, and focus on the behaviors that I think fruit flies excel at doing.
And so I want to show you a high-speed video sequence of a fly shot at 7,000 frames per second in infrared lighting, and to the right, off-screen, is an electronic looming predator that is going to go at the fly.
The fly is going to sense this predator.
Now I have carefully cropped this sequence to be exactly the duration of a human eye blink, so in the time that it would take you to blink your eye, the fly has seen this looming predator, estimated its position, initiated a motor pattern to fly it away, beating its wings at 220 times a second as it does so.
I think this is a fascinating behavior that shows how fast the fly's brain can process information.
Well, in order to fly, just as in a human aircraft, you need wings that can generate sufficient aerodynamic forces, you need an engine sufficient to generate the power required for flight, and you need a controller, and in the first human aircraft, the controller was basically the brain of Orville and Wilbur sitting in the cockpit.
Now, how does this compare to a fly?
Well, I spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how insect wings generate enough force to keep the flies in the air.
And you might have heard how engineers proved that bumblebees couldn't fly.
Well, the problem was in thinking that the insect wings function in the way that aircraft wings work. But they don't.
And we tackle this problem by building giant, dynamically scaled model robot insects that would flap in giant pools of mineral oil where we could study the aerodynamic forces.
And it turns out that the insects flap their wings in a very clever way, at a very high angle of attack that creates a structure at the leading edge of the wing, a little tornado-like structure called a leading edge vortex, and it's that vortex that actually enables the wings to make enough force for the animal to stay in the air.
What's clever is the way the fly flaps it, which of course ultimately is controlled by the nervous system, and this is what enables flies to perform these remarkable aerial maneuvers.
Now, what about the engine?
They have two types of flight muscle: so-called power muscle, which is stretch-activated, which means that it activates itself and does not need to be controlled on a contraction-by-contraction basis by the nervous system.
It's specialized to generate the enormous power required for flight, and it fills the middle portion of the fly, so when a fly hits your windshield, it's basically the power muscle that you're looking at.
But attached to the base of the wing is a set of little, tiny control muscles that are not very powerful at all, but they're very fast, and they're able to reconfigure the hinge of the wing on a stroke-by-stroke basis, and this is what enables the fly to change its wing and generate the changes in aerodynamic forces which change its flight trajectory.
And of course, the role of the nervous system is to control all this.
So let's look at the controller.
They have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet.
They have another set of eyes on the top of their head.
They have sensors on their wing.
Their wing is covered with sensors, including sensors that sense deformation of the wing.
These devices beat back and forth about 200 hertz during flight, and the animal can use them to sense its body rotation and initiate very, very fast corrective maneuvers.
But all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain, and yes, indeed, flies have a brain, a brain of about 100,000 neurons.
Now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they're a simple model of brain function.
And I think that flies are a great model.
They're a great model for flies.
(Laughter) And let's explore this notion of simplicity.
So I think, unfortunately, a lot of neuroscientists, we're all somewhat narcissistic.
When we think of brain, we of course imagine our own brain.
But remember that this kind of brain, which is much, much smaller — instead of 100 billion neurons, it has 100,000 neurons — but this is the most common form of brain on the planet and has been for 400 million years.
And is it fair to say that it's simple?
So let's sort of think about this. I think we have to compare -- (Laughter) — we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do.
So I propose we have a Trump number, and the Trump number is the ratio of this man's behavioral repertoire to the number of neurons in his brain.
(Applause) It's a very smart, smart audience.
Yes, the inequality goes in this direction, or I would posit it.
Now I realize that it is a little bit absurd to compare the behavioral repertoire of a human to a fly.
But let's take another animal just as an example. Here's a mouse.
I used to study mice. When I studied mice, I used to talk really slowly.
And then something happened when I started to work on flies.
(Laughter) And I think if you compare the natural history of flies and mice, it's really comparable. They have to forage for food.
They have sex. They hide from predators.
They do a lot of the similar things.
But I would argue that flies do more.
So for example, I'm going to show you a sequence, and I have to say, some of my funding comes from the military, so I'm showing this classified sequence and you cannot discuss it outside of this room. Okay?
So I want you to look at the payload at the tail of the fruit fly.
Watch it very closely, and you'll see why my six-year-old son now wants to be a neuroscientist.
Wait for it.
So at least you'll admit that if fruit flies are not as clever as mice, they're at least as clever as pigeons. (Laughter) Now, I want to get across that it's not just a matter of numbers but also the challenge for a fly to compute everything its brain has to compute with such tiny neurons.
So this is a beautiful image of a visual interneuron from a mouse that came from Jeff Lichtman's lab, and you can see the wonderful images of brains that he showed in his talk.
But up in the corner, in the right corner, you'll see, at the same scale, a visual interneuron from a fly.
And it's a beautifully complex neuron.
It's just very, very tiny, and there's lots of biophysical challenges with trying to compute information with tiny, tiny neurons.
How small can neurons get? Well, look at this interesting insect.
So this is a session on frontiers in neuroscience.
But let's think about this. How can you make a small number of neurons do a lot?
And I think, from an engineering perspective, you think of multiplexing.
You can take a hardware and have that hardware do different things at different times, or have different parts of the hardware doing different things.
And these are the two concepts I'd like to explore.
And they're not concepts that I've come up with, but concepts that have been proposed by others in the past.
And one idea comes from lessons from chewing crabs.
I grew up in Baltimore, and I chew crabs very, very well.
But I'm talking about the crabs actually doing the chewing.
And here's an endoscopic movie of this structure.
The amazing thing about this is that it's controlled by a really tiny set of neurons, about two dozen neurons that can produce a vast variety of different motor patterns, and the reason it can do this is that this little tiny ganglion in the crab is actually inundated by many, many neuromodulators.
You heard about neuromodulators earlier.
There are more neuromodulators that alter, that innervate this structure than actually neurons in the structure, and they're able to generate a complicated set of patterns.
And this is the work by Eve Marder and her many colleagues who've been studying this fascinating system that show how a smaller cluster of neurons can do many, many, many things because of neuromodulation that can take place on a moment-by-moment basis.
So this is basically multiplexing in time.
Imagine a network of neurons with one neuromodulator.
You select one set of cells to perform one sort of behavior, another neuromodulator, another set of cells, a different pattern, and you can imagine you could extrapolate to a very, very complicated system.
Is there any evidence that flies do this?
Well, for many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators.
You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating.
Here's a fly and a large infrared view of the fly in the flight simulator, and this is a game the flies love to play.
It's part of their visual guidance system.
So this is the preparation that one of my former post-docs, Gaby Maimon, who's now at Rockefeller, developed, and it's basically a flight simulator but under conditions where you actually can stick an electrode in the brain of the fly and record from a genetically identified neuron in the fly's brain.
And this is what one of these experiments looks like.
It was a sequence taken from another post-doc in the lab, Bettina Schnell.
So for the first time we've actually been able to record from neurons in the fly's brain while the fly is performing sophisticated behaviors such as flight.
And why is the physiology different?
Well it turns out it's these neuromodulators, just like the neuromodulators in that little tiny ganglion in the crabs.
So here's a picture of the octopamine system.
Octopamine is a neuromodulator that seems to play an important role in flight and other behaviors.
But this is just one of many neuromodulators that's in the fly's brain.
Now, another idea, another way of multiplexing is multiplexing in space, having different parts of a neuron do different things at the same time.
So a typical cell, like the neurons in our brain, has a region called the dendrites that receives input, and that input sums together and will produce action potentials that run down the axon and then activate all the output regions of the neuron.
But non-spiking neurons are actually quite complicated because they can have input synapses and output synapses all interdigitated, and there's no single action potential that drives all the outputs at the same time.
So there's a possibility that you have computational compartments that allow the different parts of the neuron to do different things at the same time.
So these basic concepts of multitasking in time and multitasking in space, I think these are things that are true in our brains as well, but I think the insects are the true masters of this.
So I hope you think of insects a little bit differently next time, and as I say up here, please think before you swat.
(Applause)
So here's the good news about families.
The last 50 years have seen a revolution in what it means to be a family.
We have blended families, adopted families, we have nuclear families living in separate houses and divorced families living in the same house.
But through it all, the family has grown stronger.
Eight in 10 say the family they have today is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in.
Now, here's the bad news.
Just when they stop needing our help taking a bath, they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying.
And here's the worst news of all.
Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children, "If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be?"
So how can we change this dynamic?
Are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress, draw our family closer, and generally prepare our children to enter the world?
I spent the last few years trying to answer that question, traveling around, meeting families, talking to scholars, experts ranging from elite peace negotiators to Warren Buffett's bankers to the Green Berets.
I was trying to figure out, what do happy families do right and what can I learn from them to make my family happier?
I want to tell you about one family that I met, and why I think they offer clues.
At 7 p.m. on a Sunday in Hidden Springs, Idaho, where the six members of the Starr family are sitting down to the highlight of their week: the family meeting.
The Starrs are a regular American family with their share of regular American family problems.
David is a software engineer. Eleanor takes care of their four children, ages 10 to 15.
One has lacrosse on the near side of town.
One has Asperger syndrome. One has ADHD.
"We were living in complete chaos," Eleanor said.
They turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that was just spreading from manufacturers in Japan to startups in Silicon Valley.
In agile, workers are organized into small groups and do things in very short spans of time.
So instead of having executives issue grand proclamations, the team in effect manages itself.
You have constant feedback. You have daily update sessions.
You have weekly reviews. You're constantly changing.
David said when they brought this system into their home, the family meetings in particular increased communication, decreased stress, and made everybody happier to be part of the family team.
When my wife and I adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters, it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born.
And these meetings had this effect while taking under 20 minutes.
So what is Agile, and why can it help with something that seems so different, like families?
In 1983, Jeff Sutherland was a technologist at a financial firm in New England.
He was very frustrated with how software got designed.
Companies followed the waterfall method, right, in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down to programmers below, and no one had ever consulted the programmers.
Sutherland wanted to create a system where ideas didn't just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom and be adjusted in real time.
He read 30 years of Harvard Business Review before stumbling upon an article in 1986 called "The New New Product Development Game."
It said that the pace of business was quickening -- and by the way, this was in 1986 -- and the most successful companies were flexible.
It highlighted Toyota and Canon and likened their adaptable, tight-knit teams to rugby scrums.
As Sutherland told me, we got to that article, and said, "That's it."
In Sutherland's system, companies don't use large, massive projects that take two years.
Nothing takes longer than two weeks.
So instead of saying, "You guys go off into that bunker and come back with a cell phone or a social network," you say, "You go off and come up with one element, then bring it back. Let's talk about it. Let's adapt."
Today, agile is used in a hundred countries, and it's sweeping into management suites.
Inevitably, people began taking some of these techniques and applying it to their families.
Even the Sutherlands told me that they had an Agile Thanksgiving, where you had one group of people working on the food, one setting the table, and one greeting visitors at the door.
Sutherland said it was the best Thanksgiving ever.
So let's take one problem that families face, crazy mornings, and talk about how agile can help.
A key plank is accountability, so teams use information radiators, these large boards in which everybody is accountable.
So the Starrs, in adapting this to their home, created a morning checklist in which each child is expected to tick off chores.
So on the morning I visited, Eleanor came downstairs, poured herself a cup of coffee, sat in a reclining chair, and she sat there, kind of amiably talking to each of her children as one after the other they came downstairs, checked the list, made themselves breakfast, checked the list again, put the dishes in the dishwasher, rechecked the list, fed the pets or whatever chores they had, checked the list once more, gathered their belongings, and made their way to the bus.
And when I strenuously objected this would never work in our house, our kids needed way too much monitoring, Eleanor looked at me.
"That's what I thought," she said.
"I told David, 'keep your work out of my kitchen.' But I was wrong."
So I turned to David: "So why does it work?"
He said, "You can't underestimate the power of doing this."
With kids, it's heaven."
The week we introduced a morning checklist into our house, it cut parental screaming in half. (Laughter) But the real change didn't come until we had these family meetings.
So following the agile model, we ask three questions: What worked well in our family this week, what didn't work well, and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead?
Everyone throws out suggestions and then we pick two to focus on.
Like, thoughts and ideas go in, but none ever comes out, I mean at least not that are revealing.
This gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts.
You know, the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves, and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids.
Our kids love this process.
So they would come up with all these ideas.
You know, greet five visitors at the door this week, get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed.
It turns out, by the way, our girls are little Stalins.
We constantly have to kind of dial them back.
Now look, naturally there's a gap between their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week, but the truth is it didn't really bother us.
It felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables that wouldn't light up their world for many years to come.
Three years later -- our girls are almost eight now -- We're still holding these meetings.
So what did we learn?
The word "agile" entered the lexicon in 2001 when Jeff Sutherland and a group of designers met in Utah and wrote a 12-point Agile Manifesto.
I think the time is right for an Agile Family Manifesto.
I've taken some ideas from the Starrs and from many other families I met.
Plank number one: Adapt all the time.
We'll set a few rules and we'll stick to them.
We can't. What's great about the agile system is you build in a system of change so that you can react to what's happening to you in real time.
It's like they say in the Internet world: if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing.
Parents can learn a lot from that.
We have to break parents out of this straitjacket that the only ideas we can try at home are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus or other family experts.
Everybody knows that having family dinner with your children is good for the kids.
But for so many of us, it doesn't work in our lives.
We'll make Sunday meals more important."
And the truth is, recent research backs him up.
It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive time in any family meal.
The rest of it's taken up with "take your elbows off the table" and "pass the ketchup."
If you're sitting on a cushioned chair, you'll be more open."
She told me, "When you're discipling your children, sit in an upright chair with a cushioned surface.
My wife and I actually moved where we sit for difficult conversations because I was sitting above in the power position.
So move where you sit. That's adaptability.
The point is there are all these new ideas out there.
Be flexible, be open-minded, let the best ideas win.
Plank number two: Empower your children.
It's easier, and frankly, we're usually right.
There's a reason that few systems have been more waterfall over time than the family.
But the single biggest lesson we learned is to reverse the waterfall as much as possible.
So we said, "Okay, give us a reward and give us a punishment. Okay?"
So we kind of liked that.
She said, "Do I get one five-minute overreaction or can I get 10 30-second overreactions?"
If we get 15 minutes of overreaction time, that's the limit.
But we're giving them practice becoming independent, which of course is our ultimate goal.
Just as I was leaving to come here tonight, one of my daughters started screaming.
The other one said, "Overreaction! Overreaction!"
To me that is a certified agile miracle.
(Laughter) (Applause) And by the way, research backs this up too.
Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives.
The point is, we have to let our children succeed on their own terms, and yes, on occasion, fail on their own terms.
I was talking to Warren Buffett's banker, and he was chiding me for not letting my children make mistakes with their allowance.
And I said, "But what if they drive into a ditch?"
So the bottom line is, empower your children.
Plank number three: Tell your story.
Jim Collins, the author of "Good To Great," told me that successful human organizations of any kind have two things in common: they preserve the core, they stimulate progress.
So agile is great for stimulating progress, but I kept hearing time and again, you need to preserve the core.
So how do you do that?
Collins coached us on doing something that businesses do, which is define your mission and identify your core values.
So he led us through the process of creating a family mission statement.
We had a pajama party.
I made popcorn. Actually, I burned one, so I made two.
And we had this great conversation, like, what's important to us?
What values do we most uphold?
We are travelers, not tourists.
We don't like dilemmas. We like solutions.
Again, research shows that parents should spend less time worrying about what they do wrong and more time focusing on what they do right, worry less about the bad times and build up the good times.
This family mission statement is a great way to identify what it is that you do right.
A few weeks later, we got a call from the school.
And we didn't really know what to do, so we called her into my office.
The family mission statement was on the wall, and my wife said, "So, anything up there seem to apply?"
Another great way to tell your story is to tell your children where they came from.
Researchers at Emory gave children a simple "what do you know" test.
Do you know where your grandparents were born?
Do you know where your parents went to high school?
Do you know anybody in your family who had a difficult situation, an illness, and they overcame it?
The children who scored highest on this "do you know" scale had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives.
As the author of the study told me, children who have a sense of -- they're part of a larger narrative have greater self-confidence.
Spend time retelling the story of your family's positive moments and how you overcame the negative ones.
If you give children this happy narrative, you give them the tools to make themselves happier.
I was a teenager when I first read "Anna Karenina" and its famous opening sentence, "All happy families are alike.
Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Of course all happy families aren't alike."
But as I began working on this project, I began changing my mind.
Is it possible, all these years later, to say Tolstoy was right?
The answer, I believe, is yes.
When Leo Tolstoy was five years old, his brother Nikolay came to him and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness on a little green stick, which he had hidden in a ravine on the family's estate in Russia.
If the stick were ever found, all humankind would be happy.
In fact, he asked to be buried in that ravine where he thought it was hidden.
He still lies there today, covered in a layer of green grass.
That story perfectly captures for me the final lesson that I learned: Happiness is not something we find, it's something we make.
Almost anybody who's looked at well-run organizations has come to pretty much the same conclusion.
Greatness is not a matter of circumstance.
It's a matter of choice.
You just need to take small steps, accumulate small wins, keep reaching for that green stick.
What's the secret to a happy family? Try.
(Applause)
(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause)
What is going to be the future of learning?
I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from?
And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from.
It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships.
What they did was amazing.
They created a global computer made up of people.
It's still with us today.
It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine.
They made another machine to produce those people: the school.
They must be identical to each other.
The Victorians were great engineers.
They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.
The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it?
["Schools as we know them are obsolete"] So that's a pretty strong comment there.
I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete.
It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken.
It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed.
It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.
They're there in thousands in every office.
And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs.
Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand.
They do need to be able to read.
In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.
Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like.
How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?
I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago.
And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum.
And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent."
And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children?
(Laughter) What did the poor do wrong?
It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?"
And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know."
(Laughter) They said, "Why have you put it there?"
About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse.
So I said, "Well that's impossible, because -- How is it possible? They don't know anything."
One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse."
So I said, "Yeah, that's possible."
So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there.
There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it.
When they saw me, they said, "We want a faster processor and a better mouse."
(Laughter) So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?"
And they said something very interesting to me.
In an irritated voice, they said, "You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter) That's the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually.
That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall.
On your right is an eight-year-old.
To his left is his student. She's six.
And he's teaching her how to browse.
["Hole in the wall film - 1999"] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do.
And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is, and said, "There's a processor inside."
So I started publishing.
I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, in nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.
I'd seen it happen over and over and over again.
I started experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation.
There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs.
I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you say."
Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you.
Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her.
She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent.
Where does it stop?
I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition.
I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis.
Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer?
And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero.
I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers.
I put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn't understand.
So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English."
So they said, "How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry?"
(Laughter) "And anyway, I am going away."
(Laughter) So I left them for a couple of months.
So I said, "Well, what did I expect?"
So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided that you can't understand anything?"
So they said, "We haven't given up.
So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?"
(Laughter) (Applause) So I tested them.
Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm.
So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?"
So she says, "Absolutely not.
I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you."
I said, "Stand behind them.
Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that?
So she did that for two more months.
The scores jumped to 50 percent.
When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.
Here's Kallikuppam.
(Children speaking) Neurons ... communication.
I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff, but what she was saying, as you could make out, was about neurons, with her hands were like that, and she was saying neurons communicate.
What will it be tomorrow?
Could it be -- a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte -- could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete?
But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens.
But look at it this way.
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens.
What an achievement that is.
Encouragement seems to be the key.
There is evidence from neuroscience.
The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down.
Why did they create a system like that?
Because it was needed.
There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat.
When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed.
But the Age of Empires is gone.
We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure.
I came back to England looking for British grandmothers.
I put out notices in papers saying, if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per week for free?
I got 200 in the first two weeks.
I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter) They're called the Granny Cloud.
The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet.
I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles in northwestern England, deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away.
"Shhh."
Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it.
You can't catch me.
Children: You can't catch me.
Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man.
Grandmother: Well done! Very good.
SM: So what's happening here?
I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization.
If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges.
The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens.
Well, I intend to build these Self-Organized Learning Environments.
They are basically broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together.
I've tried this in many, many schools.
I said, "You won't believe the children who told me and where they're from."
Here's a SOLE in action.
(Children talking) This one is in England.
He maintains law and order, because remember, there's no teacher around.
Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons -- SM: Australia Girl: -- giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge.
The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons.
So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions.
You already heard about that. You know what that means.
There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, "What are those twinkling lights?"
They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions.
But that's not sexy enough.
you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle," and leave him alone. He'll figure it out.
This one is about what happens to the air we breathe.
My wish is that we design the future of learning.
We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer, do we?
So we need to design a future for learning.
My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together.
Help me build this school.
It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in.
It's a facility which is practically unmanned.
The lights are turned on and off by the cloud, etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud.
You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs.
It's very easy to do. There's a great document produced by TED which tells you how to do it.
That's my wish.
And just one last thing.
I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas.
At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin, I once built two Hole in the Wall computers, and the children flocked there.
And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child.
And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly.
(Laughter) (Applause) I think it was good advice.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause)
I'd like you to ask yourself, what do you feel when you hear the words "organic chemistry?"
There is a course offered at nearly every university, and it's called Organic Chemistry, and it is a grueling, heavy introduction to the subject, a flood of content that overwhelms students, and you have to ace it if you want to become a doctor or a dentist or a veterinarian.
And that is why so many students perceive this science like this ...
And this perception spread beyond college campuses long ago.
It's not good for science, and it's not good for society, and I don't think it has to be this way.
And I don't mean that this class should be easier. It shouldn't.
So I'm here today because I believe that a basic knowledge of organic chemistry is valuable, and I think that it can be made accessible to everybody, and I'd like to prove that to you today.
Audience: Yeah!
(Laughter) Here I have one of these overpriced EpiPens.
Inside it is a drug called epinephrine.
Epinephrine can restart the beat of my heart, or it could stop a life-threatening allergic reaction.
It would be like turning the ignition switch in my body's fight-or-flight machinery.
Epinephrine has been the difference between life and death for many people.
Here is the chemical structure of epinephrine.
This is what organic chemistry looks like.
It looks like lines and letters ...
I'd like to show you what I see when I look at that picture.
I see a physical object that has depth and rotating parts, and it's moving.
We call this a compound or a molecule, and it is 26 atoms that are stitched together by atomic bonds.
The unique arrangement of these atoms gives epinephrine its identity, but nobody has ever actually seen one of these, because they're very small, so we're going to call this an artistic impression, and I want to explain to you how small this is.
The number of epinephrine molecules in here is one quintillion.
That's 18 zeroes.
That number is hard to visualize.
Maybe 400 billion stars in our galaxy?
If you wanted to get into the right ballpark, you'd have to imagine every grain of sand on every beach, under all the oceans and lakes, and then shrink them all so they fit in here.
We know it is made of four different types of atoms, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen.
These are the colors we typically use for them.
Everything in our universe is made of little spheres that we call atoms.
We arrange these atoms into this familiar table.
And there are four atoms in particular that stand apart from the rest as the main building blocks of life, and they are the same ones that are found in epinephrine: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
When these atoms connect to form molecules, they follow a set of rules.
Hydrogen makes one bond, oxygen always makes two, nitrogen makes three and carbon makes four.
That's it.
If you can count to four, and you can misspell the word "honk," you're going to remember this for the rest of your lives.
(Laughter) Now here I have four bowls with these ingredients.
We can use these to build molecules.
Let's start with epinephrine.
Now, these bonds between atoms, they're made of electrons.
Atoms use electrons like arms to reach out and hold their neighbors.
Two electrons in each bond, like a handshake, and like a handshake, they are not permanent.
They can let go of one atom and grab another.
That's what we call a chemical reaction, when atoms exchange partners and make new molecules.
The backbone of epinephrine is made mostly of carbon atoms, and that's common.
Carbon is life's favorite structural building material, because it makes a good number of handshakes with just the right grip strength.
That's why we define organic chemistry as the study of carbon molecules.
Now, if we build the smallest molecules we can think of that follow our rules, they highlight our rules, and they have familiar names: water, ammonia and methane, H20 and NH3 and CH4.
The words "hydrogen," "oxygen" and "nitrogen" -- we use the same words to name these three molecules that have two atoms each.
They still follow the rules, because they have one, two and three bonds between them.
That's why oxygen gets called O2.
Here's carbon dioxide, CO2.
These fuels are made of just hydrogen and carbon.
That's why we call them hydrocarbons. We're very creative.
(Laughter) So when these crash into molecules of oxygen, as they do in your engine or in your barbecues, they release energy and they reassemble, and every carbon atom ends up at the center of a CO2 molecule, holding on to two oxygens, and all the hydrogens end up as parts of waters, and everybody follows the rules.
This is our favorite vitamin sitting next to our favorite drug, (Laughter) and morphine is one of the most important stories in medical history.
They're written by scientists, and they're read by other scientists, so we have handy representations to do this quickly on paper, and I need to teach you how to do that.
So we lay epinephrine flat on a page, and then we replace all the spheres with simple letters, and then the bonds that lie in the plane of the page, they just become regular lines, and the bonds that point forwards and backwards, they become little triangles, either solid or dashed to indicate depth.
We don't actually draw these carbons.
They're represented by corners between the bonds, and we also hide every hydrogen that's bonded to a carbon.
The last thing that's done is the bonds between OH and NH.
This is the professional way to draw molecules.
It takes a little bit of practice, but I think everyone here could do it, but for today, this is epinephrine.
This is also called adrenaline. They're one and the same.
It's made by your adrenal glands.
You have this molecule swimming through your body right now.
It's a natural molecule.
(Laughter) We can extract epinephrine from the adrenal glands of sheep or cattle, but that's not where this stuff comes from.
We make this epinephrine in a factory by stitching together smaller molecules that come mostly from petroleum.
And this is 100 percent synthetic.
And that word, "synthetic," makes some of us uncomfortable.
We're not talking about two cars that are coming off an assembly line here.
A car can have a scratch on it, and you can't scratch an atom.
These two are identical in a surreal, almost mathematical sense.
At this atomic scale, math practically touches reality.
And a molecule of epinephrine ...
it has no memory of its origin.
It just is what it is, and once you have it, the words "natural" and "synthetic," they don't matter, and nature synthesizes this molecule just like we do, except nature is much better at this than we are.
Before there was life on earth, all the molecules were small, simple: carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, just simple things.
The emergence of life changed that.
Life brought biosynthetic factories that are powered by sunlight, and inside these factories, small molecules crash into each other and become large ones: carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids, multitudes of spectacular creations.
Nature is the original organic chemist, and her construction also fills our sky with the oxygen gas we breathe, this high-energy oxygen.
All of these molecules are infused with the energy of the sun.
They store it like batteries.
So nature is made of chemicals.
(Laughter) And I'd like to do one more word.
The word "natural" doesn't mean "safe," and you all know that.
Plenty of nature's chemicals are quite toxic, and others are delicious, and some are both ...
The only way to tell whether something is harmful is to test it, and I don't mean you guys.
Professional toxicologists: we have these people.
They're well-trained, and you should trust them like I do.
So nature's molecules are everywhere, including the ones that have decomposed into these black mixtures that we call petroleum.
There's nothing unnatural about them.
Now, our dependence on them for energy -- that means that every one of those carbons gets converted into a molecule of CO2.
That's a greenhouse gas that is messing up our climate.
Maybe knowing this chemistry will make that reality easier to accept for some people, I don't know, but these molecules are not just fossil fuels.
They're also the cheapest available raw materials for doing something that we call synthesis.
We're using them like pieces of LEGO.
I have done a lot of this myself, and I still think it's amazing it's even possible.
What we do is kind of like assembling LEGO by dumping boxes of it into washing machines, but it works.
We can make molecules that are exact copies of nature, like epinephrine, or we can make creations of our own from scratch, like these two.
One of these eases the symptoms of multiple sclerosis; the other one cures a type of blood cancer that we call T-cell lymphoma.
A molecule with the right size and shape, it's like a key in a lock, and when it fits, it interferes with the chemistry of a disease.
That's how drugs work.
Natural or synthetic, they're all just molecules that happen to fit snugly somewhere important.
But nature is much better at making them than we are, so hers look more impressive than ours, like this one.
This is called vancomycin.
She gave this majestic beast two chlorine atoms to wear like a pair of earrings.
We found vancomycin in a puddle of mud in a jungle in Borneo in 1953.
It's made by a bacteria.
It's too complicated for us, but we can harvest it from its natural source, and we do, because this is one of our most powerful antibiotics.
And new molecules are reported in our literature every day.
We make them or we find them in every corner of this planet.
(Laughter) to cure deadly infections and everything else.
Being a physician today is like being a knight in shining armor.
They fight battles with courage and composure, but also with good equipment.
So let's not forget the role of the blacksmith in this picture, because without the blacksmith, things would look a little different ...
(Laughter) But this science is bigger than medicine.
It is oils and solvents and flavors, fabrics, all plastics, the cushions that you're sitting on right now -- they're all manufactured, and they're mostly carbon, so that makes all of it organic chemistry.
This is a rich science.
But I didn't come here to teach you guys organic chemistry -- I just wanted to show it to you, and I had a lot of help with that today from a young man named Weston Durland, and you've already seen him.
He's an undergraduate student in chemistry, and he also happens to be pretty good with computer graphics.
(Laughter) So Weston designed all the moving molecules that you saw today.
He and I wanted to demonstrate through the use of graphics like these to help someone talk about this intricate science.
But our main goal was just to show you that organic chemistry is not something to be afraid of.
It is, at its core, a window through which the beauty of the natural world looks richer.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, I was introduced as the former Governor of Michigan, but actually I'm a scientist.
The first problem that not just Michigan, but every state, faces is, how do you create good jobs in America in a global economy?
So let me share with you some empirical data from my lab.
We have a little tiny community called Greenville, Michigan, population 8,000, and they are about to lose their major employer, which is a refrigerator factory that's operated by Electrolux."
And I said, "Well, how many people work at Electrolux?"
And he said, "3,000 of the 8,000 people in Greenville."
And Electrolux was going to go to Mexico.
So I said, "Forget that. I'm the new Governor.
We can fix this. We're going to go to Greenville with my whole cabinet and we will just make Electrolux an offer they can't refuse."
And in the pile were things like zero taxes for 20 years, or that we'd help to build a new factory for the company, we'd help to finance it. The UAW, who represented the workers, said they would offer unprecedented concessions, sacrifices to just keep those jobs in Greenville.
But there's nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we can pay $1.57 an hour in Juarez, Mexico. So we're leaving."
And they did. And when they did, it was like a nuclear bomb went off in little Greenville.
That's a guy that is walking on his last day of work.
And on the month that the last refrigerator rolled off the assembly line, the employees of Electrolux in Greenville, Michigan, had a gathering for themselves that they called the last supper.
It was in a big pavilion in Greenville, an indoor pavilion, and I went to it because I was so frustrated as Governor that I couldn't stop the outflow of these jobs, and I wanted to grieve with them, and as I went into the room-- there's thousands of people there.
It was a just big thing. People were eating boxed lunches on roundtop tables, and there was a sad band playing music, or a band playing sad music, probably both. (Laughter) And this guy comes up to me, and he's got tattoos and his ponytail and his baseball cap on, and he had his two daughters with him, and he said, "Gov, these are my two daughters."
He said, "I'm 48 years old, and I have worked at this factory for 30 years.
My father worked at this factory," he said.
"My grandfather worked at this factory.
All I know is how to make refrigerators."
And he looked at his daughters, and he puts his hand on his chest, and he says, "So, Gov, tell me, who is ever going to hire me?
Who is ever going to hire me?"
And that was asked not just by that guy but by everyone in the pavilion, and frankly, by every worker at one of the 50,000 factories that closed in the first decade of this century.
Enigma number one: How do you create jobs in America in a global economy?
In fact, there was a poll that was done recently and the pollster compared Congress's approval ratings to a number of other unpleasant things, and it was found, in fact, that Congress's approval rating is worse than cockroaches, lice, Nickelback the band, root canals and Donald Trump. (Laughter) But wait, the good news is it's at least better than meth labs and gonorrhea. (Laughter) We got a problem, folks.
So it got me thinking, what is it?
What policy prescriptions have happened that actually cause changes to occur and that have been accepted in a bipartisan way?
So if I asked you, for example, what was the Obama Administration policy that caused massive changes across the country, what would you say?
As we know, only half the states have opted in.
The thing that caused massive policy changes to occur was Race to the Top for education.
Forty-eight governors competed, convincing 48 state legislatures to essentially raise standards for high schoolers so that they all take a college prep curriculum.
So I thought, well, why can't we do something like that and create a clean energy jobs race to the top?
Because after all, if you look at the context, 1.6 trillion dollars has been invested in the past eight years from the private sector globally, and every dollar represents a job, and where are those jobs going?
Well, they're going to places that have policy, like China.
In fact, I was in China to see what they were doing, and they were putting on a dog-and-pony show for the group that I was with, and I was standing in the back of the room during one of the demonstrations and standing next to one of the Chinese officials, and we were watching, and he says, "So, Gov, when do you think the U.S. is going to get national energy policy?"
So what if we decided to create a challenge to the governors of the country, and the price to entry into this competition used the same amount that the bipartisan group approved in Congress for the Race to the Top for education, 4.5 billion, which sounds like a lot, but actually it's less than one tenth of one percent of federal spending.
It's a rounding error on the federal side.
He wants Congress to adopt a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2030, in other words, that you'd have to get 80 percent of your energy from clean sources by the year 2030.
Why not ask all of the states to do that instead?
And imagine what might happen, because every region has something to offer.
You might take states like Iowa and Ohio -- two very important political states, by the way -- those two governors, and they would say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the wind turbines and the wind energy.
You might say the solar states, the sun belt, we're going to be the states that produce solar energy for the country, and maybe Jerry Brown says, "Well, I'm going to create an industry cluster in California to be able to produce the solar panels so that we're not buying them from China but we're buying them from the U.S."
You see, you've got solar and wind opportunity all across the nation.
In fact, if you look just at the upper and northern states in the West, they could do geothermal, or you could look at Texas and say, we could lead the nation in the solutions to smart grid.
In the middle eastern states which have access to forests and to agricultural waste, they might say, we're going to lead the nation in biofuels.
Along the eastern seaboard, we're going to lead the nation in offshore wind.
You might look at Michigan and say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the guts for the electric vehicle, like the lithium ion battery.
Every region has something to offer, and if you created a competition, it respects the states and it respects federalism.
It's opt-in. You might even get Texas and South Carolina, who didn't opt into the education Race to the Top, you might even get them to opt in. Why?
We want to bring jobs. I'm just saying.
And it fosters innovation at the state level in these laboratories of democracy.
Now, any of you who are watching anything about politics lately might say, "Okay, great idea, but really?
They can't agree to anything."
So you could wait and go through Congress, although you should be very impatient.
What if we created a private sector challenge to the governors?
What if it all started here at TED?
What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs in America -- (Applause) -- and get national energy policy and we created a national energy strategy from the bottom up?
Because, dear TEDsters, if you are impatient like I am, you know that our economic competitors, our other nations, are in the game and are eating us for lunch.
Thank you all so much. (Applause)
I have 18 minutes to tell you what happened over the past six million years.
We all have come from a long way, here in Africa, and converged in this region of Africa, which is a place where 90 percent of our evolutionary process took place.
And I say that not because I am African, but it's in Africa that you find the earliest evidence for human ancestors, upright walking traces, even the first technologies in the form of stone tools.
So we all are Africans, and welcome home.
I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.
She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.
That's the Lucy species, and was found by my research team in December of 2000 in an area called Dikika.
It's in the northeastern part of Ethiopia.
We use that name to celebrate peace in the region and in the planet.
And the fact that it was the cover story of all these famous magazines gives you already an idea of her significance, I think.
You don't just jump into an invitation.
And I learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools, 2.6 million years ago.
First entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old.
And evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old -- beads.
And you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time.
And DNA analysis of living humans and chimpanzees teaches us today that we diverged sometime around seven million years ago and that these two species share over 98 percent of the same genetic material.
I think knowing this is a very useful context within which we can think of our ancestry.
However, DNA analysis informs us only about the beginning and the end, telling us nothing about what happened in the middle.
So, for us, paleoanthropologists, our job is to find the hard evidence, the fossil evidence, to fill in this gap and see the different stages of development.
Because it's only when you do that, that you can talk about -- (Laughter) -- it's only when you do that, [that] you can talk about how we looked like and how we behaved at different times, and how those likes and looks and behaviors changed through time.
That then gives you an access to explore the biological mechanisms and forces that are responsible for this gradual change that made us what we are today.
But finding the hard evidence is a very complicated endeavor.
It's a systematic and scientific approach, which takes you to places that are remote, hot, hostile and often with no access.
It took us only seven hours to do the first 470 kilometers of the 500, but took four, solid hours to do the last only 30 kilometers.
I was the first person to actually drive a car to the spot.
When you get there, this is what you see, and it's the vastness of the place which makes you feel helpless and vulnerable.
And once you make it there, the big question is where to start.
(Laughter) And you find nothing for years and years.
You find elephants, rhinos, monkeys, pigs, etc.
But you could ask, how could these large mammals live in this desert environment?
Of course, they cannot, but I'm telling you already that the environment and the carrying capacity of this region was drastically different from what we have today.
A very important environmental lesson could be learned from this.
To tell you just an example, an anecdote about their rarity, I was going to this place every year and would do fieldwork here, and the assistants, of course, helped me do the surveys.
I would say, "No, that's an elephant."
Again, another one, "That's a monkey." "That's a pig," etc.
So one of my assistants, who never went to school, said to me, "Listen, Zeray.
You either don't know what you're looking for, or you're looking in the wrong place," he said.
(Laughter) And I said, "Why?" "Because there were elephants and lions, and the people were scared and went somewhere else.
Let's go somewhere else."
And here is actually the spinal column and the whole torso encased in a sandstone block, because she was buried by a river.
What you have here seems to be nothing, but contains an incredible amount of scientific information that helps us explore what makes us human.
This is the earliest and most complete juvenile human ancestor ever found in the history of paleoanthropology, an amazing piece of our long, long history.
The feeling I had was a deep and quiet happiness and excitement, of course accompanied by a huge sense of responsibility, of making sure everything is safe.
Here is a close-up of the fossil, after five years of cleaning, preparation and description, which was very long, as I had to expose the bones from the sandstone block I just showed you in the previous slide.
It took five years.
And here is full scale -- it's a tiny bone.
And in the middle is the minister of Ethiopian tourism, who came to visit the National Museum of Ethiopia while I was working there.
And you see me worried and trying to protect my child, because you don't leave anyone with this kind of child, even a minister.
So then, once you've done that, the next stage is to know what it is.
We were able to tell that she belonged to the human family tree because the legs, the foot, and some features clearly showed that she walked upright, and upright walking is a hallmark in humanity.
But in addition, if you compare the skull with a comparably aged chimpanzee and little George Bush here, you see that you have vertical forehead.
You don't see that in chimpanzees, and you don't see this very projecting canine.
So she belongs to our family tree, but within that, of course, you do detailed analysis, and we know now that she belongs to the Lucy species, known as Australopithecus afarensis.
And how old was she when she died?
You can determine the sex of the individual based on the size of the teeth.
How?
You know, in primates, there is this phenomenon called sexual dimorphism, which simply means males are larger than females and males have larger teeth than the females.
But using the CT scanning technology, which is normally used for medical purposes, you can go deep into the mouth and come up with this beautiful image showing you both the baby teeth here and the still-growing adult teeth here.
So when you measure those teeth, it was clear that she turned out to be a girl with very small canine teeth.
And to know how old she was when she died, what you do is you do an informed estimate, and you say, how much time would be required to form this amount of teeth, and the answer was three.
So, this girl died when she was about three, 3.3 million years ago.
So, with all that information, the big question is -- what do we actually -- what does she tell us?
To answer this question, we can phrase another question.
What do we actually know about our ancestors?
And among the answers that you can get from this skeleton are included: first, this skeleton documents, for the first time, how infants looked over three million years ago.
And second, she tells us that she walked upright, but had some adaptation for tree climbing.
And more interesting, however, is the brain in this child was still growing.
At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior.
In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent.
That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth -- faster than us, anyway.
That's why we need care from our parents.
But that care means also you learn.
You spend more time with your parents.
And that's very characteristic of humans and it's called childhood, which is this extended dependence of human children on their family or parents.
So, the still-growing brain in this individual tells us that childhood, which requires an incredible social organization, a very complex social organization, emerged over three million years ago.
This is called the hyoid bone. It's a bone which is right here.
It's, in a way, your voice box.
It determines the type of voice you produce.
It was not known in the fossil record, and we have it in this skeleton.
When we did the analysis of this bone, it was clear that it looked very chimp-like, chimpanzee-like.
So if you were there 3.3 million years ago, to hear when this girl was crying out for her mother, she would have sounded more like a chimpanzee than a human.
You know, that is very exciting for us, because it demonstrates that things were changing slowly and progressively, and that evolution is in the making.
To summarize the significance of this fossil, we can say the following.
Up to now, the knowledge that we had about our ancestors came essentially from adult individuals because the fossils, the baby fossils, were missing.
So the knowledge that we had about our ancestors, on how they looked like, how they behaved, was kind of biased toward adults.
Can you imagine how much biased his report would be?
That's what somehow we were doing so far in the absence of the fossil children, so I think the new fossil fixes this problem.
So, I think the most important question at the end is, what do we actually learn from specimens like this and from our past in general?
Of course, in addition to extracting this huge amount of scientific information as to what makes us human, you know, the many human ancestors that have existed over the past six million years -- and there are more than 10 -- they did not have the knowledge, the technology and sophistications that we, Homo sapiens, have today.
But if this species, ancient species, would travel in time and see us today, they would very much be very proud of their legacy, because they became the ancestors of the most successful species in the universe.
And they were probably not aware of this future legacy, but they did great.
Now the question is, we Homo sapiens today are in a position to decide about the future of our planet, possibly more.
So the question is, are we up to the challenge?
And can we really do better than these primitive, small-brained ancestors?
Among the most pressing challenges that our species is faced with today are the chronic problems of Africa.
One is to continue to see a poor, ill, crying Africa, carrying guns, that depends on other people forever, or to promote an Africa which is confident, peaceful, independent, but cognizant of its huge problems and great values at the same time.
And the key is to promote a positive African attitude towards Africa.
That's because we Africans concentrate -- I am from Ethiopia, by the way -- we concentrate too much on how we are seen from elsewhere, or from outside.
I think it's important to promote in a more positive way on how we see ourselves.
That's what I call positive African attitude.
So finally, I would like to say, so let's help Africa walk upright and forward, then we all can be proud of our future legacy as a species.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Breathes in) (Breathes out) So, I didn't always make my living from music.
(Laughter) Hello.
I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower -- and some intense eye contact.
And if they didn't take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing -- as they walked away.
(Laughter) So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit.
And my eyes would say -- "Thank you.
I would get harassed sometimes.
People would yell at me from their cars.
"Get a job!"
(Laughing) And I'd be, like, "This is my job."
But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful.
I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box.
And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me, given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday.
It was consistent.
And meanwhile, I was touring locally and playing in nightclubs with my band, the Dresden Dolls.
This was me on piano, a genius drummer.
I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people, because I loved it.
So after all of our shows, we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people, and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us, and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows, and they would pass the hat, and then they would come in and join us onstage, so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird, random circus guests.
And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere.
People would bring home-cooked food to us all over the world backstage and feed us and eat with us.
This is a library in Auckland.
On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat, because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast, and they showed up care of this dude, Chris, from Newport Beach, who says hello.
I once tweeted, "Where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot?"
And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in, and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death.
And I love this kind of random closeness, which is lucky, because I do a lot of couchsurfing.
In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there's no wireless, and in punk squats, everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless, clearly making it the better option.
(Laughter) My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl, still living at home, and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras.
And that night, her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds.
Is this fair?
And in the morning, her mom taught us how to try to make tortillas and wanted to give me a Bible, and she took me aside and she said to me in her broken English, "Your music has helped my daughter so much.
Thank you for staying here. We're all so grateful."
And I thought, this is fair.
This is this.
A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone.
Is this what stupid people do?
(Laughter) Is this how stupid people die?
She's an artist.
I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing.
And as usual, the band was psyched, but there was this one guy in the band who told me he just couldn't bring himself to go out there.
And meanwhile, my band is becoming bigger and bigger.
And our music is a cross between punk and cabaret.
Well, maybe it's for you.
(Laughter) We sign, and there's all this hype leading up to our next record.
And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks, and the label considers this a failure.
I was like, "25,000, isn't that a lot?"
They said, "No, the sales are going down.
And they walk off.
Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, "I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend."
(Laughter) "But I read your blog, I know you hate your label.
I just want you to have this money."
And this starts happening all the time.
I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there.
Thank you.
And this is the moment I decide I'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it's like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I'm going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I'm going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street.
So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding.
And the goal was 100,000 dollars.
My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million, which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date.
It's about 25,000 people.
And the media asked, "Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy.
How did you make all these people pay for music?"
And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you.
It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists.
But it's not easy.
And a lot of artists have a problem with this.
Asking makes you vulnerable.
And I got a lot of criticism online, after my Kickstarter went big, for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices, specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer, and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website.
And people saying, "You're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help," really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling, "Get a job."
Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them.
This is my Kickstarter backer party in Berlin.
Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers -- (Laughter) I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people.
(Laughter) This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was, I trust you this much.
For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community.
Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.
Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back.
So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price.
They see it as an unpredictable risk, but the things I've done, the Kickstarter, the street, the doorbell, I don't see these things as risk.
But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important -- to ask without shame.
My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box.
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, "How do we make people pay for music?"
What if we started asking, "How do we let people pay for music?"
Thank you.
(Applause)
The most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us.
This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable.
Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change.
But fossil fuels, carbon -- coal and gas -- are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change.
Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground.
And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert.
But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine.
On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground.
And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring.
Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well.
About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying.
I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters -- that's an inch of rain -- was falling.
Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters.
Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day.
The next day, the land looked like this.
Where had that water gone?
Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered.
Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon.
Carbon goes back to the atmosphere.
Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence.
But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation.
Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane.
Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was.
Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing.
And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs.
We were once just as certain that the world was flat.
We were wrong then, and we are wrong again.
When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks.
Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly.
So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research.
They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage.
And it got worse, not better.
One good thing did come out of it.
So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation.
And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "unknown processes."
Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter.
You have changed the microclimate.
Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate.
But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago?
This picture is a typical seasonal grassland.
It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season.
And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season.
Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon.
To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire.
But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars.
And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it.
We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow.
Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy?
And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now.
We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change.
So let's do that.
And we did that, without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow.
When I first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification, I was faced with a real dilemma.
We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world.
But we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this.
So rather than reinvent the wheel, I began studying other professions to see if anybody had.
Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight -- we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on -- and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well.
Let's look at some results.
This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe.
It has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season.
But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it, has evaporated from the soil surface.
Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended, and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid.
Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that.
Our river is flowing and healthy and clean.
The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years.
And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have.
But before we began, our land looked like that.
And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature.
And there are fallen trees in there now, because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc.
This land in Mexico was in terrible condition, and I've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound.
(Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future.
The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here.
The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers.
They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year.
We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture.
Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals.
What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels.
But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying.
And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels.
I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this.
We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people.
I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Chris.
Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you.
When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work?
But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle.
It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that.
CA: Well, I would love to -- I mean, this such an interesting and important idea.
Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.
(Applause)
The Kraken, a beast so terrifying it was said to devour men and ships and whales, and so enormous it could be mistaken for an island.
In assessing the merits of such tales, it's probably wise to keep in mind that old sailor's saw that the only difference between a fairytale and a sea story is a fairytale begins, "Once upon a time," and a sea story begins, "This ain't no shit." (Laughter) Every fish that gets away grows with every telling of the tale.
Nevertheless, there are giants in the ocean, and we now have video proof, as those of you that saw the Discovery Channel documentary are no doubt aware.
I was one of the three scientists on this expedition that took place last summer off Japan.
I'm the short one.
The other two are Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and Dr. Steve O'Shea.
In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish.
I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away.
Mike deGruy was also invited, and he spoke with great passion about his love of the ocean, and he also talked to me about applying my approach to something he's been involved with for a very long time, which is the hunt for the giant squid.
It was Mike that got me invited to the squid summit, a gathering of squid experts at the Discovery Channel that summer during Shark Week. (Laughter) I gave a talk on unobtrusive viewing and optical luring of deep sea squid in which I emphasized the importance of using quiet, unobtrusive platforms for exploration.
But I also felt like I saw more animals working with the Tiburon than the Ventana, two vehicles with the same field of view but different propulsion systems.
So my suspicion was that it might have something to do with the amount of noise they make.
So I set up a hydrophone on the bottom of the ocean, and I had each of these fly by at the same speed and distance and recorded the sound they made.
The Tiburon also uses electric powered thrusters.
It's also pretty quiet, but a bit noisier. (Louder whirring noise) But most deep-diving ROVs these days use hydraulics and they sound like the Ventana. (Loud beeping noise) I think that's got to be scaring a lot of animals away.
So for the deep sea squid hunt, I proposed using an optical lure attached to a camera platform with no thrusters, no motors, just a battery-powered camera, and the only illumination coming from red light that's invisible to most deep-sea animals that are adapted to see primarily blue.
That's visible to our eye, but it's the equivalent of infrared in the deep sea.
So this camera platform, which we called the Medusa, could just be thrown off the back of the ship, attached to a float at the surface with over 2,000 feet of line, it would just float around passively carried by the currents, and the only light visible to the animals in the deep would be the blue light of the optical lure, which we called the electronic jellyfish, or e-jelly, because it was designed to imitate the bioluminescent display of the common deep sea jellyfish Atolla.
The reason that the electronic jellyfish worked as a lure is not because giant squid eat jellyfish, but it's because this jellyfish only resorts to producing this light when it's being chewed on by a predator and its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of a larger predator that will attack its attacker and thereby afford it an opportunity for escape.
It's a scream for help, a last-ditch attempt for escape, and a common form of defense in the deep sea.
The approach worked.
Edith Widder (on video): Oh my God. Oh my God! Are you kidding me?Other scientists: Oh ho ho! That's just hanging there.
EW: It was like it was teasing us, doing a kind of fan dance -- now you see me, now you don't -- and we had four such teasing appearances, and then on the fifth, it came in and totally wowed us.
(Music) Narrator: (Speaking in Japanese) Scientists: Ooh. Bang! Oh my God! Whoa!
(Applause) EW: The full monty.
What was not mentioned in the Discovery documentary was that the bait squid that Dr. Kubodera used, a one-meter long diamondback squid had a light attached to it, a squid jig of the type that longline fishermen use, and I think it was this light that brought the giant in.
And then he got so excited, he turned on his flashlight because he wanted to see better, and the giant didn't run away, so he risked turning on the white lights on the submersible, bringing a creature of legend from the misty history into high-resolution video.
It was absolutely breathtaking, and had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended, it would have been as tall as a two-story house.
We've only explored about five percent of our ocean.
Yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we've spent on space exploration.
We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth.
Innovation drives economic growth.
So let's all go exploring, but let's do it in a way that doesn't scare the animals away, or, as Mike deGruy once said, "If you want to get away from it all and see something you've never seen, or have an excellent chance of seeing something that no one's ever seen, get in a sub."
We miss him.
(Applause)
I live in South Central.
This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots.
So the city planners, they get together and they figure they're going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what's really going wrong in the city.
This is South Los Angeles. (Laughter) Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots.
Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by.
People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles.
For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away.
And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood?
I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars.
I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks.
And I figured, this has to stop.
So I figured that the problem is the solution.
Food is the problem and food is the solution.
So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house.
It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway.
It's 150 feet by 10 feet.
But you have to maintain it.
So I'm like, "Cool. I can do whatever the hell I want, since it's my responsibility and I gotta maintain it."
So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds, we got together and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, vegetables.
What we do, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group, where it's composed of gardeners from all walks of life, from all over the city, and it's completely volunteer, and everything we do is free.
And the garden, it was beautiful.
And then somebody complained.
And I'm like, "Come on, really?
A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about?" (Laughter) And I was like, "Cool. Bring it."
So L.A. Times got ahold of it. Steve Lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org, and with 900 signatures, we were a success.
They own 26 square miles of vacant lots.
That's 20 Central Parks.
That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants.
Growing one plant will give you 1,000, 10,000 seeds.
It's my gospel, when I'm telling people, grow your own food.
Growing your own food is like printing your own money.
I grew up there. I raised my sons there.
And I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people, and I'm manufacturing my own reality.
See, I'm an artist.
Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautify lawns, parkways.
You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people.
So what happened?
I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood.
To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil.
We are the soil.
Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city.
Plus you get strawberries.
(Laughter) I remember this time, there was this mother and a daughter came, it was, like, 10:30 at night, and they were in my yard, and I came out and they looked so ashamed.
This is on the street for a reason.
It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry, and this only reinforced why I do this, and people asked me, "Fin, aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food?"
And I'm like, "Hell no, I ain't afraid they're gonna steal it.
That's why it's on the street.
That's the whole idea.
These are the guys, they helped me unload the truck.
It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother, and it was just cool to see how this changed them, if it was only for that one moment.
So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens.
If kids grow kale, kids eat kale.
(Laughter) If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. (Applause) But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them.
I see young people and they want to work, but they're in this thing where they're caught up -- I see kids of color and they're just on this track that's designed for them, that leads them to nowhere.
So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life.
We might produce the next George Washington Carver.
Now this is one of my plans. This is what I want to do.
I want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block.
I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes.
Now don't get me wrong.
The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it.
(Laughter) (Applause) What I'm talking about is putting people to work, and getting kids off the street, and letting them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food, opening farmer's markets.
So I want us all to become ecolutionary renegades, gangstas, gangsta gardeners.
We gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is.
If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta.
Get gangsta with your shovel, okay?
And let that be your weapon of choice.
If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit.
Peace. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
(Laughter) When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed, because my mother said, "If you're not careful, someday someone's going to break it."
Take it from me: Under the bed is not a good hiding spot.
I know because I've been shot down so many times, I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself.
But that's what we were told.
And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are.
We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age, and if we didn't do it, others did it for us.
And at the same time we were being told what we were, we were being asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
I always thought that was an unfair question.
It presupposes that we can't be what we already are.
We were kids.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man.
I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet.
(Laughter) When I was a kid, I wanted to shave.
Now, not so much.
(Laughter) When I was eight, I wanted to be a marine biologist.
When I was nine, I saw the movie "Jaws," and thought to myself, "No, thank you."
(Laughter) And when I was 10, I was told that my parents left because they didn't want me.
When I was 11, I wanted to be left alone.
I said, "I'd like to be a writer."
And they said, "Choose something realistic."
And they said, "Don't be stupid."
See, they asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be.
I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me.
And I wondered, what made my dreams so easy to dismiss?
Granted, my dreams are shy, because they're Canadian.
They're standing alone at the high school dance, and they've never been kissed.
But I kept dreaming.
I was going to be a wrestler. I had it all figured out.
(Laughter) My finishing move was going to be The Trash Compactor.
(Laughter) (Applause) And then this guy, Duke "The Dumpster" Droese, stole my entire shtick.
(Laughter) I was crushed, as if by a trash compactor.
(Laughter) I thought to myself, "What now? Where do I turn?"
Poetry.
(Laughter) Like a boomerang, the thing I loved came back to me.
One of the first lines of poetry I can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded I hate myself.
From age 15 to 18, I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed: a bully.
When I was 19, I wrote, "I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite."
Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence.
When I was a kid, I traded in homework assignments for friendship, then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time, and in most cases, not at all.
And I remember this plan, born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me "Yogi," then pointed at my tummy and said, "Too many picnic baskets."
He got his paper back expecting a near-perfect score, and couldn't believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero.
I knew I didn't have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30, but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me, puzzled, and I thought to myself, "Smarter than the average bear, motherfucker."
(Laughter) (Applause) This is who I am.
This is how I stand up for myself.
When I was a kid, I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing.
I thought they were both pork chops.
Not really a big deal.
One day, before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees, I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body.
I didn't want to tell my grandmother because I was scared I'd get in trouble for playing somewhere I shouldn't have been.
The gym teacher noticed the bruise, and I got sent to the principal's office.
From there, I was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home.
I saw no reason to lie.
I told her, whenever I'm sad, my grandmother gives me karate chops.
(Laughter) This led to a full-scale investigation, and I was removed from the house for three days, until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises.
News of this silly little story quickly spread through the school, and I earned my first nickname: Porkchop.
To this day, I hate pork chops.
We found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day.
In grade five, they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, "Beware of dog."
To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn't think she's beautiful, because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face.
Kids used to say, "She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase, but couldn't quite get the job done."
And they'll never understand that she's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word "Mom," because they see her heart before they see her skin, because she's only ever always been amazing.
He was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree, adopted, not because his parents opted for a different destiny.
As if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first-aid kit.
To this day, he is a stick of TNT lit from both ends, could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moment before it's about to fall, and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration, he remains a conversation piece between people who can't understand sometimes being drug-free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity.
We weren't the only kids who grew up this way.
The classics were "Hey, stupid," "Hey, spaz."
Seems like every school has an arsenal of names getting updated every year.
Are they just background noise from a soundtrack stuck on repeat, when people say things like, "Kids can be cruel."
Every school was a big top circus tent, and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers, from clowns to carnies, all of these miles ahead of who we were.
We were freaks -- lobster-claw boys and bearded ladies, oddities juggling depression and loneliness, playing solitaire, spin the bottle, trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal, but at night, while the others slept, we kept walking the tightrope.
It was practice, and yes, some of us fell.
But I want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be, and if you can't see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there's something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit.
You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, "They were wrong."
Maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything.
Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show-and-tell, but never told, because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it?
You have to believe that they were wrong.
Why else would we still be here?
We stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called.
We are graduating members from the class of We Made It, not the faded echoes of voices crying out, "Names will never hurt me."
Of course they did.
But our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty.
(Applause)
I want to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship.
I happen to have triplets.
They're little. They're five years old.
Sometimes I tell people I have triplets. They say, "Really? How many?"
Now, I also happen to be gay.
Being gay and fathering triplets is by far the most socially innovative, socially entrepreneurial thing I have ever done.
(Laughter) (Applause) The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity.
I want to talk about how the things we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector, are actually undermining the causes we love, and our profound yearning to change the world.
But before I do that, I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world.
A lot of people say now that business will lift up the developing economies, and social business will take care of the rest.
And I do believe that business will move the great mass of humanity forward.
I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love.
How do you monetize that?
And that's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in.
Philanthropy is the market for love.
And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation.
But it doesn't seem to be working.
Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer, or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city?
Why has poverty remained stuck at 12 percent of the U.S. population for 40 years?
And the answer is, these social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny.
We have two rulebooks.
It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the nonprofit sector in five different areas, the first being compensation.
So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make.
But we don't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service.
Interestingly, we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people.
You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it.
We'll put you on the cover of Wired magazine.
But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you're considered a parasite yourself.
Businessweek did a survey, looked at the compensation packages for MBAs 10 years out of business school.
And the median compensation for a Stanford MBA, with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars.
Meanwhile, for the same year, the average salary for the CEO of a $5 million-plus medical charity in the U.S.
Now, there's no way you're going to get a lot of people with $400,000 talent to make a $316,000 sacrifice every year to become the CEO of a hunger charity.
Some people say, "Well, that's just because those MBA types are greedy."
Not necessarily. They might be smart.
The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing.
But we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity.
Our attitude is, "Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, you know, to air at four o'clock in the morning, I'm okay with that.
But I don't want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy."
As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy.
In the 1990s, my company created the long-distance AIDSRide bicycle journeys, and the 60 mile-long breast cancer three-day walks, and over the course of nine years, we had 182,000 ordinary heroes participate, and they raised a total of 581 million dollars.
But they have to be asked.
We got that many people to participate by buying full-page ads in The New York Times, in The Boston Globe, in prime time radio and TV advertising.
Charitable giving has remained stuck in the U.S., at two percent of GDP, ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s.
And if you think about it, how could one sector possibly take market share away from another sector if it isn't really allowed to market?
And if we tell the consumer brands, "You may advertise all the benefits of your product," but we tell charities, "You cannot advertise all the good that you do," where do we think the consumer dollars are going to flow?
The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue.
So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops, and nobody calls the attorney general.
But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor, and it doesn't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months, and your character is called into question.
So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud.
Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation.
If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue; if you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow; and if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems.
They knew that there was a long-term objective down the line, of building market dominance.
The last area is profit itself.
If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book, this statistic is sobering: From 1970 to 2009, the number of nonprofits that really grew, that crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, is 144.
All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King.
So why do we think this way?
Well, like most fanatical dogma in America, these ideas come from old Puritan beliefs.
The Puritans came here for religious reasons, or so they said, but they also came here because they wanted to make a lot of money.
They were pious people, but they were also really aggressive capitalists, and they were accused of extreme forms of profit-making tendencies, compared to the other colonists.
But at the same time, the Puritans were Calvinists, so they were taught literally to hate themselves.
They were taught that self-interest was a raging sea that was a sure path to eternal damnation.
Here they've come all the way across the Atlantic to make all this money, but making all this money will get you sent directly to Hell.
What were they to do about this?
Well, charity became their answer.
It became this economic sanctuary, where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies -- at five cents on the dollar.
So of course, how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money?
Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others, so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself, and in 400 years, nothing has intervened to say, "That's counterproductive and that's unfair."
Now, this ideology gets policed by this one very dangerous question, which is, "What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?"
First, it makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not part of the cause.
Now, this idea that overhead is somehow an enemy of the cause creates this second, much larger problem, which is, it forces organizations to go without the overhead things they really need to grow, in the interest of keeping overhead low.
So we've all been taught that charities should spend as little as possible on overhead things like fundraising under the theory that, well, the less money you spend on fundraising, the more money there is available for the cause.
But if it's a logical world in which investment in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger, then we have it precisely backwards, and we should be investing more money, not less, in fundraising, because fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the amount of money available for the cause that we care about so deeply.
I'll give you two examples.
We launched the AIDSRides with an initial investment of 50,000 dollars in risk capital.
We launched the breast cancer three-days with an initial investment of 350,000 dollars in risk capital.
Within just five years, we had multiplied that 554 times, into 194 million dollars after all expenses, for breast cancer research.
Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research?
2002 was our most successful year ever.
They wanted to distance themselves from us because we were being crucified in the media for investing 40 percent of the gross in recruitment and customer service and the magic of the experience, and there is no accounting terminology to describe that kind of investment in growth and in the future, other than this demonic label of "overhead."
So on one day, all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs ...
because they were labeled "overhead."
Net income for breast cancer research went down by 84 percent, or 60 million dollars, in one year.
What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did?
Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer?
Here's how all of this impacts the big picture.
I said that charitable giving is two percent of GDP in the United States.
That's about 300 billion dollars a year.
But only about 20 percent of that, or 60 billion dollars, goes to health and human services causes.
The rest goes to religion and higher education and hospitals, and that 60 billion dollars is not nearly enough to tackle these problems.
But if we could move charitable giving from two percent of GDP, up just one step to three percent of GDP, by investing in that growth, that would be an extra 150 billion dollars a year in contributions, and if that money could go disproportionately to health and human services charities, because those were the ones we encouraged to invest in their growth, that would represent a tripling of contributions to that sector.
Now we're talking the potential for real change.
But it's never going to happen by forcing these organizations to lower their horizons to the demoralizing objective of keeping their overhead low.
(Laughter) (Applause) We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things.
So the next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead.
Who cares what the overhead is if these problems are actually getting solved?
If we can have that kind of generosity -- a generosity of thought -- then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all those citizens most desperately in need of it to change.
And if that can be our generation's enduring legacy -- that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been handed down to us, that we revisited it, we revised it, and we reinvented the whole way humanity thinks about changing things, forever, for everyone -- well, I thought I would let the kids sum up what that would be.
(Applause) Thank you.
So raise your hand if you know someone in your immediate family or circle of friends who suffers from some form of mental illness.
Yeah. I thought so. I'm also not surprised.
As we heard from Dr. Insel this morning, psychiatric disorders like autism, depression and schizophrenia take a terrible toll on human suffering.
Now, part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders.
This view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders, like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup.
A lot of people won't take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects.
These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block.
Some of it will dribble into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good.
Now, an emerging view that you also heard about from Dr. Insel this morning, is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion, mood and affect.
When we think about cognition, we analogize the brain to a computer. That's no problem.
Well it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion.
It's just that we don't tend to think about it that way.
But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis.
Now, it's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders.
Rather, they're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain.
So if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act.
Now to begin to overcome our ignorance of the role of brain chemistry in brain circuitry, it's helpful to work on what we biologists call "model organisms," animals like fruit flies and laboratory mice, in which we can apply powerful genetic techniques to molecularly identify and pinpoint specific classes of neurons, as you heard about in Allan Jones's talk this morning.
Moreover, once we can do that, we can actually activate specific neurons or we can destroy or inhibit the activity of those neurons.
So if we inhibit a particular type of neuron, and we find that a behavior is blocked, we can conclude that those neurons are necessary for that behavior.
On the other hand, if we activate a group of neurons and we find that that produces the behavior, we can conclude that those neurons are sufficient for the behavior.
So in this way, by doing this kind of test, we can draw cause and effect relationships between the activity of specific neurons in particular circuits and particular behaviors, something that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do right now in humans.
But can an organism like this teach us anything about emotion-like states?
Do these organisms even have emotion-like states, or are they just little digital robots?
Charles Darwin believed that insects have emotion and express them in their behaviors, as he wrote in his 1872 monograph on the expression of the emotions in man and animals.
And my eponymous colleague, Seymour Benzer, believed it as well.
Seymour recruited me to CalTech in the late 1980s.
He was my Jedi and my rabbi while he was here, and Seymour taught me both to love flies and also to play with science.
So how do we ask this question?
It's one thing to believe that flies have emotion-like states, but how do we actually find out whether that's true or not?
Now, in humans we often infer emotional states, as you'll hear later today, from facial expressions.
(Laughter) It's kind of like landing on Mars and looking out the window of your spaceship at all the little green men who are surrounding it and trying to figure out, "How do I find out if they have emotions or not?"
What can we do? It's not so easy.
Well, one of the ways that we can start is to try to come up with some general characteristics or properties of emotion-like states such as arousal, and see if we can identify any fly behaviors that might exhibit some of those properties.
So three important ones that I can think of are persistence, gradations in intensity, and valence.
Persistence means long-lasting.
We all know that the stimulus that triggers an emotion causes that emotion to last long after the stimulus is gone.
Gradations of intensity means what it sounds like.
You can dial up the intensity or dial down the intensity of an emotion.
Valence means good or bad, positive or negative.
So we built a device, which we call a puff-o-mat, in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away.
And what we found is that if we gave these flies in the puff-o-mat several puffs in a row, they became somewhat hyperactive and continued to run around for some time after the air puffs actually stopped and took a while to calm down.
So we quantified this behavior using custom locomotor tracking software developed with my collaborator Pietro Perona, who's in the electrical engineering division here at CalTech.
And what this quantification showed us is that, upon experiencing a train of these air puffs, the flies appear to enter a kind of state of hyperactivity which is persistent, long-lasting, and also appears to be graded.
So now we wanted to try to understand something about what controls the duration of this state.
And this is one of the great things about fruit flies.
There are repositories where you can just pick up the phone and order hundreds of vials of flies of different mutants and screen them in your assay and then find out what gene is affected in the mutation.
That's right -- flies, like people, have dopamine, and it acts on their brains and on their synapses through the same dopamine receptor molecules that you and I have.
Dopamine plays a number of important functions in the brain, including in attention, arousal, reward, and disorders of the dopamine system have been linked to a number of mental disorders including drug abuse, Parkinson's disease, and ADHD.
Now, in genetics, it's a little counterintuitive.
We tend to infer the normal function of something by what doesn't happen when we take it away, by the opposite of what we see when we take it away.
So when we take away the dopamine receptor and the flies take longer to calm down, from that we infer that the normal function of this receptor and dopamine is to cause the flies to calm down faster after the puff.
And that's a bit reminiscent of ADHD, which has been linked to disorders of the dopamine system in humans.
Indeed, if we increase the levels of dopamine in normal flies by feeding them cocaine after getting the appropriate DEA license — oh my God -- (Laughter) — we find indeed that these cocaine-fed flies calm down faster than normal flies do, and that's also reminiscent of ADHD, which is often treated with drugs like Ritalin that act similarly to cocaine.
So slowly I began to realize that what started out as a rather playful attempt to try to annoy fruit flies might actually have some relevance to a human psychiatric disorder.
Now, how far does this analogy go?
As many of you know, individuals afflicted with ADHD also have learning disabilities.
Is that true of our dopamine receptor mutant flies?
Remarkably, the answer is yes.
As Seymour showed back in the 1970s, flies, like songbirds, as you just heard, are capable of learning.
Then when you give those trained flies the chance to choose between a tube with the shock-paired odor and another odor, it avoids the tube containing the blue odor that was paired with shock.
Well, if you do this test on dopamine receptor mutant flies, they don't learn. Their learning score is zero.
So that means that these flies have two abnormalities, or phenotypes, as we geneticists call them, that one finds in ADHD: hyperactivity and learning disability.
Now what's the causal relationship, if anything, between these phenotypes?
In ADHD, it's often assumed that the hyperactivity causes the learning disability.
But it could equally be the case that it's the learning disabilities that cause the hyperactivity.
Because the kids can't learn, they look for other things to distract their attention.
And a final possibility is that there's no relationship at all between learning disabilities and hyperactivity, but that they are caused by a common underlying mechanism in ADHD.
Now people have been wondering about this for a long time in humans, but in flies we can actually test this.
And the way that we do this is to delve deeply into the mind of the fly and begin to untangle its circuitry using genetics.
We take our dopamine receptor mutant flies and we genetically restore, or cure, the dopamine receptor by putting a good copy of the dopamine receptor gene back into the fly brain.
But in each fly, we put it back only into certain neurons and not in others, and then we test each of these flies for their ability to learn and for hyperactivity.
If we put a good copy of the dopamine receptor back in this elliptical structure called the central complex, the flies are no longer hyperactive, but they still can't learn.
On the other hand, if we put the receptor back in a different structure called the mushroom body, the learning deficit is rescued, the flies learn well, but they're still hyperactive.
What that tells us is that dopamine is not bathing the brain of these flies like soup.
Rather, it's acting to control two different functions on two different circuits, so the reason there are two things wrong with our dopamine receptor flies is that the same receptor is controlling two different functions in two different regions of the brain.
Whether the same thing is true in ADHD in humans we don't know, but these kinds of results should at least cause us to consider that possibility.
So these results make me and my colleagues more convinced than ever that the brain is not a bag of chemical soup, and it's a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor of the soup.
What we need to do is to use our ingenuity and our scientific knowledge to try to design a new generation of treatments that are targeted to specific neurons and specific regions of the brain that are affected in particular psychiatric disorders.
If we can do that, we may be able to cure these disorders without the unpleasant side effects, putting the oil back in our mental engines, just where it's needed. Thank you very much.
Now, extinction is a different kind of death.
It's bigger.
We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati zoo.
This had been the most abundant bird in the world that'd been in North America for six million years.
Suddenly it wasn't here at all.
Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, a feathered tempest.
And indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, from Canada down to the Gulf.
What happened?
Well, commercial hunting happened.
These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton, and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground, they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands.
It was the cheapest source of protein in America.
This made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the American bison, and so these birds saved the buffalos.
But a lot of other animals weren't saved.
The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere.
There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen.
A local newspaper spelled out, "There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again."
There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things, and it happened to lots of birds that people loved.
It happened to lots of mammals.
Another keystone species is a famous animal called the European aurochs.
There was sort of a movie made about it recently.
And the aurochs was like the bison.
This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, from Spain to Korea.
The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings.
There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo.
It went extinct in 2000.
It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos.
Sorrow, anger, mourning.
What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back, what would you do? Where would you start?
So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro.
All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue, because down in there is what is called ancient DNA.
It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented, but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome.
Then the question is, can you reassemble, with that genome, the whole bird?
So in his book, "Regenesis," which I recommend, he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species, and he has a machine called the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine.
It's kind of like an evolution machine.
The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome.
So what you're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene.
Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway.
So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative.
Now along the way, George points out that his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law.
Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here.
Now, there's work to do.
But it should be be perfect enough, because nature doesn't do perfect either.
First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way, and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon.
Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, using money from his family and friends.
We hired him full-time.
Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, he's looking down at Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive.
So if he's successful, she won't be the last.
And National Geographic got interested because National Geographic has the theory that the last century, discovery was basically finding things, and in this century, discovery is basically making things.
So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, basically meeting to see if they had work to do together.
Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical.
So what they're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding, the aurochs.
Another amazing story came from Alberto Fernández-Arias.
Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain.
The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive, but then they captured her, they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, released her back into the wild, but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree.
They took the DNA from that ear, they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, the pregnancy came to term, and a live baby bucardo was born.
(Applause) It was short-lived.
This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes, but Alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then, and this will move ahead, and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern Spain.
Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder.
At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years.
Now, when it's frozen that deep, minus 196 degrees Celsius, the cells are intact and the DNA is intact.
The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs.
So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, and Mike's doing miracles with birds.
So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast, turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells.
He then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have, basically, the gonads of a falcon.
Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting.
He showed how all of this can be put together.
So what do you do about that?
There were some conservationists, really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, who is one of the founders of conservation biology, and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List.
They're excited about all this, but they're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive, that haven't gone extinct yet.
You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there.
You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year.
And so the Red List is really important, keep track of what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on.
But they're about to create what they call a Green List, and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you, species that were endangered, like the bald eagle, but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work, and protected areas around the world that are very, very well managed.
So basically, they're learning how to build on good news.
And they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on.
Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species.
The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987.
Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo, there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild.
Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa.
There were just 254 left.
Now there are 880. They're increasing in population by three percent a year.
So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan with an iPhone.
Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help, is the northern white rhinoceros.
There's no breeding pairs left.
A bit of cloning, you can get them back.
So where do we go from here?
These have been private meetings so far.
I think it's time for the subject to go public.
What do people think about it?
It is a Tinker Bell moment, because what are people excited about with this?
What are they concerned about?
So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz.
They're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon.
As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that.
We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents, and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way, maybe for the next six million years.
Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years.
We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.
Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands, by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species.
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you.
I've got a question.
So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand.
I suspect there are some people out there sitting, kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, there's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way.
You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box of who-knows-what. Do they have a point?
Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct, and many of them were keystone species, and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go.
Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is, so when these things come back, they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love.
Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED.
(Laughter) I said, "Chris, that would take a miracle."
He said, "Bono, wouldn't that be a good use of your messianic complex?"
So, yeah.
And the Pharaoh replies, "Oh, no.
And they say, "No, no, that's what it says here in our holy book."
Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids, another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book.
This time it's called the Facebook.
Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square.
They turn a social network from virtual to actual, and kind of rebooted the 21st century.
Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been, neither to oversell the role of technology, but these things have given a sense of what's possible when the age-old model of power, the pyramid, gets turned upside down, putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom, as it were.
It's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality, because facts, like people, want to be free, and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner, even for the poorest of the poor -- facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia, facts that tell us what's working and, more importantly, what's not, so we can fix it, facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that Nelson Mandela made back in 2005, when he asked us to be that great generation that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity, extreme poverty, facts that build a powerful momentum.
So I thought, forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, my usual tricks.
Because what the facts are telling us is that the long, slow journey, humanity's long, slow journey of equality, is actually speeding up.
Look at what's been achieved.
Look at the pictures these data sets print.
Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs.
Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent.
That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day.
Wow. Wow. (Applause) Let's just stop for a second, actually, and think about that.
Have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number? Wow.
Great news. It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news.
Seven thousand kids a day. Here's two of them.
This is Michael and Benedicta, and they're alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah -- she's amazing -- and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support, whether you know it or not.
And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids.
It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for.
The number of people living in back-breaking, soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010.
Give it up for that. (Applause) Halved. Halved.
Now, the rate is still too high -- still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives.
There's still work to do.
But it's heart-stopping. It's mind-blowing stuff.
And if you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data.
If you're a parent who wants the best for your kids -- and I am -- this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope.
And guess what? If the trajectory continues, look where the amount of people living on $1.25 a day gets to by 2030.
That's what the data is telling us. If the trajectory continues, we get to, wow, the zero zone.
For number-crunchers like us, that is the erogenous zone, and it's fair to say that I am, by now, sexually aroused by the collating of data.
So virtual elimination of extreme poverty, as defined by people living on less than $1.25 a day, adjusted, of course, for inflation from a 1990 baseline.
We do love a good baseline.
That's amazing.
Now I know that some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or model countries like Brazil -- and who doesn't love a Brazilian model? -- but look at sub-Saharan Africa.
There's a collection of 10 countries, some call them the lions, who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation, a tripling of aid, a tenfold increase in FDI -- that's foreign direct investment -- which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources -- that's local money -- which, when spent wisely -- that's good governance -- cut childhood mortality by a third, doubled education completion rates, and they, too, halved extreme poverty, and at this rate, these 10 get to zero too.
So the pride of lions is the proof of concept.
How about that? (Applause) And 2028, 2030? It's just around the corner.
(Laughter) I hope. I'm hoping.
Makes us look really young.
Look at this graph.
It's called inertia. It's how we screw it up.
And the next one is really beautiful.
It's called momentum.
And it's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero, just doing the things that we know work.
So inertia versus momentum.
We know the obstacles that are in our way right now, in difficult times.
In fact, today in your capital, in difficult times, some who mind the nation's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the Global Fund.
But you can do something about that.
You can tell politicians that these cuts [can cost] lives.
Right now today, in Oslo as it happens, oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries.
You can join the One Campaign, and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telecom entrepreneur.
But there's a vaccine for that too.
It's called transparency, open data sets, something the TED community is really on it.
Daylight, you could call it, transparency.
It's getting harder to hide if you're doing bad stuff.
So let me tell you about the U-report, which I'm really excited about. It's 150,000 millennials all across Uganda, young people armed with 2G phones, an SMS social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what's in the budget and how their money is being spent.
This is exciting stuff.
Once you have this knowledge, you can't un-know it.
You can't delete this data from your brain, but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant, impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives.
You can erase that, you really can, because it's not true anymore. (Applause) It's transformational.
2030? By 2030, robots, not just serving us Guinness, but drinking it.
It's not going to kill you.
In fact, it could save countless lives.
By doing so, you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken, the ever-demanding journey of equality.
Could we really be the great generation that Mandela asked us to be?
I'm thinking of Wael Ghonim, though.
Some of you know him. He set up one of the Facebook groups behind the Tahrir Square in Cairo.
He got thrown in jail for it, but I have his words tattooed on my brain.
"We are going to win because we don't understand politics.
We are going to win because we don't play their dirty games.
We are going to win because we don't have a party political agenda.
We are going to win because we have dreams, and we're willing to stand up for those dreams."
Wael is right.
We're going to win if we work together as one, because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: I have been long so fascinated and amazed by so many aspects of Netflix.
You're full of surprises, if I may say so.
So, the company back then was doing really well, but you were basically a streaming service for other people's films and TV content.
You'd persuaded Wall Street that you were right to make the kind of radical shift away from just sending people DVDs, so you were doing it by streaming.
And you were growing like a weed -- you had more than six million subscribers and healthy growth rates, and yet, you chose that moment to kind of make a giant -- really, a bet-the-company decision.
What was that decision, and what motivated it?
Reed Hastings: Well, cable networks from all time have started on other people's content and then grown into doing their own originals.
So we knew of the general idea for quite a while.
And we had actually tried to get into original content back in 2005, when we were on DVD only and buying films at Sundance -- Maggie Gyllenhaal, "Sherrybaby," we published on DVD -- we were a mini studio.
And it didn't work out, because we were subscale.
And then, as you said, in 2011, Ted Sarandos, my partner at Netflix who runs content, got very excited about "House of Cards."
And at that time, it was 100 million dollars, it was a fantastic investment, and it was in competition with HBO.
CA: But that was a significant percentage of the revenue of the company at that time.
If you got that wrong, it might have been really devastating for the company.
We were like, "Holy ...!" -- I can't say that.
(Laughter) CA: And with that, it wasn't just producing new content.
And that consumer mode hadn't really been tested.
Why did you risk that?
RH: Well, you know, we had grown up shipping DVDs.
And then there were series, box sets, on DVD.
And all of us had that experience watching some of the great HBO content you know, with the DVD -- next episode, next episode.
And so that was the trigger to make us think, wow, you know, with episodic content, especially serialized, it's so powerful to have all the episodes at once.
And it's something that linear TV can't do.
CA: And so, did it work out on the math pretty much straight away, that an hour spent watching "House of Cards," say, was more profitable to you than an hour spent watching someone else's licensed content?
RH: You know, because we're subscription, we don't have to track it at that level.
And "House of Cards" absolutely did that, because then many people would talk about it and associate that brand with us, whereas "Mad Men" we carried -- great show, AMC show -- but they didn't associate it with Netflix, even if they watched it on Netflix.
CA: And so you added all these other remarkable series, "Narcos," "Jessica Jones," "Orange is the New Black," "The Crown," "Black Mirror" -- personal favorite -- "Stranger Things" and so on.
And so, this coming year, the level of investment you're planning to make in new content is not 100 million.
And it's not enough.
There are so many great shows on other networks.
And so we have a long way to go.
CA: But eight billion -- that's pretty much higher than any other content commissioner at this point?
RH: No, Disney is in that realm, and if they're able to acquire Fox, they're even bigger.
(Laughter) CA: But clearly, from the Barry Dillers and others in the media business, it feels like from nowhere, this company has come and has really revolutionized the business.
It's like, as if Blockbuster one day said, "We're going to make Blockbuster videos," and then, six years later, was as big as Disney.
RH: That's the bitch about the internet -- it moves fast, you know?
Everything around us moves really quick.
CA: I mean, there must be something unusual about Netflix's culture that allowed you to take such bold -- I won't say "reckless" -- bold, well thought-through decisions.
RH: Yeah, absolutely.
We did have one advantage, which is we were born on DVD, and we knew that that was going to be temporary.
No one thought we'd be mailing discs for 100 years.
So that's an advantage.
And then in terms of the culture, it's very big on freedom and responsibility.
I pride myself on making as few decisions as possible in a quarter.
And we're getting better and better at that.
(Laughter) (Applause) CA: But there are some really surprising things about your people.
It looks like Netflix employees, compared to your peers', are basically the highest paid for equivalent jobs.
And every time someone made a mistake, we tried to put a process in place to make sure that mistake didn't happen again -- so, very semiconductor-yield orientation.
And the problem is, we were trying to dummy-proof the system.
Then, of course, the market shifted -- in that case, it was C++ to Java.
But you know, there's always some shift.
And the company was unable to adapt, and it got acquired by our largest competitor.
So what we're trying to do is build a sense of responsibility in people and the ability to do things.
I find out about big decisions now that are made all the time, I've never even heard about it, which is great.
RH: Sometimes.
CA: "Oh, we just entered China!"
RH: Yeah, well that would be a big one.
CA: But you allow employees to set their own vacation time, and ...
There's just -- RH: Sure, that's a big symbolic one, vacation, because most people, in practice, do that, anyway.
But yeah, there's a whole lot of that freedom.
RH: Yeah, we want people to speak the truth.
You know, it's really curiosity drawing people out.
CA: You've got this other secret weapon at Netflix, it seems, which is this vast trove of data, a word we've heard a certain amount about this week.
You've often taken really surprising stances towards building smart algorithms at Netflix.
Back in the day, you opened up your algorithm to the world and said, "Hey, can anyone do better than this recommendation we've got?
You paid someone a million dollars, because it was like 10 percent better than yours.
RH: That's right.
CA: Was that a good decision? Would you do that again?
RH: Yeah, it was super exciting at the time; this was about 2007.
So clearly, it's a very specialized tool.
So what we've done is invest a lot on the algorithms, so that we feature the right content to the right people and try to make it fun and easy to explore.
CA: And you made this, what seems like a really interesting shift, a few years ago.
Which ones of these are your best movies?"
RH: Sure.
Everyone would rate "Schindler's List" five stars, and then they'd rate Adam Sandler, "The Do-Over" three stars.
But, in fact, when you looked at what they watched, it was almost always Adam Sandler.
And so what happens is, when we rate and we're metacognitive about quality, that's sort of our aspirational self.
And it works out much better to please people to look at the actual choices that they make, their revealed preferences by how much they enjoy simple pleasures.
CA: OK, I want to talk for a couple of minutes about this, because this strikes me as a huge deal, not just for Netflix, for the internet as a whole.
But aren't there risks with this, if this go-only-with-revealed-values approach is taken too far?
RH: Well, we get a lot of joy from making people happy, Sometimes you just want to relax and watch a show like "Nailed It!"
And you know, we've had over 20 million hours of viewing on "Mudbound," which is dramatically bigger than it would have been in the theaters or any other distribution.
And you know, if you have the good mix, you get to a healthy diet.
CA: But -- yes, indeed.
But isn't it the case that algorithms tend to point you away from the broccoli and towards the candy, if you're not careful?
We just had a talk about how, on YouTube, somehow algorithms tend to, just by actually being smarter, tend to drive people towards more radical or specific content.
I'm the child of a missionary, I don't even think about these things.
But -- (Laughter) But I mean, it's possible, right?
RH: In practice, you're right that you can't just rely on algorithms.
CA: But how -- John Doerr just talked about measuring what matters.
Are subscribers grown only by the more time they spend watching Netflix, that is what will make them re-subscribe?
Isn't there a version of the business model that would be less content but more awesome content, possibly even more uplifting content?
RH: And people choose that uplifting content.
But what we want to do is offer a variety.
And what we haven't seen is this, say, race to the bottom of your violent pornography kind of examples.
And that was a struggling show when it was only in the BBC.
RH: Yeah, and again, we try not to think about it in addiction terms, we think about it as, you know: What are you going to do with your time and when you want to relax?
You can watch linear TV, you can do video games, you can do YouTube, or you can watch Netflix.
CA: But you have people in the organization who are looking regularly at the actual impacts of these brilliant algorithms that you've created.
Just for reality check, just, "Are we sure that this is the direction we want to go?"
RH: You know, I think we learn.
And you have to be humble and sort of say, "Look, there's no perfect tool."
So think of it as this multiple measures of success.
What should we know about Mark Zuckerberg that people don't know?
RH: Well, many of you know him or have seen him.
I mean, he's a fantastic human being.
I mean, yesterday we were talking about printed DNA, and it's like: could be fantastic or could be horrific.
And you know, all new technologies -- when television was first popular in the 1960s in the US, it was called a "vast wasteland," and that television was going to rot the minds of everybody.
And in social, we're just figuring that out.
CA: How much of a priority is it for the board of Facebook to really address some of the issues?
Or is the belief that, actually, the company has been completely unfairly criticized?
RH: Oh, it's not completely unfairly.
And he's very passionate about that.
I mean, you've done incredibly well with Netflix, you're a billionaire, and you spend a lot of time and indeed, money, on education.
RH: Yep.
CA: Why is this a passion, and what are you doing about it?
RH: Sure. Right out of college, I was a high school math teacher.
So when I later went into business and became a philanthropist, I think I gravitated towards education and trying to make a difference there.
And the main thing I noticed is, you know, educators want to work with other great educators and to create many unique environments for kids.
And so the tricky thing is, right now in the US, most schools are run by a local school board.
So in the US there's a form of public school called charter public schools, that are run by nonprofits.
I'm on the board of KIPP charter schools, which is one of the larger networks.
And, you know, it's 30,000 kids a year getting very stimulating education.
CA: Paint me a picture of what a school should look like.
RH: It depends on the kid.
Think about it as: with multiple kids, there's all different needs that need to be met, so there's not any one model.
And you want to be able to choose, depending on your kid and what you think they need.
But they should be very educator-centric and curious and stimulating and all of those things.
And this whole idea of 30 kids in fifth grade, all learning the same thing at the same time, you know, is clearly an industrial throwback.
But what these innovative, nonprofit schools are doing is pushing the bounds, letting kids try new things.
CA: And sometimes the criticism is put that charter schools, intentionally or unintentionally, suck resources away from the public school system.
RH: Well, they are public schools.
I mean, there's these multiple types of public schools.
And if you look at charters as a whole, they serve low-income kids.
Because if high-income kids get in trouble, the parents will send them to a private school or they move neighborhoods.
And low-income families generally don't have those choices.
Like KIPP -- it's 80 percent low-income kids, free and reduced lunch.
And the college admissions for KIPP is fantastic.
CA: Reed, you signed the Giving Pledge a few years ago, you're committed to giving away more than half of your fortune during your lifetime.
Can I cheekily ask how much you've invested in education in the last few years?
RH: It's a couple hundred million, I don't know exactly how many hundreds, but we're continuing to invest and -- (Applause) thank you all -- (Applause) You know, honestly, for a little while I tried to do politics full-time, working for John Doerr.
And while I loved working for John, I just didn't thrive on politics.
I love business, I love competing.
I love going up against Disney and HBO.
And so for now, it's the perfect life.
CA: Reed, you're a remarkable person, you've changed all of our lives and the lives of many kids.
Thank you so much for coming to TED.
(Applause)
I have a friend in Portugal whose grandfather built a vehicle out of a bicycle and a washing machine so he could transport his family.
He did it because he couldn't afford a car, but also because he knew how to build one.
Many of these do-it-yourself practices were lost in the second half of the 20th century.
But now, the maker community and the open-source model are bringing this kind of knowledge about how things work and what they're made of back into our lives, and I believe we need to take them to the next level, to the components things are made of.
For the most part, we still know what traditional materials like paper and textiles are made of and how they are produced.
But now we have these amazing, futuristic composites -- plastics that change shape, paints that conduct electricity, pigments that change color, fabrics that light up.
So conductive ink allows us to paint circuits instead of using the traditional printed circuit boards or wires.
In the case of this little example I'm holding, we used it to create a touch sensor that reacts to my skin by turning on this little light.
Conductive ink has been used by artists, but recent developments indicate that we will soon be able to use it in laser printers and pens.
And this is a sheet of acrylic infused with colorless light-diffusing particles.
What this means is that, while regular acrylic only diffuses light around the edges, this one illuminates across the entire surface when I turn on the lights around it.
Two of the known applications for this material include interior design and multi-touch systems.
And thermochromic pigments change color at a given temperature.
So these are just a few of what are commonly known as smart materials.
In a few years, they will be in many of the objects and technologies we use on a daily basis.
We may not yet have the flying cars science fiction promised us, but we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.
I'm curious about how things work and how they are made, but also because I believe we should have a deeper understanding of the components that make up our world, and right now, we don't know enough about these high-tech composites our future will be made of.
Smart materials are hard to obtain in small quantities.
There's barely any information available on how to use them, and very little is said about how they are produced.
So for now, they exist mostly in this realm of trade secrets and patents only universities and corporations have access to.
So a little over three years ago, Kirsty Boyle and I started a project we called Open Materials.
We would like it to become a large, collectively generated database of do-it-yourself information on smart materials.
But why should we care how smart materials work and what they are made of?
First of all, because we can't shape what we don't understand, and what we don't understand and use ends up shaping us.
The objects we use, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, all have a profound impact on our behavior, health and quality of life.
So if we are to live in a world made of smart materials, we should know and understand them.
So many times, amateurs, not experts, have been the inventors and improvers of things ranging from mountain bikes to semiconductors, personal computers, airplanes.
The biggest challenge is that material science is complex and requires expensive equipment.
But that's not always the case.
Two scientists at University of Illinois understood this when they published a paper on a simpler method for making conductive ink.
Jordan Bunker, who had had no experience with chemistry until then, read this paper and reproduced the experiment at his maker space using only off-the-shelf substances and tools.
He used a toaster oven, and he even made his own vortex mixer, based on a tutorial by another scientist/maker.
Jordan then published his results online, including all the things he had tried and didn't work, so others could study and reproduce it.
So Jordan's main form of innovation was to take an experiment created in a well-equipped lab at the university and recreate it in a garage in Chicago using only cheap materials and tools he made himself.
And now that he published this work, others can pick up where he left and devise even simpler processes and improvements.
Another example I'd like to mention is Hannah Perner-Wilson's Kit-of-No-Parts.
Her project's goal is to highlight the expressive qualities of materials while focusing on the creativity and skills of the builder.
Electronics kits are very powerful in that they teach us how things work, but the constraints inherent in their design influence the way we learn.
So Hannah's approach, on the other hand, is to formulate a series of techniques for creating unusual objects that free us from pre-designed constraints by teaching us about the materials themselves.
So amongst Hannah's many impressive experiments, this is one of my favorites.
["Paper speakers"] What we're seeing here is just a piece of paper with some copper tape on it connected to an mp3 player and a magnet.
(Music: "Happy Together") So based on the research by Marcelo Coelho from MIT, Hannah created a series of paper speakers out of a wide range of materials from simple copper tape to conductive fabric and ink.
Just like Jordan and so many other makers, Hannah published her recipes and allows anyone to copy and reproduce them.
But paper electronics is one of the most promising branches of material science in that it allows us to create cheaper and flexible electronics.
So Hannah's artisanal work, and the fact that she shared her findings, opens the doors to a series of new possibilities that are both aesthetically appealing and innovative.
We often tackle problems from unconventional angles, and, in the process, end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things.
So the more people experiment with materials, the more researchers are willing to share their research, and manufacturers their knowledge, the better chances we have to create technologies that truly serve us all.
So I feel a bit as Ted Nelson must have when, in the early 1970s, he wrote, "You must understand computers now."
Back then, computers were these large mainframes only scientists cared about, and no one dreamed of even having one at home.
So it's a little strange that I'm standing here and saying, "You must understand smart materials now."
Just keep in mind that acquiring preemptive knowledge about emerging technologies is the best way to ensure that we have a say in the making of our future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982. (Laughter) Actually, it's deceptively large.
There's actually only about 20 people on each page, because we have the name, address and telephone number of every single person.
And, in fact, everybody's listed twice, because it's sorted once by name and once by email address.
Obviously a very small community.
There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then.
I knew them both.
We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things.
So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community, let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days.
Now, it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet.
So I picked think.com, but then I thought, you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there.
It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department, but it obviously worked really well, and we all saw what happened with the Internet.
It was incredibly successful.
My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick.
So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure subnetworks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, but we're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust.
And that means that it's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen, or certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad.
So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network.
They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they did because of the way that the protocols work.
Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is, you may remember a couple of years ago, all the planes west of the Mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in Salt Lake City had a bug in it.
Now, you don't really think that our airplane system depends on the Internet, and in some sense it doesn't.
But the fact is that people couldn't take off because something was going wrong on the Internet, and the router card was down.
And so, there are many of those things that start to happen.
Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April.
All of a sudden, a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet, including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations, started getting re-routed through China.
So for a few hours, it all passed through China.
Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes.
Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks.
So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days, they're not going to do it with tanks.
That will not succeed.
There was basically a factory of industrial machines.
It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet.
And so there's a lot of -- I'm sure you've read a lot in papers, about worries about cyberattacks and defenses against those.
So actually, in the early days, back when it was the ARPANET, there were actually times -- there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it.
Everything started breaking.
The interesting thing was, though, that the sysadmins were able to fix it, but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off.
I mean, everything off, it's like the service call you get from the cable company, except for the whole world.
What's happening increasingly, though, is these systems are beginning to use the Internet.
Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet, but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions, for administrative functions, and so if you take something like the cell phone system, which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part, Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions, and it's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well, they're cheap, they're repeated, and so on.
So all of our systems, more and more, are starting to use the same technology and starting to depend on this technology.
That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that.
So we've built this system where we understand all the parts of it, but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it, and it's gotten a very, very different scale than it was designed for.
And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather, or something like that.
They have an informed opinion, but it's changing so quickly that even the experts don't know exactly what's going on.
So if you see one of these maps of the Internet, it's just somebody's guess.
Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it's different than it was an hour ago.
And the problem with it is, I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system, where we take a system that's basically built on trust, was basically built for a smaller-scale system, and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate.
And so right now, I think it's literally true that we don't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be, and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year, and worse next year, and so on.
But so what we need is a plan B.
There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully kept to be independent of the Internet, made out of completely different sets of building blocks.
This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project.
It's actually relatively simple to do, technically, because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground, existing wireless infrastructure.
But people won't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it, and that's the problem that we have right now.
So I think that, if people understand how much we're starting to depend on the Internet, and how vulnerable it is, we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist, and I think if enough people say, "Yeah, I would like to use it, I'd like to have such a system," then it will get built.
It's not that hard a problem.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet.
And I grew up singing a song called "Nothing To Envy."
And I was very proud.
In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies.
Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed.
When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution.
But I thought my life in North Korea was normal.
My family was not poor, and myself, I had never experienced hunger.
But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister.
It read, "When you read this, our five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past three weeks.
We are lying on the floor together, and our bodies are so weak, we are waiting to die."
I was so shocked.
This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering.
Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that to this day I can't erase from my memory.
A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face.
But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families.
A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s.
Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark.
Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night, except for the sea of lights in China, just across the river from my home.
I always wondered why they had lights, but we didn't.
This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night, compared to neighbors.
As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross.
But many die.
Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river.
I can't reveal many details about how I left North Korea, but I only can say that during the ugly years of the famine, I was sent to China to live with distant relatives.
But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time.
I could have never imagined that it would take 14 years to live together.
In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family.
I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee.
But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants.
So I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed, and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate, back in North Korea.
One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police, and brought to the police station for interrogation.
Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities, and asked me tons of questions.
I was so scared.
I thought my heart was going to explode.
I thought my life was over.
But I managed to control all the emotions inside me, and answer the questions.
After they finished questioning me, one official said to another, "This was a false report. She's not North Korean."
And they let me go. It was a miracle.
Some North Koreans in China seek asylum in foreign embassies.
These girls were so lucky.
Even though they were caught, they were eventually released, after heavy international pressure.
These North Koreans were not so lucky.
Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned, or publicly executed.
Even though I was really fortunate to get out, many other North Koreans have not been so lucky.
It's tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identities and struggle so hard just to survive.
That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea.
Settling down in South Korea was a lot more challenging than I had expected.
English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language.
We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different, due to 67 years of division.
Am I South Korean or North Korean?
Suddenly, there was no country I could proudly call my own.
Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan -- I started studying for the university entrance exam.
Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call.
The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside.
So I started planning how to help them escape.
North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom.
It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea.
So, ironically, I took a flight back to China and headed toward the North Korean border.
Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles in China, and then into Southeast Asia.
The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times.
One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer.
Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested.
As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning.
He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily, he believed me.
But I had to spend almost all my money to bribe the border guards in Laos.
But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing.
But soon after, my family was arrested and jailed again, in the capital of Laos.
This was one of the lowest points in my life.
I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail, just a short distance from the South Korean embassy.
I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out.
but I didn't have enough money to pay a bribe or fine anymore.
I lost all hope.
At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, "What's wrong?"
I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask.
In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM, and he paid the rest of the money for my family, and two other North Koreans to get out of jail.
I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, "Why are you helping me?"
"I'm not helping you," he said.
"I'm helping the North Korean people."
I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life.
The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people, when we needed it most.
And he showed me that the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope we North Korean people need.
Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea.
Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money.
So we can benefit from the international community for education, English language training, job training, and more.
We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world.
Because many of us stay in contact with family members still inside, and we send information and money that is helping to change North Korea from inside.
I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support.
I'm confident that you will see more and more North Koreans succeeding all over the world, including the TED stage.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car?
Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university.
I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity?
I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production.
That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns.
In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.
CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels.
How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help?
EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer.
So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency.
If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency.
And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source.
So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant.
CA: That scale delivers efficiency.
And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation.
So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport.
CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video -- So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle?
EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets.
There's just no way around Newton's third law.
The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport?
And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America.
And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size.
So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range.
CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently -- by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency.
EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range.
And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range.
I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge.
CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter) EM: I mean, you can certainly drive -- if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number.
CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice.
EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible.
So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP.
You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness.
You can't do that with a gasoline car.
I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive.
CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car.
Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle?
EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume.
So we're at step two at this point.
So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster.
Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars.
And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car.
But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product.
And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there.
CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home.
EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever.
And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize.
By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else.
And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven.
So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for.
So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going.
CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour.
So it's common -- don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes.
Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything.
It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going.
CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow.
You've been working on this solar company SolarCity.
EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar.
I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is.
We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization.
What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already.
If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation.
The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.
CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here?
EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas.
(Applause)CA: How?
CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers.
What are you doing?
Most people choose to lease.
And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there.
It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century.
So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest -- those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar.
And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas.
CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front.
EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front.
You will then pay, how long is a typical lease?
For you, the dream here then is that -- I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term?
EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank.
Google is one of our big partners here.
And they have an expected return on that capital.
With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill.
CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power.
You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility.
So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof.
So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses.
CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar?
CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with?
EM: With a friend who will remain nameless.
CA: Just between us. (Laughter) EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source.
CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet.
You decided to build a space company.
Why on Earth would someone do that?
(Laughter) EM: I got that question a lot, that's true.
People would say, "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?"
And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one.
And they'd look at me, like, "Is he serious?"
CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened?
The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket.
CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization?
You've dreamed of Mars and beyond?
EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this.
It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one?
And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.
CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it.
NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this?
EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation.
There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but -- CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right?
EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent.
EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's really, really interesting.
But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this.
EM: Right, so the big innovation— CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here.
All rockets that fly today are fully expendable.
The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight.
EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours.
CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small.
So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket.
So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket.
That's why it's so important.
Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets.
So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization.
CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic.
CA: Definitely more expensive.
So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale.
You'd like to see a colony on Mars.
EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars -- being the only realistic option -- and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species.
CA: So progress on this "let's make it reusable," how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw.
EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky.
And we've had some good tests.
CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah.
So that's just to give a sense of scale.
We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter) CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it.
You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then -- EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building.
(Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters.
CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this?
These projects are so -- Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale.
EM: I don't know, actually.
You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times.
Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you?
It is truly amazing what you've done.
EM: Well, thanks. Thank you.
Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking.
It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning.
Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations.
And you have to do that.
Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day.
But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach.
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics.
It's really counterintuitive.
So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends.
CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics.
Learn from this man.
Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED.
EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool.
Look at that. (Applause) Just take a bow. That was fantastic.
Thank you so much.
How many people here are over the age of 48?
Well, there do seem to be a few.
Well, congratulations, because if you look at this particular slide of U.S. life expectancy, you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900.
But look what happened in the course of that century.
If you follow that curve, you'll see that it starts way down there.
There's that dip there for the 1918 flu.
And here we are at 2010, average life expectancy of a child born today, age 79, and we are not done yet.
Now, that's the good news.
But there's still a lot of work to do.
So, for instance, if you ask, how many diseases do we now know the exact molecular basis?
Turns out it's about 4,000, which is pretty amazing, because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while.
It's exciting to see that in terms of what we've learned, but how many of those 4,000 diseases now have treatments available?
Only about 250.
So we have this huge challenge, this huge gap.
Well, wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy?
Maybe you've got a swimmer and a rowboat and a sailboat and a tugboat and you set them off on their way, and the rains come and the lightning flashes, and oh my gosh, there are sharks in the water and the swimmer gets into trouble, and, uh oh, the swimmer drowned and the sailboat capsized, and that tugboat, well, it hit the rocks, and maybe if you're lucky, somebody gets across.
Is it going to land where it's supposed to?
So look at this picture here -- a lot of shapes dancing around for you.
Now what you need to do, if you're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or Alzheimer's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe.
And when you look at what happens to that pipeline, you start out maybe with thousands, tens of thousands of compounds.
Ultimately, maybe you can run a clinical trial with four or five of these, and if all goes well, 14 years after you started, you will get one approval.
So we have to look at this pipeline the way an engineer would, and say, "How can we do better?"
And that's the main theme of what I want to say to you this morning.
One that has just happened in the last few months is the successful approval of a drug for cystic fibrosis.
But it's taken a long time to get there.
Cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in Toronto, discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7.
That picture you see there?
Here it is. That's the same kid.
That's Danny Bessette, 23 years later, because this is the year, and it's also the year where Danny got married, where we have, for the first time, the approval by the FDA of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding.
That's the good news.
The bad news is, this drug doesn't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis, and it won't work for Danny, and we're still waiting for that next generation to help him.
But it took 23 years to get this far. That's too long.
How do we go faster?
Well, one way to go faster is to take advantage of technology, and a very important technology that we depend on for all of this is the human genome, the ability to be able to look at a chromosome, to unzip it, to pull out all the DNA, and to be able to then read out the letters in that DNA code, the A's, C's, G's and T's that are our instruction book and the instruction book for all living things, and the cost of doing this, which used to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has in the course of the last 10 years fallen faster than Moore's Law, down to the point where it is less than 10,000 dollars today to have your genome sequenced, or mine, and we're headed for the $1,000 genome fairly soon.
It's called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging.
The normal cell, if you looked at it under the microscope, would have a nucleus sitting in the middle of the cell, which is nice and round and smooth in its boundaries and it looks kind of like that.
A progeria cell, on the other hand, because of this toxic protein called progerin, has these lumps and bumps in it.
Well that was exciting, but would it actually work in a real human being?
This has led, in the space of only four years from the time the gene was discovered to the start of a clinical trial, to a test of that very compound.
Sam is 15 years old. His parents, Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon, both physicians, are here with us this morning as well.
Sam, please have a seat.
(Applause) So Sam, why don't you tell these folks what it's like being affected with this condition called progeria?
Sam Burns: Well, progeria limits me in some ways.
I cannot play sports or do physical activities, but I have been able to take interest in things that progeria, luckily, does not limit.
But when there is something that I really do want to do that progeria gets in the way of, like marching band or umpiring, we always find a way to do it, and that just shows that progeria isn't in control of my life.
(Applause) Francis Collins: So what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this?
What would you say to them both about research on progeria and maybe about other conditions as well?
SB: Well, research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years, and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far, and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria, and it shows that if that drive exists, anybody can cure any disease, and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future, and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that Francis was talking about.
FC: Excellent. So Sam took the day off from school today to be here, and he is — (Applause) -- He is, by the way, a straight-A+ student in the ninth grade in his school in Boston.
SB: Thank you very much. FC: Well done. Well done, buddy.
(Applause) So I just want to say a couple more things about that particular story, and then try to generalize how could we have stories of success all over the place for these diseases, as Sam says, these 4,000 that are waiting for answers.
It's such a rare disease, it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug.
This is a drug that was developed for cancer.
Turned out, it didn't work very well for cancer, but it has exactly the right properties, the right shape, to work for progeria, and that's what's happened.
Wouldn't it be great if we could do that more systematically?
Now we're learning about all these new molecular pathways -- some of those could be repositioned or repurposed, or whatever word you want to use, for new applications, basically teaching old drugs new tricks.
We have many discussions now between NIH and companies about doing this that are looking very promising.
There are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances.
The first drug for HIV/AIDS was not developed for HIV/AIDS.
It was developed for cancer. It was AZT.
It didn't work very well for cancer, but became the first successful antiretroviral, and you can see from the table there are others as well.
So how do we actually make that a more generalizable effort?
Well, we have to come up with a partnership between academia, government, the private sector, and patient organizations to make that so.
At NIH, we have started this new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk, because that first time you're never quite sure?
How do we know, for instance, whether drugs are safe before we give them to people? We test them on animals.
And it's not all that reliable, and it's costly, and it's time-consuming.
Suppose we could do this instead on human cells.
So what if you used those cells as your test for whether a drug is going to work and whether it's going to be safe?
Here you see a picture of a lung on a chip.
And it has cells in between that allow you to see what happens when you add a compound.
Are those cells happy or not?
You can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys, for hearts, for muscles, all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem, for the liver.
And ultimately, because you can do this for the individual, we could even see this moving to the point where the ability to develop and test medicines will be you on a chip, what we're trying to say here is the individualizing of the process of developing drugs and testing their safety.
We are in a remarkable moment here.
For me, at NIH now for almost 20 years, there has never been a time where there was more excitement about the potential that lies in front of us.
We have made all these discoveries pouring out of laboratories across the world.
This is research that's high-risk, sometimes high-cost.
The payoff is enormous, both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth. We need to support that.
Second, we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations, just like the one I've been describing here, in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds.
We need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort -- all ages, all different groups -- because this is the time, folks.
This is the 21st-century biology that you've been waiting for, and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will, in fact, knock out disease. That's my goal.
I hope that's your goal.
I think it'll be the goal of the poets and the muppets and the surfers and the bankers and all the other people who join this stage and think about what we're trying to do here and why it matters.
It matters for now. It matters as soon as possible.
If you don't believe me, just ask Sam.
(Applause)
In 1991 I had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life.
I took a couple victory laps in there.
And I was on a college choir tour up in Northern California, and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus, and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains.
And there were crickets and birds and frogs making noise, and as we sat there, over the mountains coming in from the north were these Steven Spielbergian clouds rolling toward us, and as the clouds got about halfway over the valley, so help me God, every single animal in that place stopped making noise at the same time.
(Music) And we released to YouTube this, the Virtual Choir Project, 185 singers from 12 different countries.
You can see my little video there conducting these people, alone in their dorm rooms or in their living rooms at home.
Two years ago, on this very stage, we premiered Virtual Choir 2, 2,052 singers from 58 different countries, this time performing a piece that I had written called "Sleep."
And then just last spring we released Virtual Choir 3, "Water Night," another piece that I had written, this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries.
(Music) And when I was speaking to Chris about the future of Virtual Choir and where we might be able to take this, he challenged me to push the technology as far as we possibly could.
Could we do this all in real time?
And with the help of Skype, that is what we are going to attempt today.
I'm joined by singers from Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton and Riverside Community College, some of the best amateur choirs in the country, and — (Applause) -- and in the second half of the piece, the virtual choir will join us, 30 different singers from 30 different countries.
Now, we've pushed the technology as far as it can go, but there's still less than a second of latency, but in musical terms, that's a lifetime.
So with deep humility, and for your approval, we present "Cloudburst."
(Applause) (Piano) [The rain ...] [Eyes of shadow-water] [eyes of well-water] [eyes of dream-water.] [Blue suns, green whirlwinds,] [birdbeaks of light pecking open] [pomegranate stars.] [But tell me, burnt earth, is there no water?] [Only blood, only dust,] [only naked footsteps on the thorns?] [The rain awakens...] [We must sleep with open eyes,] [we must dream with our hands,] [we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course,] [of the sun dreaming its worlds.] [We must dream aloud,] [we must sing till the song puts forth roots,] [trunk, branches, birds, stars.] [We must find the lost word,] [and remember what the blood,] [the tides, the earth, and the body say,] [and return to the point of departure...] (Music) (Applause) ["Cloudburst" Octavio Paz][translation by Lysander Kemp, adapted by Eric Whitacre] Eric Whitacre: Beth. Annabelle, where are you? Jacob.
(Applause) Thank you.
Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi.
Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes.
As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems.
Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are.
The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods.
The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system.
The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath, or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch.
So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens.
If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways.
I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?"
And I believe the answer is yes.
I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously.
I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds.
We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust.
From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences.
This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project.
This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me."
So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk.
The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle.
So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare.
Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building.
If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems.
But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another.
I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest.
I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of."
And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.
This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around.
We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air.
So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system.
They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology.
If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another.
Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices.
Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes.
And that is exactly what we found.
If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different.
I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem.
I am collaborating with Charlie Brown.
He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change.
He's dedicated his life to sustainable design.
When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did.
He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health.
He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated.
So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building.
What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time.
Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms.
A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill.
What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again.
When you walked into those rooms, they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before.
Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers.
He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.
Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone.
There's a new microbe, I just discovered it.
It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?
A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is where I live. I live in Kenya, at the south parts of the Nairobi National Park.
So predators like lions follow them, and this is what they do.
They kill our livestock.
This is one of the cows which was killed at night, and I just woke up in the morning and I found it dead, and I felt so bad, because it was the only bull we had.
My community, the Maasai, we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them, and that's why we value them so much.
So I grew up hating lions so much.
So they kill the lions.
It's one of the six lions which were killed in Nairobi.
And I think this is why the Nairobi National Park lions are few.
So I had to find a way of solving this problem.
And the first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire.
So I didn't give up. I continued.
And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow.
But lions are very clever. (Laughter) They will come the first day and they see the scarecrow, and they go back, but the second day, they'll come and they say, this thing is not moving here, it's always here. (Laughter) So he jumps in and kills the animals.
So one night, I was walking around the cowshed with a torch, and that day, the lions didn't come.
And I discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light.
So I had an idea.
Since I was a small boy, I used to work in my room for the whole day, and I even took apart my mom's new radio, and that day she almost killed me, but I learned a lot about electronics. (Laughter) So I got an old car battery, an indicator box. It's a small device found in a motorcycle, and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left. It blinks.
And I got a switch where I can switch on the lights, on and off.
So I set up everything.
As you can see, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box. I call it a transformer.
And the indicator box makes the lights flash.
And that's how it looks to lions when they come at night.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thanks.
One of them was this grandmother.
She had a lot of her animals being killed by lions, and she asked me if I could put the lights for her.
And I said, "Yes."
Since now, I've set up seven homes around my community, and they're really working.
And my idea is also being used now all over Kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas, leopards, and it's also being used to scare elephants away from people's farms.
Because of this invention, I was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in Kenya, Brookhouse International School, and I'm really excited about this.
My new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness.
So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside.
And here I am today.
I got a chance to come by plane for my first time for TED.
So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up.
I used to hate lions, but now because my invention is saving my father's cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: You have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours.
CA: You're working on other electrical inventions.
What's the next one on your list?
RT: My next invention is, I want to make an electric fence.CA: Electric fence?
RT: But I know electric fences are already invented, but I want to make mine.
(Laughter) CA: You already tried it once, right, and you --RT: I tried it before, but I stopped because it gave me a shock. (Laughter) CA: In the trenches. Richard Turere, you are something else.
Thank you so much.RT: Thank you. (Applause)
I've actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years.
And in fact, in 2000, I was ready to talk about eBay, but no call.
In 2004, I started Participant Productions and we had a really good first year, and no call.
And finally, I get a call last year, and then I have to go up after J.J. Abrams.
(Laughter) You've got a cruel sense of humor, TED.
(Laughter) When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley, I had some misgivings.
But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood.
(Laughter) And, in fact, some advantages to owning your own media company.
And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed.
Hollywood has its sex symbols, and the Valley has its sex symbols.
(Laughter) Hollywood has its rivalries, and the Valley has its rivalries.
Hollywood gathers around power tables, and the Valley gathers around power tables.
But I'm actually here today to tell a story.
And part of it is a personal story. When Chris invited me to speak, he said, people think of you as a bit of an enigma, and they want to know what drives you a bit.
And what really drives me is a vision of the future that I think we all share.
It's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability.
And when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days, Ed Wilson and the pictures of James Nachtwey, I think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that I like to call "Humanity 2.0."
And it's also something that resides in each of us, to close what I think are the two big calamities in the world today.
One is the gap in opportunity -- this gap that President Clinton last night called uneven, unfair and unsustainable -- and, out of that, comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us.
But perhaps the other, bigger gap is what we call the hope gap.
And I think that's just a horrible thing.
And so chapter one really begins today, with all of us, because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps.
And if the men and women of TED can't make a difference in the world, I don't know who can.
And for me, a lot of this started when I was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate New York.
And so I used to read authors like James Michener and James Clavell and Ayn Rand.
And their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place.
And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected, that maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all, and maybe engage them to make a difference.
I didn't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living, so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent, so I could write these stories as quickly as I could.
And my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer, and it looked pretty bad.
So I set out in a hurry. I studied engineering.
I started a couple of businesses that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom.
One of those businesses was a computer rental business called Micros on the Move, which is very well named, because people kept stealing the computers.
(Laughter) So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business, so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there.
And while I was there, I made friends with a fellow named Pierre Omidyar, who is here today. And Pierre, I apologize for this. This is a photo from the old days.
And just after I'd graduated, Pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other.
And with the wisdom of my Stanford degree, I said, "Pierre, what a stupid idea."
(Laughter) And needless to say, I was right.
(Laughter) But right after that, Pierre -- in '96, Pierre and I left our full-time jobs to build eBay as a company. And the rest of that story, you know.
The company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world.
Hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries, and so on.
But for me, personally, it was a real change.
I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto and living off their leftovers, to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources.
And around that time, I met John Gardner, who is a remarkable man.
He was the architect of the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
And I asked him what he felt was the best thing I could do, or anyone could do, to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity.
And John said, "Bet on good people doing good things.
Bet on good people doing good things."
I started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things.
These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks, who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems.
People today we call social entrepreneurs.
And to put a face on it, people like Muhammad Yunus, who started the Grameen Bank, has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale, who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever.
And by 2010, she hopes to eliminate this disease, which is really a scourge in the developing world.
And so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things.
And a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that I find really is powerful.
It's what we call, "Invest, connect and celebrate."
And invest: if you see good people doing good things, invest in them. Invest in their organizations, or in business. Invest in these folks.
Connecting them together through conferences -- like a TED -- brings so many powerful connections, or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that my foundation does at Oxford every year.
And celebrate them: tell their stories, because not only are there good people doing good work, but their stories can help close these gaps of hope.
And a light bulb went off, which was, first, that I didn't actually have to do the writing myself, I could find writers.
And I thought about the films that inspired me, films like "Gandhi" and "Schindler's List."
And I wondered who was doing these kinds of films today.
And there really wasn't a specific company that was focused on the public interest.
So, in 2003, I started to make my way around Los Angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and I was met with a lot of encouragement.
One of the lines of encouragement that I heard over and over was, "The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you, who think you're going to come to this town and make movies."
And then of course, there was the other adage.
"The surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business."
(Laughter) Undeterred, in January of 2004, I started Participant Productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest.
And our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change.
We want them to actually get involved in the issues.
In 2005, we launched our first slate of films, "Murder Ball," "North Country," "Syriana" and "Good Night and Good Luck."
And much to my surprise, they were noticed.
We ended up with 11 Oscar nominations for these films.
And it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy.
Perhaps more importantly, tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies.
And we had an online component of that, our community sect called Participate.net.
But with our social sector partners, like the ACLU and PBS and the Sierra Club and the NRDC, once people saw the film, there was actually something they could do to make a difference.
One of these films in particular, called "North Country," was actually kind of a box office disaster.
But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron and it was about women's rights, women's empowerment, domestic violence and so on.
And we released the film at the same time that the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
And with screenings on the Hill, and discussions, and with our social sector partners, like the National Organization of Women, the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act.
And so again, it goes back to betting on good people doing good things.
Speaking of which, our fellow TEDster, Al -- I first saw Al do his slide show presentation on global warming in May of 2005.
At that point, I thought I knew something about global warming.
And after we saw his slide show, it became clear that it was much more urgent.
And so right afterwards, I met backstage with Al, and with Lawrence Bender, who was there, and Laurie David, and Davis Guggenheim, who was running documentaries for Participant at the time.
And with Al's blessing, we decided on the spot to turn it into a film, because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having Al go around the world, speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time.
And I really thought this was going to be a straight-to-PBS charitable initiative.
And so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest, and today is mandatory viewing in schools in England and Scotland, and most of Scandinavia.
We've sent 50,000 DVDs to high school teachers in the U.S.
and it's really changed the debate on global warming.
We now call Al the George Clooney of global warming.
(Laughter) And for Participant, this is just the start.
And we have 10 films in production right now, and dozens others in development.
One is "Charlie Wilson's War," with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.
And it's the true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson, and how he funded the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.
And we're also doing a movie called "The Kite Runner," based on the book "The Kite Runner," also about Afghanistan.
And we think once people see these films, they'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the Middle East in general.
We premiered a film called "The Chicago 10" at Sundance this year.
And a documentary that we're doing on Jimmy Carter and his Mid-East peace efforts over the years.
In closing, I'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way.
And all the people in this room have done so through their business lives, or their philanthropic work, or their other interests.
And one thing that I've learned is that there's never one right way to make change.
And I believe if we do these things, we can close the opportunity gaps, we can close the hope gaps.
(Applause) And I like this one, "Snow Has Returned to Kilimanjaro."
(Laughter) And finally, an eBay listing for one well-traveled slide show, now obsolete, museum piece. Please contact Al Gore.
And I want to thank you all for having me here today.
(Applause) Oh, thank you.
You're about to experience a new, available and exciting technology that's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives.
What I have here is a cinder block that we've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material.
It's called Ultra-Ever Dry, and when you apply it to any material, it turns into a superhydrophobic shield.
Not anymore.
Porous, nonporous.
So what's superhydrophobic?
Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface.
The rounder it is, the more hydrophobic it is, and if it's really round, it's superhydrophobic.
A freshly waxed car, the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees.
A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees.
But what you're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees, and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic.
When you have nanotechnology and nanoscience, what's occurred is that we're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits.
And we're talking really small here.
And it's not just water that this works with.
It's a lot of water-based materials like concrete, water-based paint, mud, and also some refined oils as well.
You can see the difference.
(Applause) So what's going on here? What's happening?
Well, the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface.
You'd think it'd be smooth, but it's actually not.
And it has billions of interstitial spaces, and those spaces, along with the nanoparticles, reach up and grab the air molecules, and cover the surface with air.
So if I put this inside this water here, you can see a silver reflective coating around it, and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that's protecting the water from touching the paddle, and it's dry.
The applications in a general sense could be anything that's anti-wetting.
We've certainly seen that today.
It could be anti-corrosion.
No water, no corrosion.
And it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well.
So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work.
And I'm going to leave you with one last demonstration, but before I do that, I would like to say thank you, and think small.
(Applause) It's going to happen. Wait for it. Wait for it.
Chris Anderson: You guys didn't hear about us cutting out the Design from TED? (Laughter) [Two minutes later...] He ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part.
It's happening!
(Applause)
We're going to use an unusual combination of tools from game theory and neuroscience to understand how people interact socially when value is on the line.
So game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else.
That's a lot of things: competition, cooperation, bargaining, games like hide-and-seek, and poker.
Here's a simple game to get us started.
Everyone chooses a number from zero to 100, we're going to compute the average of those numbers, and whoever's closest to two-thirds of the average wins a fixed prize.
As you're thinking, this is a toy model of something like selling in the stock market during a rising market. Right?
You don't want to sell too early, because you miss out on profits, but you don't want to wait too late to when everyone else sells, triggering a crash.
Okay, here's two theories about how people might think about this, and then we'll see some data.
Some of these will sound familiar because you probably are thinking that way. I'm using my brain theory to see.
A lot of people say, "I really don't know what people are going to pick, so I think the average will be 50."
Other people who are a little more sophisticated, using more working memory, say, "I think people will pick 33 because they're going to pick a response to 50, and so I'll pick 22, which is two-thirds of 33."
That's better. And of course, in principle, you could do three, four or more, but it starts to get very difficult.
Just like in language and other domains, we know that it's hard for people to parse very complex sentences with a kind of recursive structure.
This is called a cognitive hierarchy theory, by the way.
It's something that I've worked on and a few other people, and it indicates a kind of hierarchy along with some assumptions about how many people stop at different steps and how the steps of thinking are affected by lots of interesting variables and variant people, as we'll see in a minute.
A very different theory, a much more popular one, and an older one, due largely to John Nash of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, is what's called equilibrium analysis.
So if you've ever taken a game theory course at any level, you will have learned a little bit about this.
An equilibrium is a mathematical state in which everybody has figured out exactly what everyone else will do.
It is a very useful concept, but behaviorally, it may not exactly explain what people do the first time they play these types of economic games or in situations in the outside world.
In this case, the equilibrium makes a very bold prediction, which is everyone wants to be below everyone else, therefore they'll play zero.
Let's see what happens. This experiment's been done many, many times.
This is a beautiful data set of 9,000 people who wrote in to three newspapers and magazines that had a contest.
The contest said, send in your numbers and whoever is close to two-thirds of the average will win a big prize.
And as you can see, there's so much data here, you can see the spikes very visibly.
There is another spike visible at 22.
They don't necessarily pick exactly 33 and 22.
There's another group of people who seem to have a firm grip on equilibrium analysis, because they're picking zero or one.
But they lose, right?
Because picking a number that low is actually a bad choice if other people aren't doing equilibrium analysis as well.
So they're smart, but poor.
(Laughter) Where are these things happening in the brain?
One study by Coricelli and Nagel gives a really sharp, interesting answer.
So they had people play this game while they were being scanned in an fMRI, and two conditions: in some trials, they're told you're playing another person who's playing right now and we're going to match up your behavior at the end and pay you if you win.
In the other trials, they're told, you're playing a computer.
They're just choosing randomly.
And you see activity in some regions we've seen today, medial prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial, however, up here, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, an area that's involved in lots of types of conflict resolution, like if you're playing "Simon Says," and also the right and left temporoparietal junction.
And these are all areas which are fairly reliably known to be part of what's called a "theory of mind" circuit, or "mentalizing circuit."
So these were some of the first studies to see this tied in to game theory.
What happens with these one- and two-step types?
So we classify people by what they picked, and then we look at the difference between playing humans versus playing computers, which brain areas are differentially active.
On the top you see the one-step players.
The reason is, they're treating other people like a computer, and the brain is too.
So we know that those two-step players are doing something differently.
Now if you were to step back and say, "What can we do with this information?"
You should use those cells to think carefully about this game.
This is a bargaining game.
Two players who are being scanned using EEG electrodes are going to bargain over one to six dollars.
If they can do it in 10 seconds, they're going to actually earn that money.
That's kind of a mistake together.
The twist is that one player, on the left, is informed about how much on each trial there is.
They play lots of trials with different amounts each time.
In this case, they know there's four dollars.
The uninformed player doesn't know, but they know that the informed player knows.
So the uninformed player's challenge is to say, "Is this guy really being fair or are they giving me a very low offer in order to get me to think that there's only one or two dollars available to split?"
So there's some tension here between trying to get the most money but trying to goad the other player into giving you more.
And the way they bargain is to point on a number line that goes from zero to six dollars, and they're bargaining over how much the uninformed player gets, and the informed player's going to get the rest.
That's an interesting difference, as you might imagine.
It's good for them. They make a lot of money.
But we're interested in, can we say something about when disagreements occur versus don't occur?
So this is the other group of subjects who often disagree.
They might be eligible to be on "Real Housewives," the TV show.
This turns out to be something that's predicted by a very complicated type of game theory you should come to graduate school at CalTech and learn about.
It's a little too complicated to explain right now, but the theory tells you that this shape kind of should occur.
Your intuition might tell you that too.
Remember that we scanned both brains at the same time, so we can ask about time-synced activity in similar or different areas simultaneously, just like if you wanted to study a conversation and you were scanning two people talking to each other and you'd expect common activity in language regions when they're actually kind of listening and communicating.
So the arrows connect regions that are active at the same time, and the direction of the arrows flows from the region that's active first in time, and the arrowhead goes to the region that's active later.
So in this case, if you look carefully, most of the arrows flow from right to left.
That is, it looks as if the uninformed brain activity is happening first, and then it's followed by activity in the informed brain.
And by the way, these were trials where their deals were made.
This is from the first two seconds.
Those are all cases in which a lot of value is lost by delay and strikes.
Here's the case where the disagreements occur.
You can see it looks different than the one before.
That means that the brains are synced up more closely in terms of simultaneous activity, and the arrows flow clearly from left to right.
They're hairy, smelly, fast and strong.
Maybe if you had a chimpanzee with you.
Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago.
They're still our closest genetic kin.
We share 98.8 percent of the genes.
And we're also their closest cousin.
They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas.
So how humans and chimpanzees behave differently might tell us a lot about brain evolution.
So this is an amazing memory test from Nagoya, Japan, Primate Research Institute, where they've done a lot of this research.
This goes back quite a ways. They're interested in working memory.
Then they disappear and they're replaced by squares, and they have to press the squares that correspond to the numbers from low to high to get an apple reward.
And they're highly experienced, so they've done this thousands and thousands of time.
Obviously there's a big training effect, as you can imagine.
Not only can they do it very well, they do it in a sort of lazy way.
He had a bold idea that -- what he called the cognitive trade-off hypothesis.
We know chimps are faster and stronger.
The chimps are actually interacting with each other through the computers.
They're going to press left or right.
One chimp is called a matcher.
And the rewards are apple cube rewards.
So here's how game theorists look at these data.
This is a graph of the percentage of times the matcher picked right on the x-axis, and the percentage of times they predicted right by the mismatcher on the y-axis.
So a point here is the behavior by a pair of players, one trying to match, one trying to mismatch.
The NE square in the middle -- actually NE, CH and QRE -- those are three different theories of Nash equilibrium, and others, tells you what the theory predicts, which is that they should match 50-50, because if you play left too much, for example, I can exploit that if I'm the mismatcher by then playing right.
Now we move the payoffs.
Now they get three apple cubes.
Game theoretically, that should actually make the mismatcher's behavior shift, because what happens is, the mismatcher will think, oh, this guy's going to go for the big reward, and so I'm going to go to the right, make sure he doesn't get it.
And as you can see, their behavior moves up in the direction of this change in the Nash equilibrium.
Finally, we changed the payoffs one more time.
Now it's four apple cubes, and their behavior again moves towards the Nash equilibrium.
It's sprinkled around, but if you average the chimps out, they're really, really close, within .01.
They're actually closer than any species we've observed.
What about humans? You think you're smarter than a chimpanzee?
Here's two human groups in green and blue.
They're closer to 50-50. They're not responding to payoffs as closely, and also if you study their learning in the game, they aren't as sensitive to previous rewards.
The chimps are playing better than the humans, better in the sense of adhering to game theory.
And these are two different groups of humans from Japan and Africa. They replicate quite nicely.
So here are some things we learned today.
People seem to do a limited amount of strategic thinking using theory of mind.
We have some preliminary evidence from bargaining that early warning signs in the brain might be used to predict whether there will be a bad disagreement that costs money, and chimps are better competitors than humans, as judged by game theory.
Thank you.
(Applause)
If Matt's in the audience, I just borrowed that, I'll return it in a second, this character from your series.
So 144,000 are called Lester, which means about .05 percent is named Lester.
One is called the general election.
And here's the trick.
You don't necessarily have to win, but you must do extremely well.
It has competing dependencies, we could say conflicting dependencies, depending upon who the Lesters are.
In the money election, it's the funders who get to vote, the funders who get to vote, and just like in Lesterland, the trick is, to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the money election.
You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown.
Really .05 percent?
Well, here are the numbers from 2010: .26 percent of America gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate, .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate, .01 percent -- the one percent of the one percent -- gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates, and in this election cycle, my favorite statistic is .000042 percent — for those of you doing the numbers, you know that's 132 Americans — gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending.
So I'm just a lawyer, I look at this range of numbers, and I say it's fair for me to say it's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America.
Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land?
Well, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, we could say, of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials. We have a general election, but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election.
And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy.
As anyone would, as they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money.
Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, "Always lean to the green."
Then to clarify, she went on, "He was not an environmentalist." (Laughter) So here too we have a democracy, a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people, competing dependencies, possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are.
But in our land, in this land, in USA-land, there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there, many of them in this room here today, but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters, because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest.
I don't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption.
The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal.
So here's the model of government.
They have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency, but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence, no longer a dependence upon the people alone, increasingly a dependence upon the funders.
This is a corruption.
Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption.
One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption.
It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about.
So the right wants smaller government.
When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry.
If we deregulate these guys, how are we going to raise money from them?"
It works against the left and the right, and that, you might say, is good news.
But here's the bad news.
It's a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption, because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election, that means the tiniest number of us, the tiniest, tiniest number of us, can block reform.
I can only find cheese. I'm sorry. So there it is.
Block reform.
Because there is an economy here, an economy of influence, an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization.
It feeds on dysfunction.
The worse that it is for us, the better that it is for this fundraising.
Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
This is the root.
You couldn't be here if you didn't know this, yet you ignore it.
You ignore it. This is an impossible problem.
You focus on the possible problems, like eradicating polio from the world, or taking an image of every single street across the globe, or building the first real universal translator, or building a fusion factory in your garage.
These are the manageable problems, so you ignore — (Laughter) (Applause) — so you ignore this corruption.
But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore.
And not works for the left or the right, but works for the left and the right, the citizens of the left and right, because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption.
Grab that issue, sit it down in front of you, look straight in its eyes, and tell it there is no Christmas this year.
There will never be a Christmas.
If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America, the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans, to spread it out, to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone.
Each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us.
It's the politics that's hard, indeed impossibly hard, because this reform would shrink K Street, and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, put it, has become a farm league for K Street, a farm league for K Street.
Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head, a business model focused on their life after government, their life as lobbyists.
Those numbers have only gone up, and as United Republic calculated last April, the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent.
This is a solvable issue.
If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues.
You don't wake up one day no longer a racist.
It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people.
But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives.
When Connecticut adopted this system, in the very first year, 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only.
Because if you want to kickstart reform, look, I could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy, I could give you back a republic.
Okay. But even if you're not yet with me, even if you believe this is impossible, what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me as I've spoken about this issue again and again is, even if you think it's impossible, that is irrelevant.
I spoke at Dartmouth once, and a woman stood up after I spoke, I write in my book, and she said to me, "Professor, you've convinced me this is hopeless. Hopeless.
There's nothing we can do."
What is that sense of hopelessness?"
And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son.
And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying, "Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do.
Nothing you can do."
And then I saw the obvious link, because even we liberals love this country.
(Laughter) And so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible, what this love of country says back is, "That's just irrelevant."
We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong.
So here's my question: Do you have that love?
Do you have that love?
When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, "Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?"
Franklin said, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."
A republic. A representative democracy.
We have lost that republic.
All of us have to act to get it back.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a 26-year-old British Asian woman working in media and living in a South West postcode in London.
I have previously lived at two addresses in Sussex, and two others in North East London.
While growing up, my family lived in a detached house in Kent and took holidays to India every year.
They mostly did their shopping online at Ocado, gave money to charities and read the Financial Times.
I'm interested in movies and startups, and I have taken five holidays in the past 12 months, mostly to visit friends abroad.
I don't own a TV or watch any scheduled programming, but I do enjoy on-demand services such as Netflix or Now TV.
Last week, I passed through Upper Street in North London on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 7 p.m.
I cook a little, but I tend to eat out or get takeaways often.
My favourite cuisines are Thai and Mexican food.
On weeknights, I tend to spend the evenings with my university friends having dinner.
On Fridays, you'll find me at the pub after work.
I like the idea of living abroad someday.
I prefer to work as a team than on my own.
I'm ambitious, and it's important to me that my many thinks I'm doing well.
I'm rarely swayed by others' views.
This motley set of characteristics, attitudes, thoughts, and desires come very close to defining me as a person.
It is also a precise and accurate description of what a group of companies I had never heard of, personal data trackers, had learned about me.
My journey to uncover what data companies knew began in 2014, when I became curious about the murky world of data brokers, a multi-billion-pound industry of companies that collect, package, and sell detailed profiles of individuals based on their online and offline behaviours.
I decided to write about it for Wired Magazine.
What I found out shocked me, and reinforced my anxieties about a profit-led system designed to log behaviours every time we interact with the connected world.
I already knew about my daily records being collected by services such as Google Maps, Search, Facebook, or contactless credit card transactions.
Your life is being converted into such a data package to be sold on.
Ostensibly, we're all protected by data protection laws.
In the UK, the law states that any personal data set has to be stripped of identifiers such as your name or your National Insurance number.
This doesn't mean it can't be sold on.
Simple examples of personal data include your full credit card number, your bank statement, or a criminal record.
About a decade ago, Latanya Sweeney, a professor of privacy at Harvard University proved that about 87% of US citizens could be uniquely identified by just three facts about them: their zip code, their date of birth, and their gender.
In the UK, where we have far fewer citizens serviced by much longer postcodes, that probability is far higher.
Professor Sweeney proved this in a rather cheeky way when William Weld, a former governor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the US decided to support the commercial release of 135,000 state employee health records along with their families, including his own.
These records did not contain a name or a social security number, but did contain hundreds of fields of sensitive medical information including drugs prescribed, hospitalisations, and procedures performed on these employees.
For $20, Professor Sweeney purchased the voter records for Cambridge, Massachusetts, containing the names, zip codes, dates of birth, and gender for every voter in the area, and then cross-referenced this with their health records.
Only six people in Cambridge shared his date of birth.
Three of them were men.
And he was the only one living in his zip code.
Professor Sweeney sent the governor his health records in the post.
(Laughter) Every day, we hear about new examples of companies digging ever deeper into our personal lives.
In the November US presidential election, a little-known British company known as Cambridge Analytica was tasked with winning the election for a certain candidate: Donald Trump, using data analytics.
The company employed cookies online to track people around the web, logging every website visited, every search term typed, and every video watched.
They also created a viral Facebook quiz to dig into people's personalities, which was taken by over six million people.
In total, they managed to amass data on 220 million voting Americans with an average of about 5,000 pieces of data on each person.
They then used this data to understand people's inner feelings and then targeted adverts to them on Facebook.
Researchers have called them a propaganda machine.
I realised on my phone that every time I logged fitness data into the app Endomondo, it was sharing my details including my location and gender with third-party advertisers.
WebMD, a symptom checkers app, was sharing even more sensitive information including the symptoms, procedures, and drugs viewed by users within its app with its third parties.
Fitbit was sharing data with Yahoo.
A pregnancy tracking app was selling on information about its users' ovulation cycles and fertility cycles with people or advertisers like InMobi.
As long as my phone is turned on, my location can be tracked, not just by the obvious apps like Google Maps, but a whole host of unrelated services from Uber to Twitter, Photos, Snapchat, TripAdvisor, and others.
You're not even safe in your own home.
In 2015, Samsung was found to be recording people in the homes in which their TVs had been sold using their voice recognition systems.
But the creepy factor remains.
Even services like Google and Facebook, trusted and used by billions around the world, have been accused of crossing the line.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I were driving home from work and discussing where we should have dinner.
I suggested a restaurant that I knew was somewhere on our way back and then opened up Google Maps to plot it.
Turns out it was already marked on the map with a little bubble.
There have been several anecdotal reports of people being shown adverts based on things and conversations they were having in real life, prompting concerns that Facebook and Google are eavesdropping on people via their personal devices.
To piece together what all these companies knew about me, I spoke to a data profiler called Eyeota.
Eyeota uses cookies to assign me to thousands of different categories, including my job, how many children I have, and whether I'm likely to buy Star Wars memorabilia.
(Laughter) They don't know my name, but they know more about me than my neighbours do.
Eyeota also buys information from third parties such as the credit rating agency Experian, which amasses a massive database of 15 different demographic types and 66 lifestyles, all based on people's post codes.
Because Eyeota buys this information, it knows that I'm more likely to take taxis home rather than night buses late at night and that I'm very, very unlikely to ever be found in a DIY store.
(Laughter) It can then sell this information on to the highest bidder.
Sometimes, large data sets can be useful for the public good, for example for the use of health researchers or city and urban planners.
But most of this information being collected is sustained by advertisers and traded commercially.
In fact, eMarketer has predicted that the online advertising industry, which is based almost completely on data targeting and tracking, will hit an all-time high of 77 billion dollars this year.
Personalised browser ads may be harmless, but connecting disparate aspects of your life to predict your future behaviour could lead to unexpected consequences.
For instance, decisions on whether your child gets to go to a certain university or what price you pay for your home or car insurance premiums could be made based on data given to third parties that you never intended to, such as your own lifestyle habits or family members' ailments.
In 2014, Ross Anderson, a professor of Privacy and Security at Cambridge University found that the NHS had been sharing its hospitals' database, which included details of hospitalisations for every citizen in Britain with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, a body that was researching how likely people are to develop chronic illnesses at certain ages.
Of course, this resulted in an increase in health insurance premiums.
As the amount of data that is collected increases exponentially, it becomes much easier to identify you.
For example, your Fitbit measures our heart rate or your gait patterns and these can be used to estimate things like your height, your weight, or even your gender.
The data is no longer about you.
It is you.
Companies are also starting to predict future behaviours - for example, whether you're a trustworthy driver, a good employee, or a good credit risk, based on things like your social media activity, your health and fitness, or your home energy use.
The more the companies know about you - where you live, how many children you have, what your medical ailments are, what you buy - your anonymity becomes irrelevant.
What's more, you lose your right to free choice, as companies make decisions on your behalf without your knowledge.
Along my journey of discovery, my first reaction was shock.
I immediately wrote to my local council and asked them to make my voter records private.
I made up a fake email address, and I started registering with a fake age and gender.
I turned off targeted advertising, and I asked Facebook to send me all the information that they held on me, including things I had deleted, and spent hours poring over it obsessively.
But after a few weeks I realised this was a pointless exercise.
I couldn't be a digital hermit.
Knowing all the different ways in which my data was being shared and collected made me more responsible about where I put it.
For example, I stopped signing up to supposedly free services, for example, a VIP card at my local hairdresser or a discount coupon at your supermarket.
Whenever I download an app, I make sure to check my settings to see what permissions it has.
Ultimately, there is hope.
As more of us begin to realise the extent of our data footprint, we will start to demand custody and control of this data.
This means it will become too expensive for companies, governments, and non-profits to recklessly mine and hold our data, and sell it on indiscriminately But until the data economy matures, and power moves back from the corporation to the individual, I have lost more than my anonymity.
All I have left is my name.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where I work as a curator.
It's my job to make sure the collection stays okay, and that it grows, and basically it means I collect dead animals.
Back in 1995, we got a new wing next to the museum.
You may know that birds don't understand the concept of glass. They don't see it, so they fly into the windows and get killed.
(Laughter) And in those days, I developed an ear to identify birds just by the sound of the bangs they made against the glass.
And it was on June 5, 1995, that I heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck.
And this is what I saw when I looked out of the window.
This is the dead duck. It flew against the window.
And then this happened.
The live duck mounted the dead duck, and started to copulate.
Well, I'm a biologist. I'm an ornithologist.
I said, "Something's wrong here."
One is dead, one is alive. That must be necrophilia.
Homosexual necrophilia.
So I -- (Laughter) I took my camera, I took my notebook, took a chair, and started to observe this behavior.
After 75 minutes — (Laughter) — I had seen enough, and I got hungry, and I wanted to go home.
So I went out, collected the duck, and before I put it in the freezer, I checked if the victim was indeed of the male sex.
And here's a rare picture of a duck's penis, so it was indeed of the male sex.
It's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis.
[The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves:Anatidae)] I knew I'd seen something special, but it took me six years to decide to publish it.
(Laughter) I mean, it's a nice topic for a birthday party or at the coffee machine, but to share this among your peers is something different.
So after six years, my friends and colleagues urged me to publish, so I published "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."
A is my office, B is the place where the duck hit the glass, and C is from where I watched it.
As you probably know, in science, when you write a kind of special paper, only six or seven people read it.
(Laughter) But then something good happened.
I got a phone call from a person called Marc Abrahams, and he told me, "You've won a prize with your duck paper: the Ig Nobel Prize."
And the Ig Nobel Prize — (Laughter) (Applause) — the Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think, with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science.
(Laughter) I went -- let me remind you that Marc Abrahams didn't call me from Stockholm.
He called me from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
So I traveled to Boston, to Cambridge, and I went to this wonderful Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held at Harvard University, and this ceremony is a very nice experience.
Real Nobel laureates hand you the prize.
And there are nine other winners who get prizes.
Here's one of my fellow winners. That's Charles Paxton who won the 2000 biology prize for his paper, "Courtship behavior of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain."
(Laughter) And I think there are one or two more Ig Nobel Prize winners in this room.
Dan, where are you? Dan Ariely?
(Laughter) So here's my one minute of fame, my acceptance speech, and here's the duck.
You can pass it around.
Please note it's a museum specimen, but there's no chance you'll get the avian flu.
In the first place, people started to send me all kinds of duck-related things, and I got a real nice collection.
(Laughter) This is a moose.
It's a moose trying to copulate with a bronze statue of a bison.
This is in Montana, 2008.
This is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish.
These are cane toads in Australia.
This is roadkill.
Please note that this is necrophilia.
The missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom.
These are pigeons in Rotterdam.
This is a turkey in Wisconsin on the premises of the Ethan Allen juvenile correctional institution.
So what does this mean?
I mean, the question I ask myself, why does this happen in nature?
And here you see a dead duck.
So there goes my theory of necrophilia.
Another example of the impact of glass buildings on the life of birds.
This is Mad Max, a blackbird who lives in Rotterdam.
The only thing this bird did was fly against this window from 2004 to 2008, day in and day out.
Here he goes, and here's a short video.
(Music) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) So what this bird does is fight his own image.
And I thought, in the beginning -- I studied this bird for a couple of years -- that, well, shouldn't the brain of this bird be damaged?
It's not. I show you here some slides, some frames from the video, and at the last moment before he hits the glass, he puts his feet in front, and then he bangs against the glass.
So I'll conclude to invite you all to Dead Duck Day.
That's on June 5 every year.
At five minutes to six in the afternoon, we come together at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, the duck comes out of the museum, and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows.
And as you know, or as you may not know, this is one of the major causes of death for birds in the world.
In the U.S. alone, a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings.
So I hope to see you next year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for Dead Duck Day.
Thank you.
(Applause) Oh, sorry.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
But when I say the word electric vehicle, people think about vehicles. They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles, and the vehicles that you use every day.
But if you come about it from a different perspective, you can create some more interesting, more novel concepts.
I've got some of the pieces in my pocket here.
So this is the motor.
This motor has enough power to take you up the hills of San Francisco at about 20 miles per hour, about 30 kilometers an hour, and this battery, this battery right here has about six miles of range, or 10 kilometers, which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the U.S. alone.
But the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store.
These are from remote control airplanes.
So today we're going to show you one example of how you can use this.
Pay attention to not only how fun this thing is, but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like San Francisco.
(Music) [6 Mile Range] [Top Speed Near 20mph] [Uphill Climbing] [Regenerative Braking] (Applause) (Cheers) So we're going to show you what this thing can do.
It's really maneuverable. You have a hand-held remote, so you can pretty easily control acceleration, braking, go in reverse if you like, also have braking.
It's incredible just how light this thing is.
I mean, this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go.
So I'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles.
This uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car, which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build, but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation.
So instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city, now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation.
So next time you think about a vehicle, I hope, like us, you're thinking about something new.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and my favorite hobby is photography.
And as I travel around the world, I love taking photographs like these, so I can remember all the beautiful and interesting things that I've seen.
But what I can't do is record and share how these objects feel to touch.
And that's kind of surprising, because your sense of touch is really important.
It's involved in every physical interaction you do every day, every manipulation task, anything you do in the world.
So the sense of touch is actually pretty interesting.
It has two main components.
The first is tactile sensations, things you feel in your skin.
This has to do with the position of your body and how it's moving, and the forces you encounter.
And I'm intrigued and curious about whether we could make technology better by doing a better job at leveraging the human capability with the sense of touch.
Could I improve the interfaces to computers and machines by letting you take advantage of your hands?
And indeed, I think we can, and that's at the core of a field called haptics, and this is the area that I work in.
It's all about interactive touch technology.
And the way it works is, as you move your body through the world, if, as an engineer, I can make a system that can measure that motion, and then present to you sensations over time that kind of make sense, that match up with what you might feel in the real world, I can fool you into thinking you're touching something even though there's nothing there.
So here are three examples and these are all done from research in my lab at Penn.
The first one is all about that same problem that I was showing you: how can we capture how objects feel and recreate those experiences?
So the way we solve this problem is by creating a hand-held tool that has many different sensors inside.
It has a force sensor, so we can tell how hard you're pushing; it has motion tracking, so we can tell exactly where you've moved it; and it has a vibration sensor, an accelerometer, inside, that detects the shaking back and forth of the tool that lets you know that's a piece of canvas and not a piece of silk or something else.
Here's ten seconds of data.
And we make a mathematical model of those relationships and program them into a tablet computer so that when you take the stylus and go and touch the screen, that voice-coil actuator in the white bracket plays vibrations to give you the illusion that you're touching the real surface, just like if you touched, dragged back and forth, on the real canvas.
We can create very compelling illusions.
We can do this for all kinds of surfaces and it's really a lot of fun.
And I think it has potential benefits in all sorts of areas like online shopping, maybe interactive museum exhibits, where you're not supposed to touch the precious artifacts, but you always want to.
The second example I want to tell you about comes from a collaboration I have with Dr. Margrit Maggio at the Penn Dental School.
Part of her job is to teach dental students how to tell where in a patient's mouth there are cavities.
What they're feeling for is if the tooth is really hard, then it's healthy, but if it's kind of soft and sticky, that's a signal that the enamel is starting to decay.
These types of judgments are hard for a new dental student to make, because they haven't touched a lot of teeth yet.
And you want them to learn this before they start practicing on real human patients.
So what we do is add an accelerometer on to the dental explorer, and then we record what Dr. Maggio feels as she touches different extracted teeth.
So here's a sample one.
Here's a tooth that looks kind of suspicious, right?
It has all those brown stains.
You might be thinking, "We should definitely put a filling in this tooth."
But if you pay attention to how it feels, all the surfaces of this tooth are hard and healthy, so this patient does not need a filling.
And these are exactly the kind of judgments doctors make every day and I think this technology we've invented has a lot of potential for many different things in medical training, because it's really simple and it does a great job at recreating what people feel through tools.
The last example I want to tell you about is again about human movement.
You practice.
I think we could use computers to help make that process more efficient and more fun.
And so here, for example, if I have six different arm movements that I want you to learn, you come into my lab at Penn and try out our system.
We developed this system for use in stroke rehabilitation, but I think there are a lot of applications, like maybe dance training or all sorts of sports training as well.
So now you know a little bit about the field of haptics, which I think you'll hear more about in the coming years.
I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the great students who work with me in my lab at Penn and my collaborators.
They're a great group.
(Applause)
I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze -- that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way.
This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways.
And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us.
Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing.
If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness?
No, they are full of misery.
And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, "This was a terrible mistake.
I'll never do it again."
(Laughter) "Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos."
And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things.
It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak.
It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me.
And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation.
He was working in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition.
And he was working very hard on this presentation -- graphs, tables, information.
He stayed late at night every day.
And the guy was deeply depressed.
Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy.
Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor.
And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos.
And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, "Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars?
We'll pay you three dollars for it."
And people said yes, and they built with these Legos.
And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?"
People built one Bionicle after another.
And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition.
You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress.
Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again.
There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?"
And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished.
So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions?
The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles -- eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition.
People were not curing cancer or building bridges.
People were building Bionicles for a few cents.
And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon.
Now we had another version of this experiment.
What happened?
So people understand that meaning is important, they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it's important.
If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don't.
And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it.
There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
In that condition, the correlation was zero -- there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity.
We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle.
I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle.
And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project.
And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to.
And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment.
And everybody raised their hand.
I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?"
Everybody raised their hand.
I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?"
And they didn't raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports.
And then I asked them, I said, "What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?"
And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization.
He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work.
And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning.
If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn't] care.
The next experiment was slightly different.
We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other.
That was the task.
People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth.
And we had three conditions.
In the second condition, people did not write their name on it.
The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages.
In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
So low numbers mean that people worked harder.
At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts.
They could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it.
It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there's good news and bad news here.
The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes.
The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations.
So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA.
I can't say I enjoy the process.
(Laughter) And there's an old story about cake mixes.
So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila -- you had cake.
But it turns out they were very unpopular.
People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that.
No, the taste was great.
It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "Here is my cake."
No, it was somebody else's cake, as if you bought it in the store.
So what did they do?
They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree.
But then we told them, "Look, this origami really belongs to us.
You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you.
And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it.
And we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers.
And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami -- (Laughter) and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally.
Or "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?"
Which one of those two is correct?
At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami.
So now this was tougher.
Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult.
Why?
(Laughter) They put all this extra effort into it.
Because in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?"
Your memories and associations and so on.
(Laughter) But imagine this was slightly different.
Imagine if you did not have your kids.
And one day you went to the park and you met some kids.
They were just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, "Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale."
And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection.
By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter) By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on.
Let me say one last comment.
If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency.
He gave an example of a pin factory.
He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low.
But if you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously.
And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency.
Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing.
But if you do one step every time, maybe you don't care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx.
But the reality is that we've switched, and now we're in the knowledge economy.
You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy?
Is efficiency still more important than meaning?
I think the answer is no.
So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This is me building a prototype for six hours straight.
This is slave labor to my own project.
This is what the DIY and maker movements really look like.
And this is an analogy for today's construction and manufacturing world with brute-force assembly techniques.
And this is exactly why I started studying how to program physical materials to build themselves.
But there is another world.
Today at the micro- and nanoscales, there's an unprecedented revolution happening.
And this is the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape, change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter.
There's even a software called cadnano that allows us to design three-dimensional shapes like nano robots or drug delivery systems and use DNA to self-assemble those functional structures.
But if we look at the human scale, there's massive problems that aren't being addressed by those nanoscale technologies.
If we look at construction and manufacturing, there's major inefficiencies, energy consumption and excessive labor techniques.
In infrastructure, let's just take one example.
We bury them in the ground.
If anything changes -- if the environment changes, the ground moves, or demand changes -- we have to start from scratch and take them out and replace them.
So I'd like to propose that we can combine those two worlds, that we can combine the world of the nanoscale programmable adaptive materials and the built environment.
And I don't mean automated machines.
And that's called self-assembly, which is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through only local interaction.
We need a few simple ingredients.
The first ingredient is materials and geometry, and that needs to be tightly coupled with the energy source.
And then you need smartly designed interactions.
So in one-dimensional systems -- this is a project called the self-folding proteins.
And when I throw this up into the air and catch it, it has the full three-dimensional structure of the protein, all of the intricacies.
And this gives us a tangible model of the three-dimensional protein and how it folds and all of the intricacies of the geometry.
So we can study this as a physical, intuitive model.
And we're also translating that into two-dimensional systems -- so flat sheets that can self-fold into three-dimensional structures.
In three dimensions, we did a project last year at TEDGlobal with Autodesk and Arthur Olson where we looked at autonomous parts -- so individual parts not pre-connected that can come together on their own.
And we built 500 of these glass beakers.
They had different molecular structures inside and different colors that could be mixed and matched.
And so these became intuitive models to understand how molecular self-assembly works at the human scale.
This is the polio virus.
You shake it hard and it breaks apart.
And this is demonstrating that through random energy, we can build non-random shapes.
We even demonstrated that we can do this at a much larger scale.
Last year at TED Long Beach, we built an installation that builds installations.
The idea was, could we self-assemble furniture-scale objects?
So remember, I said 4D.
So today for the first time, we're unveiling a new project, which is a collaboration with Stratasys, and it's called 4D printing.
The idea behind 4D printing is that you take multi-material 3D printing -- so you can deposit multiple materials -- and you add a new capability, which is transformation, that right off the bed, the parts can transform from one shape to another shape directly on their own.
And this is like robotics without wires or motors.
So you completely print this part, and it can transform into something else.
We also worked with Autodesk on a software they're developing called Project Cyborg.
And this allows us to simulate this self-assembly behavior and try to optimize which parts are folding when.
But most importantly, we can use this same software for the design of nanoscale self-assembly systems and human scale self-assembly systems.
These are parts being printed with multi-material properties.
Here's the first demonstration.
This is another part, single strand, dipped in a bigger tank that self-folds into a cube, a three-dimensional structure, on its own.
And we think this is the first time that a program and transformation has been embedded directly into the materials themselves.
So I know you're probably thinking, okay, that's cool, but how do we use any of this stuff for the built environment?
And we're dedicated to trying to develop programmable materials for the built environment.
These are scenarios where it's difficult to build, our current construction techniques don't work, it's too large, it's too dangerous, it's expensive, too many parts.
And space is a great example of that.
We're trying to design new scenarios for space that have fully reconfigurable and self-assembly structures that can go from highly functional systems from one to another.
Let's go back to infrastructure.
In infrastructure, we're working with a company out of Boston called Geosyntec.
Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate, or maybe even undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves.
So this isn't expensive pumps or valves.
These are complex things built with complex parts that come together in complex ways.
So I would like to invite you from whatever industry you're from to join us in reinventing and reimagining the world, how things come together from the nanoscale to the human scale, so that we can go from a world like this to a world that's more like this.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set.
I mean, nine years is a long time.
And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics, I think what that means is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead.
(Laughter) But not all, a few are still alive.
I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me.
And I can't complain about this.
I feel like that was always sort of my destiny, although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet.
If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager, it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name.
But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there.
I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad with whatever great fact I had just read about -- Haley's comet or giant squids or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was.
I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same.
And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work.
I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school, that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud."
And later, in the mid-'80s, when "Jeopardy" came back on the air, I remember running home from school every day to watch the show.
It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house.
And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working, where there was only one English language TV channel.
So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy."
I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s and holding my own, back when that was a fad.
There's a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know.
And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power -- the right fact deployed at exactly the right place.
I never had a guidance counselor who thought this was a legitimate career path, that thought you could major in trivia or be a professional ex-game show contestant.
And so I sold out way too young.
But that's what I was doing.
And of course I said yes, for several reasons.
One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time.
I don't think they know that, luckily, but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons.
I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have.
And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future.
People playing computers on game shows was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future, and now I could be on the stage with it.
The third reason I said yes is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win.
I had taken some artificial intelligence classes.
(Laughter) But as the years went on, as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this, I started to get occasional updates from them, and I started to get a little more worried.
So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to.
And at first, it was very low.
And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud.
And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color.
"The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings."
And I realized, this is it.
(Laughter) It's not the Terminator's gun sight; it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do, the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at.
And when the game eventually happened about a year later, it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to.
We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set.
Watson does not travel.
Watson's actually huge.
It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, trillions of bytes of memory.
And so Watson does not travel.
You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage.
So me and the other human player wound up at this secret IBM research lab in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County to play the computer.
There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage.
Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls, and there's the thing in the middle of their court.
I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint.
I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR, but Watson won handily.
It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer.
And I remember thinking, this is it.
I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line.
I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers.
If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally -- and I see this all the time -- that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically without actually needing a human pharmacist.
And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions.
I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score from a baseball or football game and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game and was commenting on it.
And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job as the humans they're replacing, but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper.
So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be.
I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies, we'll enter a new golden age of leisure when we'll all have time for the things we really love because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren.
I've heard other people say quite the opposite, that this is yet another tier of the middle class that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology and that this is actually something ominous, something that we should worry about.
I'm not an economist myself.
And it made me think, what does this mean, if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, not just lower unimportant brain functions.
I have read that there's now actually evidence that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships, physically shrinks and atrophies in people who use tools like GPS, because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore.
And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber.
And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are?
Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that?
Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less?
As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, this was a terrifying idea to me.
The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important.
The advantage of volume, first, just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays.
Being a Renaissance man or woman, that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance.
They say that the scope of human information is now doubling every 18 months or so, the sum total of human information.
That means between now and late 2014, we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes, as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together.
It's doubling every 18 months now.
This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts.
A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in?
Who do I vote for?
These are the decisions that require correct judgments about many different kinds of facts.
According to a National Geographic survey I just saw, somewhere along the lines of 80 percent of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map.
If you can't do that first step, are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy?
Quite probably not.
The other issue is the advantage of time that you have if you have all these things at your fingertips.
I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith.
She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand.
She runs up to them on the beach one morning and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach."
And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here."
Her parents thought about it, and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her.
They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel, and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily, because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami, the day after Christmas, 2004, that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean.
But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach, because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before.
Now when facts come in handy like that -- I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact, one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time -- normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life.
And it happens in real life all the time.
It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation.
You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah."
People love that shared connection that gets created when somebody knows something about you.
It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met.
That's often the advantage of time.
Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo."
That doesn't work. That's just annoying.
(Laughter) The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it."
And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that.
I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete.
I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced by these little bubbles of specialty, so that none of us know about the common associations that used to bind our civilization together.
I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all sitting on a mountain somewhere, reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes and the lyrics of Abba songs.
I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices, to our search engines and our smartphones.
In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think, things don't always end well.
Those movies are never about beautiful utopias.
It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001."
And I feel like we're sort of at the point now where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in.
This is a question of leadership, because it becomes a question of who leads the future.
On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age where information is more universally available than it's ever been in human history, where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips.
And on the other hand, we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia where the machines have taken over and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore, that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud, and why would we ever bother learning anything new.
Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in.
And we can all make that choice.
We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn, who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over, I don't have to learn anymore," or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime.
No, every day we should be striving to learn something new.
We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us.
These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants sitting at home memorizing the phone book.
For the most part, they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject.
We can live in one of these two worlds.
Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours.
Thank you very much.
So just by a show of hands, how many of you all have a robot at home?
So a couple.
That's the problem that we're trying to solve at Romotive -- that I and the other 20 nerds at Romotive are obsessed with solving.
So we really want to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or 80.
And as it turns out, that's a really hard problem, because you have to build a small, portable robot that's not only really affordable, but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids.
He should be friendly and cute.
So meet Romo.
Romo's a robot that uses a device you already know and love -- your iPhone -- as his brain.
And by leveraging the power of the iPhone's processor, we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks, which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past.
So he's actually using the video camera on the device to follow my face.
If I come over here -- (Laughs) He's smart.
And if I get too close to him, he gets scared just like any other creature.
So in a lot of ways, Romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own.
And if I want to explore the world -- uh-oh, Romo's tired -- if I want to explore the world with Romo, I can actually connect him from any other iOS device.
So here's the iPad.
And Romo will actually stream video to this device.
Now this is a free app on the App Store, so if any of you guys had this app on your phones, we could literally right now share control of the robot and play games together.
So I'll show you really quickly, Romo actually -- he's streaming video, so you can see me and the entire TED audience.
And if I want to control him, I can just drive.
So I can drive him around, and I can take pictures of you.
I've always wanted a picture of a 1,500-person TED audience.
And in the same way that you scroll through content on an iPad, I can actually adjust the angle of the camera on the device.
So there are all of you through Romo's eyes.
And finally, because Romo is an extension of me, I can express myself through his emotions.
So I can go in and I can say let's make Romo excited.
But the most important thing about Romo is that we wanted to create something that was literally completely intuitive.
In fact, who would like to drive a robot?
Thank you, Scott.
And even cooler, you actually don't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him.
So he actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices.
So you can log in through the browser, and it's kind of like Skype on wheels.
So we were talking before about telepresence, and this is a really cool example.
You can imagine an eight-year-old girl, for example, who has an iPhone, and her mom buys her a robot.
That girl can take her iPhone, put it on the robot, send an email to Grandma, who lives on the other side of the country.
Grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night, when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year.
Thanks, Scott.
(Applause) So those are a couple of the really cool things that Romo can do today.
But I just want to finish by talking about something that we're working on in the future.
This is actually something that one of our engineers, Dom, built in a weekend.
It's built on top of a Google open framework called Blockly.
This allows you to drag and drop these blocks of semantic code and create any behavior for this robot you want.
You do not have to know how to code to create a behavior for Romo.
And you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser, which is what you see Romo doing on the left.
And then if you have something you like, you can download it onto your robot and execute it in real life, run the program in real life.
And then if you have something you're proud of, you can share it with every other person who owns a robot in the world.
So all of these wi-fi–enabled robots actually learn from each other.
The reason we're so focused on building robots that everyone can train is that we think the most compelling use cases in personal robotics are personal.
They change from person to person.
So we think that if you're going to have a robot in your home, that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination.
So I wish that I could tell you what the future of personal robotics looks like.
But what we do know is that it isn't 10 years or 10 billion dollars or a large humanoid robot away.
The future of personal robotics is happening today, and it's going to depend on small, agile robots like Romo and the creativity of people like yourselves.
So we can't wait to get you all robots, and we can't wait to see what you build.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Three years ago, I got a phone call, based on an earlier film I had made, with an offer to embed the New Hampshire National Guard.
I was thinking, I just finished making another film about World War II vets, and I realized I'd gotten to know their stories, and I realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tell a warrior's story as it unfolded.
So I went to bed that night pretty excited.
It wasn't at four in the morning, but it was closer to midnight.
So, I called back Major Heilshorn, who's the public affairs officer of the New Hampshire National Guard.
And he knew me, so I was like, "Greg?"
Told him my idea, and you know, he is one of the bravest men in the world, as is General Blair, who, in the end, gave me permission to try this experiment.
Within 10 days, I was down at Fort Dix.
I picked one unit -- Charlie Company, Third of the 172nd, they're mountain infantry -- for two reasons.
One, they're infantry.
Number two, they were going to be based at LSA Anaconda, so I knew they would have Internet access.
The caveat for my access was I had to get the soldiers to volunteer.
I started with the 1607 Massachusetts Bay Colony Pequot Indian Wars.
So, I'd like to show the clip of the film.
It's our trailer, because I know, obviously you guys are busy, many of you may not have had a chance to see it.
(Video) Stephen Pink: This is Sergeant Stephen Pink.
Michael Moriarty: Specialist Michael Moriarty.
Zack Bazzi: Do I really want to go? Probably not.
Soldier: We're not supposed to talk to the media.
SP: I'm not the media, dammit!
MM: The day is here. Life will change.
Soldier: Bring it on! Narrator: You ready? Voice 2: Iraq, here we come!
ZB: Every soldier eventually wants to go in combat.
It's natural instinct.
ZB: Hey, Nestor, your ass crack is right in my face.
Soldiers: IV! Are we on fire? IV!
Man down! Man down!
MM: Keep going, brother. You wanna play?
Michael Moriarty's Wife: It's really hard for him to not have his dad.
MM: This little kid is in the middle of a war zone.
Stephen Pink's Girlfriend: In the beginning, he's like, "Write something dirty!"
George W. Bush: The world's newest democracy.
MM: They're shooting at me.
Soldier: We've got a drive through window at Burger King now.
MM: I support George Bush. We're not there for the oil.
SP: Baril, don't look at it, bud.
Michael Moriarty's Wife: He's not the same person anymore.
MM: I will not go back.
Soldiers: Sergeant Smith is down! Sergeant Smith is down?
JB: It'll be a better country in 20 years, 'cause we were there.
I hope.
(Applause) Deborah Scranton: Thank you.
One of the things I'd like to talk to you about is having a conversation about something that is difficult to talk about.
I don't know how many of you might imagine it, but there's actually a TEDster who recently got back from Iraq.
This is Paul Anthony.
He served -- (Applause) -- with the Marines, and I want to tell you a little, brief story.
We were one of the lucky ones to get in the class with the Sony cameras and the Vista software.
Right? And we started talking.
People will see my tag, and they'll see "The War Tapes," and then we'll start talking about war.
We got in a conversation with some other people in the class, and it went on and on.
I mean, we were there for an hour, talking.
And you know, Paul was talking, and he then turned to Constance and said, "You know, I wouldn't have this conversation if she weren't here, because I know she has my back."
And I want to say, I was nervous.
This film was not about the Internet, but it could not have been made without it.
The guys' tapes on average took two weeks to get from Iraq to me.
But there were 3,211 emails and IMs and text messages that I was able to save.
The reason I quantify that is because we really embarked on this as a mutual journey to really get inside of it.
So I wanted to show you a clip, and then I was going tell you a little bit of how it got put together.
If we could roll the clip.
Because, you know, we obviously have the advantage. I'm just kidding.
SP: All right, let's get over to that site.
We believe that the blast was right outside the gate of Taji, we're heading to that location now.
Soldier: That's a fucking car bomb!
Soldiers: Get your vest on!
Probably 20 dead, at least 20 or 30 wounded Iraqis.
I don't think there was anything left from his abdominal down.
This is blood.
And that's it, that's all that's left.
I remember giving three IVs, bandaging several wounded.
Soldiers sitting in the corner of a sandbag wall, shaking and screaming.
I later heard that Iraqi casualties were not to be treated in Taji.
They can work on the post for pennies, but can't die there.
They've got to die outside.
If one of those incompetent medical officers told me to stop treatment, I would've slit his throat right there.
News Anchor: More violence in Iraq.
Twin suicide car bombings killed eight Iraqis and wounded dozens more near a coalition base north of Baghdad.
I feel exploited and proud at the same time.
I've lost all faith in the media -- a hapless joke I would much rather laugh at than become a part of.
I should really thank God for saving my lucky ass.
I'll do that, then I'm gonna jerk off.
Another mission at 06:00.
DS: Now -- (Applause) -- thanks.
It's a new way of trying to make a documentary.
Five soldiers filmed the entire time.
There are three featured in the film.
The way I learned about Taji was Steve Pink sent me an email, and in it, attached a photo of that burned body out at the car.
And the tone from the email was, you know, it had been a very bad day, obviously.
And I saw in my IM window that Mike Moriarty was at the base.
So, I pinged Mike and I said, "Mike, can you please go get that interview with Pink?"
Because the thing that very often is missing is, in the military what they call "hot wash."
And for me, I really wanted that.
Most of the Humvees, we ended up mounting two cameras in them.
So you get to experience that in real time, right?
The interview that you see is the one that Mike went and did within 24 hours of that episode happening.
Steve Pink reading his journal happened five months after he came home.
I knew about that journal, but it was very, very private.
And you know, you earn someone's trust, especially in doc filmmaking, through your relationship.
So, it wasn't until five months after he was home that he would read that journal.
Now, the news footage I put in there to try to show -- you know, I think mainstream media tries to do the best they can in the format that they have.
But the thing that I know you all have heard a lot of times, American soldiers saying, "Why don't they talk about the good stuff that we do?"
OK, this is a perfect example.
They didn't have to go outside the wire.
They spent their entire day outside the wire trying to save Iraqi lives -- the Iraqis who work on the post.
So, when you may hear soldiers complaining, that's what they're talking about, you know?
And I think it's such an amazing gift that they would share this as a way of bridging.
But it seems like people don't want to hear so much, or listen, or try to have an exchange.
And we have to be able to go into scary places where we may, you know, we think we know.
But we just have to leave that little bit of openness, to know.
And for me, it's trying to bridge that disconnect.
I'll share one story.
And usually, the first questions are, "Oh, what kind of cameras did you use?"
And they wait until pretty much everybody's gone.
In this film, there is a scene where an Iraqi woman is killed.
A soldier came up to me and stood, you know really, pretty close, a foot away from me.
He's a big guy.
And he looked at me, and I smiled, and then I saw the tears start welling up in his eyes.
And he wasn't going to blink.
And he said, "My gunner was throwing candy."
And I knew what he was going to say.
The gunner was throwing candy.
They used to throw candy to the kids.
Kids got too close, very often.
And he said, "I killed a child.
And I'm a father. I have children.
I'm afraid she's going to think I'm a monster."
I hugged him, of course, and I said, you know, "It's going to be OK."
And he said, "I'm going to bring her to see your film.
And then I'm going to tell her."
So when I talk about a disconnect, it's not only for maybe those people who don't know a soldier, which there obviously are. You know, these days, it's not like World War II, where there was a war front and a home front, and everybody seemed involved.
And often, I'll hear people say, who maybe know that I did this film, and they say, "Oh, you know, I'm against the war, but I support the soldiers."
Are you volunteering at a VA?
You know, obviously, like Dean Kamen's working on that amazing thing, but there's charities where you can sponsor computers for wounded soldiers.
Are you a friend to them?
Do you really care?
And really do give them a hug.
Thank you.
So I'll be talking about the success of my campus, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, in educating students of all types, across the arts and humanities and the science and engineering areas.
What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from a group of students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder -- students of color, students underrepresented in selected areas.
And what makes the story especially unique is that we have learned how to help African-American students, Latino students, students from low-income backgrounds, to become some of the best in the world in science and engineering.
And so I begin with a story about my childhood.
We all are products of our childhood experiences.
It's hard for me to believe that it's been 50 years since I had the experience of being a ninth grade kid in Birmingham, Alabama, a kid who loved getting A's, a kid who loved math, who loved to read, a kid who would say to the teacher -- when the teacher said, "Here are 10 problems," to the class, this little fat kid would say, "Give us 10 more."
And the whole class would say, "Shut up, Freeman."
And there was a designated kicker every day.
And so I was always asking this question: "Well how could we get more kids to really love to learn?"
And amazingly, one week in church, when I really didn't want to be there and I was in the back of the room being placated by doing math problems, I heard this man say this: "If we can get the children to participate in this peaceful demonstration here in Birmingham, we can show America that even children know the difference between right and wrong and that children really do want to get the best possible education."
And I looked up and said, "Who is that man?"
And they said his name was Dr. Martin Luther King.
And I said to my parents, "I've got to go.
I want to go. I want to be a part of this."
And they said, "Absolutely not."
And somehow I said, "You know, you guys are hypocrites.
You make me go to this. You make me listen.
The man wants me to go, and now you say no."
And they thought about it all night.
And they came into my room the next morning.
They had been literally crying and praying and thinking, "Will we let our 12-year-old participate in this march and probably have to go to jail?"
And they decided to do it.
And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses, and I got really scared, I really did.
It simply means that they believe it's important to do it.
I wanted a better education.
I did not want to have to have hand-me-down books.
I wanted to know that the school I attended not only had good teachers, but the resources we needed.
And as a result of that experience, in the middle of the week, while I was there in jail, Dr. King came and said with our parents, "What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born."
I recently realized that two-thirds of Americans today had not been born at the time of 1963.
And so for them, when they hear about the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, in many ways, if they see it on TV, it's like our looking at the 1863 "Lincoln" movie: It's history.
And the real question is, what lessons did we learn?
Well amazingly, the most important for me was this: That children can be empowered to take ownership of their education.
And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King, in 1963.
And what made that institutional founding especially important is that Maryland is the South, as you know, and, quite frankly, it was the first university in our state founded at a time when students of all races could go there.
The experiment is this: Is it possible to have institutions in our country, universities, where people from all backgrounds can come and learn and learn to work together and learn to become leaders and to support each other in that experience?
We produced great artists. Beckett is our muse.
The problem that we faced was the same problem America continues to face -- that students in the sciences and engineering, black students were not succeeding.
And as a result of that, we decided to do something that would help, first of all, the group at the bottom, African-American students, and then Hispanic students.
And Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, philanthropists, said, "We'd like to help."
Robert Meyerhoff said, "Why is it that everything I see on TV about black boys, if it's not about basketball, is not positive?
I'd like to make a difference, to do something that's positive."
We married those ideas, and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program.
And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things.
That's a big deal. It really is.
(Applause) You see, most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering.
Quite frankly, you're talking about Americans.
But the other part has to do with the culture of science and engineering on our campuses.
And the number one reason, we find, quite frankly, is they did not do well in first year science courses.
How many of you in this audience know somebody who started off in pre-med or engineering and changed their major within a year or two?
And what is interesting about that is that so many students are smart and can do it.
We need to find ways of making it happen.
But equally important, it takes an understanding that it's hard work that makes the difference.
I don't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are.
Smart simply means you're ready to learn.
You're excited about learning and you want to ask good questions.
And he said, in contrast, his Jewish mother would say, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?"
And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious.
And as a result of those high expectations, we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them, not simply to survive in science and engineering, but to become the very best, to excel.
Every foundation makes the difference in the next level.
That young man went on to graduate from UMBC, to become the first black to get the M.D./Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
He now works at Harvard.
Test scores are important, but they're not the most important thing.
But she had a factor that was very important.
She never missed a day of school, K-12.
That young woman went on, and she is today with an M.D./Ph.D. from Hopkins.
She's on the faculty, tenure track in psychiatry, Ph.D. in neuroscience.
She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients.
(Applause) And so high expectations, very important.
Secondly, the idea of building community among the students.
Students are not taught to work in groups.
And that's what we work to do with that group to get them to understand each other, to build trust among them, to support each other, to learn how to ask good questions, but also to learn how to explain concepts with clarity.
So building community among those students, very important.
And so our students are working in labs regularly.
They were in the lab working, and they saw the work, not as schoolwork, but as their lives.
They knew they were working on AIDS research.
And what was interesting was each one of them focused on that work.
And he said, "It doesn't get any better than that."
And then finally, if you've got the community and you've got the high expectations and you've got researchers producing researchers, you have to have people who are willing as faculty to get involved with those students, even in the classroom.
What was significant was that the faculty member was observing every student to understand who was really involved and who was not and was saying, "Let me see how I can work with them.
That young man today is actually a faculty member M.D./Ph.D. in neuroengineering at Duke.
Give him a big hand for that.
(Applause) And so the significance is that we have now developed this model that is helping us, not only finally with evaluation, assessing what works.
And what we learned was that we needed to think about redesigning courses.
And so we redesigned chemistry, we redesigned physics.
But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences.
Because so many students are bored in class.
Many students, K-12 and in universities, don't want to just sit there and listen to somebody talk.
And it's working so well that throughout our university system in Maryland, more and more courses are being redesigned.
It's called academic innovation.
If you don't know it, there's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000.
And what I'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students, telling young women, young minority students and students in general, you can do this work.
And most important, giving them a chance to build that community with faculty pulling them into the work and our assessing what works and what does not work.
When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham, I kept thinking, "I wonder what my future could be."
I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries, where students are not there just to survive, where they love learning, where they enjoy being the best, where they will one day change the world.
Aristotle said, "Excellence is never an accident.
It is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution.
And then he said something that gives me goosebumps.
He said, "Choice, not chance, determines your destiny."
Choice, not chance, determines your destiny, dreams and values.
(Applause)
I want to share some personal friends and stories with you that I've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world.
And I'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound, and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once, and I'm like, "Uh oh, this is bad news."
Now, with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis, it just sucked me in immediately, as if I began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me, until I met a patient named Verna in a waiting room, who became a dear friend, and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases, and said, "Eric, these people who get this are normally in their '70s and '80s.
Take control of your health and get on with your life."
And I did.
Now, these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people.
In fact, these professionals were miracle workers, but they're working in a flawed, expensive system that's set up the wrong way.
It's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need.
And it's dependent on passive patients who just take it and don't ask any questions.
Now the problem with this model is that it's unsustainable globally.
We need to invent what I call a personal health system.
So what does this personal health system look like, and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail?
Now, I'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine, Libby, somebody I've become quite attached to over the last six months.
This is Libby, or actually, this is an ultrasound image of Libby.
This is the kidney transplant I was never supposed to have.
Now, this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today, and you'll notice, on the edge of this image, there's some dark spots there, which was really concerning to me.
This is not a wardrobe malfunction. I have to take my belt off here.
(Laughter) I'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante.
This is a portable ultrasound.
Mobisante is up in Redmond, Washington, and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself.
They're not approved to do this. Patients are not approved to do this.
This is a concept demo, so I want to make that clear.
All right, I gotta gel up.
Now the people in the front row are very nervous. (Laughter) And I want to actually introduce you to Dr. Batiuk, who's another friend of mine.
He's up in Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon.
So let me just make sure. Hey, Dr. Batiuk. Can you hear me okay?
And actually, can you see Libby?
Thomas Batuik: Hi there, Eric.
You look busy. How are you?
So I just wanted to see, is this the image you need to get?
And I know you want to look and see if those spots are still there.
Okay, freeze that image. That's a good one for me.
ED: All right. Now last week, when I did this, you had me measure that spot to the right.
TB: Yeah, let's do that.
ED: All right. This is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring, but I've got it, I think, and I'll save that image and send it to you.
TB: Many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney.
Based on the other images we have, I'm really happy how it looks today.
ED: All right. Well, I guess we'll double check it when I come in.
TB: Good choice.ED: All right, thanks, Dr. Batiuk.
All right. So what you're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies, of mobile, social and analytic technologies.
Now there's really three pillars of this personal health I want to talk to you about now, and it's care anywhere, care networking and care customization.
Humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s. It is time to update our thinking.
And these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients, especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections.
And many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built.
Now I personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age.
This was me in third grade.
I broke my elbow very seriously, had to have surgery, worried that they were going to actually lose the arm.
Recovering from the surgery in the hospital, I get bedsores.
The future of personal health that I'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model, not in a hospital or clinic.
Now the smartphones that we're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them, and a whole array of others, today, and as sensing is built into these, we'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we've never had before.
Many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now.
Now the software is also getting smarter, right?
Think about a coach, an agent online, that's going to help me do safe self-care.
That same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing, and the device will say, "Up, down, left, right, ah, Eric, that's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor."
Now, if we've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere, it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff, and that leads to the second pillar I want to talk about, care networking.
We have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care.
Uncoordinated care today is expensive at best, and it is deadly at worst.
Eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members.
They put me through five weeks of tests -- very expensive, very scary -- before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper, my meds list that I've been carrying to every single appointment, and says, "Oh my gosh."
Three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me.
I did not have a heart problem. I had an overdose problem.
And this happens to millions of people every year.
I want to use technology that we're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport.
Now this is the most frightening thing to me.
And this is a picture of my graduation team from Legacy.
There's a couple of the folks here. You'll recognize Dr. Batiuk.
We just talked to him. Here's Jenny, one of the nurses, Allison, who helped manage the transplant list, and a dozen other people who aren't pictured, a pharmacist, a psychologist, a nutritionist, even a financial counselor, Lisa, who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles.
I wept the day I graduated.
I should have been happy, because I was so well that I could go back to my normal doctors, but I wept because I was so actually connected to this team.
And here's the most important part.
The other people in this picture are me and my wife, Ashley.
That's the only way that the model works.
My team is actually working in China on one of these self-care models for a project we called Age-Friendly Cities.
The most important point I want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past.
The future of health care is smart teams, and you'd better be on that team for yourself.
Randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis, and those are important things, don't get me wrong.
The technologies that are coming, high-performance computing, analytics, big data that everyone's talking about, will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients.
And the magic here is, experiment on my avatar in software, not my body in suffering.
Now, I've had two examples I want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey.
The first was quite simple. I finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity.
I was optimizing my life for quality of life, and quality of life for me means time in snow.
So on my chart, I forced them to put, "Patient goal: low doses of drugs over longer periods of time, side effects friendly to skiing."
Now the second example of customization -- and by the way, you can't customize care if you don't know your own goals, so health care can't know those until you know your own health care goals.
But the second example I want to give you is, I happened to be an early guinea pig, and I got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced.
Now it took about two weeks of processing on Intel's highest-end servers to make this happen, and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data.
And at the end of all of that, they said, "Yes, those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong, and we have a better path forward."
The future that Intel's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours, and make this kind of tool available, not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world, but in the mainstream -- every patient, every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing.
And I tell you, this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime.
So these three pillars of personal health, care anywhere, care networking, care customization, are happening in pieces now, but this vision will completely fail if we don't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles.
It's what my friend Verna said: Wake up and take control of your health.
Because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways.
I only had one night in the hospital.
The surgery was done laparoscopically, so I have just five very small scars on my abdomen, and I had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything I'd done before without any changes.
ED: Well, I probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again.
(Applause) This TED stage and all of the TED stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies, and I've done that here today, and I've seen amazing things coming from TED speakers, I mean, my gosh, artificial kidneys, even printable kidneys, that are coming.
But until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us, and even when they are, it's up to us to care for, and even save, one another.
(Applause)
I'd like you to come back with me for a moment to the 19th century, specifically to June 24, 1833.
The British Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its third meeting at the University of Cambridge.
It's the first night of the meeting, and a confrontation is about to take place that will change science forever.
An elderly, white-haired man stands up.
The members of the Association are shocked to realize that it's the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who hadn't even left his house in years until that day.
They're even more shocked by what he says.
"You must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers."
Coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs.
They were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the British Association.
The crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly.
A young Cambridge scholar named William Whewell stood up and quieted the audience.
What were scientists called before?
What had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment?
Prior to this meeting, those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs.
After this, they were scientists, professionals with a particular scientific method, goals, societies and funding.
Much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at Cambridge University in 1812: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell.
Charles Babbage, I think known to most TEDsters, invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer.
John Herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere, and, in his spare time, co-invented photography.
I'm sure we could all be that productive without Facebook or Twitter to take up our time.
Richard Jones became an important economist who later influenced Karl Marx.
And Whewell not only coined the term scientist, as well as the words anode, cathode and ion, but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides.
In the Cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813, the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts.
They talked about science and the need for a new scientific revolution.
They felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century.
And I'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made.
About 200 years before, Francis Bacon and then, later, Isaac Newton, had proposed an inductive scientific method.
Now that's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws, which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise.
However, in 1809, David Ricardo muddied the waters by arguing that the science of economics should use a different, deductive method.
The problem was that an influential group at Oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics, this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too.
The members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed.
Reading one of Herschel's books was such a watershed moment for Charles Darwin that he would later say, "Scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me.
It also shaped Darwin's scientific method, as well as that used by his peers.
[Science for the public good] Previously, it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen, or for one's own personal gain.
For example, ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports.
The philosophical breakfast club changed that, working together.
The four men really helped each other in every way.
They also relentlessly lobbied the British government for the money to build Babbage's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society.
These tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part-time workers known as -- and this is amazing -- computers, but these calculations were really difficult.
Each month required 1,365 calculations, so these tables were filled with mistakes.
Babbage's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accurately compute any of these tables.
Two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years by a team from the Science Museum of London using his own plans.
This is the one now at the Computer History Museum in California, and it calculates accurately. It actually works.
Later, Babbage's analytical engine was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense.
It had a separate memory and central processor.
Tragically, Babbage's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non-human computers would have no usefulness for the public.
[New scientific institutions] Founded in Bacon's time, the Royal Society of London was the foremost scientific society in England and even in the rest of the world.
By the 19th century, it had become a kind of gentleman's club populated mainly by antiquarians, literary men and the nobility.
The members of the philosophical breakfast club helped form a number of new scientific societies, including the British Association.
These new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results.
They reinstated the tradition of the Q&A after scientific papers were read, which had been discontinued by the Royal Society as being ungentlemanly.
And for the first time, they gave women a foot in the door of science.
The British Association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members.
[External funding for science] Up to the 19th century, natural philosophers were expected to pay for their own equipment and supplies.
Occasionally, there were prizes, such as that given to John Harrison in the 18th century, for solving the so-called longitude problem, but prizes were only given after the fact, when they were given at all.
On the advice of the philosophical breakfast club, the British Association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy, the tides, fossil fish, shipbuilding, and many other areas.
These grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research, but they also encouraged thinking outside the box, rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question.
Eventually, the Royal Society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit, and this has become -- fortunately it's become -- a major part of the scientific landscape today.
So the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist.
That's the heroic part of their story.
There's a flip side as well.
They did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution.
They would have been deeply dismayed by today's disjunction between science and the rest of culture.
It's shocking to realize that only 28 percent of American adults have even a very basic level of science literacy, and this was tested by asking simple questions like, "Did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time?"
and "What proportion of the Earth is covered in water?"
This is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends.
In fact, "Origin of Species" was written for a general and popular audience, and was widely read when it first appeared.
Darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten, that science is not only for scientists.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let's talk dirty.
To go back to that toilet, it wasn't a particularly fancy toilet, it wasn't as nice as this one from the World Toilet Organization.
That's the other WTO. (Laughter) But it had a lockable door, it had privacy, it had water, it had soap so I could wash my hands, and I did because I'm a woman, and we do that.
(Laughter) (Applause) But that day, when I asked that question, I learned something, and that was that I'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right, when in fact it's a privilege.
2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet.
Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet.
And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway, which is called open defecation, or poo-pooing in the open.
And he does that every day, and every day, probably, that guy in the picture walks on by, because he sees that little boy, but he doesn't see him.
But he should, because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers.
He's barefoot. He'll run back into his house, and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet.
But if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency, this is the picture that you come up with.
(Laughter) Still not sure about the bikini.
And here's another image of diarrhea.
You can't see her, because she's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea -- the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke.
And that's her dad.
But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day.
Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together.
It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction.
And the cost to the world is immense: 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation.
These are cholera beds in Haiti.
You'll have heard of cholera, but we don't hear about diarrhea.
But we know how to fix this.
We know, because in the mid-19th century, wonderful Victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet, and disease dropped dramatically.
The flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the British Medical Journal, and they were choosing over the Pill, anesthesia, and surgery.
It's a wonderful waste disposal device.
But I think that it's so good — it doesn't smell, we can put it in our house, we can lock it behind a door — and I think we've locked it out of conversation too.
Poop's not particularly adequate.
We know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation, but if you look at the budgets of countries, developing and developed, you'll think there's something wrong with the math, because you'll expect absurdities like Pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation, even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in Pakistan every year.
But then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget, and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply, which is great; we all need water.
No one's going to refuse clean water.
Think about it. That little boy who's running back into his house, he may have a nice, clean fresh water supply, but he's got dirty hands that he's going to contaminate his water supply with.
And I think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development, because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us.
Twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation.
They've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in.
We've all done that, but they do it every day, and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating, it just gets too much.
And I understand that. Who can blame them?
So if you met an educationalist and said, "I can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing," you'd make a lot of friends in education.
Poop can cook your dinner.
It's got nutrients in it.
We ingest nutrients. We excrete nutrients as well.
We don't keep them all.
So these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in Butare.
They're genocidal inmates, most of them, and they're stirring the contents of their own latrines, because if you put poop in a sealed environment, in a tank, pretty much like a stomach, then, pretty much like a stomach, it gives off gas, and you can cook with it.
It's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives.
Here's a woman who's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes, which is what you think it is, except not quite, because it's actually donated.
There is now a new career path called stool donor.
It's like the new sperm donor.
Because she has been suffering from a superbug called C. diff, and it's resistant to antibiotics in many cases.
She's been suffering for years.
She gets a dose of healthy human feces, and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent.
That's okay, because there's a team of research scientists in Canada who have now created a stool sample, a fake stool sample which is called RePOOPulate.
So you'd be thinking by now, okay, the solution's simple, we give everyone a toilet.
And this is where it gets really interesting, because it's not that simple, because we are not simple.
We need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware.
So the idea is to manipulate human emotion.
It's been done for decades. The soap companies did it in the early 20th century.
They tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it.
They tried selling it as sexy. Everyone bought it.
In India now there's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that don't have a toilet.
(Laughter) And in case you think that poster's just propaganda, here's Priyanka, 23 years old.
I met her last October in India, and she grew up in a conservative environment.
She grew up in a rural village in a poor area of India, and she was engaged at 14, and then at 21 or so, she moved into her in-law's house.
And she was horrified to get there and find that they didn't have a toilet.
And the first night she was there, she was told that at 4 o'clock in the morning -- her mother-in-law got her up, told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open.
And she was scared. She was scared of drunks hanging around.
She was scared of snakes. She was scared of rape.
After three days, she did an unthinkable thing.
She got her toilet, and now she goes around all the other villages in India persuading other women to do the same thing.
It's what I call social contagion, and it's really powerful and really exciting.
Another version of this, another village in India near where Priyanka lives is this village, called Lakara, and about a year ago, it had no toilets whatsoever.
Kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera.
Some visitors came, using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other.
That's what really made them change their behavior.
It cost nothing. It's going to save that boy's life.
It's the most off-track Millennium Development Goal.
We're not going to meet targets, providing people with sanitation at this rate.
So when I get sad about sanitation, I think of Japan, because Japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks, and now it's a nation of what are called Woshurettos, washlet toilets.
They have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely, hands-free cleaning experience, and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the "marriage-saver."
(Laughter) But most importantly, what they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door.
They've made it conversational.
People go out and upgrade their toilet.
They talk about it. They've sanitized it.
All we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent, shameful issue that it is.
And don't think that it's just in the poor world that things are wrong.
Our sewers are crumbling.
The solution to all of this is pretty easy.
I'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing, and that's to go out, protest, speak about the unspeakable, and talk shit.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So let's start with some good news, and the good news has to do with what do we know based on biomedical research that actually has changed the outcomes for many very serious diseases?
Let's start with leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, the most common cancer of children.
When I was a student, the mortality rate was about 95 percent.
Today, some 25, 30 years later, we're talking about a mortality rate that's reduced by 85 percent.
Six thousand children each year who would have previously died of this disease are cured.
If you want the really big numbers, look at these numbers for heart disease.
Heart disease used to be the biggest killer, particularly for men in their 40s.
Today, we've seen a 63-percent reduction in mortality from heart disease -- remarkably, 1.1 million deaths averted every year.
AIDS, incredibly, has just been named, in the past month, a chronic disease, meaning that a 20-year-old who becomes infected with HIV is expected not to live weeks, months, or a couple of years, as we said only a decade ago, but is thought to live decades, probably to die in his '60s or '70s from other causes altogether.
These are just remarkable, remarkable changes in the outlook for some of the biggest killers.
Early detection, early intervention, that's the story for these successes.
Unfortunately, the news is not all good.
Now this is, of course, not a disease, per se.
What you may not realize is just how prevalent it is.
There are 38,000 suicides each year in the United States.
Third most common cause of death amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25.
It's kind of an extraordinary story when you realize that this is twice as common as homicide and actually more common as a source of death than traffic fatalities in this country.
Now, when we talk about suicide, there is also a medical contribution here, because 90 percent of suicides are related to a mental illness: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, borderline personality. There's a long list of disorders that contribute, and as I mentioned before, often early in life.
But it's not just the mortality from these disorders.
If you look at disability, as measured by the World Health Organization with something they call the Disability Adjusted Life Years, it's kind of a metric that nobody would think of except an economist, except it's one way of trying to capture what is lost in terms of disability from medical causes, and as you can see, virtually 30 percent of all disability from all medical causes can be attributed to mental disorders, neuropsychiatric syndromes.
You're probably thinking that doesn't make any sense.
I mean, cancer seems far more serious.
Heart disease seems far more serious.
But you can see actually they are further down this list, and that's because we're talking here about disability.
Why are they number one here?
Well, there are probably three reasons.
One is that they're highly prevalent.
About one in five people will suffer from one of these disorders in the course of their lifetime.
But what really drives these numbers, this high morbidity, and to some extent the high mortality, is the fact that these start very early in life.
This is obviously not one of them.
This is the part of it that is perhaps most difficult, and in a sense this is a kind of confession for me.
I work for the federal government.
Actually, I work for you. You pay my salary.
But what I want to suggest, and the reason I'm here is to tell you that I think we're about to be in a very different world as we think about these illnesses.
What I've been talking to you about so far is mental disorders, diseases of the mind.
That's actually becoming a rather unpopular term these days, and people feel that, for whatever reason, it's politically better to use the term behavioral disorders and to talk about these as disorders of behavior.
Fair enough. They are disorders of behavior, and they are disorders of the mind.
But what I want to suggest to you is that both of those terms, which have been in play for a century or more, are actually now impediments to progress, that what we need conceptually to make progress here is to rethink these disorders as brain disorders.
Now, for some of you, you're going to say, "Oh my goodness, here we go again.
We're going to hear about a biochemical imbalance or we're going to hear about drugs or we're going to hear about some very simplistic notion that will take our subjective experience and turn it into molecules, or maybe into some sort of very flat, unidimensional understanding of what it is to have depression or schizophrenia.
It depends, of course, on what scale or what scope you want to think about, but this is an organ of surreal complexity, and we are just beginning to understand how to even study it, whether you're thinking about the 100 billion neurons that are in the cortex or the 100 trillion synapses that make up all the connections.
We have just begun to try to figure out how do we take this very complex machine that does extraordinary kinds of information processing and use our own minds to understand this very complex brain that supports our own minds.
It's actually a kind of cruel trick of evolution that we simply don't have a brain that seems to be wired well enough to understand itself.
We call this the human connectome, and you can think about the connectome sort of as the wiring diagram of the brain.
It's a little different than the way we think about brain disorders like Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease where you have a bombed-out part of your cortex.
Here we're talking about traffic jams, or sometimes detours, or sometimes problems with just the way that things are connected and the way that the brain functions.
You could, if you want, compare this to, on the one hand, a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, where you have dead tissue in the heart, versus an arrhythmia, where the organ simply isn't functioning because of the communication problems within it.
Either one would kill you; in only one of them will you find a major lesion.
As we think about this, probably it's better to actually go a little deeper into one particular disorder, and that would be schizophrenia, because I think that's a good case for helping to understand why thinking of this as a brain disorder matters.
These are scans from Judy Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia, and you can see already in the top there's areas that are red or orange, yellow, are places where there's less gray matter, and as they followed them over five years, comparing them to age match controls, you can see that, particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus, there's a profound loss of gray matter.
And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions.
That's something we can observe.
But look at this closely and you can see that actually they've crossed a different threshold.
There are changes in the brain a decade or more before you see the first signs of a behavioral change.
The tools that we have now allow us to detect these brain changes much earlier, long before the symptoms emerge.
The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention.
If we waited until the heart attack, we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease.
That is precisely what we do today when we decide that everybody with one of these brain disorders, brain circuit disorders, has a behavioral disorder.
That's not early detection. That's not early intervention.
Now to be clear, we're not quite ready to do this.
But this tells us how we need to think about it, and where we need to go.
I think that this is something that will happen over the course of the next few years, but I'd like to finish with a quote about trying to predict how this will happen by somebody who's thought a lot about changes in concepts and changes in technology.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10." -- Bill Gates.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)
One year ago, I rented a car in Jerusalem to go find a man I'd never met but who had changed my life.
I didn't have a phone number to call to say I was coming.
I didn't have an exact address, but I knew his name, Abed, I knew that he lived in a town of 15,000, Kfar Kara, and I knew that, 21 years before, just outside this holy city, he broke my neck.
And so, on an overcast morning in January, I headed north off in a silver Chevy to find a man and some peace.
I then rounded the very bend where his blue truck, heavy with four tons of floor tiles, had borne down with great speed onto the back left corner of the minibus where I sat.
I was then 19 years old.
I palmed the ball in my large right hand, and when that hand reached the rim, I felt invincible.
I was off in the bus to get the pizza I'd won on the court.
I didn't see Abed coming.
From my seat, I was looking up at a stone town on a hilltop, bright in the noontime sun, when from behind there was a great bang, as loud and violent as a bomb.
My head snapped back over my red seat.
My eardrum blew. My shoes flew off.
Over the coming months, I learned to breathe on my own, then to sit and to stand and to walk, but my body was now divided vertically.
I was a hemiplegic, and back home in New York, I used a wheelchair for four years, all through college.
It was then I read the testimony that Abed gave the morning after the crash, of driving down the right lane of a highway toward Jerusalem.
It was the first time I'd felt anger toward this man, and it came from magical thinking.
On this xeroxed piece of paper, the crash had not yet happened.
I decided to find Abed, and when I finally did, he responded to my Hebrew hello which such nonchalance, it seemed he'd been awaiting my phone call.
And maybe he had.
I didn't mention to Abed his prior driving record -- 27 violations by the age of 25, the last, his not shifting his truck into a low gear on that May day — and I didn't mention my prior record -- the quadriplegia and the catheters, the insecurity and the loss — and when Abed went on about how hurt he was in the crash, I didn't say that I knew from the police report that he'd escaped serious injury.
Abed said that I should call back in a few weeks, and when I did, and a recording told me that his number was disconnected, I let Abed and the crash go.
Many years passed.
I walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents.
Each of us had a before and an after.
Still, Abed was far from my mind, when last year, I returned to Israel to write of the crash, and the book I then wrote, "Half-Life," was nearly complete when I recognized that I still wanted to meet Abed, and finally I understood why: to hear this man say two words: "I'm sorry."
(Laughter) I pulled into the town of Abu Ghosh, and bought a brick of Turkish delight: pistachios glued in rosewater. Better.
Back on Highway 1, I envisioned what awaited.
Abed would say, "I'm sorry."
I then began to wonder, as I had many times before, how my life would have been different had this man not injured me, had my genes been fed a different helping of experience.
Who was I?
Was I who I had been before the crash, before this road divided my life like the spine of an open book?
Was I what had been done to me?
It seemed that we could be nothing more than genes and experience, but how to tease out the one from the other?
As Yeats put that same universal question, "O body swayed to music, o brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?"
I'd been driving for an hour when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw my own brightening glance.
But I also saw in my reflection that, had Abed not injured me, I would now, in all likelihood, be a doctor and a husband and a father.
I would be less mindful of time and of death, and, oh, I would not be disabled, would not suffer the thousand slings and arrows of my fortune.
The dancer and the dance were hopelessly entwined.
But Chopin was on the radio, seven beautiful mazurkas, and I pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm.
I'd been told that in an Arab town, one need only mention the name of a local and it will be recognized.
And I was mentioning Abed and myself, noting deliberately that I was here in peace, to the people in this town, when I met Mohamed outside a post office at noon.
He listened to me.
Many cried.
And one day, after a woman I met on the street did the same and I later asked her why, she told me that, best she could tell, her tears had had something to do with my being happy and strong, but vulnerable too.
I listened to her words. I suppose they were true.
He led me to a house of cream stucco, then drove off.
And as I sat contemplating what to say, a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe.
Her Hebrew was not good, and she later confessed that she thought that I had come to install the Internet.
(Laughter) I drove off and returned at 4:30, thankful to the minaret up the road that helped me find my way back.
And so at once, we shook hands, and smiled, and I gave him my gift, and he told me I was a guest in his home, and we sat beside one another on a fabric couch.
It was then that Abed resumed at once the tale of woe he had begun over the phone 16 years before.
He'd just had surgery on his eyes, he said.
Did I wish to see him remove them?
"I was handsome," he said.
We looked down at his laminated mug.
Twenty-one years later, he was now thinner than his wife, his skin slack on his face, and looking at Abed looking at his young self, I remembered looking at that photograph of my young self after the crash, and recognized his longing.
"The crash changed both of our lives," I said.
And so I didn't point out that in his own testimony the morning after the crash, Abed did not even mention the bus driver.
No, I was quiet. I was quiet because I had not come for truth.
And so I now went looking for remorse and threw truth under the bus.
Abed spoke three quick words.
"Yes, I suffered."
Abed then told me why he'd suffered.
It was then that God intervened: news on the TV of a car wreck that hours before had killed three people up north.
We looked up at the wreckage.
"Strange," I said.
"Strange," he agreed.
Some, as had Abed, would forget the date.
I was baffled.
Abed had said something remarkable.
He'd served six months in prison, lost his truck license for a decade.
I forgot my discretion.
"Um, Abed," I said, "I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash."
It was then I understood that Abed would never apologize.
Abed and I sat with our coffee.
We'd spent 90 minutes together, and he was now known to me.
He was a limited man who'd found it within himself to be kind to me.
I wished to tell him that, were he to acknowledge my disability, it would be okay, for people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp.
I wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.
"This," wrote the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, "is the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."
I wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good, that a crash is from God and so a crash is good, a broken neck is good.
We have to be in the good and enjoy the good, study and work and adventure and friendship -- oh, friendship -- and community and love.
But most of all, I wished to tell him what Herman Melville wrote, that "truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast."
Yes, contrast.
When one morning, years after the crash, I stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow.
But I didn't say these things to Abed.
I told him only that he had killed one man, not two.
I told him the name of that man.
And then I said, "Goodbye."
Thank you.
(Applause) Thanks a lot.
(Applause)
One of the things I want to establish right from the start is that not all neurosurgeons wear cowboy boots.
I just wanted you to know that.
So I am indeed a neurosurgeon, and I follow a long tradition of neurosurgery, and what I'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain, being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients.
So as I said, neurosurgery comes from a long tradition.
In Mesoamerica, there used to be neurosurgery, and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients.
And they were trying to -- they knew that the brain was involved in neurological and psychiatric disease.
They didn't know exactly what they were doing.
Not much has changed, by the way. (Laughter) But they thought that, if you had a neurologic or psychiatric disease, it must be because you are possessed by an evil spirit.
So if you are possessed by an evil spirit causing neurologic or psychiatric problems, then the way to treat this is, of course, to make a hole in your skull and let the evil spirit escape.
So this was the thinking back then, and these individuals made these holes.
There were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes, and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common, and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago.
Now, in the course of time, we've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things.
So there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite, and so on.
And when things work well, then the nervous system works well, and everything functions.
But once in a while, things don't go so well, and there's trouble in these circuits, and there are some rogue neurons that are misfiring and causing trouble, or sometimes they're underactive and they're not quite working as they should.
Now, the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are.
So when these neurons are in the motor circuit, you get dysfunction in the movement system, and you get things like Parkinson's disease.
When the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood, you get things like depression, and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function, then you get things like Alzheimer's disease.
So what we've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain, and we've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down.
So this is very much like choosing the correct station on the radio dial.
Once you choose the right station, whether it be jazz or opera, in our case whether it be movement or mood, we can put the dial there, and then we can use a second button to adjust the volume, to turn it up or turn it down.
So what I'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients.
And this is accomplished using this kind of device, and this is called deep brain stimulation.
So what we're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain.
Again, we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime, putting an electrode in, and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest, and with a remote control very much like a television remote control, we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain.
You see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there, and we can place this really anywhere in the brain.
I tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon, because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now.
Now the first example I'm going to show you is a patient with Parkinson's disease, and this lady has Parkinson's disease, and she has these electrodes in her brain, and I'm going to show you what she's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her Parkinson's symptoms, and then we're going to turn it on.
(Video) Man: Okay. Woman: I can't. Man: Can you try to touch my finger?
It's on. Just turned it on.
And this works like that, instantly.
And the difference between shaking in this way and not -- (Applause) The difference between shaking in this way and not is related to the misbehavior of 25,000 neurons in her subthalamic nucleus.
We want you to stop doing that."
So in this case, we are suppressing the activity of abnormal neurons.
We started using this technique in other problems, and I'm going to tell you about a fascinating problem that we encountered, a case of dystonia.
So dystonia is a disorder affecting children.
It's a genetic disorder, and it involves a twisting motion, and these children get progressively more and more twisting until they can't breathe, until they get sores, urinary infections, and then they die.
So back in 1997, I was asked to see this young boy, perfectly normal. He has this genetic form of dystonia.
There are eight children in the family.
Five of them have dystonia.
So here he is.
This boy is nine years old, perfectly normal until the age six, and then he started twisting his body, first the right foot, then the left foot, then the right arm, then the left arm, then the trunk, and then by the time he arrived, within the course of one or two years of the disease onset, he could no longer walk, he could no longer stand.
So he is one of five kids.
He did not respond to any drugs.
We did not know what to do with this boy.
So here he is now, back in Israel where he lives, three months after the procedure, and here he is.
(Applause) On the basis of this result, this is now a procedure that's done throughout the world, and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery.
This boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life.
This has been one of the most satisfying cases that I have ever done in my entire career, to restore movement and walking to this kind of child.
And let's see if we can use this technique to help these patients with depression.
So here you really have the blues, and the areas in blue are areas that are involved in motivation, in drive and decision-making, and indeed, if you're severely depressed as these patients were, those are impaired. You lack motivation and drive.
The other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive, area 25, seen there in red, and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain.
If I make any of you sad, for example, I make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died, this area of the brain lights up.
It is the sadness center of the brain.
And so patients with depression have hyperactivity.
The thermostat is set at 100 degrees, and the other areas of the brain, involved in drive and motivation, are shut down.
And we placed electrodes in area 25, and in the top scan you see before the operation, area 25, the sadness area is red hot, and the frontal lobes are shut down in blue, and then, after three months of continuous stimulation, 24 hours a day, or six months of continuous stimulation, we have a complete reversal of this.
We're able to drive down area 25, down to a more normal level, and we're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain, and indeed we're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression.
I've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of Parkinson's disease and dystonia.
I've shown you that we can use it to treat a mood circuit in cases of depression.
Can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter?
(Laughter) Anybody interested in that?
So what we've decided to do is we're going to try to turbocharge the memory circuits in the brain.
We're going to do this in people that have cognitive deficits, and we've chosen to treat patients with Alzheimer's disease who have cognitive and memory deficits.
As you know, this is the main symptom of early onset Alzheimer's disease.
Now it turns out that in Alzheimer's disease, there's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain.
The brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose.
Twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain, and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor for Alzheimer's, all the way to Alzheimer's disease, then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose.
They shut down. They turn off.
And indeed, what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely.
Can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again?
So this is what we did. We implanted electrodes in the fornix of patients with Alzheimer's disease, we turned it on, and we looked at what happens to glucose use in the brain.
And indeed, at the top, you'll see before the surgery, the areas in blue are the areas that use less glucose than normal, predominantly the parietal and temporal lobes.
These areas of the brain are shut down.
We then put in the DBS electrodes and we wait for a month or a year, and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization.
So the message here is that, in Alzheimer's disease, the lights are out, but there is someone home, and we're able to turn the power back on to these areas of the brain, and as we do so, we expect that their functions will return.
So this is now in clinical trials.
We are going to operate on 50 patients with early Alzheimer's disease to see whether this is safe and effective, whether we can improve their neurologic function.
(Applause) So the message I want to leave you with today is that, indeed, there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states, whether we're talking about Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's.
We are now learning to understand what are the circuits, what are the areas of the brain that are responsible for the clinical signs and the symptoms of those diseases.
We can now reach those circuits.
We can introduce electrodes within those circuits.
We're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain.
It involves the work of engineers, of imaging scientists, of basic scientists, of neurologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, and certainly at the interface of these multiple disciplines that there's the excitement.
Thank you very much.
The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today.
Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked.
That's what we're probably genetically specified for.
That's how we use language most.
Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages.
For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:" "The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself."
Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words.
You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking.
Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic.
It's much less reflective -- very different from writing.
So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things.
So, for example, in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing.
So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat, and they go, "Ahem, ladies and gentlemen," and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech.
It's formal. It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one.
It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example, we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie.
The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event.
Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours.
It was perfectly natural.
That's what people did then, speaking like writing.
Well, if you can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak.
The problem was just that in the material, mechanical sense, that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it.
It's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand, and then communication is limited.
On a manual typewriter it was very difficult, and even when we had electric typewriters, or then computer keyboards, the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly.
Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak.
No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting?
And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline.
And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up.
Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "laughing out loud."
But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore.
"I love the font you're using, btw."
So Julie says, "I just sent you an email."
Very funny people, if that's what LOL means.
Susan: "lol, I have to write a 10 page paper."
LOL is being used in a very particular way.
It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation.
We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles.
If you happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word "ne" that you use at the end of a lot of sentences.
If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word "yo."
Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, "We're going to have a party-slash-networking session."
Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today.
So for example, this Sally person says, "So I need to find people to chill with" and Jake says, "Haha" -- you could write a dissertation about "Haha" too, but we don't have time for that — "Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?"
Jake: "Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye."
The slash is interesting.
I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic.
Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully.
You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think --" when it really didn't, but what you're really -- (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic.
You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium.
All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker -- or two, or three.
Texting has developed one from this slash.
So we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think, well, something is still wrong.
Well, the fact of the matter is, look at this person in 1956, and this is when texting doesn't exist, "I Love Lucy" is still on the air.
"Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically -- " We've heard that sort of thing before, not just in 1956. 1917, Connecticut schoolteacher.
1917. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on "Downton Abbey" are articulate, or something like that.
So, "From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.'" And so on. You can go even further back than this.
It's the President of Harvard. It's 1871.
You can go even further back.
1841, some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time "noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original" blah blah blah blah blah.
Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. -- (Laughter) -- and there's this poor man who doesn't like the way people are speaking Latin.
As it happens, he was writing about what had become French.
And so, there are always — (Laughter) (Applause) — there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning.
And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things.
Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial.
And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.
It's very simple.
If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of "Love Story," but they would understand what was on that message board.
So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to "The Wire." I would want to know.
And — I really would ask that — and then I'd want to know actually what was going on on "Downton Abbey."
That'd be the second thing.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
That's how we traveled in the year 1900.
That's an open buggy. It doesn't have heating.
That horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound, and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains.
That's a Boeing 707.
So I started wondering and pondering, could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us?
And that leads to the suggestion, maybe economic growth is almost over.
Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial.
There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face.
They're powerful enough to cut growth in half.
So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline.
And here's my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half.
Now here's eight centuries of economic growth.
You'll notice that, for the first four centuries, there's hardly any growth at all, just 0.2 percent.
Then growth gets better and better.
That last downward notch in the red line is not actual data.
That is a forecast that I made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent.
But you know what the actual facts are?
You know what the growth in per-person income has been in the United States in the last six years?
Negative.
Now the history that we've achieved is that we've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period, 1891 to 2007, and remember it's been a little bit negative since 2007.
But if growth slows down, instead of doubling our standard of living every generation, Americans in the future can't expect to be twice as well off as their parents, or even a quarter [more well off than] their parents.
The vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today's prices.
You'll notice that in 1891, over on the left, we were at about 5,000 dollars.
Now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years?
Two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years.
That means we'd go from 44,000 to 180,000.
The first headwind is demographics.
It's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity, rises faster than output per hour, if hours per person increased.
And we got that gift back in the '70s and '80s when women entered the labor force.
The next headwind is education.
We have a lot of debt.
Our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing.
Consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today.
And everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of GDP at a very rapid rate, and the only way that's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements, also called transfer payments.
And then we have inequality.
Over the 15 years before the financial crisis, the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we've been talking about before.
All the rest went to the top one percent.
So that brings us down to 0.8.
And that 0.8 is the big challenge.
If so, that's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years.
So let's see what some of those inventions were.
If you wanted to read in 1875 at night, you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp.
They created pollution, they created odors, they were hard to control, the light was dim, and they were a fire hazard.
By 1929, electric light was everywhere.
We had the vertical city, the invention of the elevator.
Central Manhattan became possible.
And then, in addition to that, at the same time, hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools, all achieved by electricity.
Electricity was also very helpful in liberating women.
Women, back in the late 19th century, spent two days a week doing the laundry.
They did it on a scrub board.
Then they had to hang the clothes out to dry.
And then we had the electric washing machine.
And by 1950, they were everywhere.
But the women still had to shop every day, but no they didn't, because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator.
Back in the late 19th century, the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating.
The bedrooms were cold. They were unheated.
But by 1929, certainly by 1950, we had central heating everywhere.
What about the internal combustion engine, which was invented in 1879?
In America, before the motor vehicle, transportation depended entirely on the urban horse, which dropped, without restraint, 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine.
That comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities.
That's the percentage of American agricultural land it took to feed the horses.
Of course, when the motor vehicle was invented, and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929, that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export.
And here's an interesting ratio: Starting from zero in 1900, only 30 years later, the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the United States reached 90 percent in just 30 years.
Back before the turn of the century, women had another problem.
All the water for cooking, cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside.
It's a historical fact that in 1885, the average North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water.
But by 1929, cities around the country had put in underground water pipes.
They had put in underground sewer pipes, and as a result, one of the great scourges of the late 19th century, waterborne diseases like cholera, began to disappear.
And an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century, the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century.
We went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound.
Electrification, central heat, ownership of motor cars, they all went from zero to 100 percent.
Urban environments make people more productive than on the farm.
What about the electronic revolution?
Here's an early computer.
By 1960 we had telephone bills, bank statements were being produced by computers.
The earliest cell phones, the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s.
The 1980s brought us Bill Gates, DOS, ATM machines to replace bank tellers, bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector.
You have to choose either option A or option B.
So you get Google, you get Amazon, you get Wikipedia, and you get running water and indoor toilets.
Or you get everything invented to yesterday, including Facebook and your iPhone, but you have to give up, go out to the outhouse, and carry in the water.
The problem we face is that all these great inventions, we have to match them in the future, and my prediction that we're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2, the fanciful curve that I drew you at the beginning.
I'd like to award an Oscar to the inventors of the 20th century, the people from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to the Wright Brothers, I'd like to call them all up here, and they're going to call back to you.
Your challenge is, can you match what we achieved?
Thank you.
(Applause)
On simplicity. What a great way to start.
First of all, I've been watching this trend where we have these books like such and such "For Dummies."
My daughters pointed out that I'm very similar looking, so this is a bit of a problem.
(Laughter) But I was looking online at Amazon.com for other books like this.
There's a sort of business model around being stupid in some sense.
But I really like that, so I wrote a book called "The Laws of Simplicity."
I was in Milan last week, for the Italian launch.
It's kind of a book about questions, questions about simplicity.
Very few answers. I'm also wondering myself, what is simplicity?
After I wrote "The Laws of Simplicity," I was very tired of simplicity, as you can imagine.
And so in my life, I've discovered that vacation is the most important skill for any kind of over-achiever.
(Laughter) So, I went to the Cape last summer to hide from simplicity, and I went to the Gap, because I only have black pants.
So I went and bought khaki shorts or whatever, and unfortunately, their branding was all about "Keep It Simple."
(Laughter) I opened up a magazine, and Visa's branding was, "Business Takes Simplicity."
I develop photographs, and Kodak said, "Keep It Simple."
So, I felt kind of weird that simplicity was sort of following me around.
So, I turned on the TV, and I don't watch TV very much, but you know this person? This is Paris Hilton, apparently.
And she has this show, "The Simple Life."
So, I opened up this TV Guide thing, and on the E! channel, this "Simple Life" show is very popular.
They'll play it over, and over, and over.
(Laughter) So it was traumatizing, actually.
And Cape Cod, there are idyllic roads, and all of us can drive in this room.
And when you drive, these signs are very important.
It's a very simple sign, it says, "road" and "road approaching."
(Laughter) So, I thought complexity was attacking me suddenly, so I thought, "Ah, simplicity. Very important."
But then I thought, "Oh, simplicity. What would that be like on a beach?
What if the sky was 41 percent gray? Wouldn't that be the perfect sky?"
But in reality, the sky looked like this. It was a beautiful, complex sky.
You know, with the pinks and blues. We can't help but love complexity.
We're human beings: we love complex things.
We love relationships -- very complex. So we love this kind of stuff.
I'm at this place called the Media Lab.
Maybe some of you guys have heard of this place.
It's designed by I. M. Pei, one of the premier modernist architects.
Modernism means white box, and it's a perfect white box.
(Laughter) And some of you guys are entrepreneurs, etc., whatever.
Last month, I was at Google, and, boy, that cafeteria, man.
Last year at TED, these were all my titles. I had a lot of titles.
I have a default title as a father of a bunch of daughters.
This year at TED, I'm happy to report that I have new titles, in addition to my previous titles.
Another "Associate Director of Research."
And this also happened, so I have five daughters now.
(Laughter) That's my baby Reina. (Applause) Thank you.
And so, my life is much more complex because of the baby, actually, but that's okay. We will still stay married, I think.
But looking way back, when I was a child -- you see, I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle.
Many of you may not like tofu because you haven't had good tofu, but tofu's a good food. It's a very simple kind of food.
As a child, we used to wake up at 1 a.m. and work till 6 p.m., six days a week.
So often, seven days a week. Family business equals child labor.
We were a great model. So, I loved going to school.
School was great, and maybe going to school helped me get to this Media Lab place, I'm not sure.
(Laughter) Thank you.
But the Media Lab is an interesting place, and it's important to me because as a student, I was a computer science undergrad, and I discovered design later on in my life.
And there was this person, Muriel Cooper.
Who knows Muriel Cooper? Muriel Cooper?
Wasn't she amazing? Muriel Cooper. She was wacky.
And she's very important in my life, because she's the one that told me to leave MIT and go to art school.
It was the best advice I ever got. So I went to art school, because of her.
She passed away in 1994, and I was hired back to MIT to try to fill her shoes, but it's so hard.
This amazing person, Muriel Cooper.
When I was in Japan -- I went to an art school in Japan -- I had a nice sort of situation, because somehow I was connected to Paul Rand.
Some of you guys know Paul Rand, the greatest graphic designer -- I'm sorry -- out there.
The great graphic designer Paul Rand designed the IBM logo, the Westinghouse logo.
He basically said, "I've designed everything."
And also Ikko Tanaka was a very important mentor in my life -- the Paul Rand of Japan. He designed most of the major icons of Japan, like Issey Miyake's brand and also Muji.
When you have mentors -- and yesterday, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar talked about mentors, these people in your life -- the problem with mentors is that they all die.
And I'm grateful for my mentors, and I'm sure all of you are too.
Because the human thing is very hard when you're at MIT.
The T doesn't stand for "human," it stands for "technology."
And because of that, I always wondered about this human thing.
So, I've always been Googling this word, "human," to find out how many hits I get.
And in 2001, I had 26 million hits, and for "computer," because computers are against humans a bit, I have 42 million hits. Let me do an Al Gore here.
So, if you sort of compare that, like this, you'll see that computer versus human -- I've been tracking this for the last year -- computer versus human over the last year has changed.
It used to be kind of two to one. Now, humans are catching up.
Very good, us humans! We're catching up with the computers.
So if you compare complexities to simplicity, it's also catching up in a way, too.
I spent my entire early career making complex stuff.
I wrote computer programs to make complex graphics like this.
I had clients in Japan to make really complex stuff like this.
And I've always felt bad about it, in a sense.
So, I hid in a time dimension.
I built things in a time-graphics dimension.
I did this series of calendars for Shiseido.
This is a floral theme calendar in 1997, and this is a firework calendar. So, you launch the number into space, because the Japanese believe that when you see fireworks, you're cooler for some reason.
This is why they have fireworks in the summer.
A very extreme culture.
Lastly, this is a fall-based calendar, because I have so many leaves in my yard.
And so I made a lot of these types of things.
I feel kind of bad about that.
Tomorrow, Paola Antonelli is speaking. I love Paola.
She has this show right now at MoMA, where some of these early works are here on display at MoMA, on the walls.
If you're in New York, please go and see that.
"Eye candy" -- sort of pejorative, don't you think?
So, I say, "No, I make eye meat," instead.
I've been interested in computer programs all my life, actually.
Computer programs are essentially trees, and when you make art with a computer program, there's kind of a problem.
Whenever you make art with a computer program, you're always on the tree, and the paradox is that for excellent art, you want to be off the tree.
So, to get off the tree, I began to use my old computers.
I took these to Tokyo in 2001 to make computer objects.
This is a new way to type, on my old, color Classic.
I also discovered that an IR mouse responds to CRT emissions and starts to move by itself, so this is a self-drawing machine.
And also, one year, the G3 Bondi Blue thing -- that caddy would come out, like, dangerous, like, "whack," like that.
(Laughter) Shortly after this, 9/11 happened, and I was very depressed.
In Japan, it's a wonderful thing to remove the clementine peel just in one piece. Who's done that before? One-piece clementine?
Oh, you guys are missing out, if you haven't done it yet.
So, I went back to the computer, and I bought five large fries, and scanned them all. And I was looking for some kind of food theme, and I wrote some software to automatically lay out french-fry images.
And as a child, I'd hear that song, you know, "Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain," so I made this amber waves image.
It's sort of a Midwest cornfield out of french fries.
And also, as a child, I was the fattest kid in class, so I used to love Cheetos. Oh, I love Cheetos, yummy.
So, I wanted to play with Cheetos in some way.
Cheeto paint is a very simple way to paint with Cheetos.
(Laughter) I discovered that Cheetos are good, expressive material.
And with these Cheetos, I began to think, "What can I make with these Cheetos?"
People ask me how they make the antenna.
Sometimes, they find a hair in the food. That's my hair.
I'm a tenured professor, which means, basically, I don't have to work anymore.
It's a strange business model. I can come into work everyday and staple five pieces of paper and just stare at it with my latte.
End of story.
(Laughter) But I realized that life could be very boring, so I've been thinking about life, and I notice that my camera -- my digital camera versus my car, a very strange thing.
The car is so big, the camera is so small, yet the manual for the camera is so much bigger than the car manual.
It doesn't make any sense.
(Laughter) So, I was in the Cape one time, and I typed the word "simplicity," and I discovered, in this weird, M. Night Shyamalan way, that I discovered [the] letters, M, I, T. You know the word?
In the words "simplicity" and "complexity," M, I, T occur in perfect sequence.
So, I thought, maybe I'll do this for the next twenty years or something.
And I wrote this book, "The Laws of Simplicity."
It's a very short, simple book. There are ten laws and three keys.
But the laws are kind of like sushi in a way: there are all kinds.
In Japan, they say that sushi is challenging.
So enjoy your sushi meal later, with the laws of simplicity.
Because I want to simplify them for you.
Because that's what this is about. I have to simplify this thing.
So, if I simplify the laws of simplicity, I have what's called the cookie versus laundry thing.
Anyone who has kids knows that if you offer a kid a big cookie or a small cookie, which cookie are they going to take? The big cookie.
You can say the small cookie has Godiva chocolate bits in it, but it doesn't work. They want the big cookie.
But if you offer kids two piles of laundry to fold, the small pile or the big pile, which will they choose?
And so, to boil it all down, simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain.
Basically, it always depends.
I love life. I love being alive. I like to see things.
And I just love to see the world. The world is an amazing place.
By being at TED, we see so many things at one time.
And I can't help but enjoy looking at everything in the world.
Like everything you see, every time you wake up.
It's such a joy to sort of experience everything in the world.
From everything from a weird hotel lobby, to Saran wrap placed over your window, to this moment where I had my road in front of my house paved dark black, and this white moth was sitting there dying in the sun.
This was given to me by the chairman of Shiseido.
He's an expert in aging. This horizontal axis is how old you are -- twelve years old, twenty-four years old, seventy-four, ninety-six years old -- and this is some medical data. So, brain strength increases up to 60, and then after 60, it sort of goes down. Kind of depressing in a way.
You know, I have a lot of cocky freshmen at MIT, so I tell them, "Oh, your bodies are really getting stronger and stronger, but in your late twenties and mid-thirties, cells, they die."
OK. It gets them to work harder, sometimes.
And if you have your vision, vision is interesting.
(Laughter) Your social responsibility is very interesting.
So, as you get older, you may, like, have kids, whatever.
And then the kids graduate, and you have no responsibility any more -- that's very good, too.
They have so many thoughts, and they have so much wisdom, and I think -- you know, this TED thing, I've come here.
And this is the fourth time, and I come here for this wisdom, I think.
And I'm so glad to be here, and I'm very grateful to be here, Chris.
And this is an amazing experience for me as well.
Growth is not dead.
(Applause) Let's start the story 120 years ago, when American factories began to electrify their operations, igniting the Second Industrial Revolution.
That's long enough for a generation of managers to retire.
You see, the first wave of managers simply replaced their steam engines with electric motors, but they didn't redesign the factories to take advantage of electricity's flexibility.
Sure. It's the computer.
But technology alone is not enough.
Technology is not destiny.
We shape our destiny, and just as the earlier generations of managers needed to redesign their factories, we're going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system.
As we'll see in a moment, productivity is actually doing all right, but it has become decoupled from jobs, and the income of the typical worker is stagnating.
These troubles are sometimes misdiagnosed as the end of innovation, but they are actually the growing pains of what Andrew McAfee and I call the new machine age.
Let's look at some data.
So here's GDP per person in America.
This is a log scale, so what looks like steady growth is actually an acceleration in real terms.
And here's productivity.
You can see a little bit of a slowdown there in the mid-'70s, but it matches up pretty well with the Second Industrial Revolution, when factories were learning how to electrify their operations.
So maybe "history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."
Today, productivity is at an all-time high, and despite the Great Recession, it grew faster in the 2000s than it did in the 1990s, the roaring 1990s, and that was faster than the '70s or '80s.
It's growing faster than it did during the Second Industrial Revolution.
And that's just the United States.
The global news is even better.
Worldwide incomes have grown at a faster rate in the past decade than ever in history.
If anything, all these numbers actually understate our progress, because the new machine age is more about knowledge creation than just physical production.
Now getting stuff for free is a good thing, right?
Sure, of course it is.
But that's not how economists measure GDP.
Zero price means zero weight in the GDP statistics.
According to the numbers, the music industry is half the size that it was 10 years ago, but I'm listening to more and better music than ever.
You know, I bet you are too.
Now let's look to the future.
There are some super smart people who are arguing that we've reached the end of growth, but to understand the future of growth, we need to make predictions about the underlying drivers of growth.
I'm optimistic, because the new machine age is digital, exponential and combinatorial.
When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously.
But there's a subtler benefit to the digitization of the world.
Measurement is the lifeblood of science and progress.
In the age of big data, we can measure the world in ways we never could before.
Secondly, the new machine age is exponential.
A child's Playstation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.
But our brains are wired for a linear world.
I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at, like driving a car through traffic.
(Laughter) That's right, here's Andy and me grinning like madmen because we just rode down Route 101 in, yes, a driverless car.
Thirdly, the new machine age is combinatorial.
The stagnationist view is that ideas get used up, like low-hanging fruit, but the reality is that each innovation creates building blocks for even more innovations.
Here's an example. In just a matter of a few weeks, an undergraduate student of mine built an app that ultimately reached 1.3 million users.
He was able to do that so easily because he built it on top of Facebook, and Facebook was built on top of the web, and that was built on top of the Internet, and so on and so forth.
Put them together, and we're seeing a wave of astonishing breakthroughs, like robots that do factory work or run as fast as a cheetah or leap tall buildings in a single bound.
You know, robots are even revolutionizing cat transportation.
(Laughter) But perhaps the most important invention, the most important invention is machine learning.
Consider one project: IBM's Watson.
At first, Watson wasn't very good, but it improved at a rate faster than any human could, and shortly after Dave Ferrucci showed this chart to my class at MIT, Watson beat the world "Jeopardy" champion.
Damn. (Laughter) But you know, Watson is growing up fast.
Isn't it ironic that at the very moment we are building intelligent machines, perhaps the most important invention in human history, some people are arguing that innovation is stagnating?
Like the first two industrial revolutions, the full implications of the new machine age are going to take at least a century to fully play out, but they are staggering.
So does that mean we have nothing to worry about?
No. Technology is not destiny.
We have created more wealth in the past decade than ever, but for a majority of Americans, their income has fallen.
You know, it's not surprising that millions of people have become disillusioned by the great decoupling, but like too many others, they misunderstand its basic causes.
Technology is racing ahead, but it's leaving more and more people behind.
You know, I recently overheard a conversation that epitomizes these new economics.
TurboTax does everything that my tax preparer did, but it's faster, cheaper and more accurate."
How can a skilled worker compete with a $39 piece of software?
She can't.
Today, millions of Americans do have faster, cheaper, more accurate tax preparation, and the founders of Intuit have done very well for themselves.
That is a microcosm of what's happening, not just in software and services, but in media and music, in finance and manufacturing, in retailing and trade -- in short, in every industry.
What can we do to create shared prosperity?
The answer is not to try to slow down technology.
That is our grand challenge.
The new machine age can be dated to a day 15 years ago when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Blue, a supercomputer.
The machine won that day, and today, a chess program running on a cell phone can beat a human grandmaster.
It got so bad that, when he was asked what strategy he would use against a computer, Jan Donner, the Dutch grandmaster, replied, "I'd bring a hammer."
(Laughter) But today a computer is no longer the world chess champion.
What they had was better teamwork, and they showed that a team of humans and computers, working together, could beat any computer or any human working alone.
Technology is not destiny.
We shape our destiny.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development.
LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005.
And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it.I used this work to express my objection.
I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom.
In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit.
When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter) After finishing this series of protests, I started questioning why my fate was like this, and I realized that it's not just me -- all Chinese are as confused as I am.
As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress.
This work is called Xia Gang ("leaving post").
It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy.
From 1998 to 2000, 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China.
The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers.
I made them invisible in the deserted shop wherethey had lived and worked all their lives.
On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution: "The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party."
For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work.
This spring, I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 -- I picked the news photos of the day.
One is about the war in the Middle East, and another one is about a public demonstration in France.
I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions.
This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.
Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.
(Applause) LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes.
But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately.
Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes.
So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture.
But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small.
LB: This one is about 9/11 memories.
This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River.
Kenny Scharf's graffiti.
(Laughter) This is Venice, Italy.
This is the ancient city of Pompeii.
Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii.
LB: This is the Borghese Gallery in Rome.
When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas.
What will making myself invisible here cause people to think?
This one is called Instant Noodles.
Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter) LB: Since August 2012, harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets.
To create this artwork, I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket.
And my task is to stand there, trying to be still, setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple, I usually have to stand for three to four hours.
This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot.
Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot.
And this one, this is about food safety in China.
Unsafe food can harm people's health, and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter) The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages, in different countries and at different times.
I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element.
(Music) That's all I want to say.
Thank you. (Applause)
Bean bags are awesome.
Using the Live Strong Organization's online database of weight loss resources, you can calculate that by the time I'm done with this speech, those of you who are standing will have burned 7.5 more calories than those of you who are bean-bagging it.
(Laughter) Okay, here's a question, speaking of weight loss, specifically weight, this speech is live.
I'm actually here in front of you guys, we're all here together.
But this speech is being recorded and it will become a video that people can access all over the world on computers, mobile devices, televisions.
I weight about 190 pounds.
Asking questions like that is what I do every week on my channel Vsauce.
For the last two years, I have been asking really fun questions, mind-boggling questions, and approaching them as sincerely as I can, celebrating scientific concepts and scientists.
And I research and write and produce and host and edit and upload and run the social media all by myself, but it's not lonely, because Vsauce has more than 2 million subscribers, and every month, my videos are seen by more than 20 million people.
Yeah.
(Applause) It's very exciting.
I've found that asking a strange question is a great way to get people in, not just people, but fans.
And fans are different than just viewers or an audience, because fans want to come back.
They subscribe to you on YouTube and they want to watch everything you've made and everything you plan to make in the future because we are curious people and sparking curiosity is great bait.
So, let's take a look at some of my videos.
Here are eight of them.
But down here in the lower-right corner, "What Color is a Mirror?"
How could you possibly answer that question?"
Well, so far, 7.6 million people have watched this five-minute video about what color a mirror is.
And in that episode, I answer the question and I get a chance to explain what would normally be kind of dry topics: optics, diffuse versus specular reflection, how light works, how light works on the retina, and even the etymology of color terms like white and black.
Mirrors, technically speaking, are just a tiny, tiny, little bit ...
green.
You can demonstrate this by putting two mirrors next to each other, facing so they reflect back and forth forever.
Look down that infinite reflection, and it will get dimmer, because some light is lost or absorbed every time, but it will also become greener, because green light, that is light of a wavelength that we perceive as green, is best reflected by most mirrors.
Okay, so, how much does a video weigh?
And the number of electrons on your device won't actually increase or decrease.
But it takes energy to store them in one place, and, thanks to our friend Albert Einstein, we know that energy and mass are related.
Okay, so here's the thing: let's say you're watching a YouTube video at a really nice resolution, 720p.
Assuming a typical bit rate, we can figure that a minute of YouTube video is going to need to involve about 10 million electrons on your device.
Plugging all those electrons and the energy it takes to hold them in the correct place for you to see the video, into that formula, we can figure out that one minute of YouTube video increases the mass of your computer by about 10 to the negative 19th grams.
Written out, it looks like this.
So, we can't measure it, but we can, like we just did, calculate it.
And that's really cool because when I was a kid, my school had two shelves of science books.
That was really cool, but I read all of them within, like, two grades, and it was hard to get more books because books are heavy, you need space for them and moving books around is tougher than what we can do today.
With numbers that small, I can fit thousands of books on my own little personal electronic reader.
And as information becomes that light, it becomes a lot more democratic, meaning that more teachers and presenters and creators and viewers than ever before can be involved.
Right now, on YouTube, there is an explosion of content like this happening.
The three Vsauce channels are down there in the corner.
But everyone else, all together, collectively, their views dwarf what I can do alone or with the people that I work with, and that is really, really exciting.
It turns out that tapping into people's curiosity and responsibly answering their questions is a brilliant way to build fans and an audience and get in viewers.
It's even a great way for brands and companies to build trust.
(Applause)
You know, the blissfully happy family moves in to their perfect new home, excited about their perfect future, and it's sunny outside and the birds are chirping ...
And then it gets dark.
And there are noises from the attic.
When I started working at Google in 2006, Facebook was just a two-year-old, and Twitter hadn't yet been born.
And I was in absolute awe of the internet and all of its promise to make us closer and smarter and more free.
But as we were doing the inspiring work of building search engines and video-sharing sites and social networks, criminals, dictators and terrorists were figuring out how to use those same platforms against us.
And we didn't have the foresight to stop them.
Over the last few years, geopolitical forces have come online to wreak havoc.
And in response, Google supported a few colleagues and me to set up a new group called Jigsaw, with a mandate to make people safer from threats like violent extremism, censorship, persecution -- threats that feel very personal to me because I was born in Iran, and I left in the aftermath of a violent revolution.
I'm going to focus on just two.
The first is terrorism.
So in order to understand the radicalization process, we met with dozens of former members of violent extremist groups.
And she was 13 years old.
So I sat down with her and her father, and I said, "Why?"
And she said, "I was looking at pictures of what life is like in Syria, and I thought I was going to go and live in the Islamic Disney World."
That's what she saw in ISIS.
She thought she'd meet and marry a jihadi Brad Pitt and go shopping in the mall all day and live happily ever after.
ISIS understands what drives people, and they carefully craft a message for each audience.
They make pamphlets, radio shows and videos in not just English and Arabic, but German, Russian, French, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese.
I've even seen an ISIS-produced video in sign language.
Just think about that for a second: ISIS took the time and made the effort to ensure their message is reaching the deaf and hard of hearing.
It's actually not tech-savviness that is the reason why ISIS wins hearts and minds.
It's their insight into the prejudices, the vulnerabilities, the desires of the people they're trying to reach that does that.
If we want to have a shot at building meaningful technology that's going to counter radicalization, we have to start with the human journey at its core.
And I'm sitting there in this makeshift prison in the north of Iraq with this 23-year-old who had actually trained as a suicide bomber before defecting.
And he says, "I arrived in Syria full of hope, and immediately, I had two of my prized possessions confiscated: my passport and my mobile phone."
The symbols of his physical and digital liberty were taken away from him on arrival.
And then this is the way he described that moment of loss to me.
He said, "You know in 'Tom and Jerry,' when Jerry wants to escape, and then Tom locks the door and swallows the key and you see it bulging out of his throat as it travels down?"
And I was wondering: What, if anything, could have changed his mind the day that he left home?
So I asked, "If you knew everything that you know now about the suffering and the corruption, the brutality -- that day you left home, would you still have gone?"
And he said, "Yes."
"Well, what if you knew everything that you know now six months before the day that you left?"
"At that point, I think it probably would have changed my mind."
Radicalization isn't this yes-or-no choice.
And they're coming online for answers, which is an opportunity to reach them.
And there are videos online from people who have answers -- defectors, for example, telling the story of their journey into and out of violence; stories like the one from that man I met in the Iraqi prison.
There are locals who've uploaded cell phone footage of what life is really like in the caliphate under ISIS's rule.
There are clerics who are sharing peaceful interpretations of Islam.
These people don't generally have the marketing prowess of ISIS.
They risk their lives to speak up and confront terrorist propaganda, and then they tragically don't reach the people who most need to hear from them.
And we wanted to see if technology could change that.
So in 2016, we partnered with Moonshot CVE to pilot a new approach to countering radicalization called the "Redirect Method."
It uses the power of online advertising to bridge the gap between those susceptible to ISIS's messaging and those credible voices that are debunking that messaging.
And it works like this: someone looking for extremist material -- say they search for "How do I join ISIS?" -- will see an ad appear that invites them to watch a YouTube video of a cleric, of a defector -- someone who has an authentic answer.
And that targeting is based not on a profile of who they are, but of determining something that's directly relevant to their query or question.
During our eight-week pilot in English and Arabic, we reached over 300,000 people who had expressed an interest in or sympathy towards a jihadi group.
These people were now watching videos that could prevent them from making devastating choices.
And because violent extremism isn't confined to any one language, religion or ideology, the Redirect Method is now being deployed globally to protect people being courted online by violent ideologues, whether they're Islamists, white supremacists or other violent extremists, with the goal of giving them the chance to hear from someone on the other side of that journey; to give them the chance to choose a different path.
I want to give you a second example: online harassment.
Online harassers also work to figure out what will resonate with another human being.
But not to recruit them like ISIS does, but to cause them pain.
You post something on social media, and in a reply, you're told that you'll be raped, that your son will be watching, details of when and where.
In fact, your home address is put online for everyone to see.
That feels like a pretty real threat.
Online abuse has been this perverse art of figuring out what makes people angry, what makes people afraid, what makes people insecure, and then pushing those pressure points until they're silenced.
When online harassment goes unchecked, free speech is stifled.
And where online spaces remain, we descend into echo chambers with people who think just like us.
But that enables the spread of disinformation; that facilitates polarization.
What if technology instead could enable empathy at scale?
We wanted to see if we could build machine-learning models that could understand the emotional impact of language.
"Break a leg at TED!"
... and "I'll break your legs at TED."
(Laughter) You are human, that's why that's an obvious difference to you, even though the words are pretty much the same.
But for AI, it takes some training to teach the models to recognize that difference.
With the help of Perspective, the New York Times, for example, has increased spaces online for conversation.
Before our collaboration, they only had comments enabled on just 10 percent of their articles.
With the help of machine learning, they have that number up to 30 percent.
So they've tripled it, and we're still just getting started.
But this is about way more than just making moderators more efficient.
You don't have that opportunity online.
Imagine if machine learning could give commenters, as they're typing, real-time feedback about how their words might land, just like facial expressions do in a face-to-face conversation.
Machine learning isn't perfect, and it still makes plenty of mistakes.
But if we can build technology that understands the emotional impact of language, we can build empathy.
That means that we can have dialogue between people with different politics, different worldviews, different values.
And we can reinvigorate the spaces online that most of us have given up on.
When people use technology to exploit and harm others, they're preying on our human fears and vulnerabilities.
If we ever thought that we could build an internet insulated from the dark side of humanity, we were wrong.
If we want today to build technology that can overcome the challenges that we face, we have to throw our entire selves into understanding the issues and into building solutions that are as human as the problems they aim to solve.
Let's make that happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm an MIT professor, but I do not design buildings or computer systems.
Rather, I build body parts, bionic legs that augment human walking and running.
In 1982, I was in a mountain-climbing accident, and both of my legs had to be amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite.
Here, you can see my legs: 24 sensors, six microprocessors and muscle-tendon-like actuators.
But with this advanced bionic technology, I can skip, dance and run.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) I'm a bionic man, but I'm not yet a cyborg.
Artificial electrodes sense these signals, and small computers in the bionic limb decode my nerve pulses into my intended movement patterns.
However, those computers can't input information into my nervous system.
If I were a cyborg and could feel my legs via small computers inputting information into my nervous system, it would fundamentally change, I believe, my relationship to my synthetic body.
They're not part of me.
I believe that if I were a cyborg and could feel my legs, they would become part of me, part of self.
At MIT, we're thinking about NeuroEmbodied Design.
In this design process, the designer designs human flesh and bone, the biological body itself, along with synthetics to enhance the bidirectional communication between the nervous system and the built world.
NeuroEmbodied Design is a methodology to create cyborg function.
In this design process, designers contemplate a future in which technology no longer compromises separate, lifeless tools from our minds and our bodies, a future in which technology has been carefully integrated within our nature, a world in which what is biological and what is not, what is human and what is not, what is nature and what is not will be forever blurred.
That future will provide humanity new bodies.
NeuroEmbodied Design will extend our nervous systems into the synthetic world, and the synthetic world into us, fundamentally changing who we are.
There are many ways in which to build new bodies across scale, from the biomolecular to the scale of tissues and organs.
Today, I want to talk about one area of NeuroEmbodied Design, in which the body's tissues are manipulated and sculpted using surgical and regenerative processes.
The current amputation paradigm hasn't changed fundamentally since the US Civil War and has grown obsolete in light of dramatic advancements in actuators, control systems and neural interfacing technologies.
A major deficiency is the lack of dynamic muscle interactions for control and proprioception.
What is proprioception?
The opposite happens when you extend your ankle.
When these muscles flex and extend, biological sensors within the muscle tendons send information through nerves to the brain.
This is how we're able to feel where our feet are without seeing them with our eyes.
The current amputation paradigm breaks these dynamic muscle relationships, and in so doing eliminates normal proprioceptive sensations.
Consequently, a standard artificial limb cannot feed back information into the nervous system about where the prosthesis is in space.
The patient therefore cannot sense and feel the positions and movements of the prosthetic joint without seeing it with their eyes.
But when I try to move them, I cannot.
How is the AMI designed, and how does it work?
The AMI comprises two muscles that are surgically connected, an agonist linked to an antagonist.
When the agonist contracts upon electrical activation, it stretches the antagonist.
This muscle dynamic interaction causes biological sensors within the muscle tendon to send information through the nerve to the central nervous system, relating information on the muscle tendon's length, speed and force.
This is how muscle tendon proprioception works, and it's the primary way we, as humans, can feel and sense the positions, movements and forces on our limbs.
When a limb is amputated, the surgeon connects these opposing muscles within the residuum to create an AMI.
Now, multiple AMI constructs can be created for the control and sensation of multiple prosthetic joints.
Artificial electrodes are then placed on each AMI muscle, and small computers within the bionic limb decode those signals to control powerful motors on the bionic limb.
When the bionic limb moves, the AMI muscles move back and forth, sending signals through the nerve to the brain, enabling a person wearing the prosthesis to experience natural sensations of positions and movements of the prosthesis.
A few years ago, my good friend Jim Ewing -- of 34 years -- reached out to me for help.
Jim was in an a terrible climbing accident.
He fell 50 feet in the Cayman Islands when his rope failed to catch him hitting the ground's surface.
He suffered many, many injuries: punctured lungs and many broken bones.
After his accident, he dreamed of returning to his chosen sport of mountain climbing, but how might this be possible?
The answer was Team Cyborg, a team of surgeons, scientists and engineers assembled at MIT to rebuild Jim back to his former climbing prowess.
Team member Dr. Matthew Carty amputated Jim's badly damaged leg at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, using the AMI surgical procedure.
Tendon pulleys were created and attached to Jim's tibia bone to reconnect the opposing muscles.
The AMI procedure reestablished the neural link between Jim's ankle-foot muscles and his brain.
When Jim moves his phantom limb, the reconnected muscles move in dynamic pairs, causing signals of proprioception to pass through nerves to the brain, so Jim experiences normal sensations with ankle-foot positions and movements, even when blindfolded.
Here's Jim at the MIT laboratory after his surgeries.
We electrically linked Jim's AMI muscles, via the electrodes, to a bionic limb, and Jim quickly learned how to move the bionic limb in four distinct ankle-foot movement directions.
We were excited by these results, but then Jim stood up, and what occurred was truly remarkable.
All the intricacies of foot placement during stair ascent -- (Applause) emerged before our eyes.
Here's Jim descending steps, reaching with his bionic toe to the next stair tread, automatically exhibiting natural motions without him even trying to move his limb.
Because Jim's central nervous system is receiving the proprioceptive signals, it knows exactly how to control the synthetic limb in a natural way.
Now, Jim moves and behaves as if the synthetic limb is part of him.
Instead, you shake it off, and that's exactly what Jim did after being neurally connected to the limb for just a few hours.
What was most interesting to me is what Jim was telling us he was experiencing.
He said, "The robot became part of me."
Jim Ewing: The morning after the first time I was attached to the robot, my daughter came downstairs and asked me how it felt to be a cyborg, and my answer was that I didn't feel like a cyborg.
I felt like I had my leg, and it wasn't that I was attached to the robot so much as the robot was attached to me, and the robot became part of me.
Hugh Herr: Thank you.
(Applause) By connecting Jim's nervous system bidirectionally to his synthetic limb, neurological embodiment was achieved.
I hypothesized that because Jim can think and move his synthetic limb, and because he can feel those movements within his nervous system, the prosthesis is no longer a separate tool, but an integral part of Jim, an integral part of his body.
Because of this neurological embodiment, Jim doesn't feel like a cyborg.
He feels like he just has his leg back, that he has his body back.
Now I'm often asked when I'm going to be neurally linked to my synthetic limbs bidirectionally, when I'm going to become a cyborg.
The truth is, I'm hesitant to become a cyborg.
Before my legs were amputated, I was a terrible student.
I got D's and often F's in school.
Then, after my limbs were amputated, I suddenly became an MIT professor.
(Laughter) (Applause) Now I'm worried that once I'm neurally connected to my limbs once again, my brain will remap back to its not-so-bright self.
(Laughter) But you know what, that's OK, because at MIT, I already have tenure.
(Laughter) (Applause) I believe the reach of NeuroEmbodied Design will extend far beyond limb replacement and will carry humanity into realms that fundamentally redefine human potential.
In this 21st century, designers will extend the nervous system into powerfully strong exoskeletons that humans can control and feel with their minds.
Muscles within the body can be reconfigured for the control of powerful motors, and to feel and sense exoskeletal movements, augmenting humans' strength, jumping height and running speed.
In this 21st century, I believe humans will become superheroes.
Humans may also extend their bodies into non-anthropomorphic structures, such as wings, controlling and feeling each wing movement within the nervous system.
Leonardo da Vinci said, "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return."
During the twilight years of this century, I believe humans will be unrecognizable in morphology and dynamics from what we are today.
Humanity will take flight and soar.
Jim Ewing fell to earth and was badly broken, but his eyes turned skyward, where he always longed to return.
After his accident, he not only dreamed to walk again, but also to return to his chosen sport of mountain climbing.
At MIT, Team Cyborg built Jim a specialized limb for the vertical world, a brain-controlled leg with full position and movement sensations.
Using this technology, Jim returned to the Cayman Islands, the site of his accident, rebuilt as a cyborg to climb skyward once again.
(Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Ewing, the first cyborg rock climber.
(Applause)
What happens when technology knows more about us than we do?
A computer now can detect our slightest facial microexpressions and be able to tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one.
That's only the beginning.
Technology has become incredibly intelligent and already knows a lot about our internal states.
And whether we like it or not, we already are sharing parts of our inner lives that's out of our control.
That seems like a problem, because a lot of us like to keep what's going on inside from what people actually see.
We all like to have a poker face.
And while that might sound scary, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I've spent a lot of time studying the circuits in the brain that create the unique perceptual realities that we each have.
And now I bring that together with the capabilities of current technology to create new technology that does make us better, feel more, connect more.
And I believe to do that, we have to be OK losing some of our agency.
With some animals, it's really amazing, and we get to see into their internal experiences.
And we get to see into this window, into their internal states and their biological experiences.
It's really pretty cool.
Now, stay with me for a moment -- I'm a violinist, not a singer.
But the spider's already given me a critical review.
And likely, the harmonics of my voice as it went higher coupled with how loud I was singing recreated either the predatory call of an echolocating bat or a bird, and the spider did what it should.
I love this.
But us, humans -- we're different.
We like to think we have cognitive control over what people see, know and understand about our internal states -- our emotions, our insecurities, our bluffs, our trials and tribulations -- and how we respond.
Try this with me.
The response you're about to see is driven entirely by mental effort and has nothing to do with changes in lighting.
We know this from neuroscience.
I promise, your eyes are doing the same thing as the subject in our lab, whether you want them to or not.
At first, you'll hear some voices.
It's going to be hard at first, one should drop out, and it should get really easy.
You're going to see the change in effort in the diameter of the pupil.
(Video) (Two overlapping voices talking) (Single voice) Intelligent technology depends on personal data.
(Two overlapping voices talking) (Single voice) Intelligent technology depends on personal data.
When your brain's having to work harder, your autonomic nervous system drives your pupil to dilate.
When I take away one of the voices, the cognitive effort to understand the talkers gets a lot easier.
I could have put the two voices in different spatial locations, I could have made one louder.
We might think we have more agency over the reveal of our internal state than that spider, but maybe we don't.
Today's technology is starting to make it really easy to see the signals and tells that give us away.
The amalgamation of sensors paired with machine learning on us, around us and in our environments, is a lot more than cameras and microphones tracking our external actions.
Our bodies radiate our stories from changes in the temperature of our physiology.
We can look at these as infrared thermal images showing up behind me, where reds are hotter and blues are cooler.
We can actually see people give off heat on their cheeks in response to an image of flame.
But aside from giving away our poker bluffs, what if dimensions of data from someone's thermal response gave away a glow of interpersonal interest?
Tracking the honesty of feelings in someone's thermal image might be a new part of how we fall in love and see attraction.
Our technology can listen, develop insights and make predictions about our mental and physical health just by analyzing the timing dynamics of our speech and language picked up by microphones.
Groups have shown that changes in the statistics of our language paired with machine learning can predict the likelihood someone will develop psychosis.
Dementia, diabetes can alter the spectral coloration of our voice.
Changes in our language associated with Alzheimer's can sometimes show up more than 10 years before clinical diagnosis.
What we say and how we say it tells a much richer story than we used to think.
And devices we already have in our homes could, if we let them, give us invaluable insight back.
There's a dynamic mixture of acetone, isoprene and carbon dioxide that changes when our heart speeds up, when our muscles tense, and all without any obvious change in our behaviors.
Some things might be going on on the side screens, but try and focus on the image in the front and the man at the window.
(Eerie music) (Woman screams) PC: Sorry about that. I needed to get a reaction.
(Laughter) I'm actually tracking the carbon dioxide you exhale in the room right now.
We've installed tubes throughout the theater, lower to the ground, because CO2 is heavier than air.
But they're connected to a device in the back that lets us measure, in real time, with high precision, the continuous differential concentration of CO2.
The clouds on the sides are actually the real-time data visualization of the density of our CO2.
You might still see a patch of red on the screen, because we're showing increases with larger colored clouds, larger colored areas of red.
And that's the point where a lot of us jumped.
(Cheerful music) (Woman laughs) PC: You knew it was coming.
But it's a lot different when we changed the creator's intent.
Changing the music and the sound effects completely alter the emotional impact of that scene.
And we can see it in our breath.
Suspense, fear, joy all show up as reproducible, visually identifiable moments.
We broadcast a chemical signature of our emotions.
It is the end of the poker face.
Our spaces, our technology will know what we're feeling.
And we are enabling the capabilities that true technological partners can bring to how we connect with each other and with our technology.
If we recognize the power of becoming technological empaths, we get this opportunity where technology can help us bridge the emotional and cognitive divide.
And in that way, we get to change how we tell our stories.
We can enable a better future for technologies like augmented reality to extend our own agency and connect us at a much deeper level.
Imagine a high school counselor being able to realize that an outwardly cheery student really was having a deeply hard time, where reaching out can make a crucial, positive difference.
Or authorities, being able to know the difference between someone having a mental health crisis and a different type of aggression, and responding accordingly.
Or an artist, knowing the direct impact of their work.
Leo Tolstoy defined his perspective of art by whether what the creator intended was experienced by the person on the other end.
Today's artists can know what we're feeling.
But regardless of whether it's art or human connection, today's technologies will know and can know what we're experiencing on the other side, and this means we can be closer and more authentic.
But I realize a lot of us have a really hard time with the idea of sharing our data, and especially the idea that people know things about us that we didn't actively choose to share.
I'm not looking to create a world where our inner lives are ripped open and our personal data and our privacy given away to people and entities where we don't want to see it go.
And we can have richer experiences from our technology.
Any technology can be used for good or bad.
Transparency to engagement and effective regulation are absolutely critical to building the trust for any of this.
But the benefits that "empathetic technology" can bring to our lives are worth solving the problems that make us uncomfortable.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let's face it: Driving is dangerous.
It's one of the things that we don't like to think about, but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true.
Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States -- leading cause of death -- and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.
So what happens?
No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident.
I was a young driver out on the highway, and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on.
I'm like, "Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down, I'll slow down too."
I step on the brake.
But no, this guy isn't slowing down.
This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway.
I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going, and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop, and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled, and fortunately, no one was hurt.
I think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other.
I just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now.
Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble.
You can't really directly sense the world around you.
You're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways, in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds.
Stop looking where you're going, turn, check your blind spot, and drive down the road without looking where you're going.
Why do we do this? Because we have to, we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here?
What's more important?
But occasionally we miss something.
Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late.
And I believe that. I believe that.
We can only watch so much.
But the technology exists now that can help us improve that.
In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other, we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind, to the right and left, all at the same time, bird's eye view, we will actually be able to see into those cars.
We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us, to see how fast that guy's going or stopping.
And with computation and algorithms and predictive models, we will be able to see the future.
You may think that's impossible.
How can you predict the future? That's really hard.
Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity.
Often they travel on pre-published routes.
It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car's going to be in the near future.
Even if, when you're in your car and some motorcyclist comes -- bshoom! -- 85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting -- I know you've had this experience -- that guy didn't "just come out of nowhere."
Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy, and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map, he's on the map -- position, velocity, good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour.
You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave.
I mean, they're Newtonian objects.
So how do we get there?
We can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars, just sharing GPS.
If I have a GPS and a camera in my car, I have a pretty precise idea of where I am and how fast I'm going.
With computer vision, I can estimate where the cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going.
What happens if two cars share that data, if they talk to each other?
I can tell you exactly what happens.
Everybody wins.
Professor Bob Wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic, when cars just share GPS data, and we've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots: stereo cameras, GPS, and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems.
We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio, and the robots talk to each other.
When these robots come at each other, they track each other's position precisely, and they can avoid each other.
We're now adding more and more robots into the mix, and we encountered some problems.
One of the problems, when you get too much chatter, it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize, and that's where the predictive model helps you.
If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories, you don't pay as much attention to those packets.
You prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course.
So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how.
And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way.
And we wanted to do -- how can we best alert everyone?
How can these cars whisper, "You need to get out of the way?"
If one guy has a really great car, but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something, they're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency.
And now, using a series of three cameras, we can detect if a driver is looking forward, looking away, looking down, on the phone, or having a cup of coffee.
We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone.
I think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data.
I think it's a very disconcerting notion, this idea that our cars will be watching us, talking about us to other cars, that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip.
But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy, just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside, I don't really know about you.
If I look at your license plate number, I don't really know who you are.
(Laughter) And I think it's going to be a great thing.
I want you to consider for a moment if you really don't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you're braking, that you're coming to a dead stop.
By sharing our data willingly, we can do what's best for everyone.
So let your car gossip about you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
[This talk contains graphic images] My parents always wanted me to be a doctor.
But a doctor that studies how vultures eat dead things is probably not the type of doctor my parents had in mind.
(Laughter) I study vulture scavenging behavior and how vultures affect crime scenes.
I'm here to talk to you about how we take vultures for granted in forensic science.
It's May 2014 and we're standing in a park in Nashville, Tennessee, because we've been at a horse race.
As we wait for the porta potty, we see two ladies in their Sunday best: heels, pearls and lovely, floppy derby hats.
Something must be dead."
We look up and to the left and see vultures circling round and round.
It occurred to me at this very moment that if these ladies at the derby are aware of vulture's connection to death, then why aren't we talking more about these birds at crime scenes?
People know that vultures are connected to death.
But they don't really understand how.
For example, here's an email I received from a detective in Louisiana: "Lauren, there's been a kidnapping.
What buzzards or vultures do we have in Louisiana?"
Before we address the kidnapping, I'll first address this buzzard/vulture question I get all the time.
Buzzards don't live in the United States.
The big black birds you see circling in the sky within the US are vultures.
The two types of vultures that live in Louisiana are the turkey vulture and black vulture.
To fully understand the role of vultures in forensic science, I'll walk you through this forensic case.
And he wants to use the birds to try to find the body.
Like the ladies in Nashville, the detective thinks that vultures circling in the sky will lead him to the body.
It's not that simple.
I don't know if you've ever seen a vulture up close or spent much time with them, but they're huge, huge.
Six-foot wingspan.
Vultures circle in the air because they are too big to flap their wings and fly, so they soar.
Therefore, when you see a circling vulture, the bird is usually traveling from point A to B, rather than circling above something dead.
Actually, if you want to use a vulture to try to find a body, look for a vulture in a tree or on a fence post.
Vultures are too big and slow to hunt.
In fact, vultures are the only animals in the world that depend upon death as a food source.
The turkey vulture that you see here is super cool, because it's one of the few bird species that can actually smell.
The evolutionary role of the vulture is to rid the earth of harmful toxins produced following death.
Vultures usually remove the eyes first, then tear the skin, start pulling the tissues, and leave you with a skeleton.
Therefore, the importance of vultures is not in the air, but on the ground.
(Laughter) Although gruesome, vultures are key forensic players, and here's why.
Vultures will consume a dead human just like they will consume roadkill.
If vultures depend on death for survival and if they scavenge humans, then how can vultures be absent from forensic textbooks and training manuals?
The answer: the tradition has been for researchers to exclude animal scavengers from decomposition studies by placing a cage over the decaying subject matter.
Why?
Because researchers were afraid an animal would run away with their subject matter and they wouldn't have any data to report -- consequently excluding animals' results in a lengthy skeletonization process, and this information is currently what detectives use during investigations.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Vultures accelerate decay.
And the skeletonized body could have been there for as little as five days if scavenged by vultures.
The failure to account for vulture scavenging can result in forensic scientists inaccurately estimating how long someone has been dead and then searching through the wrong missing person's files.
Therefore, the goal is to get forensic scientists to focus on vulture evidence and to get law enforcement to consider vulture scavenging and a possible recent death when skeletal remains are found.
Let's get back to the importance of the kidnapping case.
I responded to the detectives and told them that vultures like areas with water.
They like areas with white-tailed deer, they typically arrive within the first five days following death, they're going to leave an intact spinal column and feathers.
The detectives write back and say, "We found the body buried in a shallow grave.
But there appeared to be a problem because the feathers were located 40 yards from where the body was found.
The feathers were next to a bloody pine cone.
Vultures aren't attracted to blood, and they typically don't wander.
They might wander 40 feet, but they're not going to wander 40 yards.
So my first job here was to determine if vultures were at the scene.
One of the reasons I love vultures is because they tend to operate in a manner that can be explained by biology and physics.
A body farm is a place where you can donate your body to science.
And then the year-long process of monitoring vultures via remote GPS technology.
Next, I brought up my field notes and had an "Aha!" moment.
I knew of two things that would lure a vulture 40 yards from a body.
I presented this information to the detectives and learned that they suspected the victim had been incapacitated by blunt force trauma to the head.
The blow to the head was thought to have occurred in the area where the pine cone was found, and then the victim was drug 40 yards and buried in a shallow grave.
This suggested that brain matter was the lure for the vulture and illustrates how studying vulture behavior can help piece together some of the evidence.
The detectives also sent me this photo.
The victim's arm is sticking up out of the grave.
The feather by the pine cone indicated that vultures were at the scene.
This crime scene photo also depicts characteristic vulture scavenging behavior.
Also note that the skin has a cut-like tear near the wrist.
The turkey vulture smells the decay, lands.
It can get through the pine needles, pull out the hand, it's going to tear the skin with its beak and then start pulling the soft tissues away from the bone.
Just tear and pull, tear and pull, tear and pull.
Instead, vultures just leave these very subtle clues.
Vultures are important because they are so good and fast at what they do.
They're like tornadoes.
I provided my opinion about the vulture evidence to the detective.
And he presented the vulture evidence in court.
The kidnapping case was a death penalty case.
And the defendant was found guilty.
This case illustrates how studying vulture behavior helps innovate forensic science.
Someone who has been murdered deserves the most thorough investigation possible.
When we include vultures in forensic studies, we paint a more thorough picture of what happened, when it happened and who it happened to.
So, the next time you're at a crime scene with a dead body -- (Laughter) look to the ground to find the clues vultures have left.
And if anyone ever brings up vultures on a date, you'll know they're a keeper.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I've noticed something interesting about society and culture.
So, learning to drive, owning a gun, getting married.
For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course.
So today I'm going to tell you ten things that you thought everybody knew, but it turns out they don't.
First of all, on the web, if you want to scroll down, don't pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar.
Do that only if you're paid by the hour.
The space bar scrolls down one page.
Hold down the Shift key to scroll back up again.
So, space bar to scroll down one page; works in every browser, in every kind of computer.
Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box.
Don't open the pop-up menu.
So if you want Connecticut, go, C, C, C.
If you want Texas, go T, T, and you jump right to that thing without even opening the pop-up menu.
Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus.
If you're on the Mac, it might be Command instead.
When you're typing on your Blackberry, Android, iPhone, don't bother switching layouts to the punctuation layout to hit the period and then a space, then try to capitalize the next letter.
Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it.
No need to go to the recent calls list if you're trying to call somebody just hit the call button again.
(Laughter) So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this.
Phone: At the tone, please...
(Beep) David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling.
I didn't say these were going to be perfect.
So most of you think of Google as something that lets you look up a web page, but it is also a dictionary.
You don't even have to click anything.
It's also a complete FAA database.
Type the name of the airline and the flight.
Again, you don't have to click one of the results.
While we're talking about text -- When you want to highlight -- this is just an example -- (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie.
Double click the word.
Watch "200" -- I go double-click, it neatly selects just that word.
(Laughter) Shutter lag is the time between your pressing the shutter button and the moment the camera actually snaps.
It's extremely frustrating on any camera under $1,000.
(Camera click) (Laughter) So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down -- no shutter lag!
I've just turned your $50 camera into a $1,000 camera with that trick.
And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you!
(Laughter) So when that happens -- this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program -- all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for "whiteout," and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it.
If you missed anything, I'll be happy to send you the list of these tips.
In the meantime, congratulations.
Have a great day.
(Applause)
What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you.
More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush.
Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours.
Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay.
In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation.
Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those.
Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of.
Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't.
What did get me moving was a social interaction.
Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, "I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?"
And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own.
So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week.
It's changed my life.
So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things.
Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works.
And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true.
Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable.
You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this.
And this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what I've done well.
I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons.
And this probably is not what you're expecting.
You're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion, because that's what I've done most of my life.
It's about perfecting something old, and bringing something old into the 21st century.
Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works.
In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it.
This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine.
And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world.
This is a small modular reactor.
So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here.
This is between 50 and 100 megawatts.
But that's a ton of power.
Now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they're built in a factory.
So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity.
And inside this reactor is a molten salt, so anybody who's a fan of thorium, they're going to be really excited about this, because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233.
You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and that was great, and we don't need them anymore, and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially?
So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive.
And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas.
So going back to what I was saying before about all power being produced -- well, other than photovoltaic -- being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine, that's actually not that efficient, and in fact, in a nuclear power plant like this, it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient.
And the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature.
They operate anywhere from, you know, maybe 200 to 300 degrees Celsius.
And these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which means the higher the temperature you go to, thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies.
And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle.
This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency.
And I'm really excited about this, because it's a very compact core.
Molten salt reactors are very compact by nature, but what's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you're fissioning, not to mention the fact that these burn up.
Their burn-up is much higher.
So for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor, a lot more of it's being used.
And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets.
Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it.
So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons.
They love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place.
And they eat them up, which means that, combined with the fact that the cladding doesn't last very long, you can only run one of these reactors for roughly, say, 18 months without refueling it.
So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system.
No refueling means you can seal them up and they're not going to be a proliferation risk, and they're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores.
But let's go back to safety, because everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe, and I'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons.
So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core.
These reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure, so there's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident.
Also, they operate at high temperatures, and the fuel is molten, so they can't melt down, but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances, or you lost off-site power in the case of something like Fukushima, there's a dump tank.
In this kind of reactor, you can't do that.
The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island -- looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products.
So the core of this reactor, since it's not under pressure and it doesn't have this chemical reactivity, means that there's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor.
So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity.
Carbon-free electricity.
And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation.
It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap.
And maybe something else.
As a kid, I was obsessed with space.
Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me.
That is the rocket designer's dream.
That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream.
You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts -- wow, that's a lot of power.
I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts.
That's a ton of power.
That could power a rocket there.
And people say, "Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents?"
But we launch plutonium batteries all the time.
Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor.
So I'm really excited.
I graduated high school in May, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) — I graduated high school in May, and I decided that I was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that I've developed, these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes, but I want to do this, and I've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people I've ever had the chance to work with, and I'm really prepared to make this a reality.
And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world.
But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors.
They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky.
The energy that I'm able to talk to you today, while it was converted to chemical energy in my food, originally came from a nuclear reaction, and so there's something poetic about, in my opinion, perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy.
(Applause)
Theater matters because democracy matters.
Theater is the essential art form of democracy, and we know this because they were born in the same city.
In the late 6th century BC, the idea of Western democracy was born.
It was, of course, a very partial and flawed democracy, but the idea that power should stem from the consent of the governed, that power should flow from below to above, not the other way around, was born in that decade.
And in that same decade, somebody -- legend has it, somebody named Thespis -- invented the idea of dialogue.
Well, we know that the Festival of Dionysus gathered the entire citizenry of Athens on the side of the Acropolis, and they would listen to music, they would watch dancing, and they would have stories told as part of the Festival of Dionysus.
And you may disagree with it, you may think I'm an insufferable fool, you may be bored to death, but that dialogue is mostly taking place inside your own head.
But what happens if, instead of me talking to you -- and Thespis thought of this -- I just shift 90 degrees to the left, and I talk to another person onstage with me?
And I'm talking to somebody else.
There's a conflict between two points of view.
And if you believe in democracy, you have to believe that.
But that's the basic thesis of democracy, that the conflict of different points of views leads to the truth.
I'm asking you to exercise empathy.
And the idea that truth comes from the collision of different ideas and the emotional muscle of empathy are the necessary tools for democratic citizenship.
The third thing really is you, is the community itself, is the audience.
You can spread out, put your legs over the top of the stadium seats, eat your popcorn and just enjoy it.
But if you walk into a live theater and you see that the theater is half full, your heart sinks.
You were coming to have the collective experience of laughing together, crying together, holding your breath together to see what's going to happen next.
You may have walked into that theater as an individual consumer, but if the theater does its job, you've walked out with a sense of yourself as part of a whole, as part of a community.
That's built into the DNA of my art form.
Twenty-five hundred years later, Joe Papp decided that the culture should belong to everybody in the United States of America, and that it was his job to try to deliver on that promise.
He created Free Shakespeare in the Park.
And Free Shakespeare in the Park is based on a very simple idea, the idea that the best theater, the best art that we can produce, should go to everybody and belong to everybody, and to this day, every summer night in Central Park, 2,000 people are lining up to see the best theater we can provide for free.
It's not a commercial transaction.
And so in 1967, Joe opened the Public Theater downtown on Astor Place, and the first show he ever produced was the world premiere of "Hair."
Clive Barnes in The Times said that it was as if Mr. Papp took a broom and swept up all the refuse from the East Village streets onto the stage at the Public.
(Laughter) He didn't mean it complimentarily, but Joe put it up in the lobby, he was so proud of it.
Because when Joe produced that play in 1985, there was more information about AIDS in Frank Rich's review in the New York Times than the New York Times had published in the previous four years.
Larry was actually changing the dialogue about AIDS through writing this play, and Joe was by producing it.
I was blessed to commission and work on Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," and when doing that play and along with "Normal Heart," we could see that the culture was actually shifting, and it wasn't caused by the theater, but the theater was doing its part to change what it meant to be gay in the United States.
And I'm incredibly proud of that.
(Applause) When I took over Joe's old job at the Public in 2005, I realized one of the problems we had was a victim of our own success, which is: Shakespeare in the Park had been founded as a program for access, and it was now the hardest ticket to get in New York City.
So we refounded the mobile unit and took Shakespeare to prisons, to homeless shelters, to community centers in all five boroughs and even in New Jersey and Westchester County.
And that program proved something to us that we knew intuitively: people's need for theater is as powerful as their desire for food or for drink.
It's been an extraordinary success, and we've continued it.
And the idea, we said, is: How can we turn theater from being a commodity, an object, back into what it really is -- a set of relationships among people?
And under the guidance of the amazing Lear deBessonet, we started the Public Works program, which now every summer produces these immense Shakespearean musical pageants, where Tony Award-winning actors and musicians are side by side with nannies and domestic workers and military veterans and recently incarcerated prisoners, amateurs and professionals, performing together on the same stage.
And it's not just a great social program, it's the best art that we do.
And the thesis of it is that artistry is not something that is the possession of a few.
Artistry is inherent in being a human being.
And then occasionally -- (Applause) you get a miracle like "Hamilton," Lin-Manuel's extraordinary retelling of the foundational story of this country through the eyes of the only Founding Father who was a bastard immigrant orphan from the West Indies.
He was taking the voice of the people, the language of the people, elevating it into verse, and by doing so, ennobling the language and ennobling the people who spoke the language.
But there was another side to that, and it's where I want to end, and it's the last story I want to talk about.
Some of you may have heard that Vice President-elect Pence came to see "Hamilton" in New York.
And when he came in, some of my fellow New Yorkers booed him.
And beautifully, he said, "That's what freedom sounds like."
And at the end of the show, we read what I feel was a very respectful statement from the stage, and Vice President-elect Pence listened to it, but it sparked a certain amount of outrage, a tweetstorm, and also an internet boycott of "Hamilton" from outraged people who had felt we had treated him with disrespect.
I looked at that boycott and I said, we're getting something wrong here.
All of these people who have signed this boycott petition, they were never going to see "Hamilton" anyway.
It was never going to come to a city near them.
If it could come, they couldn't afford a ticket, and if they could afford a ticket, they didn't have the connections to get that ticket.
They weren't boycotting us; we had boycotted them.
We in the culture have done exactly what the economy, what the educational system, what technology has done, which is turn our back on a large part of the country.
So this idea of inclusion, it has to keep going.
Next fall, we are sending out on tour a production of Lynn Nottage's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Sweat."
We're taking that play and we're touring it to rural counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
We're partnering with community organizations there to try and make sure not only that we reach the people that we're trying to reach, but that we find ways to listen to them back and say, "The culture is here for you, too."
Because -- (Applause) we in the culture industry, we in the theater, have no right to say that we don't know what our job is.
It's in the DNA of our art form.
That's what the theater is supposed to do, and that's what we need to try to do as well as we can.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years, I've done the same thing.
And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives.
Some of those reforms have been good.
Some of them have been not so good.
And we know why kids drop out.
We know why kids don't learn.
But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection.
Relationships.
James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship.
George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships.
For years, I have watched people teach.
I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst.
The kids should learn it.
Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like."
And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear."
Needless to say, it was.
Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship, or you don't.
I think Stephen Covey had the right idea.
Simple things, like apologizing.
Tell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock.
I'd taught the whole lesson wrong.
(Laughter) So I came back to class the next day and I said, "Look, guys, I need to apologize.
I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry."
You were so excited, we just let you go."
I wondered, "How am I going to take this group, in nine months, from where they are to where they need to be?
And it was difficult, it was awfully hard.
How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time?
One year I came up with a bright idea.
I told all my students, "You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it."
One of the students said, "Really?"
I was somebody when I came.
I am powerful, and I am strong.
I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go."
And they said, "Yeah!"
(Applause) I gave a quiz, 20 questions.
(Laughter) He said, "Then why'd you put a smiley face?"
You got two right. You didn't miss them all."
(Laughter) I said, "And when we review this, won't you do better?"
He said, "Yes, ma'am, I can do better."
You see, "-18" sucks all the life out of you.
(Laughter) And kids can be cruel.
And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life.
And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear.
(Laughter) And you know your toughest kids are never absent.
(Laughter) Never.
You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason.
It's the connection. It's the relationships.
So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway.
We teach anyway, because that's what we do.
Teaching and learning should bring joy.
How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion?
Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.
But it is not impossible.
We can do this. We're educators.
We're born to make a difference.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
I'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures.
I must speak to you a little bit of my history, because we'll be speaking on this during my speech here.
I was born in 1944 in Brazil, in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy.
I was born on a farm, a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still].
I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals, I swam in our small rivers with our caimans.
It was about 35 families that lived on this farm, and everything that we produced on this farm, we consumed.
When I was 15 years old, it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger -- much bigger -- where I did the second part of secondary school.
Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize, and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical, I was a member of leftist parties, and I became an activist.
I [went to] university to become an economist.
I [did] a master's degree in economics.
And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time.
I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend, and my associate in everything that I have done till now, my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.
We fought very hard against the dictatorship, in a moment it was necessary to us: Either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand, or leave Brazil. We were too young, and our organization thought it was better for us to go out, and we went to France, where I did a PhD in economics, Léila became an architect.
I worked after for an investment bank.
We made a lot of trips, financed development, economic projects in Africa with the World Bank.
And one day photography made a total invasion in my life.
I became a photographer, abandoned everything and became a photographer, and I started to do the photography that was important for me.
Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist, that you are an anthropologist photographer, that you are an activist photographer.
I put photography as my life.
In the '90s, from 1994 to 2000, I photographed a story called Migrations.
It became a book. It became a show.
But during the time that I was photographing this, I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda.
I lost my faith in our species.
I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, told him that I was completely sick.
He made a long examination, and told me, "Sebastian, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect.
I was really upset with photography, with everything in the world, and I made the decision to go back to where I was born.
It was a big coincidence.
It was the moment that my parents became very old.
When we received this land, this land was as dead as I was.
When I was a kid, it was more than 50 percent rainforest.
When we received the land, it was less than half a percent rainforest, as in all my region.
To build development, Brazilian development, we destroyed a lot of our forest.
This farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds, and we didn't know how to deal with these.
You say that you were born in paradise.
Let's build the paradise again.
And I went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us, and we started. We started to plant, and this first year we lost a lot of trees, second year less, and slowly, slowly this dead land started to be born again.
We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, only local species, only native species, where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed, and the life started to come back in an incredible way.
It was necessary for us to transform our land into a national park.
We transformed. We gave this land back to nature.
It became a national park.
We created an institution called Instituto Terra, and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere.
We raised money in Spain, in Italy, a lot in Brazil.
We worked with a lot of companies in Brazil that put money into this project, the government.
And the life started to come, and I had a big wish to come back to photography, to photograph again.
And this time, my wish was not to photograph anymore just one animal that I had photographed all my life: us.
And I went. I started in the beginning of 2004, and I finished at the end of 2011.
We created an incredible amount of pictures, and the result -- Lélia did the design of all my books, the design of all my shows. She is the creator of the shows.
We must protect the forest in this sense.
And with these pictures, I hope that we can create information, a system of information.
Well, this — (Applause) — Thank you. Thank you very much.
But there is another part that we must together rebuild, to build our societies, our modern family of societies, we are at a point where we cannot go back.
But we create an incredible contradiction.
To build all this, we destroy a lot.
Our forest in Brazil, that antique forest that was the size of California, is destroyed today 93 percent.
Here, on the West Coast, you've destroyed your forest.
Coming the other day from Atlanta, here, two days ago, I was flying over deserts that we made, we provoked with our own hands.
India has no more trees. Spain has no more trees.
And we must rebuild these forests.
That is the essence of our life, these forests.
We need to breathe. The only factory capable to transform CO2 into oxygen, are the forests.
The only machine capable to capture the carbon that we are producing, always, even if we reduce them, everything that we do, we produce CO2, are the trees.
I put the question -- three or four weeks ago, we saw in the newspapers millions of fish that die in Norway.
I put to myself the question, if for a moment, we will not lack oxygen for all animal species, ours included -- that would be very complicated for us.
For the water system, the trees are essential.
You happy people that have a lot of hair on your head, if you take a shower, it takes you two or three hours to dry your hair if you don't use a dryer machine.
The trees are the hair of our planet.
When you have trees, the root system holds the water.
This is the most important thing, when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life.
You remember that I told you, when I received the farm from my parents that was my paradise, that was the farm.
Land completely destroyed, the erosion there, the land had dried.
But you can see in this picture, we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil.
In each point of those spots, we had planted a tree.
There are thousands of trees.
(Applause) I told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem.
And I'll show you the last picture.
We are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees.
And I believe that we can do it together.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together: big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks.
Right?
[Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes] (Laughter) And tattoos tell you a lot of stories.
A few, but not most.
What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos?
What's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself.
And electronic tattoos also shout.
And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really hard to hide from this stuff, among other things, because it's not just the electronic tattoos, it's facial recognition that's getting really good.
So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names, although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes. (Laughter) But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this, take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody, because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos.
And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online.
Here's what happened to this company.
[Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they figure out you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the store comes up and says, "Hey, we've got five black dresses that would just look great on you."
So what if Andy was wrong?
Here's Andy's theory.
[In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.] What if we flip this?
What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes? (Laughter) Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will.
And if that's true, then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American.
Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time.
So lesson number one: Sisyphus.
It's a little like your reputation.
Myth number two: Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they're out.
With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love.
Lesson number three: Atalanta.
Greatest runner. She would challenge anybody.
If you won, she would marry you.
How did Hippomenes beat her?
Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple.
She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple.
She kept getting distracted. He eventually won the race.
Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message.
And then, of course, there's Narcissus.
(Laughter) But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with your own reflection.
Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges.
When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, "Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?"
The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten somebody with immortality.
And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I teach chemistry.
So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere.
Some people nodding yes.
The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating.
(Clang) (Laughs) Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class.
But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level.
If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle.
Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario.
You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education.
But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions.
For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing.
But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction.
In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta.
This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there.
Now, when I got this, I was -- press Caps Lock -- absolutely freaked out, okay?
But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied.
So when I asked him, he told me three things.
He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work.
And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life.
Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today.
Rule number one: Curiosity comes first.
Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around.
We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly.
And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206.
And rule number three: Practice reflection.
As if what we are doing one day will save lives.
And each case is different.
The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on.
So these are my daughters.
And, on the left, Riley.
Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here.
She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, "Why?"
Yeah. Why.
We all were at that age.
But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet.
But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'm a little nervous, because my wife Yvonne said to me, she said, "Geoff, you watch the TED Talks."
I said, "Yes, honey, I love TED Talks."
She said, "You know, they're like, really smart, talented -- " I said, "I know, I know." (Laughter) She said, "They don't want, like, the angry black man."
This year, there are going to be millions of our children that we're going to needlessly lose, that we could -- right now, we could save them all.
You saw the quality of the educators who were here.
It is absolutely possible.
Why haven't we fixed this?
Those of us in education have held on to a business plan that we don't care how many millions of young people fail, we're going to continue to do the same thing that didn't work, and nobody is getting crazy about it -- right? -- enough to say, "Enough is enough."
So here's a business plan that simply does not make any sense.
You know, I grew up in the inner city, and there were kids who were failing in schools 56 years ago when I first went to school, and those schools are still lousy today, 56 years later.
It's not like a bottle of wine.
Right? (Laughter) Where you say, like, '87 was like a good year, right?
That's now how this thing -- I mean, every single year, it's still the same approach, right?
What kind of business model is that?
Now, who can bank between 10 and 3? The unemployed.
They don't need banks. They got no money in the banks.
Who created that business model? Right?
And it went on for decades.
You know why? Because they didn't care.
It wasn't about the customers.
How could you go to the bank when you were at work? It didn't matter.
They all operate the same way. Right?
Now, one day, some crazy banker had an idea.
Maybe we should keep the bank open when people come home from work.
Now look, I'm a technology fan, but I have to admit to you all I'm a little old.
So I was a little slow, and I did not trust technology, and when they first came out with those new contraptions, these tellers that you put in a card and they give you money, I was like, "There's no way that machine is going to count that money right.
So technology has changed. Things have changed.
Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?
And if you come up with a plan to change things, people consider you radical.
They will say the worst things about you.
You say, whoo! So I heard about that in '75 when I was at the Ed School at Harvard.
I said, "Oh, wow, this is an important study."
Because it suggests we should do something.
(Laughter) Every 10 years they reproduce the same study.
The system decides you can't run schools in the summer.
You know, I always wonder, who makes up those rules?
For years I went to -- Look, I went the Harvard Ed School.
I thought I knew something.
They said it was the agrarian calendar, and people had — but let me tell you why that doesn't make sense.
So who came up with this idea? Who owns it?
Why did we ever do it?
Well it just turns out in the 1840s we did have, schools were open all year. They were open all year, because we had a lot of folks who had to work all day.
It was a perfect place to have schools.
So this is not something that is ordained from the education gods.
Because our business has refused to use science.
Yes, there'll be some place, because some folks will do the right thing.
As a profession, we have to stop this. The science is clear.
Here's what we know.
My wife, Yvonne, and I, we have four kids, three grown ones and a 15-year-old.
That's a longer story.
(Laughter) With our first kids, we did not know the science about brain development.
We didn't know how critical those first three years were.
We didn't know what was happening in those young brains.
We know that now. What are we doing about it? Nothing.
Wealthy people know. Educated people know.
And their kids have an advantage.
Poor people don't know, and we're not doing anything to help them at all.
But we know this is critical.
We know it's important for kids.
Poor kids need that experience.
You know, we provide health services and people are always fussing at me about, you know, because I'm all into accountability and data and all of that good stuff, but we do health services, and I have to raise a lot of money.
And I had to because I had to raise the money.
But now I'm older, and you know what I tell them?
You know why I provide kids with those health benefits and the sports and the recreation and the arts?
I actually like kids. (Laughter) (Applause) But when they really get pushy, people really get pushy, I say, "I do it because you do it for your kid."
(Applause) So here's the other thing.
I'm a tester guy. I believe you need data, you need information, because you work at something, you think it's working, and you find out it's not working.
I mean, you're educators. You work, you say, you think you've got it, great, no? And you find out they didn't get it.
But here's the problem with testing.
The testing that we do -- we're going to have our test in New York next week — is in April.
You know when we're going to get the results back?
Maybe July, maybe June.
And the results have great data.
And so, what do you do?
You go on vacation. (Laughter) You come back from vacation.
Now you've got all of this test data from last year.
You're going to go and teach this year.
I need that data in September.
I need that data in November.
I need to know that this week.
I don't need to know that at the end of the year when it's too late.
Because in my older years, I've become somewhat of a clairvoyant.
You take me to any school.
I'm really good at inner city schools that are struggling.
And you tell me last year 48 percent of those kids were on grade level.
You say, "We're doing the same thing."
I'm going to make a prediction. (Laughter) This year, somewhere between 44 and 52 percent of those kids will be on grade level.
So we're spending all of this money, but we're getting what?
Teachers need real information right now about what's happening to their kids.
So here's the other issue that I just think we've got to be concerned about.
If you try something new, people are always like, "Ooh, charter schools." Hey, let's try some stuff. Let's see.
This stuff hasn't worked for 55 years.
Let's try something different. And here's the rub.
You know, people tell me, "Yeah, those charter schools, a lot of them don't work."
A lot of them don't. They should be closed.
I mean, I really believe they should be closed.
Right? Because that's not the way the world works.
If you think about technology, imagine if that's how we thought about technology.
Every time something didn't work, we just threw in the towel and said, "Let's forget it." Right?
You know, they convinced me. I'm sure some of you were like me -- the latest and greatest thing, the PalmPilot.
Did anybody stop inventing? Not a person. Not a soul.
The folks went out there. They kept inventing.
And we've got to do better. The evaluation, we have to start with kids earlier, we have to make sure that we provide the support to young people.
We've got to give them all of these opportunities.
So that we have to do. But this innovation issue, this idea that we've got to keep innovating until we really nail this science down is something that is absolutely critical.
And this is something, by the way, that I think is going to be a challenge for our entire field.
America cannot wait another 50 years to get this right.
I don't know about a fiscal cliff, but I know there's an educational cliff that we are walking over right this very second, and if we allow folks to continue this foolishness about saying we can't afford this — So Bill Gates says it's going to cost five billion dollars.
What is five billion dollars to the United States?
What did we spend in Afghanistan this year?
How many trillions? (Applause) When the country cares about something, we'll spend a trillion dollars without blinking an eye.
(Applause) John Legend: So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children's Zone?
This year's seniors will have 100 percent graduating high school.
GC: Well, you know, one of the bad problems we have in this country is these kids, the same kids, these same vulnerable kids, when you get them in school, they drop out in record numbers.
And so we've figured out that you've got to really design a network of support for these kids that in many ways mimics what a good parent does.
They harass you, right? They call you, they say, "I want to see your grades. How'd you do on that last test?
And you're not coming back here."
When kids know that you refuse to let them fail, it puts a different pressure on them, and they don't give up as easy.
JL: Well, thank you Dr. Canada.
(Applause)
When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.
I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.
When the work came back, I calculated grades.
What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students.
Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores.
Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well.
And that got me thinking.
The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram.
But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective.
In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ.
But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.
I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why?
My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.
We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out.
We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.
And who's going to earn the most money?
In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.
And it wasn't social intelligence.
It was grit.
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
Grit is having stamina.
Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.
So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters.
It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?
How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"
Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments.
In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.
This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort.
Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.
So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit.
But we need more.
We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them.
We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I grew up in East Los Angeles, not even realizing I was poor.
My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets.
She worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean's office, so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class, for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined.
So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school, and sometimes we're just not ready to focus.
Like, I remember one day I found my dad convulsing, foaming at the mouth, OD-ing on the bathroom floor.
Really, do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list?
Not so much.
But I really needed a support network, a group of people who were going to help me make sure that I wasn't going to be a victim of my own circumstance, that they were going to push me beyond what I even thought I could do.
It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate.
So my mom said, "You're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day."
So for the next two years, that's what I did.
I took a school bus to the fancy side of town.
Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable.
You had to survive.
She has an issue with authority.
She's not going to go anywhere."
But then, they were very surprised when I graduated from high school.
I was accepted to Pepperdine University, and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant.
And then I told them, "I want to be a teacher."
And boy, they were like, "What? Why?
Why would you want to do that?"
And so every year, I share my background with my kids, because they need to know that everyone has a story, everyone has a struggle, and everyone needs help along the way.
And I am going to be their help along the way.
I had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before.
I was like, "You need to go to a hospital, the school nurse, something."
He's like, "No, Miss, I'm not going.
I need to be in class because I need to graduate."
How do you get to build those relationships?
So we created a new school.
And we created the San Fernando Institute for Applied Media.
But we had to do it.
Our community deserved a new way of doing things.
And as the very first pilot middle school in all of Los Angeles Unified School District, you better believe there was some opposition.
But what if we get it right?
And we did.
So even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts -- you can't teach, or you don't want to teach, you don't get to be at my school with my kids.
Well, we're making school worth coming to every day.
Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all.
And because we connect it to what they're doing — For example, they made public service announcements for the Cancer Society.
These were played in the local trolley system.
Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we've become our own school.
And it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say, "Know, the district is trying to impose this, but you have the freedom to do otherwise."
Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live?
They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood, a school that they can be proud to say they attend, and a school that the community can be proud of as well, and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances.
Because it's time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In this talk today, I want to present a different idea for why investing in early childhood education makes sense as a public investment.
It's a different idea, because usually, when people talk about early childhood programs, they talk about all the wonderful benefits for participants in terms of former participants, in preschool, they have better K-12 test scores, better adult earnings.
And that's actually crucial because if we're going to get increased investment in early childhood programs, we need to interest state governments in this.
So we have to appeal to them, the legislators in the state government, and turn to something they understand, that they have to promote the economic development of their state economy.
All I mean is, is that early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can thereby promote higher per capita earnings for the state's residents.
Now, I think it's fair to say that when people think about state and local economic development, they don't generally think first about what they're doing about childcare and early childhood programs.
I know this. I've spent most of my career researching these programs.
I've talked to a lot of directors of state economic development agencies about these issues, a lot of legislators about these issues.
So for example, states compete very vigorously to attract new auto plants or expanded auto plants.
So there is a benefit to state residents that corresponds to the costs that they're paying by paying for these business tax breaks.
My argument is essentially that early childhood programs can do exactly the same thing, create more and better jobs, but in a different way.
These programs can promote more and better jobs by, you build it, you invest in high-quality preschool, it develops the skills of your local workforce if enough of them stick around, and, in turn, that higher-quality local workforce will be a key driver of creating jobs and creating higher earnings per capita in the local community.
Now, let me turn to some numbers on this.
Okay. If you look at the research evidence -- that's extensive -- on how much early childhood programs affect the educational attainment, wages and skills of former participants in preschool as adults, you take those known effects, you take how many of those folks will be expected to stick around the state or local economy and not move out, and you take research on how much skills drive job creation, you will conclude, from these three separate lines of research, that for every dollar invested in early childhood programs, the per capita earnings of state residents go up by two dollars and 78 cents, so that's a three-to-one return.
Now you can get much higher returns, of up to 16-to-one, if you include anti-crime benefits, if you include benefits to former preschool participants who move to some other state, but there's a good reason for focusing on these three dollars because this is salient and important to state legislators and state policy makers, and it's the states that are going to have to act.
Now, one objection you often hear, or maybe you don't hear it because people are too polite to say it, is, why should I pay more taxes to invest in other people's children?
And the trouble with that objection, it reflects a total misunderstanding of how much local economies involve everyone being interdependent.
Specifically, the interdependency here is, is that there are huge spillovers of skills -- that when other people's children get more skills, that actually increases the prosperity of everyone, including people whose skills don't change.
So for example, numerous research studies have shown if you look at what really drives the growth rate of metropolitan areas, it's not so much low taxes, low cost, low wages; it's the skills of the area. Particularly, the proxy for skills that people use is percentage of college graduates in the area.
So when you look, for example, at metropolitan areas such as the Boston area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Silicon Valley, these areas are not doing well economically because they're low-cost.
I don't know if you ever tried to buy a house in Silicon Valley.
It's not exactly a low-cost proposition.
They are growing because they have high levels of skills.
So when we invest in other people's children, and build up those skills, we increase the overall job growth of a metro area.
As another example, if we look at what determines an individual's wages, and we do statistical exploration of that, what determines wages, we know that the individual's wages will depend, in part, on that individual's education, for example whether or not they have a college degree.
One of the very interesting facts is that, in addition, we find that even once we hold constant, statistically, the effect of your own education, the education of everyone else in your metropolitan area also affects your wages.
So specifically, if you hold constant your education, you stick in percentage of college graduates in your metro area, you will find that has a significant positive effect on your wages without changing your education at all.
In fact, this effect is so strong that when someone gets a college degree, the spillover effects of this on the wages of others in the metropolitan area are actually greater than the direct effects.
So if someone gets a college degree, their lifetime earnings go up by a huge amount, over 700,000 dollars.
That's actually greater than the direct benefits of the person choosing to get education.
Now, what's going on here?
What can explain these huge spillover effects of education?
Well, let's think about it this way.
I can be the most skilled person in the world, but if everyone else at my firm lacks skills, my employer is going to find it more difficult to introduce new technology, new production techniques.
They will not be able to afford to pay me as good wages.
Even if everyone at my firm has good skills, if the workers at the suppliers to my firm do not have good skills, my firm is going to be less competitive competing in national and international markets.
So clearly the productivity of firms in Silicon Valley has a lot to do with the skills not only of the workers at their firm, but the workers at all the other firms in the metro area.
So as a result, if we can invest in other people's children through preschool and other early childhood programs that are high-quality, we not only help those children, we help everyone in the metropolitan area gain in wages and we'll have the metropolitan area gain in job growth.
Another objection used sometimes here to invest in early childhood programs is concern about people moving out.
So, you know, maybe Ohio's thinking about investing in more preschool education for children in Columbus, Ohio, but they're worried that these little Buckeyes will, for some strange reason, decide to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and become Wolverines.
And maybe Michigan will be thinking about investing in preschool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and be worried these little Wolverines will end up moving to Ohio and becoming Buckeyes.
Well, the reality is, if you look at the data, Americans aren't as hyper-mobile as people sometimes assume.
The data is that over 60 percent of Americans spend most of their working careers in the state they were born in, over 60 percent.
That percentage does not vary much from state to state.
So the reality is, if you invest in kids, they will stay.
Okay, so to sum up, there is a lot of research evidence that early childhood programs, if run in a high-quality way, pay off in higher adult skills.
So in my opinion, the research evidence is compelling and the logic of this is compelling.
Well, one obvious barrier is cost.
So if you look at what it would cost if every state government invested in universal preschool at age four, full-day preschool at age four, the total annual national cost would be roughly 30 billion dollars.
So, 30 billion dollars is a lot of money.
On the other hand, if you reflect on that the U.S.'s population is over 300 million, we're talking about an amount of money that amounts to 100 dollars per capita.
And, of course, as I mentioned, this cost has corresponding benefits.
So this is an investment that pays off in very concrete terms for a broad range of income groups in the state's population and produces large and tangible benefits.
Now, that's one barrier.
I actually think the more profound barrier is the long-term nature of the benefits from early childhood programs.
So we're talking about an investment that in terms of impacts on the state economy is not going to really pay off for 15 or 20 years, and of course America is notorious for being a short term-oriented society.
Ultimately, this is something we're investing in now for the future.
And so what I want to leave you with is what I think is the ultimate question.
I mean, I'm an economist, but this is ultimately not an economic question, it's a moral question: Are we willing, as Americans, are we as a society still capable of making the political choice to sacrifice now by paying more taxes in order to improve the long-term future of not only our kids, but our community?
And that's something that each and every citizen and voter needs to ask themselves.
That is the notion of investment.
So I think the research evidence on the benefits of early childhood programs for the local economy is extremely strong.
However, the moral and political choice is still up to us, as citizens and as voters.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters.
Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language.
But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China.
Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so.
I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful.
Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence.
A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters.
You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy.
The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature -- enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers.
Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works.
You are ready?
Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square.
This is a person going for a walk.
If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "Help! I'm on fire!" -- This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you.
This is a tree.
This is a mountain.
The sun.
The moon.
The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west.
I call these eight characters radicals.
They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters.
As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd.
If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "It was this big."
He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale.
Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "idiot." (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic.
Remember fire?
For us, the sun is the source of prosperity.
Two suns together, prosperous.
Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness.
It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night.
The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise.
Knock knock. Is anyone home?
This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading.
On the left, we have a woman.
Two women together, they have an argument.
By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32.
The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32.
So after we know the characters, we start building phrases.
For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano.
We know Japan is the land of the rising sun.
This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China.
So a sun, origin together, we build Japan.
In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains.
A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit.
This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you.
(Applause)
I march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors, but I never have the decency to honor their names.
Lockers left open like teenage boys' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else.
Masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers, camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs.
This is a training ground.
My high school is Chicago, diverse and segregated on purpose.
Social lines are barbed wire.
I am an Honors but go home with Regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them.
This is a training ground to sort out the Regulars from the Honors, a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system.
This is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow.
Homework is stressful, but when you go home every day and your home is work, you don't want to pick up any assignments.
Taking tests is stressful, but bubbling in a Scantron does not stop bullets from bursting.
I hear education systems are failing, but I believe they're succeeding at what they're built to do -- to train you, to keep you on track, to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids.
Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles -- (Laughter) thinking we were moving to America, but anyway -- (Laughter) It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America.
(Laughter) I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "Americans don't get irony."
(Laughter) Have you come across this idea?
It's not true.
It's one of those cultural myths, like, "The British are reserved."
(Laughter) I don't know why people think this.
We've invaded every country we've encountered.
(Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back.
(Laughter) But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "No Child Left Behind."
(Laughter) Because whoever thought of that title gets irony.
(Applause) Because it's leaving millions of children behind.
We propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work.
And it's working beautifully.
(Laughter) In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school.
In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids.
If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars.
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg.
America spends more money on education than most other countries.
Class sizes are smaller than in many countries.
And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education.
The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction.
There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.
The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse.
Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own?
(Laughter) Small people wandering about.
(Laughter) I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet.
Like, "Which one are you? Remind me."
(Laughter) "Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused."
What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement.
One of the effects of "No Child Left Behind" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines.
I'm not here to argue against science and math.
On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient.
A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education.
An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you -- (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder.
ADHD.
(Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition.
They're suffering from childhood.
Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them.
They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched.
The second, thank you -- (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity.
If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often.
Curiosity is the engine of achievement.
Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers.
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers.
Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.
But teaching is a creative profession.
You know, you're not there just to pass on received information.
Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage.
You see, in the end, education is about learning.
If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on.
And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning.
The whole point of education is to get people to learn.
(Laughter) But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher.
He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs.
There he is. He's dieting.
You can say, "There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching."
But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning.
And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing.
Now, testing is important.
But they should not be the dominant culture of education.
(Laughter) "Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange."
So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance.
Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity.
And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative.
It's why we all have different résumés.
We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them.
It's the common currency of being a human being.
It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.
I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours?
I mean, you may have a dog.
And your dog may get depressed.
(Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
(Laughter) "Would you like to come for a walk?"
(Laughter) "You go. I'll wait. But take pictures."
(Laughter) We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity.
Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.
Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading.
They don't look for other things that matter just as much.
They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.
Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland.
I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks.
Why would you drop out?
Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America."
No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland.
But you can compare it to a state in America.
I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there.
They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity.
That's how you get them to learn.
They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development.
Investing in professional development is not a cost.
It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai.
And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done.
You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education -- That's what happens in some systems.
Central or state governments decide, they know best and they're going to tell you what to do.
It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working.
(Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country.
And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education.
The point is that education is not a mechanical system.
It's a human system.
It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn.
Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography.
They may find it boring.
They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school.
There are trends, but the stories are always unique.
These are programs designed to get kids back into education.
They have certain common features.
They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school.
And they work.
What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education."
(Laughter) You know?
(Applause) (Applause ends) So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor.
We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential.
Culture is an organic term, isn't it?
Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley.
Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there.
Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain.
Hence, Death Valley.
In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley.
Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period.
And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon.
The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while.
What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead.
You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life.
Great leaders know that.
The real role of leadership in education -- and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level -- is not and should not be command and control.
The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility.
And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected.
There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin.
And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement.
And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution.
And that's what we need.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
Everyone needs a coach.
It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.
(Laughter) My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go.
We all need people who will give us feedback.
That's how we improve.
I'm talking about teachers.
Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory.
How would I know who was the best?
The system we have today isn't fair to them.
It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk.
So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve.
Let's start by asking who's doing well.
Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems.
So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve.
The U.S. isn't number one.
We're not even in the top 10.
Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve?
Eleven out of 14.
The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math.
So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills.
Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China.
Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving.
They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work.
They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working.
They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues.
You might ask, why is a system like this so important?
Some teachers are far more effective than others.
In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains.
If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world.
So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best.
What would that system look like?
Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching.
Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea?
We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?"
"Do you learn to correct your mistakes?"
First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes.
So it tells us we're asking the right questions.
And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve.
I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action.
(Music) (Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody.
Let's talk about what's going on today.
A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays.
My name is Sarah Brown Wessling.
I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa.
Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about -- I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it.
I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality.
You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this.
I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens.
But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot.
If I don't write things down, I don't remember them.
So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing.
I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom.
I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about.
Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend.
I'll see you later.
[Every classroom could look like that] (Applause) Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that.
But we still have more work to do.
Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle.
If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.
So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy.
Building this system will also require a considerable investment.
Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars.
Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries.
We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it.
But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country.
It would also make us a more fair and just one, too.
I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve.
I hope you are too.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.
The green agenda is probably the most important agenda and issue of the day.
I think that -- I've said in the past, many, many years ago, before anybody even invented the concept of a green agenda, that it wasn't about fashion -- it was about survival.
But what I never said, and what I'm really going to make the point is, that really, green is cool.
I mean, all the projects which have, in some way, been inspired by that agenda are about a celebratory lifestyle, in a way celebrating the places and the spaces which determine the quality of life.
I rarely actually quote anything, so I'm going to try and find a piece of paper if I can, [in] which somebody, at the end of last year, ventured the thought about what for that individual, as a kind of important observer, analyst, writer -- a guy called Thomas Friedman, who wrote in the Herald Tribune, about 2006.
He said, "I think the most important thing to happen in 2006 was that living and thinking green hit Main Street.
We reached a tipping point this year where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geo-political and competitive thing they could do.
Hence my motto: green is the new red, white and blue."
And I asked myself, in a way, looking back, "When did that kind of awareness of the planet and its fragility first appear?"
And I think it was July 20, 1969, when, for the first time, man could look back at planet Earth.
And, in a way, it was Buckminster Fuller who coined that phrase.
And before the kind of collapse of the communist system, I was privileged to meet a lot of cosmonauts in Space City and other places in Russia.
And interestingly, as I think back, they were the first true environmentalists.
They were filled with a kind of pioneering passion, fired about the problems of the Aral Sea.
And at that period it was -- in a way, a number of things were happening.
He was a design scientist, if you like, a poet, but he foresaw all the things that are happening now.
It's another subject. It's another conversation.
You can go back to his writings: it's quite extraordinary.
It was at that time, with an awareness fired by Bucky's prophecies, his concerns as a citizen, as a kind of citizen of the planet, that influenced my thinking and what we were doing at that time.
And it's a number of projects.
I select this one because it was 1973, and it was a master plan for one of the Canary Islands.
And this probably coincided with the time when you had the planet Earth's sourcebook, and you had the hippie movement.
And all the components are there which are now in common parlance, in our vocabulary, you know, 30-odd years later: wind energy, recycling, biomass, solar cells.
And in parallel at that time, there was a very kind of exclusive design club.
People who were really design conscious were inspired by the work of Dieter Rams, and the objects that he would create for the company called Braun.
This is going back the mid-'50s, '60s.
And despite Bucky's prophecies that everything would be miniaturized and technology would make an incredible style -- access to comfort, to amenities -- it was very, very difficult to imagine that everything that we see in this image, would be very, very stylishly packaged.
And I think that that digital revolution now is coming to the point where, as the virtual world, which brings so many people together here, finally connects with the physical world, there is the reality that that has become humanized, so that digital world has all the friendliness, all the immediacy, the orientation of the analog world.
Probably summed up in a way by the stylish or alternative available here, as we generously had gifted at lunchtime, the [unclear], which is a further kind of development -- and again, inspired by the incredible sort of sensual feel.
A very, very beautiful object.
So, something which in [the] '50s, '60s was very exclusive has now become, interestingly, quite inclusive.
And the reference to the iPod as iconic, and in a way evocative of performance, delivery -- quite interesting that [in] the beginning of the year 2007, the Financial Times commented that the Detroit companies envy the halo effect that Toyota has gained from the Prius as the hybrid, energy-conscious vehicle, which rivals the iPod as an iconic product.
And I think it's very tempting to, in a way, seduce ourselves -- as architects, or anybody involved with the design process -- that the answer to our problems lies with buildings.
Buildings are important, but they're only a component of a much bigger picture.
In other words, as I might seek to demonstrate, if you could achieve the impossible, the equivalent of perpetual motion, you could design a carbon-free house, for example.
That would be the answer.
Unfortunately, it's not the answer.
It's only the beginning of the problem.
But again, that only shows part of the picture.
If you looked at the buildings together with the associated transport, in other words, the transport of people, which is 26 percent, then 70 percent of the energy consumption is influenced by the way that our cites and infrastructure work together.
So the problems of sustainability cannot be separated from the nature of the cities, of which the buildings are a part.
If you compared Detroit with a city of a Northern European example -- and Munich is not a bad example of that, with the greater dependence on walking and cycling -- then a city which is really only twice as dense, is only using one-tenth of the energy.
In other words, you take these comparable examples and the energy leap is enormous.
So basically, if you wanted to generalize, you can demonstrate that as the density increases along the bottom there, that the energy consumed reduces dramatically.
Of course you can't separate this out from issues like social diversity, mass transit, the ability to be able to walk a convenient distance, the quality of civic spaces.
But again, you can see Detroit, in yellow at the top, extraordinary consumption, down below Copenhagen.
And Copenhagen, although it's a dense city, is not dense compared with the really dense cities.
In the year 2000, a rather interesting thing happened.
So you have to ask yourself -- the environmental impact of, for example, China or India.
If you take China, and you just take Beijing, you can see on that traffic system, and the pollution associated with the consumption of energy as the cars expand at the price of the bicycles.
So, if we think of the transition in our society of the movement from the land to the cities, which took 200 years, then that same process is happening in 20 years.
And quite interestingly, over something like a 60-year period, we're seeing the doubling in life expectancy, over that period where the urbanization has trebled.
How does it affect the design of buildings?
And particularly, how can it lead to the creation of buildings which consume less energy, create less pollution and are more socially responsible?
The one example I take is a corporate headquarters for a company called Willis and Faber, in a small market town in the northeast of England, commuting distance with London.
And here, the first thing you can see is that this building, the roof is a very warm kind of overcoat blanket, a kind of insulating garden, which is also about the celebration of public space.
In other words, for this community, they have this garden in the sky.
So the humanistic ideal is very, very strong in all this work, encapsulated perhaps by one of my early sketches here, where you can see greenery, you can see sunlight, you have a connection with nature.
And nature is part of the generator, the driver for this building.
And symbolically, the colors of the interior are green and yellow.
Now this was 1973.
In 2001, this building received an award.
And the award was about a celebration for a building which had been in use over a long period of time.
So we humored him, we kept him happy."
The image at the top, what it doesn't -- if you look at it in detail, really what it is saying is you can wire this building.
This building was wired for change.
So, in 1975, the image there is of typewriters.
And what they were saying on this occasion was that our competitors had to build new buildings for the new technology.
Round about that design period leading up to this building, I did a sketch, which we pulled out of the archive recently.
And I was saying, and I wrote, "But we don't have the time, and we really don't have the immediate expertise at a technical level."
In other words, we didn't have the technology to do what would be really interesting on that building.
And that would be to create a kind of three-dimensional bubble -- a really interesting overcoat that would naturally ventilate, would breathe and would seriously reduce the energy loads.
And if I fast-forward in time, what is interesting is that the technology is now available and celebratory.
And again, the transition from one of the many thousands of sketches and computer images to the reality.
And a combination of devices here, the kind of heavy mass concrete of these book stacks, and the way in which that is enclosed by this skin, which enables the building to be ventilated, to consume dramatically less energy, and where it's really working with the forces of nature.
And what is interesting is that this is hugely popular by the people who use it.
So it's not a kind of sacrifice, quite the reverse.
I think it's a great -- it's a celebration.
And you can measure the performance, in terms of energy consumption, of that building against a typical library.
If I show another aspect of that technology then, in a completely different context -- this apartment building in the Alps in Switzerland.
And just to give a sort of glimpse of that technology, the ability to plot points in the sky and to transmit, to transfer that information now, directly into the factory.
So if you cross the border -- just across the border -- a small factory in Germany, and here you can see the guy with his computer screen, and those points in space are communicated.
And on the left are the cutting machines, which then, in the factory, enable those individual pieces to be fabricated and plus or minus very, very few millimeters, to be slotted together on site.
And again, the way in which that works as a building, for those of us who can enjoy the spaces, to live and visit there.
If I made the leap into these new technologies, then how did we -- what happened before that?
I mean, you know, what was life like before the mobile phone, the things that you take for granted?
I mean, this is a glimpse of the interior of our Hong Kong bank of 1979, which opened in 1985, with the ability to be able to reflect sunlight deep into the heart of this space here.
So for example, we would put models under an artificial sky.
For wind tunnels, we would literally put them in a wind tunnel and blast air, and the many kilometers of cable and so on.
And the turning point was probably, in our terms, when we had the first computer.
And that was at the time that we sought to redesign, reinvent the airport.
This is Terminal Four at Heathrow, typical of any terminal -- big, heavy roof, blocking out the sunlight, lots of machinery, big pipes, whirring machinery.
And Stansted, the green alternative, which uses natural light, is a friendly place: you know where you are, you can relate to the outside.
And for a large part of its cycle, not needing electric light -- electric light, which in turn creates more heat, which creates more cooling loads and so on.
And that's a little image of the tree of Stansted.
It's not that long ago, 17 years, and here we are now.
Going back in time, there was a lady called Valerie Larkin, and in 1987, she had all our information on one disk.
But meanwhile, as you know, wonderful protagonists like Al Gore are noting the inexorable rise in temperature, set in the context of that, interestingly, those buildings which are celebratory and very, very relevant to this place.
Obviously the wind tunnel had a place, but the ability now with the computer to explore, to plan, to see how that would work in terms of the forces of nature: natural ventilation, to be able to model the chamber below, and to look at biomass.
A combination of biomass, aquifers, burning vegetable oil -- a process that, quite interestingly, was developed in Eastern Germany, at the time of its dependence on the Soviet Bloc.
So really, retranslating that technology and developing something which was so clean, it was virtually pollution-free.
You can compare how that building, in terms of its emission in tons of carbon dioxide per year -- at the time that we took that project, over 7,000 tons -- what it would have been with natural gas and finally, with the vegetable oil, 450 tons.
And again, we can measure the reduction in terms of energy consumption.
There is an evolution here between the projects, and Swiss Re again develops that a little bit further -- the project in the city in London.
And this sequence shows the buildup of that model.
But what it shows first, which I think is quite interesting, is that here you see the circle, you see the public space around it.
What are the other ways of putting the same amount of space on the site?
And you enclose that with something that also is central to its appearance, which is a mesh of triangulated structures -- again, in a long connection evocative of some of those works of Buckminster Fuller, and the way in which triangulation can increase performance and also give that building its sense of identity.
And here, if we look at a detail of the way that the building opens up and breathes into those atria, the way in which now, with a computer, we can model the forces, we can see the high pressure, the low pressure, the way in which the building behaves rather like an aircraft wing.
So it also has the ability, all the time, regardless of the direction of the wind, to be able to make the building fresh and efficient.
Comparing it with a typical building, what happens if we seek to use such design strategies in terms of really large-scale thinking?
It's been well known that the Dead Sea is dying.
The level is dropping, rather like the Aral Sea.
And the Dead Sea is obviously much lower than the oceans and seas around it.
So there has been a project which rescues the Dead Sea by creating a pipeline, a pipe, sometimes above the surface, sometimes buried, that will redress that, and will feed from the Gulf of Aqaba into the Dead Sea.
What if it is the equivalent, depending on where you are, of the Grand Canal, in terms of tourists, habitation, desalination, agriculture?
And if you just go back to the previous image, and you look at this area of volatility and hostility, that a unifying design idea as a humanitarian gesture could have the affect of bringing all those warring factions together in a united cause, in terms of something that would be genuinely green and productive in the widest sense.
Infrastructure at that large scale is also inseparable from communication.
And how do we make more legible in this growing world, especially in some of the places that I'm talking about -- China, for example, which in the next ten years will create 400 new airports.
How do you make them more friendly at that scale?
Hong Kong I refer to as a kind of analog experience in a digital age, because you always have a point of reference.
It is physically the largest project on the planet at the moment.
250 -- excuse me, 50,000 people working 24 hours, seven days.
Larger by 17 percent than every terminal put together at Heathrow -- built -- plus the new, un-built Terminal Five.
As Hubert was talking over lunch, as we sort of engaged in conversation, talked about this, talked about cities.
Hubert was saying, absolutely correctly, "These are the new cathedrals."
And in a way, one aspect of this conversation was triggered on New Year's Eve, when I was talking about the Olympic agenda in China in terms of its green ambitions and aspirations.
And I voiced the thought that maybe at the turn of the year, I thought that the inspiration was more likely to come from those other, larger countries out there -- the Chinas, the Indias, the Asian-Pacific tigers.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client.
I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley.
She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex.
(Laughter) And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys.
"Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right.
Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later.
I pushed back.
Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one."
That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment.
That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20.
Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime.
That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it.
There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now.
We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first.
(Laughter) Raise your hand if you're in your 20s.
This is not my opinion.
We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35.
People who are over 40, don't panic.
We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30.
We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it.
We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35.
So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.
So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain.
It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become.
But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development.
But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing.
Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood.
Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "twixters" and "kidults."
(Laughing) It's true!
Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time.
Nothing happens.
But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself.
I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college."
I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30."
Where are the twentysomethings here?
Do not do that.
(Laughter) Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high.
When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time.
Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s.
It's realizing you can't have that career you now want.
It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling.
Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?"
I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking.
It's a story about a woman named Emma.
At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis.
And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder.
She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends."
Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour.
She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck?
Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?"
But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared.
Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance.
So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear.
First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital.
By "get identity capital," I mean do something that adds value to who you are.
Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next.
I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital.
That's procrastination.
I told Emma to explore work and make it count.
Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated.
Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work.
New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends.
So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed.
But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group.
Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that unposted job.
It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads.
Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends.
Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own.
Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you.
But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress.
The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work.
Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.
So what happened to Emma?
Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state.
That weak tie helped her get a job there.
Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums.
Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings.
They are so easy to help.
Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west.
Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.
Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.
It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex.
It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family.
Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do.
You're deciding your life right now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
"Don't talk to strangers."
You have heard that phrase uttered by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades.
It's a norm. It's a social norm.
But it's a special kind of social norm, because it's a social norm that wants to tell us who we can relate to and who we shouldn't relate to.
Stick with the people you know.
When we're at our best, we reach out to people who are not like us, because when we do that, we learn from people who are not like us.
My phrase for this value of being with "not like us" is "strangeness," and my point is that in today's digitally intensive world, strangers are quite frankly not the point.
Because strangers are part of a world of really rigid boundaries.
They belong to a world of people I know versus people I don't know, and in the context of my digital relations, I'm already doing things with people I don't know.
The question isn't whether or not I know you.
What can I learn with you?
What can we do together that benefits us both?
I spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing, how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people.
The most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future.
The economies of the future depend on that.
Our social lives in the future depend on that.
The threat to worry about isn't strangers.
The threat to worry about is whether or not we're getting our fair share of strangeness.
Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers, but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations, and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices.
Stanley Milgram from the '60s and '70s, the creator of the small-world experiments, which became later popularized as six degrees of separation, made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps.
We can reach them. There are paths that enable us to reach them.
Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973 in his seminal essay "The Strength of Weak Ties," made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks, these strangers, are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties, the people closest to us.
He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us, these strong ties in our lives, actually have a homogenizing effect on us.
My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives, what kinds of new routines are possible.
We've been looking specifically at the kinds of digital platforms that have enabled us to take our possessions, those things that used to be very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses, and to make them available to people we don't know.
And we concluded a very important insight, which was that as people's relationships to the things in their lives change, so do their relations with other people.
It continues to try to predict what I need based on some past characterization of who I am, of what I've already done.
Security technology after security technology continues to design data protection in terms of threats and attacks, keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations.
Categories like "friends" and "family" and "contacts" and "colleagues" don't tell me anything about my actual relations.
People are always a combination of the two, and that combination is constantly changing.
What if technologies could intervene to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships?
What if technologies could intervene to help me find the person that I need right now?
Strangeness is that calibration of closeness and distance that enables me to find the people that I need right now, that enables me to find the sources of intimacy, of discovery, and of inspiration that I need right now.
So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness, and it's a problem faced not just by individuals today, but also by organizations, organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities.
We have to change the norms.
We have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses.
What interesting questions lie ahead for us in this world of no strangers?
How might we think differently about our relations with people?
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's funny, someone just mentioned MacGyver, because that was, like, I loved it, and when I was seven, I taped a fork to a drill and I was like, "Hey, Mom, I'm going to Olive Garden."
And -- (Drilling noise) (Laughter) And it worked really well there.
And you know, it had a profound effect on me.
It sounds silly, but I thought, okay, the way the world works can be changed, and it can be changed by me in these small ways.
And so, about 20 years later, I didn't realize the full effect of this, but I went to Costa Rica and I stayed with these Guaymí natives there, and they could pull leaves off of trees and make shingles out of them, and they could make beds out of trees, and they could -- I watched this woman for three days.
I was there. She was peeling this palm frond apart, these little threads off of it, and she'd roll the threads together and make little thicker threads, like strings, and she would weave the strings together, and as the materiality of this exact very bag formed before my eyes over those three days, the materiality of the way the world works, of reality, kind of started to unravel in my mind, because I realized that this bag and these clothes and the trampoline you have at home and the pencil sharpener, everything you have is made out of either a tree or a rock or something we dug out of the ground and did some process to, maybe a more complicated one, but still, everything was made that way.
And so I had to start studying, who is it that's making these decisions?
Because this is how reality is created.
So I started right away. I was at MIT Media Lab, and I was studying the maker movement and makers and creativity.
And I started in nature, because I saw these Guaymís doing it in nature, and there just seems to be less barriers.
And, like, within minutes, this is very easy for adults and teens to do.
A leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass.
And the creator of this, he said, "This is fire. I call this fire."
And someone asked him, "How do you get those sticks to stay on that tree?"
And he's like, "I don't know, but I can show you."
So his hands know and his intuition knows, but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be, especially when it comes to the human-made, human-built world.
We think we already know how something works, so we can't imagine how it could work.
So kids don't have as hard of a time with this, and I saw in my own son, I gave him this book.
I'm a good hippie dad, so I'm like, "Okay, you're going to learn to love the moon.
But he doesn't really know what to do with these.
I didn't show him.
This is no different than the sticks are to the teens in the forest.
And at this point, I'm starting to wonder, what kind of tools can we give people, especially adults, who know too much, so that they can see the world as malleable, so they see themselves as agents of change in their everyday lives.
So let me show you a little demo.
This is a little piano circuit right in here, and this is an ordinary paintbrush that I smashed it together with. (Beeping) And so, with some ketchup, — (musical notes) — and then I can kind of — (musical notes) — (Laughter) (Applause) And that's awesome, right?
What's awesome is what happens when you give the piano circuit to people.
A pencil is not just a pencil.
That's a wire running down the middle, and not only is it a wire, if you take that piano circuit, you can thumbtack into the middle of a pencil, and you can lay out wire on the page, too, and get electrical current to run through it.
And so you can kind of hack a pencil, just by thumbtacking into it with a little piano electrical circuit.
And the electricity runs through your body too.
And then you can take the little piano circuit off the pencil.
You can make one of these brushes just on the fly.
The metal in the sink is conductive.
Flowing water acts like a theremin or a violin.
Anything in the world is either conductive or not conductive, and you can use those together.
And this young woman, she made what she called a hula-looper, and as the hula hoop traveled around her body, she has a circuit taped to her shirt right there.
You can see her pointing to it in the picture.
And every time the hula hoop would smush against her body, it would connect two little pieces of copper tape, and it would make a sound, and the next sound, and it would loop the same sounds over and over again.
In Taiwan, at an art museum, this 12-year-old girl made a mushroom organ out of some mushrooms that were from Taiwan and some electrical tape and hot glue.
And then we came up with this idea to not just use electronics, but let's just smash computers with everyday objects and see how that goes over.
And so I just want to do a quick demo.
So this is the MaKey MaKey circuit, and I'm just going to set it up from the beginning in front of you.
So I'll just plug it in, and now it's on by USB.
And I'll just hook up a little ground wire to it.
And so we're like, "We gotta put a video out about this."
Because no one really believed that this was important or meaningful except me and, like, one other guy.
So we made a video to prove that there's lots of stuff you can do.
You can kind of sketch with Play-Doh and just Google for game controllers.
And you can literally draw joysticks and just find Pacman on your computer and then just hook it up. (Video game noises) And you know the little plastic drawers you can get at Target?
Well, if you take those out, they hold water great, but you can totally cut your toes, so yeah, just be careful.
It shouldn't be a set of experts engineering the way the world works.
We should all be participating in changing the way the world works together.
Aluminum foil. Everybody has a cat.
Get a bowl of water. This is just Photo Booth on your Mac OS.
Hover the mouse over the "take a photo" button, and you've got a little cat photo booth.
And so we needed hundreds of people to buy this.
And so we put it up on Kickstarter, and hundreds of people bought it in the first day.
And then 30 days later, 11,000 people had backed the project.
And then what the best part is, we started getting a flood of videos in of people doing crazy things with it.
And we actually sent this guy materials.
We're like, "We're sponsoring you, man.
Okay, just wait for this one. This is good.
And dads and daughters are completing circuits in special ways.
And then this brother -- look at this diagram.
See where it says "sister"?
I always add humans to any technical -- if you're drawing a technical diagram, put a human in it.
And this kid is so sweet. He made this trampoline slideshow advancer for his sister so that on her birthday, she could be the star of the show, jumping on the trampoline to advance the slides.
And this guy rounded up his dogs and he made a dog piano.
Like this dad who wrote us, his son has cerebral palsy and he can't use a normal keyboard.
And so his dad couldn't necessarily afford to buy all these custom controllers.
And so, with the MaKey MaKey, he planned to make these gloves to allow him to navigate the web.
And a huge eruption of discussion around accessibility came, and we're really excited about that.
And I love the carrot on the turntable.
(Music: Massive Attack — "Teardrop") Most people cannot play them that way. (Laughter) And when this started to get serious, I thought, I'd better put a really serious warning label on the box that this comes in, because otherwise people are going to be getting this and they're going to be turning into agents of creative change, and governments will be crumbling, and I wouldn't have told people, so I thought I'd better warn them.
And I also put this little surprise. When you open the lid of the box, it says, "The world is a construction kit."
And so next time you're on an escalator and you drop an M&M by accident, you know, maybe that's an M&M surfboard, not an escalator, so don't pick it up right away.
I used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that.
But as I'm kind of getting older and kind of messing with all this stuff, I'm realizing that my idea of a perfect world really can't be designed by one person or even by a million experts.
It's really going to be seven billion pairs of hands, each following their own passions, and each kind of like a mosaic coming up and creating this world in their backyards and in their kitchens.
And that's the world I really want to live in.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm talking about dying.
We all think a lot about how to live well.
I'd like to talk about increasing our chances of dying well.
I'm not a geriatrician.
I design reading programs for preschoolers.
What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two.
In the last few years, I helped two friends have the end of life they wanted.
Jim and Shirley Modini spent their 68 years of marriage living off the grid on their 1,700-acre ranch in the mountains of Sonoma County.
They kept just enough livestock to make ends meet so that the majority of their ranch would remain a refuge for the bears and lions and so many other things that lived there.
This was their dream.
I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s.
As we became friends, I became their trustee and their medical advocate, but more importantly, I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences.
In their final years, Jim and Shirley faced cancers, fractures, infections, neurological illness.
It's true.
At the end, our bodily functions and independence are declining to zero.
What we found is that, with a plan and the right people, quality of life can remain high.
The beginning of the end is triggered by a mortality awareness event, and during this time, Jim and Shirley chose ACR nature preserves to take their ranch over when they were gone.
This gave them the peace of mind to move forward.
It might be a diagnosis. It might be your intuition.
But one day, you're going to say, "This thing is going to get me."
Jim and Shirley spent this time letting friends know that their end was near and that they were okay with that.
Dying from cancer and dying from neurological illness are different.
Jim died first. He was conscious until the very end, but on his last day he couldn't talk.
Most people say, "I'd like to die at home."
Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home.
Saying we'd like to die at home is not a plan.
This is not a plan either; this is illegal.
You will need advocates.
You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well, and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation.
Hospital readiness is critical.
Prepare a one-page summary of your medical history, medications and physician information.
Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards, your power of attorney, and your do-not-resuscitate order.
Tape a set to your refrigerator.
You're going to need caregivers.
You'll need to assess your personality and financial situation to determine whether an elder care community or staying at home is your best choice.
In either case, do not settle.
Finally, last words.
What do you want to hear at the very end, and from whom would you like to hear it?
When you believe it's okay to let go, you will.
So, this is a topic that normally inspires fear and denial.
What I've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life, we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life.
Here are Jim and Shirley just after deciding who would take care of their ranch.
Here's Jim just a few weeks before he died, celebrating a birthday he didn't expect to see.
And here's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch.
Jim and Shirley had a good end of life, and by sharing their story with you, I hope to increase our chances of doing the same.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Okay, it's great to be back at TED.
(Music) (Video) Man: Okay, Glass, record a video.
Woman: This is it. We're on in two minutes.
Man 2: Okay Glass, hang out with The Flying Club.
Man 3: Google "photos of tiger heads." Hmm.
Man 4: You ready? You ready? (Barking) Woman 2: Right there. Okay, Glass, take a picture.
(Child shouting) Man 5: Go!
Man 6: Holy [beep]! That is awesome.
Child: Whoa! Look at that snake!
Woman 3: Okay, Glass, record a video!
Man 8: Okay, A12, right there!
(Applause) (Children singing) Man 9: Google, say "delicious" in Thai.
Woman 4: Google "jellyfish."
(Music) Man 10: It's beautiful.
(Applause) Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince.
He needs help getting 10 million dollars.
Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information.
But that was the vision behind Glass, and that's why we've created this form factor.
In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body?
You're standing around there and you're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass.
You're just kind of moving around.
So when we developed Glass, we thought really about, can we make something that frees your hands?
They were all wearing Glass, and that's how we got that footage.
That's why we put the display up high, out of your line of sight, so it wouldn't be where you're looking and it wouldn't be where you're making eye contact with people.
And also we wanted to free up the ears, so the sound actually goes through, conducts straight to the bones in your cranium, which is a little bit freaky at first, but you get used to it.
And ironically, if you want to hear it better, you actually just cover your ear, which is kind of surprising, but that's how it works.
My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all.
And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth.
We've learned an amazing amount.
It's been really important to make it comfortable.
So our first prototypes we built were huge.
It was like cell phones strapped to your head.
It was very heavy, pretty uncomfortable.
We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job, and then she almost ran away screaming.
But we've come a long way.
And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera.
Our original prototypes didn't have cameras at all, but it's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family, my kids.
And lastly I've realized, in experimenting with this device, that I also kind of have a nervous tic.
(Applause)
(Video) Reporter: It's a story that's deeply unsettled millions in China: footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby, footage too graphic to be shown.
The driver pauses after hitting the child, his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second.
Others look at her before moving off.
Peter Singer: There were other people who walked past Wang Yue, and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm.
She was rushed to hospital, but it was too late. She died.
I would have stopped to help."
UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases.
UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good.
But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day.
I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.
The fact that they're not right in front of us, the fact, of course, that they're of a different nationality or race, none of that seems morally relevant to me.
What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day?
Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need.
You can think what your own habit is, whether it's a new car, a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink.
You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization, the Against Malaria Foundation, which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one, and we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria, just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day.
Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism.
It's important because it combines both the heart and the head.
The heart, of course, you felt.
You felt the empathy for that child.
But it's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed, and not only that, but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us, that they can suffer as we can, that parents grieve for the deaths of their children, as we do, and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us, it matters just as much to all of these people.
So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want.
And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math.
And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, "Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds."
This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, "All lives have equal value."
That's the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.
According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived.
Over the coming years, undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more, is going to save a lot more lives.
They worry how much of a difference they can make.
But you don't have to be a billionaire.
This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford.
He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career, an academic career, he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living.
So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty.
Toby himself does better than that.
And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage.
Now, mentioning time might lead you to think, "Well, should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day?"
One person who's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch.
He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career.
But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider, if they have the right abilities and character, is to go into banking or finance.
Here's one young man who's taken this advice.
He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math, actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated.
He's already earning enough so that he's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on.
Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote, "The Life You Can Save," which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat, steal, maim, kill, but that if we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little.
Many people will think, though, that charities aren't really all that effective.
So let's talk about effectiveness.
Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones.
Take, for example, providing a guide dog for a blind person.
Well, right, it is a good thing to do, but you have to think what else you could do with the resources.
It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person.
It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma.
You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness.
GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one.
So it's very tough. If you want to look for other recommendations, thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list, but you can find effective organizations, and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor.
That's another cause that I've been concerned about all my life, the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year.
So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering, you can go to Effective Animal Activism.
And some effective altruists think it's very important to make sure that our species survives at all.
So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction.
Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet.
Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us, but actually to deflect them.
There's many possibilities.
Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist.
He thinks that the life he's saving is his own.
And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows.
I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem.
Here's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill.
Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle, where you work hard to get money, you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you'll enjoy using?
But then the money's gone, you have to work hard to get more, spend more, and to maintain the same level of happiness, it's kind of a hedonic treadmill.
Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment.
It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living.
I'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago.
This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery.
Why was he recovering from surgery?
The email began, "Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger.
That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys."
There's about 100 people each year in the U.S.
I was pleased to read it. Chris went on to say that he'd been influenced by my writings in what he did.
Well, I have to admit, I'm also somewhat embarrassed by that, because I still have two kidneys.
But Chris went on to say that he didn't think that what he'd done was all that amazing, because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people, the extension of life, was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation.
And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, when I was in art school, I developed a shake in my hand, and this was the straightest line I could draw.
Now in hindsight, it was actually good for some things, like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid, but at the time this was really doomsday.
The shake developed out of, really, a single-minded pursuit of pointillism, just years of making tiny, tiny dots.
And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles, because of the shake.
And this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues, I had trouble holding anything.
And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left art completely.
But after a few years, I just couldn't stay away from art, and I decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage.
And he actually took one look at my squiggly line, and said, "Well, why don't you just embrace the shake?"
So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just started letting my hand shake and shake.
And even though it wasn't the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great.
And more importantly, once I embraced the shake, I realized I could still make art.
I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted.
Now, I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism, seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole.
So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn't affect the work, like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas, or, in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours, creating a 2D image by burning it with a blowtorch.
I discovered that, if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials, my hand really wouldn't hurt, and after having gone from a single approach to art, I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons.
This was the first time I'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity.
At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies.
I had this horrible little set of tools, and I felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have.
I actually didn't even have a regular pair of scissors.
I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at.
So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I just went nuts buying supplies.
And then when I got home, I sat down and I set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box.
But I sat there for hours, and nothing came to mind.
And I was in a dark place for a long time, unable to create.
And it didn't make any sense, because I was finally able to support my art, and yet I was creatively blank.
And I realized, if I ever wanted my creativity back, I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it.
At this point, I was spending a lot of my evenings in -- well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks — but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50.
Surprisingly, they just handed them right over, and then with some pencils I already had, I made this project for only 80 cents.
I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas, and wondered what if, instead of painting on a canvas, I could only paint on my chest?
So I painted 30 images, one layer at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life.
Or what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? (Laughter) So I'd dip my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks.
So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam.
I slept on the floor and I ate takeout, and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment.
Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas.
This seemed like the ultimate limitation, being an artist without art.
This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that I called Goodbye Art, where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation.
In the beginning of Goodbye Art, I focused on forced destruction, like this image of Jimi Hendrix, made with over 7,000 matches.
(Laughter) Then I opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally.
I looked for temporary materials, like spitting out food -- (Laughter) — sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine.
The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn't actually exist in the first place.
So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out, then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled the videos into the larger image.
So the end image was never visible as a physical whole.
It was destroyed before it ever existed.
In the course of this Goodbye Art series, I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display.
What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation, as each time I created, the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project.
It did not happen overnight.
There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground, or, even worse, after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing.
As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of failures, and let go of imperfections.
And in return, I found a process of creating art that's perpetual and unencumbered by results.
I found myself in a state of constant creation, thinking only of what's next and coming up with more ideas than ever.
When I think back to my three years away from art, away from my dream, just going through the motions, instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream, I just quit, I gave up.
And what if I didn't embrace the shake?
It turned out to be about life, and having life skills.
Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and, collectively, transform our world.
Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life.
(Laughter) One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I've learned into something others can replicate.
Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity, but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted norms.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When we use the word "architect" or "designer," what we usually mean is a professional, someone who gets paid, and we tend to assume that it's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big, systemic design challenges that we face like climate change, urbanization and social inequality.
And I think it's wrong, actually.
In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years, and go out and get a job, and this happened.
And a couple of things struck me about this.
One, don't listen to career advisers.
It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design, but actually there's an economics behind architecture that we don't talk about, and I think we need to.
That's about 36,000, 37,000 dollars.
Now in terms of the whole world's population, that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people, which raises the question of, who is it I'm working for?
The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world's population, and it always has been.
The reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when, actually, the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent, for various different reasons, whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century, communism in the early 20th, the welfare state, and most recently, of course, through this inflated real estate bubble.
And all of those booms, in their own various ways, have now kicked the bucket, and we're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population.
Now it's not just that that's bad for democracy, though I think it probably is, it's actually not a very clever business strategy, actually.
I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is, how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent?
And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done.
The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings.
And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions.
So here's a story.
And they said to the architects, "Look, our corridors are an absolute nightmare.
There's bullying. We can't control them.
So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building, and we know it's going to cost several million pounds, but we're reconciled to the fact."
And the team thought about this, and they went away, and they said, "Actually, don't do that.
Instead, get rid of the school bell.
And instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times, distribute the traffic through the corridors."
Now, it looks like you're doing yourself out of a job, but you're not. You're actually making yourself more useful.
Architects are actually really, really good at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking.
And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions, we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product, and I don't think that needs to be the case anymore.
The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big -- big buildings and big finance.
Actually, we've got ourselves locked into this Industrial Era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf, procuring whole neighborhoods in single, monolithic projects, and of course, form follows finance.
So what you end up with are single, monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model.
And a lot of people can't even afford them.
And when they do, they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live.
And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development?
How will we sell design services?
What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build?
And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens.
And thirdly, we need to remember that, from a strictly economic point of view, design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly -- mostly it's done by amateurs.
Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what's called the social economy or the core economy, which is people doing it for themselves.
So the challenge we face is, how are we going to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture's social economy?
And that began with open-source software.
And over the last few years, it's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware, which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves.
And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting.
Right? When suddenly you had a 3D printer that was open-source, the parts for which could be made on another 3D printer.
Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine, which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood.
They're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it's got to be one-size-fits-all.
We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone.
That really is an industrial revolution.
And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production, and these technologies are coming back with a solution: actually, maybe no one. All of us.
And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture.
So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system.
And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online, access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in, at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use, and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them, in effect, to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood.
And the parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit.
It uses wedge and peg connections.
And even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well.
And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this.
They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day.
(Applause) And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what's cheap and what's available.
Of course, the house is never finished.
We're shifting our heads here, so the house is not a finished product.
With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door.
So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially.
And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now, and some really interesting lessons here.
Don't reinvent the wheel every time.
Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs.
It's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings.
We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing.
There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing, and thanks to the TED city Prize, we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university.
I hope next time you see it, you won't even be able to see the map.
We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer, but it's a small answer to a really, really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities.
They're self-made cities in one form or another.
You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team.
So if we're serious about problems like climate change, urbanization and health, actually, our existing development models aren't going to do it.
How extraordinary would it be, though, if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we've been working on, but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning, off-grid energy, off-grid sanitation -- low-cost, open-source, high-performance solutions that anyone can very, very easily make, and to put them all into a commons where they're owned by everyone and they're accessible by everyone?
And once something's in the commons, it will always be there.
How much would that change the rules?
And I think the technology's on our side.
If design's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption -- that was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA — I think design's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production.
And when it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
In order to do that in 20 minutes, I have to bring out four ideas -- it's like four pieces of a puzzle.
The first piece of the puzzle is remoteness and the quality of education.
Now, by remoteness, I mean two or three different kinds of things.
Of course, remoteness in its normal sense, which means that as you go further and further away from an urban center, you get to remoter areas.
What happens to education?
So keep both of those ideas of remoteness.
We made a guess. The guess was that schools in remote areas do not have good enough teachers.
They do not have good enough infrastructure.
But I wanted to check if this is true. So what I did last year was we hired a car, looked up on Google, found a route into northern India from New Delhi which, you know, which did not cross any big cities or any big metropolitan centers. Drove out about 300 kilometers, and wherever we found a school, administered a set of standard tests, and then took those test results and plotted them on a graph.
The graph was interesting, although you need to consider it carefully.
I mean, this is a very small sample; you should not generalize from it.
It did not correlate with the size of classrooms.
It did not correlate with the quality of the infrastructure.
It did not correlate with the poverty levels. It did not correlate.
But what happened was that when I administered a questionnaire to each of these schools, with one single question for the teachers -- which was, "Would you like to move to an urban, metropolitan area?" -- 69 percent of them said yes. And as you can see from that, they say yes just a little bit out of Delhi, and they say no when you hit the rich suburbs of Delhi -- because, you know, those are relatively better off areas -- and then from 200 kilometers out of Delhi, the answer is consistently yes.
The literature -- one part of it, the scientific literature -- consistently blames ET as being over-hyped and under-performing.
The teachers always say, well, it's fine, but it's too expensive for what it does.
Because it's being piloted in a school where the students are already getting, let's say, 80 percent of whatever they could do.
So the principal looks at it and says, 3 percent for 300,000 dollars? Forget it.
So the relative change that ET, Educational Technology, would make, would be far greater at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top, but we seem to be doing it the other way about.
And finally came the question of, how do you tackle teacher perception?
Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology, the teacher's first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine -- it's impossible.
I don't know why it's impossible, but, even for a moment, if you did assume that it's impossible -- I have a quotation from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whom I met in Colombo, and he said something which completely solves this problem.
Anyway, so I'm proposing that an alternative primary education, whatever alternative you want, is required where schools don't exist, where schools are not good enough, where teachers are not available or where teachers are not good enough, for whatever reason.
So far I haven't come across such an area, except for one case. I won't name the area, but somewhere in the world people said, we don't have this problem, because we have perfect teachers and perfect schools.
There are such areas, but -- anyway, I'd never heard that anywhere else.
I'm going to talk about children and self-organization, and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like.
They're called the hole-in-the-wall experiments.
They cut a hole inside that wall -- which is how it has got the name hole-in-the-wall -- and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end, a touchpad similarly embedded into the wall, put it on high-speed Internet, put the Internet Explorer there, put it on Altavista.com -- in those days -- and just left it there.
And this is what we saw.
So that was my office in IIT. Here's the hole-in-the-wall.
About eight hours later, we found this kid.
To the right is this eight-year-old child who -- and to his left is a six-year-old girl, who is not very tall.
And what he was doing was, he was teaching her to browse.
So it sort of raised more questions than it answered.
The last question is what everybody said, but you know, I mean, they must have poked their head over the wall and asked the people in your office, can you show me how to do it, and then somebody taught him.
So I took the experiment out of Delhi and repeated it, this time in a city called Shivpuri in the center of India, where I was assured that nobody had ever taught anybody anything.
(Laughter) So it was a warm day, and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building. This is the first kid who came there; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout.
He came there and he started to fiddle around with the touchpad.
Very quickly, he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen -- and later on he told me, "I have never seen a television where you can do something."
So he figured that out. It took him over two minutes to figure out that he was doing things to the television.
And then, as he was doing that, he made an accidental click by hitting the touchpad -- you'll see him do that.
He did that, and the Internet Explorer changed page.
Eight minutes later, he looked from his hand to the screen, and he was browsing: he was going back and forth.
When that happened, he started calling all the neighborhood children, like, children would come and see what's happening over here.
So eight minutes and an embedded computer seemed to be all that we needed there.
So we thought that this is what was happening: that children in groups can self-instruct themselves to use a computer and the Internet. But under what circumstances?
At this time there was a -- the main question was about English.
I took the experiment out to northeastern India, to a village called Madantusi, where, for some reason, there was no English teacher, so the children had not learned English at all.
One big difference in the villages, as opposed to the urban slums: there were more girls than boys who came to the kiosk.
In the urban slums, the girls tend to stay away.
I left the computer there with lots of CDs -- I didn't have any Internet -- and came back three months later.
So when I came back there, I found these two kids, eight- and 12-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer.
And as soon as they saw me they said, "We need a faster processor and a better mouse."
(Laughter) I was real surprised.
So, Madantusi seemed to show that language is not a barrier; in fact they may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to.
India is a good place to do such an experiment in, because we have all the ethnic diversities, all the -- you know, the genetic diversity, all the racial diversities, and also all the socio-economic diversities.
So I did this for almost five years, and this experiment really took us all the way across the length and breadth of India.
This is the Himalayas. Up in the north, very cold.
I also had to check or invent an engineering design which would survive outdoors, and I was using regular, normal PCs, so I needed different climates, for which India is also great, because we have very cold, very hot, and so on.
This is the desert to the west. Near the Pakistan border.
And you see here a little clip of -- one of these villages -- the first thing that these children did was to find a website to teach themselves the English alphabet.
So we had to solve all the problems we had without air conditioning and with very poor power, so most of the solutions that came out used little blasts of air put at the right places to keep the machines running.
And this happens very often with these computers, that the younger children are found teaching the older ones.
We took standard statistical techniques, so I'm going to not talk about that.
Basic Windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting and email, games and educational material, music downloads, playing video.
In short, what all of us do.
And over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer.
So, how do they do that?
And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what they should do.
If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them.
So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing.
It seems counter-intuitive to adult learning, but remember, eight-year-olds live in a society where most of the time they are told, don't do this, you know, don't touch the whiskey bottle.
So what does the eight-year-old do?
He observes very carefully how a whiskey bottle should be touched.
And if you tested him, he would answer every question correctly on that topic.
It could perhaps be a self-organizing system, so that was the second bit that I wanted to tell you, that children can self-organize and attain an educational objective.
The third piece was on values, and again, to put it very briefly, I conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over India, and asked them -- I gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions.
We got all sorts of opinions. Yes, no or I don't know.
These were areas where the children were clearly confused, because half said yes and half said no.
A typical example being, "Sometimes it is necessary to tell lies."
They don't have a way to determine which way to answer this question; perhaps none of us do.
Finally, self-organizing systems, about which, again, I won't say too much because you've been hearing all about it.
Natural systems are all self-organizing: galaxies, molecules, cells, organisms, societies -- except for the debate about an intelligent designer.
But at this point in time, as far as science goes, it's self-organization.
But other examples are traffic jams, stock market, society and disaster recovery, terrorism and insurgency.
And you know about the Internet-based self-organizing systems.
So here are my four sentences then.
Remoteness affects the quality of education.
Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, and other areas later.
And learning is most likely a self-organizing system.
If you put all the four together, then it gives -- according to me -- it gives us a goal, a vision, for educational technology.
An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized.
As educationists, we have never asked for technology; we keep borrowing it.
PowerPoint is supposed to be considered a great educational technology, but it was not meant for education, it was meant for making boardroom presentations.
And could this be a goal for educational technology in the future?
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
Hi, everybody.
I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair.
The violin, which meant everything to me, became a grave burden on me.
Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me, their words sounded like meaningless noise.
When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering, I started to rediscover the true power of music.
The comfort the music gave me was just indescribable, and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too, and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist.
Do you feel like you are all alone?
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
Now, I use my music to reach people's hearts and have found there are no boundaries.
My audience is anyone who is here to listen, even those who are not familiar with classical music.
Now, with my last piece, I'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun, exciting, and that it can rock you.
Let me introduce you to my brand new project, "Baroque in Rock," which became a golden disc most recently.
It's such an honor for me.
I think, while I'm enjoying my life as a happy musician, I'm earning a lot more recognition than I've ever imagined.
But it's now your turn.
Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world.
Just play your life with all you have, and share it with the world.
I really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you, TEDsters.
(Music) (Applause)
When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house.
And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal.
And we used to imagine that someday, they would actually come to life and they would crawl out of the resin, and, if they could, they would fly away.
If you had asked whether or not we would actually be able to revive an extinct species, I would have said, pipe dream.
But I'm actually standing here today, amazingly, to tell you that not only is the sequencing of extinct genomes a possibility, actually a modern-day reality, but the revival of an extinct species is actually within reach, maybe not from the insects in amber -- in fact, this mosquito was actually used for the inspiration for "Jurassic Park" — but from woolly mammoths, the well preserved remains of woolly mammoths in the permafrost.
Woollies are a particularly interesting, quintessential image of the Ice Age.
They were large. They were hairy.
They had large tusks, and we seem to have a very deep connection with them, like we do with elephants.
Maybe it's because elephants share many things in common with us.
They bury their dead. They educate the next of kin.
Or maybe it's actually because we're bound by deep time, because elephants, like us, share their origins in Africa some seven million years ago, and as habitats changed and environments changed, we actually, like the elephants, migrated out into Europe and Asia.
So the first large mammoth that appears on the scene is meridionalis, which was standing four meters tall weighing about 10 tons, and was a woodland-adapted species and spread from Western Europe clear across Central Asia, across the Bering land bridge and into parts of North America.
And then, again, as climate changed as it always does, and new habitats opened up, we had the arrival of a steppe-adapted species called trogontherii in Central Asia pushing meridionalis out into Western Europe.
And the open grassland savannas of North America opened up, leading to the Columbian mammoth, a large, hairless species in North America.
And there they survive on the mainland until about 10,000 years ago, and actually, surprisingly, on the small islands off of Siberia and Alaska until about 3,000 years ago.
So Egyptians are building pyramids and woollies are still living on islands.
And then they disappear.
Like 99 percent of all the animals that have once lived, they go extinct, likely due to a warming climate and fast-encroaching dense forests that are migrating north, and also, as the late, great Paul Martin once put it, probably Pleistocene overkill, so the large game hunters that took them down.
Fortunately, we find millions of their remains strewn across the permafrost buried deep in Siberia and Alaska, and we can actually go up there and actually take them out.
So the preservation and the survival of DNA depends on many factors, and I have to admit, most of which we still don't quite understand, but depending upon when an organism dies and how quickly he's buried, the depth of that burial, the constancy of the temperature of that burial environment, will ultimately dictate how long DNA will survive over geologically meaningful time frames.
So if we were to go deep now within the bones and the teeth that actually survived the fossilization process, the DNA which was once intact, tightly wrapped around histone proteins, is now under attack by the bacteria that lived symbiotically with the mammoth for years during its lifetime.
So those bacteria, along with the environmental bacteria, free water and oxygen, actually break apart the DNA into smaller and smaller and smaller DNA fragments, until all you have are fragments that range from 10 base pairs to, in the best case scenarios, a few hundred base pairs in length.
But a few of them actually have DNA fragments that survive for thousands, even a few millions of years in time.
And using state-of-the-art clean room technology, we've devised ways that we can actually pull these DNAs away from all the rest of the gunk in there, and it's not surprising to any of you sitting in the room that if I take a mammoth bone or a tooth and I extract its DNA that I'll get mammoth DNA, but I'll also get all the bacteria that once lived with the mammoth, and, more complicated, I'll get all the DNA that survived in that environment with it, so the bacteria, the fungi, and so on and so forth.
Not surprising then again that a mammoth preserved in the permafrost will have something on the order of 50 percent of its DNA being mammoth, whereas something like the Columbian mammoth, living in a temperature and buried in a temperate environment over its laying-in will only have 3 to 10 percent endogenous.
But we've come up with very clever ways that we can actually discriminate, capture and discriminate, the mammoth from the non-mammoth DNA, and with the advances in high-throughput sequencing, we can actually pull out and bioinformatically re-jig all these small mammoth fragments and place them onto a backbone of an Asian or African elephant chromosome.
So a hominid genome is about three billion base pairs, but an elephant and mammoth genome is about two billion base pairs larger, and most of that is composed of small, repetitive DNAs that make it very difficult to actually re-jig the entire structure of the genome.
So having this information allows us to answer one of the interesting relationship questions between mammoths and their living relatives, the African and the Asian elephant, all of which shared an ancestor seven million years ago, but the genome of the mammoth shows it to share a most recent common ancestor with Asian elephants about six million years ago, so slightly closer to the Asian elephant.
With advances in ancient DNA technology, we can actually now start to begin to sequence the genomes of those other extinct mammoth forms that I mentioned, and I just wanted to talk about two of them, the woolly and the Columbian mammoth, both of which were living very close to each other during glacial peaks, so when the glaciers were massive in North America, the woollies were pushed into these subglacial ecotones, and came into contact with the relatives living to the south, and there they shared refugia, and a little bit more than the refugia, it turns out.
It looks like they were interbreeding.
It reminds me a bit of high school, unfortunately.
So that means that we can actually take Asian elephant chromosomes, modify them into all those positions we've actually now been able to discriminate with the mammoth genome, we can put that into an enucleated cell, differentiate that into a stem cell, subsequently differentiate that maybe into a sperm, artificially inseminate an Asian elephant egg, and over a long and arduous procedure, actually bring back something that looks like this.
Now, this wouldn't be an exact replica, because the short DNA fragments that I told you about will prevent us from building the exact structure, but it would make something that looked and felt very much like a woolly mammoth did.
Where are you going to house a mammoth?
Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation.
So this landscape would be easily able to house it, and I have to admit that there [is] a part of the child in me, the boy in me, that would love to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the north once again, but I do have to admit that part of the adult in me sometimes wonders whether or not we should.
Thank you very much.
You've left us with a question.
it feels like you're reticent there, and yet you've given us a vision of it being so possible.
Hendrik Poinar: I don't think it's reticence.
HP: Thank you. (Applause)
I'm almost like a crazy evangelical.
If the day is sunny, I think, "Oh, the gods have had a good design day."
So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression.
That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design, and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture, is still posters, is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today.
But in truth, what I really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot, like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij, where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts, as if he were a big candy, and makes a chair out of it.
Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity.
I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life.
And it's interesting how so much of what we're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design.
And in fact, interaction design is what I've been trying to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for a few years, starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works, for instance, by Martin Wattenberg -- the way a machine plays chess with itself, that you see here, or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners, the Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child, Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On musical instruments, and Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters, and John Maeda's Reactive Books, and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's I Want You To Want Me.
These were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public.
But more recently, I've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable.
The Wind Map, by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, I don't know if you've ever seen it -- it's really fantastic.
It looks at the territory of the United States as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what's going on with the winds in the United States.
But also, more recently, we started acquiring video games, and that's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way. (Laughter) There are still people that believe that there's a high and there's a low.
And that's really what I find so intriguing about the reactions that we've had to the anointment of video games in the MoMA collection.
I love them. So we are in the right quadrant.
We are in the Highbrow -- that's daring, that's courageous -- and Brilliant, which is great.
So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian.
"Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art."
Did I ever say they were art? I was talking about interaction design. Excuse me.
"Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh" -- They're two floors away. (Laughter) — "will mean game over for any real understanding of art."
We were talking about the rapture? It's coming.
And Jonathan Jones is making it happen.
So the same Guardian rebuts, "Are video games art: the debate that shouldn't be.
You know, it's like once again there's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art, or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to, would like to be called, artists.
No. Designers aspire to be really great designers.
Thank you very much. And that's more than enough.
So my knight in shining armor, John Maeda, without any prompt, came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the MoMA.
And that was fantastic. And I thought that was it.
But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in The New Republic, so pretentious, by Liel Leibovitz, and it said, "MoMA has mistaken video games for art." Again.
"That misses the point."
Excuse me. You're missing the point.
And here, look, the above question is put bluntly: "Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art because they are quite thoroughly something else: code."
Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right?
The International Cat Video Film Festival didn't have that much of a reaction. (Laughter) I think this was truly fantastic.
And there's this Flaubert quote that I love: "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it."
(Laughter) (Applause) You know, we have to go through that.
Even in the 1930s, my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art.
So it's happened before, and it will happen in the future, but right now I can tell you that I am so, so proud to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection.
And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one.
And you know, the amount of work -- yeah, Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government and that's how he developed Tetris, and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed.
And it's fantastic.
So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work, because we're still the Museum of Modern Art, so even when we tackle popular culture, we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA, therefore, has to be researched.
So to get to choosing Eric Chahi's wonderful Another World, amongst others, we put together a panel of experts, and we worked on this acquisition, and it's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway.
We worked on it for a year and a half.
So many people helped us — designers of games, you might know Jamin Warren and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine, and you know, Kevin Slavin. You name it.
We were not real gamers enough, so we had to really talk to them.
They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation.
That's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke. It's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future.
We live today, as you know very well, not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.
And in order to explain interaction, we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives.
So when I talk about it, I don't talk only about video games, which are in a way the purest form of interaction, unadulterated by any kind of function or finality.
I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine, which I consider a masterpiece of interaction.
I mean, that interface is beautiful.
It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel.
So I let people understand that it's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it's good or when it's bad.
So when I show The Sims, I try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with The Sims, not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the Tamagotchi.
I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy.
It's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you'll be able to make it into a planet.
I've never made it into a planet, but that's it.
Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States.
It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan.
And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music.
Not to mention Eve Online.
Eve Online is an artificial universe, if you wish, but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi, not Ambassador Stevens, but one of his collaborators, was a really big shot in Eve Online, so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in Eve Online to kind of test, maybe, all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building, and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on Eve Online, and after his death, several parts of the universe were named after him.
And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing.
I mean, we're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many, but that is very educational.
Of course, there are games that are even more educational.
It was amazing to see. And it's a beautiful game.
So you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like MoMA's are kept alive also by the selection of these games.
And you know, Valve -- you know, Portal -- is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games, what to do with violence.
Right? We had to make decisions.
At MoMA, interestingly, there's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection, but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago, and as an Italian, I said, "You know what, we need a Beretta."
And I was told, "No. No guns in the design collection."
And I was like, "Why?"
Interestingly, I learned that it's considered that in design and in the design collection, what you see is what you get.
So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection.
But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design, so maybe one day we'll be able to acquire also the guns.
But here, in this particular case, we decided, you know, with Kate and Paul, that we would have no gratuitous violence.
So we have Portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces.
We have Street Fighter II, because martial arts are good.
And to this day, I am ambivalent, but when you have instead games like Flow, there's no doubt.
It's like, it's about serenity and it's about sublime.
It's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature.
What we want, what we aspire to, is the code.
But that's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time, and that's what museums do.
We're going to stay with them forever.
And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter) But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important.
And I'm showing you Core War here, which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor.
So the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor's limitedness, which is fantastic. So aesthetics is always important.
And so is space, the spatial aspect of games.
You know, I feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them, and if they're not architects, bona fide trained in architecture, they have that feeling.
Time. The way we experience time in video games, as in other forms of interaction design, is really quite amazing.
It can be real time or it can be the time within the game, as is in Animal Crossing, where seasons follow each other at their own pace.
So time, space, aesthetics, and then, most important, behavior.
The real core issue of interaction design is behavior.
Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives.
They're not just limited to our interaction with the screen.
In this case, I'm showing you Marble Madness, which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you, so you have a sphere that's moving in this landscape, and the sphere, the controller itself, gives you a sense of the movement.
In a way, you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is.
We don't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia. No arcade nostalgia.
So the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox. You see them here displayed alongside other examples of design, furniture and other parts, but there's no paraphernalia, no nostalagia, only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers.
The controllers are, of course, part of the experience, so you cannot do away with it.
But interestingly, this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers.
I would like to do the same with video games.
By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood, I want people to understand that those are important forms of design.
And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design.
One of my dream acquisitions, which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner, is a 747.
So it's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying.
It was the first example of an acquisition of something that is in the public domain.
So in a way, we're showing a manifestation of something that is truly important and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have.
And it's too long to explain the acquisition, but if you want to go on the MoMA blog, there's a long post where I explain why it's such a great example of design.
Design is truly everywhere, and design is as important as anything, and I'm so glad that, because of its diversity and because of its centrality to our lives, many more people are coming to it as a profession, as a passion, and as, very simply, part of their own culture.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence: sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children.
That whole range of issues that I'll refer to in shorthand as "gender violence issues," they've been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with, but I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it.
I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with.
In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues, first and foremost.
Now obviously -- (Applause) Obviously, they're also women's issues, so I appreciate that, but calling gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem, for a number of reasons.
The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention, right?
A lot of men hear the term "women's issues" and we tend to tune it out, and we think, "I'm a guy; that's for the girls," or "that's for the women."
And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result.
This is also true, by the way, of the word "gender," because a lot of people hear the word "gender" and they think it means "women."
There's some confusion about the term gender.
So let's talk for a moment about race.
In the US, when we hear the word "race," a lot of people think that means African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on.
A lot of people, when they hear the word "sexual orientation" think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual.
And a lot of people, when they hear the word "gender," think it means women.
As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity or belong to some racial category or construct, as if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation, as if men don't have a gender.
And this is amazing how this works in domestic and sexual violence, how men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men.
And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about by using the old tech.
This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues.
This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.
It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary."
That's a good English sentence.
John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence.
Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice.
"Mary was beaten by John."
And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence.
We've gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John."
We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain.
The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, "Mary was beaten," and now it's all about Mary.
We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary.
Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered," so we have "Mary was battered."
And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, "Mary is a battered woman."
So now Mary's very identity -- Mary is a battered woman -- is what was done to her by John in the first instance.
But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.
Those of us who work in the domestic and sexual violence field know that victim-blaming is pervasive in this realm, which is to say, blaming the person to whom something was done rather than the person who did it.
This is victim blaming, and there are many reasons for it, but one is that our cognitive structure is set up to blame victims.
This is all unconscious.
Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions about women and women's choices and what they're doing, thinking, wearing.
It's a legitimate thing to ask.
The questions are not about Mary, they're about John.
Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the US and all over the world?
What's going on? Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, verbally, and other ways, the women and girls, and the men and boys, that they claim to love?
Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys?
Why is that a common problem in our society and all over the world today?
Why do we hear over and over again about new scandals erupting in major institutions like the Catholic Church or the Penn State football program or the Boy Scouts of America, on and on and on?
And then local communities all over the country and all over the world.
The sexual abuse of children.
What's going on with men? Why do so many men rape women in our society and around the world?
Why do so many men rape other men?
What is going on with men?
And then what is the role of the various institutions in our society that are helping to produce abusive men at pandemic rates?
That's a naive way to understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem.
That's a very naive notion, right?
So the question is, what are we doing here in our society and in the world?
What are the roles of various institutions in helping to produce abusive men?
What's the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects, and race and ethnicity and how that intersects?
How can we change the practices?
I understand that a lot of women who have been trying to speak out about these issues, today and yesterday and for years and years, often get shouted down for their efforts.
They get called nasty names like "male-basher" and "man-hater," and the disgusting and offensive "feminazi", right?
And you know what all this is about?
It's called kill the messenger.
We don't like it when people challenge our power.
Thank goodness that we live in a world where there's so much women's leadership that can counteract that.
But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say, or, better yet, we can be heard saying some things that women often can't be heard saying.
Now, I appreciate that that's a problem, it's sexism, but it's the truth.
So one of the things that I say to men, and my colleagues and I always say this, is we need more men who have the courage and the strength to start standing up and saying some of this stuff, and standing with women and not against them and pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes and other kinds of nonsense.
We live in the world together.
And by the way, one of the things that really bothers me about some of the rhetoric against feminists and others who have built the battered women's and rape crisis movements around the world is that somehow, like I said, that they're anti-male.
What about all those boys?
What about all the young men and boys who have been traumatized by adult men's violence?
You know what?
The same system that produces men who abuse women, produces men who abuse other men.
And if we want to talk about male victims, let's talk about male victims.
So that's something that both women and men have in common.
We are both victims of men's violence.
So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out.
Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do in the sports culture and the US military, in schools, we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach to gender-violence prevention.
And I just want to give you the highlights of the bystander approach, because it's a big thematic shift, although there's lots of particulars, but the heart of it is, instead of seeing men as perpetrators and women as victims, or women as perpetrators, men as victims, or any combination in there.
I'm using the gender binary.
I know there's more than men and women, there's more than male and female.
And there are women who are perpetrators, and of course there are men who are victims.
But instead of seeing it in the binary fashion, we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders, and a bystander is defined as anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation, so in other words friends, teammates, colleagues, coworkers, family members, those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse, but we are embedded in social, family, work, school, and other peer culture relationships with people who might be in that situation.
What do we do? How do we speak up? How do we challenge our friends?
How do we support our friends?
But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse?
Now, when it comes to men and male culture, the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are.
And when I say abusive, I don't mean just men who are beating women.
We're not just saying a man whose friend is abusing his girlfriend needs to stop the guy at the moment of attack.
So, for example, if you're a guy and you're in a group of guys playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present, and another guy says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women, instead of laughing along or pretending you didn't hear it, we need men to say, "Hey, that's not funny.
that could be my sister you're talking about, and could you joke about something else?
Or could you talk about something else?
I don't appreciate that kind of talk."
Just like if you're a white person and another white person makes a racist comment, you'd hope, I hope, that white people would interrupt that racist enactment by a fellow white person.
Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors towards people of varying sexual orientations, if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then, in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity?
Well, the bystander approach is trying to give people tools to interrupt that process and to speak up and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable, not just because it's illegal, but because it's wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture.
Because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted.
He's a normal guy in every other way, isn't he?
Now, among the many great things that Martin Luther King said in his short life was, "In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."
There's been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children, hasn't there?
Now, it's easier said than done, because I'm saying it now, but I'm telling you it's not easy in male culture for guys to challenge each other, which is one of the reasons why part of the paradigm shift that has to happen is not just understanding these issues as men's issues, but they're also leadership issues for men.
Because ultimately, the responsibility for taking a stand on these issues should not fall on the shoulders of little boys or teenage boys in high school or college men.
Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable for being leaders on these issues, because when somebody speaks up in a peer culture and challenges and interrupts, he or she is being a leader, really.
But on a big scale, we need more adult men with power to start prioritizing these issues, and we haven't seen that yet, have we?
Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago, and I work extensively with the US military, all the services.
And I said, "With all due respect, I don't do sensitivity training with the Marines.
I run a leadership program in the Marine Corps."
We need leadership training, because, for example, when a professional coach or a manager of a baseball team or a football team -- and I work extensively in that realm as well -- makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement, makes a racist comment, there will be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio.
And some people will say, "He needs sensitivity training."
That's political correctness run amok, he made a stupid statement, move on."
My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training.
He needs leadership training, because he's being a bad leader, because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity -- (Applause) and racial and ethnic diversity, you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership.
If we can make this point that I'm making to powerful men and women in our society at all levels of institutional authority and power, it's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking.
We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right?
There's no excuse for a college or university to not have domestic and sexual violence prevention training mandated for all student athletes, coaches, administrators, as part of their educational process.
But it's not the leadership of student athletes.
It's the leadership of the athletic director, the president of the university, the people in charge who make decisions about resources and who make decisions about priorities in the institutional settings.
You had so many situations in that realm where men in powerful positions failed to act to protect children, in this case, boys.
And one of the ways to do that is to say there's an awful lot of men who care deeply about these issues.
I know this, I work with men, and I've been working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men for many decades now.
But there's so many men who care deeply about these issues, but caring deeply is not enough.
We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them.
By the way, we owe it to women.
There's no question about it.
But we also owe it to our sons.
They didn't make the choice.
I hope that, going forward, men and women, working together, can begin the change and the transformation that will happen so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy that we deal with on a daily basis.
I know we can do it, we can do better.
How many of you have checked your email today?
Credit card, investment account?
This week? Last week?
A few energy geeks spread out across the room.
But the rest of us -- this is a room filled with people who are passionate about the future of this planet, and even we aren't paying attention to the energy use that's driving climate change.
The woman in the photo with me is Harriet.
We met her on our first family vacation.
Harriet's paying attention to her energy use, and she is decidedly not an energy geek.
This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention.
This is coal, the most common source of electricity on the planet, and there's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year.
But unfortunately, between here and here, most of that energy is lost to things like transmission leakage and heat.
In fact, only 10 percent ends up as light.
So this coal will last a little bit more than a month.
If you wanted to light this bulb for a year, you'd need this much coal.
The bad news here is that, for every unit of energy we use, we waste nine.
That means there's good news, because for every unit of energy we save, we save the other nine.
So the question is, how can we get the people in this room and across the globe to start paying attention to the energy we're using, and start wasting less of it?
The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer, 10 years ago, and only 90 miles from here, in San Marcos, California.
Graduate students put signs on every door in a neighborhood, asking people to turn off their air conditioning and turn on their fans.
One quarter of the homes received a message that said, did you know you could save 54 dollars a month this summer?
Another group got an environmental message.
And still a third group got a message about being good citizens, preventing blackouts.
Most people guessed that money-saving message would work best of all.
In fact, none of these messages worked.
It was as if the grad students hadn't shown up at all.
But there was a fourth message, and this message simply said, "When surveyed, 77 percent of your neighbors said that they turned off their air conditioning and turned on their fans.
The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing.
So what does this tell us?
Well, if something is inconvenient, even if we believe in it, moral suasion, financial incentives, don't do much to move us -- but social pressure, that's powerful stuff.
And harnessed correctly, it can be a powerful force for good.
In fact, it already is.
Inspired by this insight, my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower.
We built software and partnered with utility companies who wanted to help their customers save energy.
We deliver personalized home energy reports that show people how their consumption compares to their neighbors in similar-sized homes.
We started with paper, we moved to a mobile application, web, and now even a controllable thermostat, and for the last five years we've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world.
And it's working.
Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills, and we're just getting started.
This year alone, in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries, we're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings.
Now, the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours, but for the rest of us, two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year.
Two terawatt hours, it's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year.
And two terawatt hours? In terms of coal, we'd need to burn 34 of these wheelbarrows every minute around the clock every day for an entire year to get two terawatt hours of electricity.
And we're not burning anything.
We're just motivating people to pay attention and change their behavior.
But we're just one company, and this is just scratching the surface.
Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted, and when I say wasted, I don't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs. They may.
That's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change.
That's 40 billion -- with a B -- every year in the U.S. alone.
Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential.
But the most overlooked resource to get us to a sustainable energy future, it isn't on this slide.
It's in this room. It's you, and it's me.
And we can harness this resource with no new material science simply by applying behavioral science.
So what are we waiting for?
Well, in most places, utility regulation hasn't changed much since Thomas Edison.
Utilities are still rewarded when their customers waste energy.
But this story is much more than about household energy use.
Take a look at the Prius.
It's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science.
Which brings us back to Harriet.
We met her on our first family vacation.
She came over to meet my young daughter, and she was tickled to learn that my daughter's name is also Harriet.
She asked me what I did for a living, and I told her, I work with utilities to help people save energy.
It was then that her eyes lit up.
She looked at me, and she said, "You're exactly the person I need to talk to.
You see, two weeks ago, my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility.
It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors."
(Laughter) "And for the last two weeks, all we can think about, talk about, and even argue about, is what we should be doing to save energy.
Now I'm here with a genuine expert.
There are many experts who can help answer Harriet's question.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s.
But my tiger mother said, "No."
My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them.
After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job.
But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer.
That is me playing my imaginary piano.
An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school.
I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show.
But no adults liked the idea.
Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was.
So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained.
My dream would never come true.
I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for.
But that's so unfair.
I turned to books.
I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.["Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei"] I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.["Jane Eyre"] And I learned to be efficient from this book.["Cheaper by the Dozen"] And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these.
["Complete Works of Sanmao" (aka Echo Chan)] ["Lessons From History" by Nan Huaijin] I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first?
(Laughter) That's a topic for a different day.
But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: "You shall honor your father and mother."
So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents.
Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading.
For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with.
Comparative reading actually is nothing new.
It's a standard practice in the academic world.
There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature.
So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too?
So I started reading books in pairs.
So they can be about people -- ["Benjamin Franklin" by Walter Isaacson]["John Adams" by David McCullough] -- who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences.
["Personal History" by Katharine Graham]["The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres -- (Laughter) [Holy Bible: King James Version]["Lamb" by Chrisopher Moore] -- or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.["The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations.
For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual.
For the Buddha, they are all psychological: lust, fear and social duty -- interesting.
So if you know a foreign language, it's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages.
"Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh.
(Laughter) Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present.
I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again.
Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered.
Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from.
So because of books, I'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality -- a pitiable flight from life.
That's from "Time" magazine in 1966, when I was three years old.
And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage.
(Applause) And my question is: How did we get from there to here?
How did an illness become an identity?
When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother.
And at the end of buying our shoes, the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home.
My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon.
(Laughter) But I said that I definitely wanted the pink one.
And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue.
The fact that my favorite color now is blue, but I'm still gay -- (Laughter) is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits.
(Laughter) (Applause) When I was little, my mother used to say, "The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world.
And until you have children, you don't know what it's like."
And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me.
And when I was an adolescent, I thought, "But I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family."
And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it, it made me furious.
I said, "I'm gay. That's not the direction that I'm headed in.
And I want you to stop saying that."
About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at the "New York Times Magazine" to write a piece about Deaf culture.
And I was rather taken aback.
And then I went out into the Deaf world.
I went to Deaf clubs.
I saw performances of Deaf theater and of Deaf poetry.
(Laughter) And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the Deaf world, I became convinced that Deafness was a culture and that the people in the Deaf world who said, "We don't lack hearing; we have membership in a culture," were saying something that was viable.
It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it, but I appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it, it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture.
It felt as valid, perhaps, even as American culture.
Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf.
She was facing the question of what to do with this child.
Should she say, "You're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter?"
And I suddenly thought, "Most deaf children are born to hearing parents.
Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them.
Those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence.
Most gay people are born to straight parents.
Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on.
And here was this friend of mine, looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter.
And I thought, "There it is again: a family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary."
And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity.
There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child.
Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion.
Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children.
And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them.
You can argue that it's harder in the United States -- our current presidency notwithstanding -- to be a person of color.
There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group, and I call them "horizontal identities," because the peer group is the horizontal experience.
And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure.
And I wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them.
And it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place.
There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance.
Love is something that, ideally, is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child.
But acceptance is something that takes time.
It always takes time.
One of the dwarfs I got to know was a guy named Clinton Brown.
When he was born, he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism, a very disabling condition, and his parents were told that he would never walk, he would never talk, he would have no intellectual capacity, and he would probably not even recognize them.
And it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly.
His mother said she wasn't going to do it, and she took her son home.
And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures.
While he was there, they sent tutors around to help him with his schoolwork, and he worked very hard, because there was nothing else to do.
He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially fitted car that accommodated his unusual body.
(Laughter) "And I thought to myself, 'They're six feet tall, he's three feet tall.
She said, "And then I thought, if someone had said to me, when he was born, that my future worry would be that he'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies ..."
(Laughter) (Applause) And I said to her, "What do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming, accomplished, wonderful person?"
And she said, "What did I do?
Clinton just always had that light in him.
And his father and I were lucky enough to be the first to see it there."
I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s.
This one is from 1968 -- "The Atlantic Monthly," voice of liberal America -- written by an important bioethicist.
The fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day.
But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be.
One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome.
In the time since that "Atlantic Monthly" story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled.
The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood.
And I said, "Do you regret it?
Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome?
And interestingly, his father said, "Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life.
But I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome, it would be a catastrophic loss."
And Karen Robards said to me, "I'm with Tom.
But speaking for myself -- well, I would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point.
We live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up.
Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech.
A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene.
Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene grow to full size.
There are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up Down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before, making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies, or to terminate them.
So we have both social progress and medical progress.
And I believe in both of them.
But I think it's a tragedy when one of them doesn't see the other.
And when I see the way they're intersecting in conditions like the three I've just described, I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan.
Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, "When parents say, 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is, 'I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, nonautistic child instead.' Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence.
One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold, who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre.
It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it, and the first weekend I spent with them, the first of many, I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation.
And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted.
We were sitting in the kitchen. Sue Klebold was fixing dinner.
And I said, "If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him?"
And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute.
And then she looked back up and said, "I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head."
When I had dinner with her a couple of years later -- one of many dinners that we had together -- she said, "You know, when it first happened, I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children.
If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed, and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened.
But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them.
"So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me."
And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws.
If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living-room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children -- more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter -- (Laughter) I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.
But if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing, then you discover that it's a nearly universal phenomenon.
Ironically, it turns out, that it's our differences and our negotiation of difference that unite us.
I decided to have children while I was working on this project.
And many people were astonished and said, "But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?"
And I said, "I'm not studying everything that can go wrong.
What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong."
I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect.
And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed: once of the child I wanted, and once of the son I loved."
And I figured it was possible, then, for anyone to love any child, if they had the effective will to do so.
So, my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis.
I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children.
And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas.
And my husband and I have a son who lives with us all the time, of whom I am the biological father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis.
(Laughter) So -- (Applause) The shorthand is: five parents of four children in three states.
(Laughter) And there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family.
And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist.
And I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones.
And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.
The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned.
He wasn't extending his legs appropriately.
She said that might mean that he had brain damage.
And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus.
And as she told me all of these things, I felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor.
And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness.
And I wanted, also, to protect myself from illness.
And yet, I knew from the work I had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for, that those would ultimately be his identity, and if they were his identity, they would become my identity, that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded.
We took him to the MRI machine, we took him to the CAT scanner, we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw.
We felt helpless.
And at the end of five hours, they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly.
I thought, "The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world.
And until you have children, you don't know what it feels like.
But I'm not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been so in the thick of this research project of mine.
During these 10 years, I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, and I had come to see how it conquers everything else.
And while I had sometimes thought the parents I was interviewing were fools, enslaving themselves to a lifetime's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery, I realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that I was ready to join them on their ship.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers) Thank you.
My journey started 14 years ago.
I was a young reporter. I had just come out of college.
Then I got a scoop.
The scoop was quite a very simple story.
Police officers were taking bribes from hawkers who were hawking on the streets.
As a young reporter, I thought that I should do it in a different way, so that it has a maximum impact, since everybody knew that it was happening, and yet there was nothing that was keeping it out of the system.
So I decided to go there and act as a seller.
The impact was great.
It was fantastic.
This was what many call immersion journalism, or undercover journalism.
I am an undercover journalist.
Journalism is about results.
It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way.
I have worked on this for over 14 years, and I can tell you, the results are very good.
So I built a prosthetic baby, and I went into the village, pretended as though this baby had been born with a deformity, and here was the guys who do the killing.
In their bids to kill, I got the police on standby, and they came that fateful morning to come and kill the child.
As I speak now, they are before the courts.
Another key story that comes to mind, which relates to this spirit child phenomenon, is "The Spell of the Albinos."
I'm sure most of you may have heard, in Tanzania, children who are born with albinism are sometimes considered as being unfit to live in society.
It was time to go undercover again.
So I went undercover as a man who was interested in this particular business, of course.
For the first time, I filmed on hidden camera the guys who do this, and they were ready to buy the arm and they were ready to use it to prepare those potions for people.
I am glad today the Tanzanian government has taken action, but the key issue is that the Tanzanian government could only take action because the evidence was available.
My journalism is about hard core evidence.
I show you how you stole it and when, or what you used what you had stolen to do.
What is the essence of journalism if it doesn't benefit society?
My kind of journalism is a product of my society.
I know that sometimes people have their own criticisms about undercover journalism.
He wants to bring the cocoa and send it to Cote d'Ivoire.
So with my hidden intention, I kept quiet.
I didn't utter a word.
But my colleagues didn't know.
So after collecting the money, when he left, we were waiting for him to bring the goods.
Immediately after he left, I told my colleagues that since I was the leader of the group, I told my colleagues that if they come, we will arrest them.
So I'm surprised.
You see a hand counting money just in front of me.
Reporter: When Metro News contacted investigative reporter Anas Aremeyaw Anas for his reaction, he just smiled and gave this video extract he did not use in the documentary recently shown onscreen.
AAA: That was my president.
I thought that I couldn't come here without giving you something special.
I have a piece, and I'm excited that I'm sharing it for the first time with you here.
I have been there for a long time.
Many times, the prison authorities have denied ever having issues of drug abuse, issues of sodomy, so many issues they would deny that it ever happens.
So I was in the prison. ["Nsawan Prison"] Now, what you are seeing is a pile of dead bodies.
There were issues of bad food being served as I recall that some of the food I ate is just not good for a human being.
Toilet facilities: very bad.
I mean, you had to queue to get proper toilets to attend -- and that's what I call proper, when four of us are on a manhole.
Of course, drugs were abundant.
It was easier to get cannabis, heroin and cocaine, faster even, in the prison than outside the prison.
Evil in the society is an extreme disease.
My kind of journalism might not fit in other continents or other countries, but I can tell you, it works in my part of the continent of Africa, because usually, when people talk about corruption, they ask, "Where is the evidence?
Show me the evidence."
You see, we on the continent are able to tell the story better because we face the conditions and we see the conditions.
That is why I was particularly excited when we launched our "Africa Investigates" series where we investigated a lot of African countries.
As a result of the success of the "Africa Investigates" series, we are moving on to World Investigates.
By the end of it, a lot more bad guys on our continent will be put behind bars.
I'm going to carry on with this kind of journalism, because I know that when evil men destroy, good men must build and bind.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you.
How did you end up in jail? This was just a few weeks ago, I believe, yeah?
AAA: Sure. You know, undercover is all about setting the priorities right, so we got people to take me to court.
So I went through the very legal process, because at the end of the day, the prison authorities want to check whether indeed you have been there or not, and that's how I got in there.
CA: So someone sued you in court, and they took you there, and you were in remand custody for part of it, and you did that deliberately.
AAA: Yes, yes.
CA: Talk to me just about fear and how you manage that, because you're regularly putting your life at risk.
How do you do that?
Before we go undercover, we follow the rules.
If you don't, you will end up losing your life.
CA: Well, you're an amazing human and you've done amazing work and you've taught us a story like no story I think any of us have heard before.
AAA: Thank you.
Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years.
And we know they use some of that brainpower for just living complicated lives, but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence?
Well, we know a few things.
We know that their brain-to-body ratio, which is a physical measure of intelligence, is second only to humans.
Cognitively, they can understand artificially-created languages.
And they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors.
And in some parts of the world, they use tools, like sponges to hunt fish.
But there's one big question left: do they have a language, and if so, what are they talking about?
So decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system.
Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater, but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida.
And they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows, but at night, they go off the edge and hunt in deep water.
Now, it's not a bad place to be a researcher, either.
So we go out for about five months every summer in a 20-meter catamaran, and we live, sleep and work at sea for weeks at a time.
My main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone, and this is so I can correlate sound and behavior.
And most of our work's pretty non-invasive.
We try to follow dolphin etiquette while we're in the water, since we're actually observing them physically in the water.
Now, Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons.
They're born without spots, and they get spots with age, and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases, so that's fun to track their behavior.
Now the mother you see here is Mugsy.
She's 35 years old in this shot, but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s.
And like all the dolphins in our community, we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin, and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time.
Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up, and they use their teenage years to practice social skills, and at about the age of nine, the females become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant, and the males mature quite a bit later, at around 15 years of age.
And dolphins are very promiscuous, and so we have to determine who the fathers are, so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting DNA.
Now, dolphins are natural acousticians.
They make sounds 10 times as high and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do.
But they have other communication signals they use.
They have good vision, so they use body postures to communicate.
They have taste, not smell.
And they have touch.
And sound can actually be felt in the water, because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water's about the same.
So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance.
Now, we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors.
Now, the signature whistle is a whistle that's specific to an individual dolphin, and it's like a name. (Dolphin whistling noises) And this is the best-studied sound, because it's easy to measure, really, and you'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting, for example.
Another well studied sound are echolocation clicks.
This is the dolphin's sonar. (Dolphin echolocation noises) And they use these clicks to hunt and feed.
For example, males will stimulate a female during a courtship chase.
(Laughter) Don't tell anyone. It's a secret.
And you can really feel the sound. That was my point with that.
(Laughter) So dolphins are also political animals, so they have to resolve conflicts.
(Dolphin noises) And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting.
Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight.
Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins.
For example, they babysit each other's calves.
The males have dominance displays that they use when they're chasing each other's females.
And the two species actually form temporary alliances when they're chasing sharks away.
And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony.
They synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger.
(Dolphins noises) Now, these are bottlenose dolphins, and you'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds.
(Dolphin noises) You see, they're synchronizing with their partner as well as the other dyad.
Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds, and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds, and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds.
But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery.
Two are human words, and one is a dolphin vocalizing.
So just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin.
Now, it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look a bit like human phonemes.
Now, one way to crack the code is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean, but it's a difficult job, and we actually don't have a Rosetta Stone yet.
But a second way to crack the code is to develop some technology, an interface to do two-way communication, and that's what we've been trying to do in the Bahamas and in real time.
Now, scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins.
This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida, at the Epcot Center, was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information.
So we wanted to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting.
And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity.
They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures, and they were also inviting us into dolphin games.
Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play, and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed, or sargassum in this case, around.
And they're very adept. They like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage.
She's 25 years old here, and this is her newborn, Cobalt, and he's just learning how to play this game.
(Dolphin noises) She's kind of teasing him and taunting him.
He really wants that sargassum.
Now, when dolphins solicit humans for this game, they'll often sink vertically in the water, and they'll have a little sargassum on their flipper, and they'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it, and then we'll have a little seaweed keep away game.
But when we don't dive down and get it, they'll bring it to the surface and they'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail and drop it for us like they do their calves, and then we'll pick it up and have a game.
And so we started thinking, well, wouldn't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time, their favorite toys?
So the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer, and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other.
They've got better things to do in the wild.
They might do it in captivity, but in the wild -- So we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water, and we labeled four objects they like to play with, the scarf, rope, sargassum, and also had a bow ride, which is a fun activity for a dolphin. (Whistle) And that's the scarf whistle, which is also associated with a visual symbol.
And these are artificially created whistles.
They're outside the dolphin's normal repertoire, but they're easily mimicked by the dolphins.
They could point at the visual object, or they could mimic the whistle.
Now this is video of a session.
So I've got the rope, I'm diving down, and I'm basically trying to get the dolphin's attention, because they're kind of like little kids.
You have to keep their attention.
I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy, from the dolphins using the rope sound.
Let's see if they might actually understand what that means.
(Whistle) That's the rope whistle.
(Applause) So this is only once.
We don't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles.
Okay, so here's a second toy in the water.
This is a scarf toy, and I'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal.
Now this dolphin, we call her "the scarf thief," because over the years she's absconded with about 12 scarves.
In fact, we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas.
So I'm reaching over. She's got the scarf on her right side.
And we try to not touch the animals too much, we really don't want to over-habituate them.
And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf.
So I try to give her the scarf.
But this is the moment where everything becomes possible.
The dolphin's at the keyboard.
And this sometimes went on for hours.
And I wanted to share this video with you not to show you any big breakthroughs, because they haven't happened yet, but to show you the level of intention and focus that these dolphins have, and interest in the system.
And because of this, we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology.
So we joined forces with Georgia Tech, with Thad Starner's wearable computing group, to build us an underwater wearable computer that we're calling CHAT. [CHAT: Cetacean Hearing And Telemetry] Now, instead of pushing a keyboard through the water, the diver's wearing the complete system, and it's acoustic only, so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad on the forearm, the sounds go out through an underwater speaker, if a dolphin mimics the whistle or a human plays the whistle, the sounds come in and are localized by two hydrophones.
And the real power of the system is in the real-time sound recognition, so we can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately.
So Diver A and Diver B both have a wearable computer and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle, the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water, but also as a word through bone conduction.
So Diver A plays the scarf whistle or Diver B plays the sargassum whistle to request a toy from whoever has it.
Now, how far can this kind of communication go?
We hope so and we think so.
But as we decode their natural sounds, we're also planning to put those back into the computerized system.
Likewise, we can create our own whistles, our own whistle names, and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with.
Now it may be that all our mobile technology will actually be the same technology that helps us communicate with another species down the road.
In the case of a dolphin, you know, it's a species that, well, they're probably close to our intelligence in many ways and we might not be able to admit that right now, but they live in quite a different environment, and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems.
I mean, imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed.
He said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs.
We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers, and we're already taking R2D2, painting him orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles.
Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you -- the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago, and they have been wrong.
The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills.
For example, mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive, but the research arm of the Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this, and if the track record is any guide, this competition is going to be successful.
So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all when we're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now.
It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling "the new machine age."
The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news.
This is the best economic news on the planet these days.
Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it.
This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide.
The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil.
This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society, a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, provoke each other."
It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference.
And there's actually a huge amount of truth here.
In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities.
The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation.
And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before.
["Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." — Freeman Dyson] Which brings up another great question: What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age?
Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home.
We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating.
They were touring one of the new modern factories, and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, "Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?"
If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital -- in other words, corporate profits -- we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high.
If we look at the returns to labor, in other words total wages paid out in the economy, we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction.
It looks like it might be great news for Ford, but it's actually not. If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class.
But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now.
We all know a lot of the statistics, but just to repeat one of them, median income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years, and we're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time.
The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention.
There are a set of societal challenges that I'm actually not that worried about, and they're captured by images like this.
There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us.
I'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer.
(Laughter) (Applause) So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about.
To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers.
And to make them really stereotypical, let's make them both white guys.
We're going to call him "Ted."
He's at the top of the American middle class.
His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy.
We're going to call that guy "Bill."
And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives.
For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week.
But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot.
Over this time frame, Ted has continued to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't.
Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society?
They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life.
They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work, and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils.
["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire] So with these challenges, what do we do about them?
The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: Encourage entrepreneurship, double down on infrastructure, and make sure we're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills.
But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income.
Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth.
I did a little bit of research on this notion, and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman.
I do know that education is a huge part of it.
I witnessed this firsthand.
I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it.
The school stopped in third grade, so then I entered the public school system, and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me.
We have to do better than this.
So we see some green shoots that things are getting better.
We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones.
We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while.
And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have.
I don't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough.
We're facing very tough challenges.
To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months.
And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world where we're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity.
The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known.
We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip.
And then we're off to the races, because I don't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try.
Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant.
Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, and he said, "If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance, it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production."
The great point is to give them the plain facts."
So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we're creating.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I made a film that was impossible to make, but I didn't know it was impossible, and that's how I was able to do it.
No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen.
Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, really, back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be.
When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million.
But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget.
Well, it's two things. First, it's time.
When you don't have money, you must take time, and it took me seven years to do "Mars et Avril."
The second aspect is love.
And it seems like every department had nothing, so they had to rely on our creativity and turn every problem into an opportunity.
And that brings me to the point of my talk, actually, how constraints, big creative constraints, can boost creativity.
But let me go back in time a bit.
In my early 20s, I did some graphic novels, but they weren't your usual graphic novels.
They were books telling a science fiction story through images and text, and most of the actors who are now starring in the movie adaptation, they were already involved in these books portraying characters into a sort of experimental, theatrical, simplistic way.
And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage.
And I just love this guy.
And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project, and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak, who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time, space, love, music and women.
And he was a perfect fit for the part, and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance.
He was the one who believed in me and encouraged me to do an adaptation of my books into a film, and to write, direct, and produce the film myself.
And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity.
Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet.
I mean, his agenda is booked until 2042, and he's really hard to get, and I wanted him to be in the movie, to reprise his role in the movie.
But the thing is, had I waited for him until 2042, my film wouldn't be a futuristic film anymore, so I just couldn't do that. Right?
Well, I said as a joke in a production meeting -- and this is a true story, by the way — I said, "Why don't we turn this guy into a hologram?
Because, you know, he is everywhere and nowhere on the planet at the same time, and he's an illuminated being in my mind, and he's in between reality and virtual reality, so it would make perfect sense to turn this guy into a hologram."
Everybody around the table laughed, but the joke was kind of a good solution, so that's what we ended up doing.
Here's how we did it. We shot Robert with six cameras.
He was dressed in green and he was like in a green aquarium.
Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head, so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed, and we shot only his head.
And he was wearing a green hood so that we could erase the green hood in postproduction and replace it with Robert Lepage's head.
So he became like a renaissance man, and here's what it looks like in the movie.
(Music) (Video) Robert Lepage: [As usual, Arthur's drawing didn't account for the technical challenges.
I welded the breech, but the valve is still gaping.
I tried to lift the pallets to lower the pressure in the sound box, but I might have hit a heartstring.
The instrument always ends up resembling its model.] (Music) Martin Villeneuve: Now these musical instruments that you see in this excerpt, they're my second example of how constraints can boost creativity, because I desperately needed these objects in my movie.
They are objects of desire.
They are imaginary musical instruments.
And they carry a nice story with them.
But my problem was, I didn't have the money to pay for them. I couldn't afford them.
So that's kind of a big problem too.
And, you know, I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea.
I said, "What if I have somebody else pay for them?"
(Laughter) But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women's bodies?
And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal, because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen?
Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money, but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy.
It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price, because they weren't even made.
He took a leap of faith.
And obviously I was happy because I got the instruments in my film for free, which was kind of what I tried to do.
So here they are.
And my last example of how constraints can boost creativity comes from the green, because this is a weird color, a crazy color, and you need to replace the green screens eventually and you must figure that out sooner rather than later.
And this guy is another guy I admire a lot, and I wanted him to be involved in the movie as a production designer.
But people told me, you know, Martin, it's impossible, the guy is too busy and he will say no.
Well, I said, you know what, instead of mimicking his style, I might as well call the real guy and ask him, and I sent him my books, and he answered that he was interested in working on the film with me because he could be a big fish in a small aquarium.
In other words, there was space for him to dream with me.
So here I was with one of my childhood heroes, drawing every single frame that's in the film to turn that into Montreal in the future.
And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire.
So, again, my solution was to aim for the best possible artist that I could think of.
And there's this guy in Montreal, another Quebecois called Carlos Monzon, and he's a very good VFX artist.
So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of.
So this is what happened on this movie, and that's how it got made, and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale, and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film.
I have experienced it.
And you might end up doing some crazy projects, and who knows, you might even end up going to Mars.
Thank you.
(Applause)
2014, July 5, the Ukrainian army entered Sloviansk city in eastern Ukraine.
They gathered all the locals in Lenin Square.
Then, they organized the public crucifixion of the son of a pro-Russia militant.
He was only three years old.
Refugee Galina Pyshnyak told this story to Russia's First TV channel.
In fact, this incident never happened.
I visited Sloviansk.
There is no Lenin Square.
In reality, Galina's husband was an active pro-Russia militant in Donbass.
This is just one of many examples.
Ukraine has been suffering from Russian propaganda and fake news for four years now, but Russia is not the only player in this space.
Fake news is happening all around the world.
We all know about fake news.
We see it and read it all the time.
But the thing about fake news is that we don't always know what is fake and what is real, but we base our decisions on facts we get from the press and social media.
When facts are false, decisions are wrong.
They easily become prey to populists in elections, or even take up arms.
Fake news is not only bad for journalism.
It's a threat for democracy and society.
Four years ago, unmarked soldiers entered the Crimean Peninsula, and at the same time, Russian media was going crazy with fake news about Ukraine.
So a group of journalists, including me, started a website to investigate this fake news.
We called it StopFake.
The idea was simple: take a piece of news, check it with verifiable proof like photos, videos and other strong evidence.
If it turns out to be fake, we put it on our website.
Now, StopFake is an informational hub which analyzes propaganda in all its phases.
We have 11 language versions, we have millions of views, We have taught more than 10,000 people how to distinguish true from false.
And we teach fact checkers all around the world.
StopFake has uncovered more than 1,000 fakes about Ukraine.
We've identified 18 narratives created using this fake news, such as Ukraine is a fascist state, a failed state, a state run by a junta who came to power as a result of a coup d'état.
We proved that it's not bad journalism; it's a deliberate act of misinformation.
Fake news is a powerful weapon in information warfare, but there is something we can do about it.
We all have smartphones.
When we see something interesting, it's often automatic.
But how can you not be a part of fake news?
First, if it's too dramatic, too emotional, too clickbait, then it's very likely that it isn't true.
The truth is boring sometimes.
(Laughter) Manipulations are always sexy.
This is the second point, very simple.
Look at other sites.
Check out alternative news sources.
Google names, addresses, license plates, experts and authors.
It's the only way to stop this culture of fake news.
This information warfare is not only about fake news.
Our society depends on trust: trust in our institutions, in science, trust in our leaders, trust in our news outlets.
And it's on us to find a way to rebuild trust, because fake news destroys it.
So ask yourself, what have you lost your faith in?
Where has trust been ruined for you?
And what are you going to do about it?
Thank you.
(Applause)
You're also talking about baseball.
(Laughter) You can strike out, which means you don't get to have any sexual activity.
And if you're a benchwarmer, you might be a virgin or somebody who for whatever reason isn't in the game, maybe because of your age or because of your ability or because of your skillset.
A switch-hitter is a bisexual person, and we gay and lesbian folks play for the other team.
And then there's this one: "if there's grass on the field, play ball."
And that usually refers to if a young person, specifically often a young woman, is old enough to have pubic hair, she's old enough to have sex with.
This baseball model is incredibly problematic.
And it can't result in healthy sexuality developing in young people or in adults.
So we need a new model.
I'm here today to offer you that new model.
And it's based on pizza.
Now pizza is something that is universally understood and that most people associate with a positive experience.
So let's do this.
Let's take baseball and pizza and compare it when talking about three aspects of sexual activity: the trigger for sexual activity, what happens during sexual activity, and the expected outcome of sexual activity.
So when do you play baseball?
You play baseball when it's baseball season and when there's a game on the schedule.
It's not exactly your choice.
Can you imagine saying to your coach, "Uh, I'm not really feeling it today, I think I'll sit this game out."
And when you get together to play baseball, immediately you're with two opposing teams, one playing offense, one playing defense, somebody's trying to move deeper into the field.
We're not playing with each other.
We're playing against each other.
And when you show up to play baseball, nobody needs to talk about what we're going to do or how this baseball game might be good for us.
Everybody knows the rules.
You just take your position and play the game.
But when do you have pizza?
It starts with an internal sense, an internal desire, or a need.
(Laughter) And because it's an internal desire, we actually have some sense of control over that.
I could decide that I'm hungry but know that it's not a great time to eat.
And then when we get together with someone for pizza, we're not competing with them, we're looking for an experience that both of us will share that's satisfying for both of us, and when you get together for pizza with somebody, what's the first thing you do?
You talk about it.
You talk about what you want.
You talk about what you like.
You may even negotiate it.
"How do you feel about pepperoni?" (Laughter) "Not so much, I'm kind of a mushroom guy myself."
"Well, maybe we can go half and half."
And even if you've had pizza with somebody for a very long time, don't you still say things like, "Should we get the usual?"
(Laughter) "Or maybe something a little more adventurous?"
Okay, so when you're playing baseball, so if we talk about during sexual activity, when you're playing baseball, you're just supposed to round the bases in the proper order one at a time.
You can't hit the ball and run to right field.
That doesn't work.
And you also can't get to second base and say, "I like it here. I'm going to stay here."
No.
And also, of course, with baseball, there's, like, the specific equipment and a specific skill set.
Not everybody can play baseball. It's pretty exclusive.
Okay, but what about pizza?
There are a million different kinds of pizza.
There's a million different toppings.
There's a million different ways to eat pizza.
And in this case, difference is good, because that's going to increase the chance that we're having a satisfying experience.
And lastly, what's the expected outcome of baseball?
Well, in baseball, you play to win.
You score as many runs as you can.
There's always a winner in baseball, and that means there's always a loser in baseball.
But what about pizza?
(Laughter) So what if we could take this pizza model and overlay it on top of sexuality education?
A lot of sexuality education that happens today is so influenced by the baseball model, and it sets up education that can't help but produce unhealthy sexuality in young people.
And those young people become older people.
They're all exclamation points.
And who gets to answer those questions?
So remember, when we're thinking about sexuality education and sexual activity, baseball, you're out.
Pizza is the way to think about healthy, satisfying sexual activity, and good, comprehensive sexuality education.
(Applause)
Well, Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s, said that, "We overestimate technology in the short term, and we underestimate it in the long term."
And I think that's some of the fear that we see about jobs disappearing from artificial intelligence and robots.
That we're overestimating the technology in the short term.
Back in 1957, there was a Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie.
So you know how it ended up, Spencer Tracy brought a computer, a mainframe computer of 1957, in to help the librarians.
Well of course a mainframe computer in 1957 wasn't much use for that job.
The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear.
It wasn't until the Internet came into play, the web came into play and search engines came into play that the need for librarians went down.
And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today.
By the way, the wages for librarians went up faster than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period, because librarians became partners of computers.
Computers became tools, and they got more tools that they could use and become more effective during that time.
Same thing happened in offices.
Back in the old days, people used spreadsheets.
But here was an interesting thing that came along.
With the revolution around 1980 of P.C.'s, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers, not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers.
So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets.
Now today, we're starting to see robots in our lives.
On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot.
When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick, as they used to do up until about 2002, they now send the robot out.
So the robot takes over the dangerous jobs.
On the right are some TUGs from a company called Aethon in Pittsburgh.
These are in hundreds of hospitals across the U.S.
They take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen.
And it frees up the nurses and the nurse's aides from doing that mundane work of just mechanically pushing stuff around to spend more time with patients.
In fact, robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways.
But I think when it comes to factory robots, people are sort of afraid, because factory robots are dangerous to be around.
In order to program them, you have to understand six-dimensional vectors and quaternions.
And ordinary people can't interact with them.
And I think we really have to look at technologies that ordinary workers can interact with.
And so I want to tell you today about Baxter, which we've been talking about.
And Baxter, I see, as a way -- a first wave of robot that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting.
We've got a conveyor there.
The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense.
The eyes are on the screen there.
The eyes look ahead where the robot's going to move.
So a person that's interacting with the robot understands where it's going to reach and isn't surprised by its motions.
And Baxter's safe to interact with.
You wouldn't want to do this with a current industrial robot.
But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface.
And so Chris is going to come and grab the other arm now.
And when he grabs an arm, it goes into zero-force gravity-compensated mode and graphics come up on the screen.
And the robot figures out, ah, he must mean I want to put stuff down.
It puts a little icon there.
He comes over here, and he gets the fingers to grasp together, and the robot infers, ah, you want an object for me to pick up.
He's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from.
It just moves it around, and the robot figures out that was an area search.
And now he's going to go off and train the visual appearance of that object while we continue talking.
This is Mildred.
Mildred's a factory worker in Connecticut.
She's worked on the line for over 20 years.
One hour after she saw her first industrial robot, she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory.
She decided she really liked robots.
And it was doing the simple repetitive tasks that she had had to do beforehand.
Now she's got the robot doing it.
When we first went out to talk to people in factories about how we could get robots to interact with them better, one of the questions we asked them was, "Do you want your children to work in a factory?"
They're older, and they're getting older and older.
There aren't many young people coming into factory work.
And as their tasks become more onerous on them, we need to give them tools that they can collaborate with, so that they can be part of the solution, so that they can continue to work and we can continue to produce in the U.S.
And so our vision is that Mildred who's the line worker becomes Mildred the robot trainer.
We're not giving them tools that they have to go and study for years and years in order to use.
There's two great forces that are both volitional but inevitable.
That's climate change and demographics.
Demographics is really going to change our world.
This is the percentage of adults who are working age.
And it's gone down slightly over the last 40 years.
But over the next 40 years, it's going to change dramatically, even in China.
The percentage of adults who are working age drops dramatically.
And turned up the other way, the people who are retirement age goes up very, very fast, as the baby boomers get to retirement age.
But more than that, as we get older we get more frail and we can't do all the tasks we used to do.
If we look at the statistics on the ages of caregivers, before our eyes those caregivers are getting older and older.
That's happening statistically right now.
And as the number of people who are older, above retirement age and getting older, as they increase, there will be less people to take care of them.
And I think we're really going to have to have robots to help us.
I mean robots doing the things that we normally do for ourselves but get harder as we get older.
Getting the groceries in from the car, up the stairs, into the kitchen.
Or even, as we get very much older, driving our cars to go visit people.
And I think robotics gives people a chance to have dignity as they get older by having control of the robotic solution.
And so I really think that we're going to be spending more time with robots like Baxter and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives. And that we will -- Here, Baxter, it's good.
And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years as part of our everyday lives.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)
Everything is interconnected.
We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York.
When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day.
And he pointed up to the sky, and he said, "Look, do you see that?
That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals."
In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "Mom, you should do that."
And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do.
These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere.
Storm chasing is a very tactile experience.
There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles.
And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues.
I've learned to respect the lightning.
My hair used to be straight.
(Laughter) I'm just kidding.
(Laughter) What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds.
As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet.
(Applause)
So what does it mean for a machine to be athletic?
We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters, or quads, for short.
Quads have been around for a long time.
By controlling the speeds of these four propellers, these machines can roll, pitch, yaw, and accelerate along their common orientation.
Quads are extremely agile, but this agility comes at a cost.
They are inherently unstable, and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly.
Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system.
It's used to locate objects in the space that have these reflective markers on them.
This data is then sent to another laptop that is running estimation and control algorithms, which in turn sends commands to the quad, which is also running estimation and control algorithms.
The bulk of our research is algorithms.
It's the magic that brings these machines to life.
So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete?
We use something broadly called model-based design.
We first capture the physics with a mathematical model of how the machines behave.
We then use a branch of mathematics called control theory to analyze these models and also to synthesize algorithms for controlling them.
For example, that's how we can make the quad hover.
We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations.
We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad.
Let me demonstrate the strength of this approach.
Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole.
With a little bit of practice, it's pretty straightforward for a human being to do this, although we do have the advantage of having two feet on the ground and the use of our very versatile hands.
It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don't use my hands.
Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top, which means that it can be located in the space.
(Applause) (Applause ends) You can notice that this quad is making fine adjustments to keep the pole balanced.
How did we design the algorithms to do this?
Here, you see that it's stable, and even if I give it little nudges, it goes back -- to the nice, balanced position.
We can also augment the model to include where we want the quad to be in space.
Using this pointer, made out of reflective markers, I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me.
(Laughter) The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms, designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory.
Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it.
In fact, the system doesn't even know that the glass is there.
Like before, I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space.
(Applause) (Applause ends) Okay, you should be asking yourself, why doesn't the water fall out of the glass?
Two facts.
The first is that gravity acts on all objects in the same way.
The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass, pointing up.
You put these two things together, the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects, which at these speeds are negligible.
And that's why you don't need to model the glass.
It naturally doesn't spill, no matter what the quad does.
(Applause) (Applause ends) The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others, and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard.
In this instance, carrying a glass of water is easy.
Balancing a pole is hard.
We've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured.
Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly, because there are four degrees of freedom to control: roll, pitch, yaw and acceleration.
Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four.
(Laughter) If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers, we discover that there's an unconventional way to fly it.
We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration.
Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible.
In this instance, this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage, just like human athletes do, instead of building machines with redundancy.
Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry?
Instead, what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly, observe how it finishes the maneuver, and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better.
(Laughter) (Applause) Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports.
(Laughter) (Applause) (Applause ends) This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large.
The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second.
We first figure out where the ball is going.
We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from.
Third, a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball.
Twenty milliseconds later, the whole process is repeated until the quad strikes the ball.
These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net.
(Applause) (Applause ends) They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me.
Notice that, at full extension, these quads are vertical.
(Applause) In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch.
The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me.
Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second.
Everything we have seen so far has been about the machines and their capabilities.
What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being?
What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming.
It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time.
Similar to the pointer that I used earlier, we can use this as inputs to the system.
We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures.
(Applause) Interaction doesn't have to be virtual.
Take this quad, for example.
It's trying to stay at a fixed point in space.
If I try to move it out of the way, it fights me, and moves back to where it wants to be.
We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad.
Once we know this force, we can also change the laws of physics, as far as the quad is concerned, of course.
Here, the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid.
I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration.
So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics.
Let's have a little bit of fun with this.
For what you will see next, these quads will initially behave as if they were on Pluto.
As time goes on, gravity will be increased until we're all back on planet Earth, but I assure you we won't get there.
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Whew!
You're all thinking now, these guys are having way too much fun, and you're probably also asking yourself, why exactly are they building machine athletes?
Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities.
Others think that it has more of a social role, that it's used to bind the group.
Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits.
Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused.
This is not a technical choice we are faced with; it's a social one.
Let's make the right choice, the choice that brings out the best in the future of machines, just like athleticism in sports can bring out the best in us.
Let me introduce you to the wizards behind the green curtain.
They're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team.
(Applause) Federico Augugliaro, Dario Brescianini, Markus Hehn, Sergei Lupashin, Mark Muller and Robin Ritz.
Look out for them. They're destined for great things.
Thank you.
I will talk to you today about the failure of leadership in global politics and in our globalizing economy.
But I will in the end urge you to rethink, actually take risks, and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy.
Failure of leadership.
What is the failure of leadership today?
And why is our democracy not working?
Well, I believe that the failure of leadership is the fact that we have taken you out of the process.
Let's start from the beginning.
Let's start from democracy.
Well, if you go back to the Ancient Greeks, it was a revelation, a discovery, that we had the potential, together, to be masters of our own fate, to be able to examine, to learn, to imagine, and then to design a better life.
And democracy was the political innovation which protected this freedom, because we were liberated from fear so that our minds in fact, whether they be despots or dogmas, could be the protagonists.
Democracy was the political innovation that allowed us to limit the power, whether it was of tyrants or of high priests, their natural tendency to maximize power and wealth.
Well, I first began to understand this when I was 14 years old.
You see, then Greece was under control of a very powerful establishment which was strangling the country, and my father was heading a promising movement to reimagine Greece, to imagine a Greece where freedom reigned and where, maybe, the people, the citizens, could actually rule their own country.
I used to join him in many of the campaigns, and you can see me here next to him.
You may not recognize me because I used to part my hair differently there.
(Laughter) So in 1967, elections were coming, things were going well in the campaign, the house was electric.
Then one night, military trucks drive up to our house.
They find me up on the top terrace.
A sergeant comes up to me with a machine gun, puts it to my head, and says, "Tell me where your father is or I will kill you."
Well, we survived, but democracy did not.
Seven brutal years of dictatorship which we spent in exile.
Sunday evening, Brussels, April 2010.
I'm sitting with my counterparts in the European Union.
I had just been elected prime minister, but I had the unhappy privilege of revealing a truth that our deficit was not 6 percent, as had been officially reported only a few days earlier before the elections by the previous government, but actually 15.6 percent.
But despite our electoral mandate, the markets mistrusted us.
So I went to Brussels on a mission to make the case for a united European response, one that would calm the markets and give us the time to make the necessary reforms.
Picture yourselves around the table in Brussels.
Negotiations are difficult, the tensions are high, progress is slow, and then, 10 minutes to 2, a prime minister shouts out, "We have to finish in 10 minutes."
I said, "Why? These are important decisions.
Another prime minister comes in and says, "No, we have to have an agreement now, because in 10 minutes, the markets are opening up in Japan, and there will be havoc in the global economy."
We quickly came to a decision in those 10 minutes.
This time it was not the military, but the markets, that put a gun to our collective heads.
What followed were the most difficult decisions in my life, painful to me, painful to my countrymen, imposing cuts, austerity, often on those not to blame for the crisis.
Greece, yes, triggered the Euro crisis, and some people blame me for pulling the trigger.
But I think today that most would agree that Greece was only a symptom of much deeper structural problems in the eurozone, vulnerabilities in the wider global economic system, vulnerabilities of our democracies.
Our democracies are trapped by systems too big to fail, or, more accurately, too big to control.
I, overly optimistically, had hoped that this crisis was an opportunity for Greece, for Europe, for the world, to make radical democratic transformations in our institutions.
Instead, I had a very humbling experience.
In Brussels, when we tried desperately again and again to find common solutions, I realized that not one, not one of us, had ever dealt with a similar crisis.
But worse, we were trapped by our collective ignorance.
We were led by our fears.
And our fears led to a blind faith in the orthodoxy of austerity.
Instead of reaching out to the common or the collective wisdom in our societies, investing in it to find more creative solutions, we reverted to political posturing.
Those profligate, idle, ouzo-swilling, Zorba-dancing Greeks, they are the problem. Punish them!
Well, a convenient but unfounded stereotype that sometimes hurt even more than austerity itself.
This could be the pattern that leaders follow again and again when we deal with these complex, cross-border problems, whether it's climate change, whether it's migration, whether it's the financial system.
And doing so will only test the faith of our citizens, of our peoples, even more in the democratic process.
It's no wonder that many political leaders, and I don't exclude myself, have lost the trust of our people.
When riot police have to protect parliaments, a scene which is increasingly common around the world, then there's something deeply wrong with our democracies.
That's why I called for a referendum to have the Greek people own and decide on the terms of the rescue package.
My European counterparts, some of them, at least, said, "You can't do this.
I said, "We need to, before we restore confidence in the markets, we need to restore confidence and trust amongst our people."
Since leaving office, I have had time to reflect.
We have weathered the storm, in Greece and in Europe, but we remain challenged.
If politics is the power to imagine and use our potential, well then 60-percent youth unemployment in Greece, and in other countries, certainly is a lack of imagination if not a lack of compassion.
So far, we've thrown economics at the problem, actually mostly austerity, and certainly we could have designed alternatives, a different strategy, a green stimulus for green jobs, or mutualized debt, Eurobonds which would support countries in need from market pressures, these would have been much more viable alternatives.
So let's try something else.
Let's see how we can bring people back to the process.
Let's throw democracy at the problem.
Again, the Ancient Greeks, with all their shortcomings, believed in the wisdom of the crowd at their best moments. In people we trust.
Democracy could not work without the citizens deliberating, debating, taking on public responsibilities for public affairs.
Average citizens often were chosen for citizen juries to decide on critical matters of the day.
Science, theater, research, philosophy, games of the mind and the body, they were daily exercises.
You see, in Ancient Greece, in ancient Athens, that term originated there.
A person who is self-centered, secluded, excluded, someone who doesn't participate or even examine public affairs.
And participation took place in the agora, the agora having two meanings, both a marketplace and a place where there was political deliberation.
Above government, above markets was the direct rule of the people.
Today we have globalized the markets but we have not globalized our democratic institutions.
So our politicians are limited to local politics, while our citizens, even though they see a great potential, are prey to forces beyond their control.
How do we democratize globalization?
And I'm not talking about the necessary reforms of the United Nations or the G20.
Well, this is exactly where I think Europe fits in.
Europe, despite its recent failures, is the world's most successful cross-border peace experiment.
So let's see if it can't be an experiment in global democracy, a new kind of democracy.
Let's see if we can't design a European agora, not simply for products and services, but for our citizens, where they can work together, deliberate, learn from each other, exchange between art and cultures, where they can come up with creative solutions.
Let's imagine that European citizens actually have the power to vote directly for a European president, or citizen juries chosen by lottery which can deliberate on critical and controversial issues, a European-wide referendum where our citizens, as the lawmakers, vote on future treaties.
And here's an idea: Why not have the first truly European citizens by giving our immigrants, not Greek or German or Swedish citizenship, but a European citizenship?
And make sure we actually empower the unemployed by giving them a voucher scholarship where they can choose to study anywhere in Europe.
Where our common identity is democracy, where our education is through participation, and where participation builds trust and solidarity rather than exclusion and xenophobia.
Europe of and by the people, a Europe, an experiment in deepening and widening democracy beyond borders.
Now, some might accuse me of being naive, putting my faith in the power and the wisdom of the people.
Believe me, I have been, I am, part of today's political system, and I know things must change.
We must revive politics as the power to imagine, reimagine, and redesign for a better world.
But I also know that this disruptive force of change won't be driven by the politics of today.
Thank you.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: You seem to describe a political leadership that is kind of unprepared and a prisoner of the whims of the financial markets, and that scene in Brussels that you describe, to me, as a citizen, is terrifying.
Help us understand how you felt after the decision.
It was not a good decision, clearly, but how do you feel after that, not as the prime minister, but as George?
George Papandreou: Well, obviously there were constraints which didn't allow me or others to make the types of decisions we would have wanted, and obviously I had hoped that we would have the time to make the reforms which would have dealt with the deficit rather than trying to cut the deficit which was the symptom of the problem.
And that hurt. That hurt because that, first of all, hurt the younger generation, and not only, many of them are demonstrating outside, but I think this is one of our problems.
When we face these crises, we have kept the potential, the huge potential of our society out of this process, and we are closing in on ourselves in politics, and I think we need to change that, to really find new participatory ways using the great capabilities that now exist even in technology but not only in technology, the minds that we have, and I think we can find solutions which are much better, but we have to be open.
BG: You seem to suggest that the way forward is more Europe, and that is not to be an easy discourse right now in most European countries.
It's rather the other way -- more closed borders and less cooperation and maybe even stepping out of some of the different parts of the European construction.
How do you reconcile that?
GP: Well, I think one of the worst things that happened during this crisis is that we started a blame game.
And the fundamental idea of Europe is that we can cooperate beyond borders, go beyond our conflicts and work together.
Now, more Europe for me is not simply giving more power to Brussels.
It is actually giving more power to the citizens of Europe, that is, really making Europe a project of the people.
So that, I think, would be a way to answer some of the fears that we have in our society.
BG: George, thank you for coming to TED.
GP: Thank you very much.BG: Thank you.(Applause)
I write fiction sci-fi thrillers, so if I say "killer robots," you'd probably think something like this.
But I'm actually not here to talk about fiction.
I'm here to talk about very real killer robots, autonomous combat drones.
Now, I'm not referring to Predator and Reaper drones, which have a human making targeting decisions.
I'm talking about fully autonomous robotic weapons that make lethal decisions about human beings all on their own.
There's actually a technical term for this: lethal autonomy.
Now, lethally autonomous killer robots would take many forms -- flying, driving, or just lying in wait.
And actually, they're very quickly becoming a reality.
These are two automatic sniper stations currently deployed in the DMZ between North and South Korea.
Both of these machines are capable of automatically identifying a human target and firing on it, the one on the left at a distance of over a kilometer.
Now, in both cases, there's still a human in the loop to make that lethal firing decision, but it's not a technological requirement. It's a choice.
And it's that choice that I want to focus on, because as we migrate lethal decision-making from humans to software, we risk not only taking the humanity out of war, but also changing our social landscape entirely, far from the battlefield.
That's because the way humans resolve conflict shapes our social landscape.
And this has always been the case, throughout history.
For example, these were state-of-the-art weapons systems in 1400 A.D.
Now they were both very expensive to build and maintain, but with these you could dominate the populace, and the distribution of political power in feudal society reflected that.
Gunpowder, cannon.
And pretty soon, armor and castles were obsolete, and it mattered less who you brought to the battlefield versus how many people you brought to the battlefield.
And as armies grew in size, the nation-state arose as a political and logistical requirement of defense.
Representative government began to form.
So again, the tools we use to resolve conflict shape our social landscape.
Autonomous robotic weapons are such a tool, except that, by requiring very few people to go to war, they risk re-centralizing power into very few hands, possibly reversing a five-century trend toward democracy.
Now, I think, knowing this, we can take decisive steps to preserve our democratic institutions, to do what humans do best, which is adapt.
But time is a factor.
Seventy nations are developing remotely-piloted combat drones of their own, and as you'll see, remotely-piloted combat drones are the precursors to autonomous robotic weapons.
That's because once you've deployed remotely-piloted drones, there are three powerful factors pushing decision-making away from humans and on to the weapon platform itself.
The first of these is the deluge of video that drones produce.
For example, in 2004, the U.S. drone fleet produced a grand total of 71 hours of video surveillance for analysis.
By 2011, this had gone up to 300,000 hours, outstripping human ability to review it all, but even that number is about to go up drastically.
The Pentagon's Gorgon Stare and Argus programs will put up to 65 independently operated camera eyes on each drone platform, and this would vastly outstrip human ability to review it.
And that means visual intelligence software will need to scan it for items of interest.
And that means very soon drones will tell humans what to look at, not the other way around.
But there's a second powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto machines, and that's electromagnetic jamming, severing the connection between the drone and its operator.
Now we saw an example of this in 2011 when an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone got a bit confused over Iran due to a GPS spoofing attack, but any remotely-piloted drone is susceptible to this type of attack, and that means drones will have to shoulder more decision-making.
They'll know their mission objective, and they'll react to new circumstances without human guidance.
Which brings us to, really, the third and most powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto weapons: plausible deniability.
Now we live in a global economy.
High-tech manufacturing is occurring on most continents.
Cyber espionage is spiriting away advanced designs to parts unknown, and in that environment, it is very likely that a successful drone design will be knocked off in contract factories, proliferate in the gray market.
And in that situation, sifting through the wreckage of a suicide drone attack, it will be very difficult to say who sent that weapon.
This raises the very real possibility of anonymous war.
This could tilt the geopolitical balance on its head, make it very difficult for a nation to turn its firepower against an attacker, and that could shift the balance in the 21st century away from defense and toward offense.
It could make military action a viable option not just for small nations, but criminal organizations, private enterprise, even powerful individuals.
It could create a landscape of rival warlords undermining rule of law and civil society.
Now if responsibility and transparency are two of the cornerstones of representative government, autonomous robotic weapons could undermine both.
Now you might be thinking that citizens of high-tech nations would have the advantage in any robotic war, that citizens of those nations would be less vulnerable, particularly against developing nations.
But I think the truth is the exact opposite.
I think citizens of high-tech societies are more vulnerable to robotic weapons, and the reason can be summed up in one word: data.
Data powers high-tech societies.
Cell phone geolocation, telecom metadata, social media, email, text, financial transaction data, transportation data, it's a wealth of real-time data on the movements and social interactions of people.
In short, we are more visible to machines than any people in history, and this perfectly suits the targeting needs of autonomous weapons.
What you're looking at here is a link analysis map of a social group.
Lines indicate social connectedness between individuals.
And these types of maps can be automatically generated based on the data trail modern people leave behind.
Now it's typically used to market goods and services to targeted demographics, but it's a dual-use technology, because targeting is used in another context.
Notice that certain individuals are highlighted.
These are the hubs of social networks.
These are organizers, opinion-makers, leaders, and these people also can be automatically identified from their communication patterns.
Now, if you're a marketer, you might then target them with product samples, try to spread your brand through their social group.
But if you're a repressive government searching for political enemies, you might instead remove them, eliminate them, disrupt their social group, and those who remain behind lose social cohesion and organization.
Now in a world of cheap, proliferating robotic weapons, borders would offer very little protection to critics of distant governments or trans-national criminal organizations.
Popular movements agitating for change could be detected early and their leaders eliminated before their ideas achieve critical mass.
And ideas achieving critical mass is what political activism in popular government is all about.
Anonymous lethal weapons could make lethal action an easy choice for all sorts of competing interests.
And this would put a chill on free speech and popular political action, the very heart of democracy.
And this is why we need an international treaty on robotic weapons, and in particular a global ban on the development and deployment of killer robots.
But robotic weapons might be every bit as dangerous, because they will almost certainly be used, and they would also be corrosive to our democratic institutions.
Now in November 2012 the U.S. Department of Defense issued a directive requiring a human being be present in all lethal decisions.
This temporarily effectively banned autonomous weapons in the U.S. military, but that directive needs to be made permanent.
And it could set the stage for global action.
Because we need an international legal framework for robotic weapons.
And we need it now, before there's a devastating attack or a terrorist incident that causes nations of the world to rush to adopt these weapons before thinking through the consequences.
Autonomous robotic weapons concentrate too much power in too few hands, and they would imperil democracy itself.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think there are tons of great uses for unarmed civilian drones: environmental monitoring, search and rescue, logistics.
If we have an international treaty on robotic weapons, how do we gain the benefits of autonomous drones and vehicles while still protecting ourselves against illegal robotic weapons?
I think the secret will be transparency.
We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on aircraft.
This is no different.
And every citizen should be able to download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and historically.
And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their presence.
And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.
But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system.
It would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.
We must ban the deployment and development of killer robots.
Autocratic governments and criminal organizations undoubtedly will, but let's not join them.
Autonomous robotic weapons would concentrate too much power in too few unseen hands, and that would be corrosive to representative government.
Let's make sure, for democracies at least, killer robots remain fiction.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
You know that all over the world, people fight for their freedom, fight for their rights.
Some battle oppressive governments.
Which battle do you think is harder?
Allow me to try to answer this question in the few coming minutes.
He was five at the time.
After finishing his bedtime rituals, he looked at me and he asked a question: "Mommy, are we bad people?"
I was shocked.
Earlier that day, I noticed some bruises on his face when he came from school.
He wouldn't tell me what happened.
[But now] he was ready to tell.
They told me, 'We saw your mom on Facebook.
You and your mom should be put in jail.'" I've never been afraid to tell Aboody anything.
But those questioning eyes of my son were my moment of truth, when it all came together.
You see, I'm a Saudi woman who had been put in jail for driving a car in a country where women are not supposed to drive cars.
Just for giving me his car keys, my own brother was detained twice, and he was harassed to the point he had to quit his job as a geologist, leave the country with his wife and two-year-old son.
And it wasn't about me, and it wasn't a punishment for taking the wheel and driving a few miles.
It was a punishment for daring to challenge the society's rules.
But my story goes beyond this moment of truth of mine.
It was May, 2011, and I was complaining to a work colleague about the harassments I had to face trying to find a ride back home, although I have a car and an international driver's license.
As long as I've known, women in Saudi Arabia have been always complaining about the ban, but it's been 20 years since anyone tried to do anything about it, a whole generation ago.
"But there is no law banning you from driving."
I looked it up, and he was right.
It was just a custom and traditions that are enshrined in rigid religious fatwas and imposed on women.
That realization ignited the idea of June 17, where we encouraged women to take the wheel and go drive.
A courageous woman, her name is Najla Hariri, she's a Saudi woman in the city of Jeddah, she drove a car and she announced but she didn't record a video.
We needed proof.
So I drove. I posted a video on YouTube.
And to my surprise, it got hundreds of thousands of views the first day.
What happened next, of course?
I started receiving threats to be killed, raped, just to stop this campaign.
The Saudi authorities remained very quiet.
I was in the campaign with other Saudi women and even men activists.
We wanted to know how the authorities would respond on the actual day, June 17, when women go out and drive.
So this time I asked my brother to come with me and drive by a police car.
It went fast. We were arrested, signed a pledge not to drive again, released.
Arrested again, he was sent to detention for one day, and I was sent to jail.
I wasn't sure why I was sent there, because I didn't face any charges in the interrogation.
But what I was sure of was my innocence.
I didn't break a law, and I kept my abaya — it's a black cloak we wear in Saudi Arabia before we leave the house — and my fellow prisoners kept asking me to take it off, but I was so sure of my innocence, I kept saying, "No, I'm leaving today."
Outside the jail, the whole country went into a frenzy, some attacking me badly, and others supportive and even collecting signatures in a petition to be sent to the king to release me.
June 17 comes.
The streets were packed with police cars and religious police cars, but some hundred brave Saudi women broke the ban and drove that day.
None were arrested. We broke the taboo.
(Applause) So I think by now, everyone knows that we can't drive, or women are not allowed to drive, in Saudi Arabia, but maybe few know why.
Allow me to help you answer this question.
There was this official study that was presented to the Shura Council -- it's the consultative council appointed by the king in Saudi Arabia — and it was done by a local professor, a university professor.
He claims it's done based on a UNESCO study.
And the study states, the percentage of rape, adultery, illegitimate children, even drug abuse, prostitution in countries where women drive is higher than countries where women don't drive.
I was like, "We are the last country in the world where women don't drive."
So if you look at the map of the world, that only leaves two countries: Saudi Arabia, and the other society is the rest of the world.
[BBC News: 'End of virginity' if women drive, Saudi cleric warns] (Laughter) And only then we realized it's so empowering to mock your oppressor.
This system is based on ultra-conservative traditions and customs that deal with women as if they are inferior and they need a guardian to protect them, so they need to take permission from this guardian, whether verbal or written, all their lives.
We are minors until the day we die.
And it becomes worse when it's enshrined in religious fatwas based on wrong interpretation of the sharia law, or the religious laws.
What's worst, when they become codified as laws in the system, and when women themselves believe in their inferiority, and they even fight those who try to question these rules.
So for me, it wasn't only about these attacks I had to face.
It was about living two totally different perceptions of my personality, of my person -- the villain back in my home country, and the hero outside.
Just to tell you, two stories happened in the last two years.
One of them is when I was in jail.
I'm pretty sure when I was in jail, everyone saw titles in the international media something like this during these nine days I was in jail.
But in my home country, it was a totally different picture.
It was more like this: "Manal al-Sharif faces charges of disturbing public order and inciting women to drive."
"Manal al-Sharif withdraws from the campaign."
I was asked last year to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum.
I was surrounded by this love and the support of people around me, and they looked at me as an inspiration.
At the same time, I flew back to my home country, they hated that speech so much.
The way they called it: a betrayal to the Saudi country and the Saudi people, and they even started a hashtag called #OsloTraitor on Twitter.
Some 10,000 tweets were written in that hashtag, while the opposite hashtag, #OsloHero, there was like a handful of tweets written.
More than 13,000 voters answered this poll: whether they considered me a traitor or not after that speech.
Ninety percent said yes, she's a traitor.
So it's these two totally different perceptions of my personality.
Because I believe a society will not be free if the women of that society are not free.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
But you learn lessons from these things that happen to you.
The first thing, I got out of jail, of course after I took a shower, I went online, I opened my Twitter account and my Facebook page, and I've been always very respectful to those people who are opining to me.
We sent a petition to the Shura Council in favor of lifting the ban on Saudi women, and there were, like, 3,500 citizens who believed in that and they signed that petition.
There were people like that, I just showed some examples, who are amazing, who are believing in women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and trying, and they are also facing a lot of hate because of speaking up and voicing their views.
The Shura Council that's appointed by the king, by royal decree of King Abdullah, last year there were 30 women assigned to that Council, like 20 percent.
20 percent of the Council. (Applause) The same time, finally, that Council, after rejecting our petition four times for women driving, they finally accepted it last February.
It used to be haram, forbidden, by the previous Grand Mufti.
So for me, it's not about only these small steps.
A friend once asked me, she said, "So when do you think this women driving will happen?"
I told her, "Only if women stop asking 'When?' and take action to make it now."
So I have no clue, really, how I became an activist.
So the question I started my talk with, who do you think is more difficult to face, oppressive governments or oppressive societies?
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
Once upon a time we lived in an economy of financial growth and prosperity.
This was called the Great Moderation, the misguided belief by most economists, policymakers and central banks that we have transformed into a new world of never-ending growth and prosperity.
This was seen by robust and steady GDP growth, by low and controlled inflation, by low unemployment, and controlled and low financial volatility.
But the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008, the great crash, broke this illusion.
So, as a reflection of this, we started the Financial Crisis Observatory.
We had the goal to diagnose in real time financial bubbles and identify in advance their critical time.
We developed a theory called "dragon-kings."
Dragon-kings represent extreme events which are of a class of their own.
They are special. They are outliers.
They are generated by specific mechanisms that may make them predictable, perhaps controllable.
Consider the financial price time series, a given stock, your perfect stock, or a global index.
A very good measure of the risk of this financial market is the peaks-to-valleys that represent a worst case scenario when you bought at the top and sold at the bottom.
You can look at the statistics, the frequency of the occurrence of peak-to-valleys of different sizes, which is represented in this graph.
Now, interestingly, 99 percent of the peak-to-valleys of different amplitudes can be represented by a universal power law represented by this red line here.
More interestingly, there are outliers, there are exceptions which are above this red line, occur 100 times more frequently, at least, than the extrapolation would predict them to occur based on the calibration of the 99 percent remaining peak-to-valleys.
The root mechanism of a dragon-king is a slow maturation towards instability, which is the bubble, and the climax of the bubble is often the crash.
This is similar to the slow heating of water in this test tube reaching the boiling point, where the instability of the water occurs and you have the phase transition to vapor.
And this process, which is absolutely non-linear -- cannot be predicted by standard techniques -- is the reflection of a collective emergent behavior which is fundamentally endogenous.
So the cause of the crash, the cause of the crisis has to be found in an inner instability of the system, and any tiny perturbation will make this instability occur.
Remember, black swan is this rare bird that you see once and suddenly shattered your belief that all swans should be white, so it has captured the idea of unpredictability, unknowability, that the extreme events are fundamentally unknowable.
Nothing can be further from the dragon-king concept I propose, which is exactly the opposite, that most extreme events are actually knowable and predictable.
(Laughter) There are many early warning signals that are predicted by this theory.
Let me just focus on one of them: the super-exponential growth with positive feedback.
Imagine you have an investment that returns the first year five percent, the second year 10 percent, the third year 20 percent, the next year 40 percent. Is that not marvelous?
This is a super-exponential growth.
A standard exponential growth corresponds to a constant growth rate, let's say, of 10 percent The point is that, many times during bubbles, there are positive feedbacks which can be of many times, such that previous growths enhance, push forward, increase the next growth through this kind of super-exponential growth, which is very trenchant, not sustainable.
And the key idea is that the mathematical solution of this class of models exhibit finite-time singularities, which means that there is a critical time where the system will break, will change regime.
It may be a crash. It may be just a plateau, something else.
We have applied this theory early on, that was our first success, to the diagnostic of the rupture of key elements on the iron rocket.
Using acoustic emission, you know, this little noise that you hear a structure emit, sing to you when they are stressed, and reveal the damage going on, there's a collective phenomenon of positive feedback, the more damage gives the more damage, so you can actually predict, within, of course, a probability band, when the rupture will occur.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the same type of theory applies to biology and medicine, parturition, the act of giving birth, epileptic seizures.
So if you measure the precursor signal, you can actually identify pre- and post-maturity problems in advance.
We have applied this theory to many systems, landslides, glacier collapse, even to the dynamics of prediction of success: blockbusters, YouTube videos, movies, and so on.
But perhaps the most important application is for finance, and this theory illuminates, I believe, the deep reason for the financial crisis that we have gone through.
This is rooted in 30 years of history of bubbles, starting in 1980, with the global bubble crashing in 1987, followed by many other bubbles.
The biggest one was the "new economy" Internet bubble in 2000, crashing in 2000, the real estate bubbles in many countries, financial derivative bubbles everywhere, stock market bubbles also everywhere, commodity and all bubbles, debt and credit bubbles -- bubbles, bubbles, bubbles.
We had a global bubble.
This is a measure of global overvaluation of all markets, expressing what I call an illusion of a perpetual money machine that suddenly broke in 2007.
The problem is that we see the same process, in particular through quantitative easing, of a thinking of a perpetual money machine nowadays to tackle the crisis since 2008 in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan.
This has very important implications to understand the failure of quantitative easing as well as austerity measures as long as we don't attack the core, the structural cause of this perpetual money machine thinking.
Now, these are big claims.
Why would you believe me?
These are a few of the major bubbles that we have lived through in recent history.
Again, many interesting stories for each of them.
We all know the Chinese miracle.
This is the expression of the stock market of a massive bubble, a factor of three, 300 percent in just a few years.
In September 2007, I was invited as a keynote speaker of a macro hedge fund management conference, and I showed to the conference a prediction that by the end of 2007, this bubble would change regime.
There might be a crash. Certainly not sustainable.
You know, they had made billions just surfing this bubble until now.
They told me, "Didier, yeah, the market might be overvalued, but you forget something.
There is the Beijing Olympic Games coming in August 2008, and it's very clear that the Chinese government is controlling the economy and doing what it takes to also avoid any wave and control the stock market."
Three weeks after my presentation, the markets lost 20 percent and went through a phase of volatility, upheaval, and a total market loss of 70 percent until the end of the year.
The Chinese market collapsed, but it rebounded.
In 2009, we also identified that this new bubble, a smaller one, was unsustainable, so we published again a prediction, in advance, stating that by August 2009, the market will correct, will not continue on this track.
Our critics, reading the prediction, said, "No, it's not possible.
The Chinese government is there.
They have learned their lesson. They will control.
They want to benefit from the growth."
Perhaps these critics have not learned their lesson previously.
The same critics then said, "Ah, yes, but you published your prediction.
It was not a prediction."
Maybe I am very powerful then.
Now, this is interesting.
It shows that it's essentially impossible until now to develop a science of economics because we are sentient beings who anticipate and there is a problem of self-fulfilling prophesies.
So we invented a new way of doing science.
We created the Financial Bubble Experiment.
The idea is the following. We monitor the markets.
We don't release the report. It's kept secret.
But with modern encrypting techniques, we have a hash, we publish a public key, and six months later, we release the report, and there is authentication.
The next day, the market started to change regime, course.
This is not a crash.
This is just the third or fourth act of a massive bubble in the making.
Wherever we look, it's observable: in the biosphere, in the atmosphere, in the ocean, showing these super-exponential trajectories characterizing an unsustainable path and announcing a phase transition.
So there are bubbles everywhere.
But is it not the case that this is probably one of the biggest gaps of mankind, which has the responsibility to steer our societies and our planet toward sustainability in the face of growing challenges and crises?
But the dragon-king theory gives hope.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal.
What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars -- (Laughter) use the words, " ... it all just sounds so, so simple."
I'll leave that to others.
But I do have an idea, and that idea is called Housing for Health.
Housing for Health works with poor people.
It works in the places where they live, and the work is done to improve their health.
Over the last 28 years, this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia and, more recently, overseas, and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments.
It can improve health and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty.
I'm going to start where the story began -- 1985, in Central Australia.
A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man, was running a health service.
Eighty percent of what walked in the door, in terms of illness, was infectious disease -- third world, developing world infectious disease, caused by a poor living environment.
Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs.
He got a medical doctor.
And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project.
That was our task.
First step, the medical doctor went away for about six months.
And he worked on what were to become these nine health goals -- what were we aiming at?
[The 9 Healthy Living Practices: Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition, crowding, animals, dust, temperature, injury] I was very unimpressed. Big ideas need big words, and preferably a lot of them.
This didn't fit the bill.
What I didn't see and what you can't see was that he'd assembled thousands of pages of local, national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets.
The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason.
We worked with the community, not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand.
And the highest priority, you see on the screen, is washing people once a day, particularly children.
Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question.
This morning before you came, who could have had a wash using a shower?
I'm going to ask you to do some more work.
OK. Let's see if your shower in that house is working.
You and your kids are fine.
Why? Because you're all too old.
And before you get offended and leave, I've got to say that being too old, in this case, means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think, is over five years of age.
And why?
You've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five.
And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem, mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure, needing dialysis at age 40.
And 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet.
These are by a simple, standard test.
And the same tests for the electrical system and the toilets.
Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure -- they're actually about improving houses.
We start on day one of every project.
We arrive in the morning with tools, tons of equipment, trades, and we train up a local team on the first day to start work.
By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning.
That work continues for six to 12 months, until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house.
That's our average budget.
At the end of six months to a year, we test every house again.
It's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house.
And for a whole house, the nine healthy living practices, we test, check and fix 250 items in every house.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) The teams do a great job, and that's their work.
Why are the houses in such poor condition?
Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance -- the sort of things that happen in all our houses.
Things wear out, should have been done by state government or local government, simply not done, the house doesn't work.
And if you've lived in Australia in the last 30 years, the final cause -- you will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses.
Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage, misuse or abuse of any sort.
We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem.
And we'll go a lot further than that; the people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution.
Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia -- over 75 at the minute -- are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in.
Our work's always had a focus on health.
The developing world bug, trachoma, causes blindness.
It's a developing-world illness, and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s, where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes, doing damage.
We put washing facilities in the school as well, so kids can wash their faces many times during the day.
We call up the doctor of dust, and there is such a person.
He was loaned to us by a mining company.
He controls dust on mining company sites.
And he came out and, within a day, it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground, the wind-driven dust -- so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids.
We tested and we reduced the dust.
So how do we do that?
As our Aboriginal mate said, "You white fellows ought to get out more."
(Laughter) And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug.
The dung beetles ate the camel dung, the flies died through lack of food, and trachoma dropped.
We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes.
And finally, you get a good eye.
All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference.
The New South Wales Department of Health, that radical organization, did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales.
And they found a 40 percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment -- a 40 percent reduction.
(Applause) Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places, I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal.
And what a beautiful place to go.
We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed.
We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families.
It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house.
The smoke coming off that timber is choking, and in an enclosed house, you simply can't breathe.
Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure.
But all of a sudden now there was a second problem: How do we actually get the smoke down?
Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste, put it into a chamber, out of that, extract biogas, methane gas.
The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day -- clean, smokeless and free for the family.
And the answer from the Nepali team who's working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous -- we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim.
But as we all sit here today, there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby.
Well over 1,000 people use those toilets.
Kanji Maya, she's a mother, and a proud one.
She's probably right now cooking lunch for her family on biogas, smokeless fuel.
Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke.
Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops.
And that, to me, is the key.
(Applause) People are not the problem.
None of those are limited by geography, by skin color or by religion.
The common link between all the work we've had to do is one thing, and that's poverty.
Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s, not too far from here, he said that like slavery and apartheid, "Poverty is not natural.
It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."
I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing -- I think -- extraordinary work, that have actually improved health, and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty.
(Applause)
I'm going to try to give you a view of the world as I see it, the problems and the opportunities that we face, and then ask the question if we should be optimistic or pessimistic.
Let me start off showing you an Al Gore movie that you may have seen before.
Now, you've all seen "Inconvenient Truth." This is a little more inconvenient.
(Video): Man: ... extremely dangerous questions.
Because, with our present knowledge, we have no idea what would happen.
Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization.
Due to our release, through factories and automobiles every year, of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide -- which helps air absorb heat from the sun -- our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.
Well, it's been calculated a few degrees' rise in the earth's temperature would melt the polar ice caps.
And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley.
Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.
For, in weather, we're not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself.
Well, it depends, really, on what your goals are.
And I think, as my goals, I always go back to Gandhi's talisman.
When Mahatma Gandhi was asked, "How do you know if the next act that you are about to do is the right one or the wrong one?" he said, "Consider the face of the poorest, most vulnerable human being that you ever chanced upon, and ask yourself if the act that you contemplate will be of benefit to that person.
For those of us in this room, it's not just the poorest and the most vulnerable individual, it's the community, it's the culture, it's the world itself.
And the trends for those who are at the periphery of our society, who are the poorest and the most vulnerable, the trends give rise to a great case for pessimism.
Let's review them both. First of all, the megatrends.
There's two degrees, or three degrees of climate change baked into the system.
It will disproportionately harm the poorest and the most vulnerable, as will the increasing rise of population.
Even though we've dodged Paul Ehrlich's population bomb, and we will not see 20 billion people in this decade, as he had forecast, we eat as if we were 20 billion.
And we consume so much that again, a rise of 6.5 billion to 9.5 billion in our grandchildren's lifetime will disproportionately hurt the poorest and the most vulnerable.
That's why they migrate to cities.
The rural areas are no longer producing as much food as they did.
The green revolution never reached Africa.
And with desertification, sandstorms, the Gobi Desert, the Ogaden, we are finding increasing difficulty of a hectare to produce as many calories as it did even 15 years ago.
So humans are turning more towards animal consumption.
In Africa last year, Africans ate 600 million wild animals, and consumed two billion kilograms of bush meat.
Their fitness for creating pandemics we are unaware of, but we are ripe for zoonotic-borne, emerging communicable diseases.
Increasingly, I would say explosive growth of technology.
Most of us are the beneficiaries of that growth. But it has a dark side -- in bioweapons, and in technology that puts us on a collision course to magnify any anger, hatred or feeling of marginalization.
And in fact, with increasing globalization -- for which there are big winners and even bigger losers -- today the world is more diverse and unfair than perhaps it has ever been in history.
One percent of us own 40 percent of all the goods and services.
What will happen if the billion people today who live on less than one dollar a day rise to three billion in the next 30 years?
Last week, Bill Clinton at the TED Awards said, "This situation is unprecedented, unequal, unfair and unstable."
So there's lots of reason for pessimism.
Darfur is, at its origin, a resource war.
Last year, there were 85,000 riots in China, 230 a day, that required police or military intervention.
Most of them were about resources.
We are facing an unprecedented number, scale of disasters.
Some are weather-related, human-rights related, epidemics.
And the newly emerging diseases may make H5N1 and bird flu a quaint forerunner of things to come. It's a destabilized world.
For some, it will lead to anger, religious and sectarian violence and terrorism.
For others, withdrawal, nihilism, materialism.
For us, where does it take us, as social activists and entrepreneurs?
Let's look at one case, the case of Bangladesh.
First, even if carbon dioxide emissions stopped today, global warming would continue.
And even with global warming -- if you can see these blue lines, the dotted line shows that even if emissions of greenhouse gasses stopped today, the next decades will see rising sea levels.
So here's Bangladesh.
70 percent of Bangladesh is at less than five feet above sea level.
Now we're looking down south, through the Kali Gandaki.
And we're going to cruise down and take a look at Bangladesh and see what the impact will be of twin increases in water coming from the north, and in the seas rising from the south.
Looking at the five major rivers that feed Bangladesh.
And now let's look from the south, looking up, and let's see this in relief.
As many as 100 million refugees from Bangladesh could be expected to migrate into India and into China.
This is the difficulty that one country faces.
But if you look at the globe, all around the earth, wherever there is low-lying area, populated areas near the water, you will find increase in sea level that will challenge our way of life.
Sub-Saharan Africa, and even our own San Francisco Bay Area.
Global warming is something that happens to all of us, all at once.
As are these newly emerging communicable diseases, names that you hadn't heard 20 years ago: ebola, lhasa fever, monkey pox.
With the erosion of the green belt separating animals from humans, we live in each other's viral environment.
Do you remember, 20 years ago, no one had ever heard of West Nile fever?
Do you remember no one had heard of ebola until we heard of hundreds of people dying in Central Africa from it?
It's just the beginning, unfortunately.
It's more than enough reason for pessimism.
We've seen the eradication of smallpox.
We may see the eradication of polio this year.
We may see the eradication of guinea worm next year -- there are only 35,000 cases left in the world.
And we've seen a new disease, not like the 30 novel emerging communicable diseases.
This disease is called sudden wealth syndrome. (Laughter) It's an amazing phenomenon.
But they're using their wealth in a way that their forefathers never did.
They're not waiting until they die to create foundations.
They're actively guiding their money, their resources, their hearts, their commitments, to make the world a better place.
We all felt that we were part of it, that a better world was right around the corner, that we were watching the birth of a world free of hatred and violence and prejudice.
Today, there's another kind of movement. It's a movement to save the earth.
It's just beginning.
Five weeks ago, a group of activists from the business community gathered together to stop a Texas utility from building nine coal-fired electrical plants that would have contributed to destroying the environment.
Six months ago, a group of business activists gathered together to join with the Republican governor in California to pass AB 32, the most far-reaching legislation in environmental history.
Al Gore made presentations in the House and the Senate as an expert witness.
Can you imagine? (Laughter) We're seeing an entente cordiale between science and religion that five years ago I would not have believed, as the evangelical community has understood the desperate situation of global warming.
And now 4,000 churches have joined the environmental movement.
The European 20-20-20 plan is an amazing breakthrough, something that should make all of us feel that hope is on the horizon.
And on April 14th, there will be Step Up Day, where there will be a thousand individual mobilized social activist movements in the United States on protest against legislation -- pushing for legislation to stop global warming.
And on July 7th, around the world, I learned only yesterday, there will be global Live Earth concerts.
And you can feel this optimistic move to save the earth in the air.
Now, that doesn't mean that people understand that global warming hurts the poorest and the weakest the most.
That means that people are beginning the first step, which is acting out of their own self-interest.
But I am seeing in the major funders, in CARE, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hewlett, Mercy Corps, you guys, Google, so many other organizations, a beginning of understanding that we need to work not just on primary prevention of global warming, but on the secondary prevention of the consequences of global warming on the poorest and the most vulnerable.
And you've heard so many inspiring stories here, and I heard so many last night that I thought I would share a little bit of mine.
And I lived in a Himalayan monastery, and I studied with a very wise teacher, who kicked me out of the monastery one day and told me that it was my destiny -- it felt like Yoda -- it is your destiny to go to work for WHO and to help eradicate smallpox, at a time when there was no smallpox program.
It should make you optimistic that smallpox no longer exists because it was the worst disease in history.
In the Summer of Love, in 1967, two million people, children, died of smallpox.
It's not ancient history.
When you read the biblical plague of boils, that was smallpox.
To eradicate smallpox, we had to gather the largest United Nations army in history.
We visited every house in India, searching for smallpox -- 120 million houses, once every month, for nearly two years.
In a cruel reversal, after we had almost conquered smallpox -- and this is what you must learn as a social entrepreneur, the realm of the final inch.
When we had almost eradicated smallpox, it came back again, because the company town of Tatanagar drew laborers, who could come there and get employment.
And they caught smallpox in the one remaining place that had smallpox, and they went home to die.
And when they did, they took smallpox to 10 other countries and reignited the epidemic.
And most importantly for us here in this room, a bond was created.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Living in Africa is to be on the edge, metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008.
Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world, but Africa was sort of cut off.
And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution.
And now we've got the digital revolution.
These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations.
Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world.
What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem.
Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself.
The connectivity situation has improved greatly, but some barriers remain.
In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow.
There was a media blackout in 2008, when there was post-election violence in Kenya.
It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time.
So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi.
And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili.
I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators.
I call them brothers from another mother.
Clearly I have a German mother somewhere.
And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi.
And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where, and you could visualize that data.
And after that initial prototype, we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did.
All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days.
And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi, an actual physical space where we could collaborate, and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya.
We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network.
And we were able to grow this software footprint, and a few years later it became very useful software, and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were, and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan.
Ushahidi is not only the software that we made.
We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world.
There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps, and even environmental monitoring crowd maps.
We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with.
There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen, if I share the information with whatever device that I have, could inform you about what is going on, and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on.
I moved back to Kenya in 2011.
Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access.
The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying.
Blackouts are not fun.
Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down with it, so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem, how do I switch back?
Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now, and other parts of Africa.
The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge.
It costs me five Kenyan shillings, or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China.
Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria?
Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa.
And also, when traveling within Africa, you've got different settings for different mobile providers.
This is the reality that we deal with.
So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."
We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi.
Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country?
So we looked at the modem, an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity, yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury.
We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context, and for our reality.
This is the BRCK.
It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out, it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network.
Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive.
It's actually everywhere.
Most towns at least have a 3G connection.
The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working, you can continue being productive, and let's just say you are less stressed.
And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection.
The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks, and whenever you switch on the backup, you pick on the fastest network, so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs, and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on, and if the up time on that is not very good, then you hop onto the next one.
The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere.
With load balancing, this can be possible.
The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors -- is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things.
Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this.
It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas.
Out of adversity can come innovation, and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure?
And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya.
It is not without challenge.
Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents.
"What are you carrying?"
And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects.
So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that, through the support of many people, not only here but online, the BRCK has been Kickstarted, and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.
The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship.
The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected, and to help them drive the global digital revolution.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was born and raised in North Korea.
Although my family constantly struggled against poverty, I was always loved and cared for first, because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family.
But then the great famine began in 1994.
I was four years old.
My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight.
I would wander the streets searching for food, and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother's back eating chips, and wanting to steal them from him.
Hunger is humiliation. Hunger is hopelessness.
Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time, and in 2003, when I was 13 years old, my father became one of them.
I saw my father wither away and die.
In the same year, my mother disappeared one day, and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money, but that she would return with money and food soon.
Since we had never been separated, and I thought we would be together forever, I didn't even give her a hug when she left.
It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life.
But again, I didn't know it was going to be a long goodbye.
I have not seen my mom or my sister since then.
Suddenly, I became an orphan and homeless.
My goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash.
I started to realize, begging would not be the solution.
So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets.
Sometimes, I found small jobs in exchange for food.
Once, I even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine, 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day.
I was not uncommon.
Many other orphans survived this way, or worse.
When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains, I hoped that, the next morning, my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food.
That hope kept me alive.
Hope kept me alive.
Every day, I told myself, no matter how hard things got, still I must live.
After three years of waiting for my sister's return, I decided to go to China to look for her myself.
I realized I couldn't survive much longer this way.
I knew the journey would be risky, but I would be risking my life either way.
I could die of starvation like my father in North Korea, or at least I could try for a better life by escaping to China.
I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen.
North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission.
Chinese soldiers will catch and send back North Koreans, where they face severe punishment.
I decided to cross during the day, first because I was still a kid and scared of the dark, second because I knew I was already taking a risk, and since not many people tried to cross during the day, I thought I might be able to cross without being seen by anyone.
I made it to China on February 15, 2006.
I was 16 years old.
I thought things in China would be easier, since there was more food.
I thought more people would help me.
But it was harder than living in North Korea, because I was not free.
I was always worried about being caught and sent back.
By a miracle, some months later, I met someone who was running an underground shelter for North Koreans, and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years.
Later that year, an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee.
I went to America without knowing a word of English, yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school.
Even in North Korea, I was an F student.
And I remember I fought in school more than once a day.
My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying, but it didn't work.
He said, "You're not my son anymore."
I was only 11 or 12, but it hurt me deeply.
So in America, it was kind of ridiculous that they said I should go to high school.
I didn't even go to middle school.
But one day, I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner.
And during dinner, I wanted to have one more wing, but I realized there were not enough for everyone, so I decided against it.
When I looked down at my plate, I saw the last chicken wing, that my foster father had given me his.
I was so happy.
I looked at him sitting next to me.
He just looked back at me very warmly, but said no words.
Suddenly I remembered my biological father.
My foster father's small act of love reminded me of my father, who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry, even if he was starving.
I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America, yet my father died of starvation.
My only wish that night was to cook a meal for him, and that night I also thought of what else I could do to honor him.
And my answer was to promise to myself that I would study hard and get the best education in America to honor his sacrifice.
I took school seriously, and for the first time ever in my life, I received an academic award for excellence, and made dean's list from the first semester in high school.
(Applause) That chicken wing changed my life.
(Laughter) Hope is personal. Hope is something that no one can give to you.
You have to choose to believe in hope.
You have to make it yourself.
In North Korea, I made it myself.
Hope brought me to America.
But in America, I didn't know what to do, because I had this overwhelming freedom.
My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction, and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America.
I did not come here by myself.
I had hope, but hope by itself is not enough.
Many people helped me along the way to get here.
North Koreans are fighting hard to survive.
They have to force themselves to survive, have hope to survive, but they cannot make it without help.
This is my message to you.
Life can be hard for everyone, wherever you live.
In the same way, you may also change someone's life with even the smallest act of love.
A piece of bread can satisfy your hunger, and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive.
But I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph's life and change thousands of other Josephs who are still having hope to survive.
Thank you.
(Applause) Adrian Hong: Joseph, thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us.
I know you haven't seen your sister for, you said, it was almost exactly a decade, and in the off chance that she may be able to see this, we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message.
Joseph Kim: In Korean?
(Laughter) JK: Okay, I'm not going to make it any longer in Korean because I don't think I can make it without tearing up.
I just wanted to say that I miss you, and I love you, and please come back to me and stay alive.
(Laughter) Yes, I'm just looking forward to seeing you, and if you can't find me, I will also look for you, and I hope to see you one day.
And can I also make a small message to my mom?
AH: Sure, please.
JK: I haven't spent much time with you, but I know that you still love me, and you probably still pray for me and think about me.
I just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Writing biography is a strange thing to do.
Five years ago, for instance, I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle to what I knew was an impossible question: What actually happened one desert night, half the world and almost half of history away?
What happened, that is, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca?
This is the core mystical moment of Islam, and as such, of course, it defies empirical analysis.
(Laughter) And I plead guilty as charged, because all exploration, physical or intellectual, is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression, of crossing boundaries.
Still, some boundaries are larger than others.
So a human encountering the divine, as Muslims believe Muhammad did, to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact but of wishful fiction, and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational.
Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air.
He did not run down shouting, "Hallelujah!"
and "Bless the Lord!"
He did not radiate light and joy.
There were no choirs of angels, no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him, no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role as the messenger of God.
Quite the contrary.
In his own reported words, he was convinced at first that what had happened couldn't have been real.
At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination -- a trick of the eye or the ear, perhaps, or his own mind working against him.
In fact, he was so sure that he could only be majnun, possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first impulse was to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he'd experienced by putting an end to all experience.
And that panicked disorientation, that sundering of everything familiar, that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension, can only be called a terrible awe.
We close the doors and hunker down, convinced that we're in control, or, at least, hoping for control.
We do our best to ignore the fact that we don't always have it, and that not everything can be explained.
Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside, what's clear is that he did experience them, and that he did so with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice.
They insist that he never doubted for even a single moment, let alone despaired.
Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.
Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt?
And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted, because doubt is essential to faith.
If this seems a startling idea at first, consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it, is the heart of the matter.
Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism is in fact the opposite of faith.
Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes, they have no questions, only answers.
They found the perfect antidote to thought and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith.
And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority.
And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above.
They're a cult all their own, blood brothers steeped in other people's blood.
This isn't faith.
It's fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two.
We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers.
It's difficult and stubborn.
It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas.
And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, can still have faith.
I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence to the contrary.
I can hardly say I believe it.
I can only have faith in it, commit myself, that is, to the idea of it, and I do this precisely because of the temptation to throw up my hands in resignation and retreat into silence.
Because despair is self-fulfilling.
And I, for one, refuse to live that way.
In fact, most of us do, whether we're atheist or theist or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter, what drives us is that, despite our doubts and even because of our doubts, we reject the nihilism of despair.
We insist on faith in the future and in each other.
Call this naive if you like.
But one thing is sure: Call it human.
Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world without such faith, without the refusal to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty?
After keeping company with him as a writer for the past five years, I can't see that he'd be anything but utterly outraged at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today.
He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population because of their gender.
He'd say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life takes the life of all humanity.
Anyone who saves a life, saves the life of all humanity.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky.
And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated.
And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield.
She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction.
Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters -- gas meters, electricity meters.
It struck her as strange.
Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension.
He'd been a miner.
But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever.
It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies.
And as she did, other ones came to mind.
She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing.
She thought about her town.
The town had a vermiculite mine in it.
Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better.
Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters.
Vermiculite was in the playground.
It was in the skating rink.
What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos.
When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons.
She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know.
In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, "Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis."
The advent of the Internet definitely helped her.
She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right.
So now she had an ally.
Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know.
"If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us."
Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, "I don't want to be a victim.
I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents."
That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, "Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing.
It's lined with vermiculite."
This wasn't ignorance.
You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them.
You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it.
You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored.
And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes.
And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number.
And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, "This is a uniquely Swiss problem."
And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is the German disease."
And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this."
And the truth is, this is a human problem.
We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind.
What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation.
And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile.
If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother?
And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, "Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them."
But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people.
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them.
They are crushed.
Nobody would want to go through something like that."
And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride.
I think of Joe Darby.
We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq.
But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in.
Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this."
I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies.
And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it.
And she said to me, she said, "You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up.
But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same."
We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want.
But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have.
These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent.
When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right.
I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil.
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla.
I said, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint.
She's like you, and she's like me.
She had freedom, and she was ready to use it."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006.
I was a surgical resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, taking emergency call.
I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her.
And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital.
The question that was being asked of me was a different one, which was, did she also need an amputation?
In her case, I knew there was nothing I could do that was actually going to save her life.
But I was committed to making sure that I could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable. I brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee.
But more importantly, see, I passed no judgment on her, because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself.
So why was it that, just a few nights later, as I stood in that same E.R. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation, why did I hold her in such bitter contempt?
You see, unlike the woman the night before, this woman had type 2 diabetes.
She was fat.
And we all know that's from eating too much and not exercising enough, right?
I mean, how hard can it be?
As I looked down at her in the bed, I thought to myself, if you just tried caring even a little bit, you wouldn't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you've never met about to amputate your foot.
Why did I feel justified in judging her?
I'd like to say I don't know.
She ate too much. She got unlucky.
Ironically, at that time in my life, I was also doing cancer research, immune-based therapies for melanoma, to be specific, and in that world I was actually taught to question everything, to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards.
Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma, I never once questioned the conventional wisdom.
Three years later, I found out how wrong I was.
But this time, I was the patient.
Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome.
Some of you may have heard of this.
I had become insulin-resistant.
You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat, whether we burn it or store it.
Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life.
And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job.
Now your blood sugar levels start to rise, and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease, cancer, even Alzheimer's disease, and amputations, just like that woman a few years earlier.
With that scare, I got busy changing my diet radically, adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking.
I did this and lost 40 pounds, weirdly while exercising less.
I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore.
More importantly, I don't have insulin resistance.
But most important, I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn't go away: How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right?
And underlying these questions, I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance.
Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance.
Logically, then, if you want to treat insulin resistance, you get people to lose weight, right?
You treat the obesity.
What if obesity isn't the cause of insulin resistance at all?
In fact, what if it's a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg?
I know it sounds crazy because we're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic, but hear me out.
What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell?
I'm not suggesting that obesity is benign, but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils.
You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately.
When we become insulin-resistant, the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state.
So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, "No thanks, I'd actually rather store this energy."
And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it's probably the safest place to store it.
So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat.
This is a really subtle distinction, but the implication could be profound.
Consider the following analogy: Think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table.
Sure, the bruise hurts like hell, and you almost certainly don't like the discolored look, but we all know the bruise per Se is not the problem.
In fact, it's the opposite. It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body.
Now, imagine we thought bruises were the problem, and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises: masking creams, painkillers, you name it, all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables.
Getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world.
Getting it wrong, and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins.
Cause and effect.
So what I'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance.
Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people?
What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be worried about?
We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don't have insulin resistance.
And by the way, they don't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people.
Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic diseases I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts.
Now I don't know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy.
So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what's going on.
So what if we're fighting the wrong war, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance?
Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we're blaming the victims?
What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong?
Personally, I can't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore, let alone the luxury of certainty.
If you ask yourself, what's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn't too much food.
It's more likely too much glucose: blood sugar.
Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run, and there's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly.
So if you put these physiological processes to work, I'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance, you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising.
When I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago, I did it simply by restricting those things, which admittedly suggests I have a bias based on my personal experience.
But that doesn't mean my bias is wrong, and most important, all of this can be tested scientifically.
But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested.
I'm betting my career on this.
Today, I devote all of my time to working on this problem, and I'll go wherever the science takes me.
I've decided that what I can't and won't do anymore is pretend I have the answers when I don't.
For the past year, I've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country, and the best part is, just like Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals, we've done the same thing.
We've recruited a team of scientific rivals, the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what's at the heart of this epidemic.
Others think it's too much dietary fat.
Others think it's too many refined grains and starches.
But this team of multi-disciplinary, highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things.
And two, if we're willing to be wrong, if we're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer, we can solve this problem.
First, how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism, hormones and enzymes, and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms?
Second, based on these insights, can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that's safe and practical to implement?
And finally, once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet, how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception?
Just because you know what to do doesn't mean you're always going to do it.
I don't know how this journey is going to end, but this much seems clear to me, at least: We can't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like I did.
Most of them actually want to do the right thing, but they have to know what that is, and it's got to work.
I dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance, because as medical professionals, we've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals: open minds, the courage to throw out yesterday's ideas when they don't appear to be working, and the understanding that scientific truth isn't final, but constantly evolving.
Staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science.
If obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness, what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy?
seven years ago.
I wish I could speak with that woman again.
I'd like to tell her how sorry I am.
I'd say, as a doctor, I delivered the best clinical care I could, but as a human being, I let you down.
You needed my empathy and compassion, and above all else, you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you didn't let the system down.
Maybe the system, of which I was a part, was letting you down.
(Applause)
I'm going to be talking about designing humor, which is sort of an interesting thing, but it goes to some of the discussions about constraints, and how in certain contexts, humor is right, and in other contexts it's wrong.
Now, I'm from New York, so it's 100 percent satisfaction here.
Actually, that's ridiculous, because when it comes to humor, 75 percent is really absolutely the best you can hope for.
Nobody is ever satisfied 100 percent with humor except this woman.
(Video) Woman: (Laughs) Bob Mankoff: That's my first wife.
(Laughter) Now let's look at this cartoon.
One of the things I'm pointing out is that cartoons appear within the context of The New Yorker magazine, that lovely Caslon type, and it seems like a fairly benign cartoon within this context.
It's making a little bit fun of getting older, and, you know, people might like it.
But like I said, you cannot satisfy everyone.
"Another joke on old white males. Ha ha. The wit.
It's nice, I'm sure to be young and rude, but some day you'll be old, unless you drop dead as I wish."
(Laughter) The New Yorker is rather a sensitive environment, very easy for people to get their nose out of joint.
Here I'm one person talking to you.
You're all collective. You all hear each other laugh and know each other laugh.
In The New Yorker, it goes out to a wide audience, and when you actually look at that, and nobody knows what anybody else is laughing at, and when you look at that the subjectivity involved in humor is really interesting.
Let's look at this cartoon.
Right? You thought it was funny.
In general, that seems like a funny cartoon, but let's look what online survey I did.
Generally, about 85 percent of the people liked it.
"I like animals!!!!!" Look how much they like them.
(Laughter) "I don't want to hurt them. That doesn't seem very funny to me."
"I don't like to see animals suffer -- even in cartoons."
To people like this, I point out we use anesthetic ink.
Other people thought it was funny.
That actually is the true nature of the distribution of humor when you don't have the contagion of humor.
Humor is a type of entertainment.
All entertainment contains a little frisson of danger, something that might happen wrong, and yet we like it when there's protection.
That's what a zoo is. It's danger. The tiger is there.
(Laughter) It's a very politically correct zoo, but it's a bad zoo.
(Laughter) So in dealing with humor in the context of The New Yorker, you have to see, where is that tiger going to be?
How are you going to manage it?
Of course, many, many cartoons must be rejected.
(Laughter) But I feel that would be a huge loss, one I could live with, but still huge.
Cartoonists come in through the magazine every week.
The average cartoonist who stays with the magazine does 10 or 15 ideas every week.
But they mostly are going to be rejected.
That's the nature of any creative activity.
Many of them fade away. Some of them stay.
Here's one of his cartoons.
(Laughter) Drew Dernavich. "Accounting night at the improv."
"Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers."
(Laughter) Now I know all about rejection, because when I quit -- actually, I was booted out of -- psychology school and decided to become a cartoonist, a natural segue, from 1974 to 1977 I submitted 2,000 cartoons to The New Yorker, and got 2,000 cartoons rejected by The New Yorker.
[Hey! You sold one. No shit! You really sold a cartoon to the fucking New Yorker magazine.] (Laughter) Now of course that's not what happened, but that's the emotional truth.
And of course, that is not New Yorker humor.
What is New Yorker humor?
Well, after 1977, I broke into The New Yorker and started selling cartoons.
With respect to idea drawings, nowhere in the contract is the word "cartoon" mentioned.
"There is no justice in the world. There is some justice in the world. The world is just."
This is What Lemmings Believe.
(Laughter) The New Yorker and I, when we made comments, the cartoon carries a certain ambiguity about what it actually is.
What is it, the cartoon? Is it really about lemmings?
You know, it's my view basically about religion, that the real conflict and all the fights between religion is who has the best imaginary friend.
(Laughter) And this is my most well-known cartoon.
It's been reprinted thousands of times, totally ripped off.
Now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity.
There's an incongruity and a contrast.
what you have is the syntax of politeness and the message of being rude.
That really is how humor works. It's a cognitive synergy where we mash up these two things which don't go together and temporarily in our minds exist.
He is both being polite and rude.
Basically, that's the way humor works.
So I'm a humor analyst, you would say.
Now E.B. White said, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog.
Nobody is much interested, and the frog dies.
Well, I'm going to kill a few, but there won't be any genocide.
But really, it makes me — Let's look at this picture. This is an interesting picture, The Laughing Audience.
He's the critic of humor, and really I'm forced to be in that position, when I'm at The New Yorker, and that's the danger that I will become this guy.
(Video) Bob Mankoff: "Oooh, no.
Oooh. Hmm. Too funny.
No. Nah. No.
No. No.
Office worker: Got a ham and swiss on rye?BM: No.
Office worker: Okay. Pastrami on sourdough?BM: No.
Office worker: Smoked turkey with bacon?BM: No.
Office worker: Falafel?BM: Let me look at it.
Eh, no.
Office worker: Grilled cheese?BM: No.
Office worker: BLT?BM: No.
Office worker: Black forest ham and mozzarella with apple mustard?BM: No.
Office worker: Green bean salad?BM: No.
(Music) No. No.
Definitely no. [Several hours after lunch] (Siren) No. Get out of here.
(Laughter) That's sort of an exaggeration of what I do.
See, that's probably not going to be New Yorker humor.
So I'll give you some examples of rejection collection humor.
"I'm thinking about having a child."
(Laughter) Now, in fact, within a context of this book, which says, "Cartoons you never saw and never will see in The New Yorker," this humor is perfect.
I'm going to explain why.
There's a concept about humor about it being a benign violation.
If we think it's completely wrong, we say, "That's not funny."
It's rude. The world really shouldn't be that way.
Within that context, we feel it's okay.
Within the context of The New Yorker magazine ...
"T-Cell Army: Can the body's immune response help treat cancer?" Oh, goodness.
One way to look at it is this.
It's sort of called a meta-motivational theory about how we look, a theory about motivation and the mood we're in and how the mood we're in determines the things we like or dislike.
When we're in a playful mood, we want excitement.
We want high arousal. We feel excited then.
It's like this, like an amusement park.
That's a cartoon about terrorism.
The New Yorker occupies a very different space.
It's a space that is playful in its own way, and also purposeful, and in that space, the cartoons are different.
Now I'm going to show you cartoons The New Yorker did right after 9/11, a very, very sensitive area when humor could be used.
How would The New Yorker attack it?
Or there was another cartoon I didn't show because actually I thought maybe people would be offended.
The great Sam Gross cartoon, this happened after the Muhammad controversy where it's Muhammad in heaven, the suicide bomber is all in little pieces, and he's saying to the suicide bomber, "You'll get the virgins when we find your penis."
That was a black hole for humor, and correctly so.
But the next week, this was the first cartoon.
"I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket."
It basically was about, if we were alive, we were going to laugh. We were going to breathe.
These cartoons are not about them. They're about us.
The humor reflects back on us.
It's 95 percent of the humor. It's not our humor.
Here's another cartoon.
(Laughter) Humor does need a target.
But interestingly, in The New Yorker, the target is us.
The target is the readership and the people who do it.
The humor is self-reflective and makes us think about our assumptions.
Look at this cartoon by Roz Chast, the guy reading the obituary.
And so The New Yorker is also trying to, in some way, make cartoons say something besides funny and something about us. Here's another one.
"I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, Then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people."
(Laughter) "Excuse me — I think there's something wrong with this in a tiny way that no one other than me would ever be able to pinpoint."
So it focuses on our obsessions, our narcissism, our foils and our foibles, really not someone else's.
The New Yorker demands some cognitive work on your part, and what it demands is what Arthur Koestler, who wrote "The Act of Creation" about the relationship between humor, art and science, is what's called bisociation.
Different frames of reference.
"You slept with her, didn't you?"
(Laughter) "Lassie! Get help!!"
(Laughter) It's called French Army Knife.
How many people know what this cartoon means?
The dog is signaling he wants to go for a walk.
This is the signal for a catcher to walk the dog.
That's why we run a feature in the cartoon issue every year called "I Don't Get It: The New Yorker Cartoon I.Q. Test."
But the way incongruity works is, observational humor is humor within the realm of reality.
That could happen. It's humor within the realm of reality.
Here, cowboy to a cow: "Very impressive. I'd like to find 5,000 more like you."
We understand that. It's absurd. But we're putting the two together.
Here, in the nonsense range: "Damn it, Hopkins, didn't you get yesterday's memo?"
In general, people who enjoy more nonsense, enjoy more abstract art, they tend to be liberal, less conservative, that type of stuff.
But for us, and for me, helping design the humor, it doesn't make any sense to compare one to the other.
It's sort of a smorgasbord that's made all interesting.
So I want to sum all this up with a caption to a cartoon, and I think this sums up the whole thing, really, about The New Yorker cartoons.
(Laughter) And now, when you look at New Yorker cartoons, I'd like you to stop and think a little bit more about them.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
I do want to test this question we're all interested in: Does extinction have to be forever?
I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about.
One is the Thylacine Project.
And it would be a fair question to ask, why have we focused on these two animals?
Well, point number one, each of them represents a unique family of its own.
We've lost a whole family.
I'd like it back.
The second reason is that we killed these things.
We slaughtered them.
There's a dreadful fungus that's moving through the world that's called the chytrid fungus, and it's nailing frogs all over the world.
We think that's probably what got this frog, and humans are spreading this fungus.
And this introduces a very important ethical point, and I think you will have heard this many times when this topic comes up.
OK. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project.
Yeah, but this was not just any frog.
Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water and goes away and wishes its froglets well, this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs, swallowed them into the stomach, where it should be having food, didn't digest the eggs, and turned its stomach into a uterus.
In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles, and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs, and they grew in the stomach until eventually the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart.
No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this, to change one organ in the body into another.
And just as everybody got excited about it, bang!
I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler in the University of Adelaide.
He was the last person who had this frog, a colony of these things, in his lab.
And I said, "Mike, by any chance --" This was 30 or 40 years ago.
And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer, minus 20 degrees centigrade, and he poured through everything in the freezer, and there in the bottom was a jar and it contained tissues of these frogs.
This was very exciting, but there was no reason why we should expect that this would work, because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it, cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen.
And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands, and the same thing happens in a cell.
If you freeze tissues, the water expands, damages or bursts the cell walls.
Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope.
It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact.
And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg.
Now, by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project, like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different, because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells.
That was a miracle, but it was workable.
What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work.
Well, we had no real reason to expect it would, and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these.
And just last February, the last time we did these trials, I saw a miracle starting to happen.
What we found was most of these eggs didn't work, but then suddenly, one of them began to divide.
That was so exciting.
And pretty soon, we had early-stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those.
We even DNA-tested some of these cells, and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells.
So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole. It's not a frog.
But it's a long way along the journey to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species.
And this is news.
We haven't announced this publicly before.
We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate, to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues.
It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog.
(Applause) Thank you.
The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project.
But it's not related to any of those. It's a marsupial.
But it's also a tragic history.
The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rain forests of Australia about 25 million years ago, and the National Geographic Society is helping us to explore these fossil deposits.
In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals.
We found carnivorous kangaroos.
These crocodiles were actually out on the land and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey on the ground.
We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist.
At any rate, it was a fascinating place, but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way.
By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared from New Guinea, and unfortunately, by 4,000 years ago, somebodies, we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes -- this is a very archaic kind of a dog -- into Australia.
That similarity meant they probably competed.
They were eating the same kinds of foods.
It's even possible that aborigines were keeping some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival.
That guy is going to eat all our sheep.
But immediately, the government said, that's it, let's get rid of them, and they paid people to slaughter every one that they saw.
It makes me very sad because, while it's a fascinating animal, and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction, we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species.
It died of exposure, and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin, they still cared so little for this animal that they threw the body in the dump.
In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum.
I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative.
The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly.
Cloning was science fiction.
But then suddenly cloning did happen.
And I thought, when I became director of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go.
I put a team together.
It was a eureka moment. We were very excited.
Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA.
Every old curator who'd been in that museum had seen this wonderful specimen, put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought, "Wow, look at that," plop, dropped it back in the jar, contaminating this specimen.
It would've kept the curator very happy, but it wasn't going to keep us happy.
So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around, and particularly, we looked into the teeth of skulls, hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers, and we found much better quality DNA.
We found nuclear mitochondrial genes.
Well, George Church, in his book, "Regenesis," has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing to work with fragmented DNA.
We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project, get that stuff into an egg of a host species.
It has to be a different species. What could it be?
Critics of this project say, hang on.
No, it's not. These are marsupials.
They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean.
Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated this might not be a waste of time.
And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet, but it's the kind of thing we want to think about.
Is this a risk?
You've taken the bits of one animal and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal.
Are we going to get a Frankenstein? Some kind of weird hybrid chimera?
And the answer is no.
Or has Tasmania changed so much that that's no longer possible?
I've been to Tasmania.
He led them around on a rope.
My interest was in whether the environment had changed.
He thought hard. It was nearly 80 years before this that he'd been at this hut.
At any rate, he led us down this bush track, and there, right where he remembered, was the hut, and tears came into his eyes.
He looked at the hut. We went inside.
There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut where he and his father and his brother had slept at night.
All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers.
And the key question for me was to ask Peter, has it changed?
And he said no.
The southern beech forests surrounded his hut just like it was when he was there in 1926.
I think gradually, as we see species all around the world, it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly not safe in the wild.
We need other parallel strategies coming online.
They were being kept as pets, and we know a lot of bush tales and memories of people who had them as pets, and they say they were wonderful, friendly.
We need to think about this in today's world.
Could it be that getting animals close to us so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct?
We are trying to restore that balance of nature that we have upset.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning.
But no, I wasn't born there.
This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries.
All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, then slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, guess where we end up?
Communism!
Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development.
The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after.
But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil, the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism, and the good shall triumph.
That, of course, was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx.
And the Chinese bought it.
We were taught that grand story day in and day out.
It became part of us, and we believed in it.
The story was a bestseller.
About one third of the entire world's population lived under that meta-narrative.
Then, the world changed overnight.
As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie.
(Laughter) Now, as I was coming of age, something else happened.
As if one big story wasn't enough, I was told another one.
Because they are all rational, once given the vote, they produce good government and live happily ever after.
Paradise on Earth, again.
Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich.
But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil.
(Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order...
(Video) George W. Bush:... ending tyranny in our world...
(Video) Barack Obama:... a single standard for all who would hold power.
According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010.
In the last 20 years, Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus: Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world.
Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success.
Those who do not are doomed to fail.
But this time, the Chinese didn't buy it.
Fool me once...
(Laughter) The rest is history.
In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy.
In other words, all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single, one-party state did without voting.
See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps.
So I asked myself, what's wrong with this picture?
Here I am in my hometown, my business growing leaps and bounds.
Entrepreneurs are starting companies every day.
Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history.
So I went and did the only thing I could. I studied it.
Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections.
Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time.
Such a system is operationally rigid, politically closed, and morally illegitimate.
Well, the assumptions are wrong.
The opposites are true.
Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system.
Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction.
It won't last long because it cannot adapt.
Now here are the facts.
In 64 years of running the largest country in the world, the range of the Party's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward, then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution, then Deng Xiaoping's market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao's rule.
So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions.
Institutionally, new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions.
Mao was the father of modern China, yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes.
So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70.
One thing we often hear is, "Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms," and "China is in dire need of political reform."
But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias.
See, some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see, and only such changes can be called political reform.
Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind.
The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow.
Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context.
The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today.
China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members.
In the larger central committee of 300 or more, the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller.
Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries, I think you'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility.
The question then is, how could that be possible in a system run by one party?
Now we come to a powerful political institution, little-known to Westerners: the Party's Organization Department.
It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components: civil service, state-owned enterprises, and social organizations like a university or a community program.
They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials.
It's serious business.
Once a year, the department reviews their performance.
They interview their superiors, their peers, their subordinates. They vet their personal conduct.
Just to show you how competitive the system is, in 2012, there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels, 600,000 fuchu and chu levels, and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels.
After the ju levels, the best few move further up several more ranks, and eventually make it to the Central Committee.
But merit remains the fundamental driver.
China's new president, Xi Jinping, is the son of a former leader, which is very unusual, first of his kind to make the top job.
Even for him, the career took 30 years.
He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars.
Now, please don't get me wrong, okay?
This is not a put-down of anyone. It's just a statement of fact.
George W. Bush, remember him?
Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest.
Well, apparently he hadn't heard of the Organization Department.
Now, Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy.
Where is the source of legitimacy?"
We all know the facts.
In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old.
Today, it's the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity.
Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes, and here are the numbers in recent years.
Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent.
Those who expect the future to be better: a whopping 82 percent.
Financial Times polls global youth attitudes, and these numbers, brand new, just came from last week.
Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future.
Now, if this is not legitimacy, I'm not sure what is.
In contrast, most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance.
With a few exceptions, the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife.
Governments get elected, and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election.
Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret.
At this rate, I'm afraid it is democracy, not China's one-party system, that is in danger of losing legitimacy.
Now, I don't want to create the misimpression that China's hunky-dory, on the way to some kind of superpowerdom.
The country faces enormous challenges.
Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues.
On the political front, the worst problem is corruption.
Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy.
But most analysts misdiagnose the disease.
Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries, and it's been moving up.
For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China, more than half of them are electoral democracies.
So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it?
So here they are.
In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S.
and become the largest economy in the world.
Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries.
Corruption will be curbed, but not eliminated, and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking.
Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st.
I'm not here to make an indictment of democracy.
On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world.
If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance.
China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal.
It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely.
The significance of China's example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist.
Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over.
It is wrong. It is irresponsible.
And worst of all, it is boring.
Let universality make way for plurality.
Are we brave enough to welcome it?
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.
What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say, actually, the national interest as you defined it is wrong?
EXL: You know, Frank Fukuyama, the political scientist, called the Chinese system "responsive authoritarianism."
So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China, okay?
The Chinese government.
Are you happy with the garbage collection?
Are you happy with the general direction of the country?
So there is, in China, there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people.
I'm not sure, actually, elections produce responsive government anymore in the world.
(Applause) BG: Many seem to agree.
One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself.
But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc.
EXL: There's a vibrant civil society in China, whether it's environment or what-have-you.
Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture.
For thousands of years, you have civil society, yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order, and I think it's a big cultural difference.
BG: Eric, thank you for sharing this with TED. EXL: Thank you.
There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing.
No keys.
The cop says, "Are you sure?
Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here?"
(Laughter) There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called "big data."
And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information.
The biggest problem is: how do we organize all that information?
I can tell you that, working in global health, that is not our biggest problem.
Because for us, even though the light is better on the Internet, the data that would help us solve the problems we're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet.
So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations.
We don't know for, really, basically, any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't.
We don't know -- and this is really amazing to me -- we don't know how many children were born -- or how many children there are -- in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan.
We don't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries.
We don't know the needs of the elderly, the mentally ill.
And part of the reason why we don't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here.
This is about a 5,000-year-old technology.
Some of you may have used it before.
This is a paper form.
Do you have any children? Were your children vaccinated?"
Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia, what percentage were vaccinated, is actually not on the Internet, but by going out and knocking on doors, sometimes tens of thousands of doors.
Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this.
You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish.
And the problem, of course, with all of this is that, with all those paper forms -- and I'm telling you, we have paper forms for every possible thing: We have paper forms for vaccination surveys.
We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics.
And what we're looking at here is a truckful of data.
This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago, that I participated in.
You can imagine that, for the entire country of Zambia, answering just that single question ...
And what makes it even worse is that's just the beginning.
Because once you've collected all that data, of course, someone -- some unfortunate person -- is going to have to type that into a computer.
I can tell you, I often wasn't really paying attention.
But eventually that data, hopefully, gets typed into a computer, and someone can begin to analyze it, and once they have an analysis and a report, hopefully, then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better.
Because if there's anything worse in the field of global public health -- I don't know what's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases -- diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar.
And millions of children die of these diseases every year.
And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate, because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this.
What makes it even more frustrating is that the data-entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months.
Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer, And sometimes, actually not infrequently, it actually never happens.
You just had teams of hundreds of people.
You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem.
The process just stops.
This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data.
So back in 1995, I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process.
Now 1995 -- obviously, that was quite a long time ago.
The top movie of the year was "Die Hard with a Vengeance."
As you can see, Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then.
I was working in the Centers for Disease Control and I had a lot more hair back then as well.
But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this.
Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device.
It wasn't an iPhone. It wasn't a Galaxy phone.
And when I saw the PalmPilot for the first time, I thought, "Why can't we put the forms on these PalmPilots?
And go out into the field just carrying one PalmPilot, which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms?
Because if we can do that, if we can actually just collect the data electronically, digitally, from the very beginning, we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing, of having somebody type that stuff into the computer.
So that's what I began to do.
Working at CDC, I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using PalmPilots to do data collection, instead of using paper.
What do you know?
Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper.
While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross.
The problem was, after a few years of doing that, I realized -- I had been to maybe six or seven programs -- and I thought, you know, if I keep this up at this pace, over my whole career, maybe I'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs.
But the problem is, 20 or 30 programs, like, training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology, that is a tiny drop in the bucket.
The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs just within health -- not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries -- is enormous.
There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs.
There are schools that need to track attendance.
And so I began to rack my brain, trying to think about, what was the process that I was doing?
How was I training folks, and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently?
And, unfortunately, after thinking about this for some time, I identified the main obstacle.
So what do I mean by that?
If you wanted to use this technology, you had to get in touch with me.
Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate.
So you could be talking about 10- or 20- or 30,000 dollars, if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn't on vacation.
And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology, and we need to scale it now.
And, you know, I was thinking, "How could I take myself out of the picture?"
for quite some time.
I'd been trained that the way you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based.
And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend for a hotel and all that stuff.
But the miracle that happened -- I'm going to call it Hotmail for short.
You may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem -- I was working in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly, at the time -- I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account.
And it struck me, "Wait a minute -- I know the Hotmail people surely didn't fly to the Ministry of Health in Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail.
So these guys are distributing technology, getting software capacity out there, but they're not actually flying around the world.
I need to think about this more."
They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps -- all these things.
Of course, all of these things are cloud based and don't require any training.
They don't require consultants.
You just have to hear about it and go to the website.
Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices, let's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved.
And that's exactly what we did.
So we created software called Magpi, which has an online form creator.
You can create forms, and once you've created the forms, you push them to a variety of common mobile phones.
Obviously, nowadays, we've moved past PalmPilots to mobile phones.
And it doesn't have to be a smartphone, it can be a basic phone, like the phone on the right, the basic Symbian phone that's very common in developing countries.
And the great part about this is it's just like Hotmail.
It's cloud based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants.
But there are some additional benefits as well.
We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes.
Cloud based, no training, no consultants, no me.
In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up and start using it to collect data: data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies.
One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives, using $10 mobile phones, send a text message using our software, once a week, with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near-real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die.
Camfed, another charity based out of the UK -- Camfed pays girls' families to keep them in school.
They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make.
Now it's real time.
And because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud, it costs, for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in, with tens of thousands of girls, the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year.
That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation.
So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way, I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket -- 10, 20, 30 different programs.
We've made a lot of progress, but I recognize that right now, even the work that we've done with 14,000 people using this is still a drop in the bucket.
But something's changed, and I think it should be obvious.
We've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school, track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die, catch criminals and successfully prosecute them -- to do all these different things to learn more about what's going on, to understand more, to see more ...
and to save lives and improve lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In the next 18 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey.
And it's a journey that you and I have been on for many years now, and it began some 50 years ago, when humans first stepped off our planet.
And in those 50 years, not only did we literally, physically set foot on the moon, but we have dispatched robotic spacecraft to all the planets -- all eight of them -- and we have landed on asteroids, we have rendezvoused with comets, and, at this point in time, we have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto, the body formerly known as a planet.
And all of these robotic missions are part of a bigger human journey: a voyage to understand something, to get a sense of our cosmic place, to understand something of our origins, and how Earth, our planet, and we, living on it, came to be.
And of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this, there's Saturn. And we have been to Saturn before -- we visited Saturn in the early 1980s -- but our investigations of Saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the Cassini spacecraft, traveling across interplanetary space for seven years, glided into orbit around Saturn in the summer of 2004, and became at that point the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the Sun.
Now, the Saturn system is a rich planetary system.
It offers mystery, scientific insight and obviously splendor beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach.
In fact, just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies.
And here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda Nebula, which is our closest, largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.
So the journey back to Saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us, and also how humans fit into that picture.
And it pains me that I can't tell you all that we have learned with Cassini.
I can't show you all the beautiful pictures that we've taken in the last two and a half years, because I simply don't have the time.
So I'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged out of this major exploratory expedition that we are conducting around Saturn, and have been for the past two and a half years.
Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons.
They range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the U.S.
Most of the beautiful pictures we've taken of Saturn, in fact, show Saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons. Here's Saturn with Dione, and then, here's Saturn showing the rings edge-on, showing you just how vertically thin they are, with the moon Enceladus.
Now, two of the 47 moons that Saturn has are standouts.
And those are Titan and Enceladus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived there, was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.
It has a very large, thick atmosphere, and in fact, its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the Earth, or at least had in the past, than any other body in the solar system.
Its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen, like you are breathing here in this room, except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane.
And these molecules high up in the atmosphere of Titan get broken down, and their products join together to make haze particles.
This haze is ubiquitous. It's completely global and enveloping Titan.
And that's why you cannot see down to the surface with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum.
But these haze particles, it was surmised, before we got there with Cassini, over billions and billions of years, gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge.
So like the equivalent, the Titan equivalent, of tar, or oil, or what -- we didn't know what.
But this is what we suspected. And these molecules, especially methane and ethane, can be liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan.
And so it turns out that methane is to Titan what water is to the Earth.
It's a condensable in the atmosphere, and so recognizing this circumstance brought to the fore a whole world of bizarre possibilities. You can have methane clouds, OK, and above those clouds, you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze, which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface.
The temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
But despite that cold, you could have rain falling down on the surface of Titan.
It can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and hills, down into the lowlands. So stop and think for a minute.
Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like.
It's dark. High noon on Titan is as dark as deep earth twilight on the Earth.
It's cold, it's eerie, it's misty, it might be raining, and you might be standing on the shores of Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner. (Laughter) That is the view that we had of the surface of Titan before we got there with Cassini, and I can tell you that what we have found on Titan, though it is not the same in detail, is every bit as fascinating as that story is.
And for us, it has been like -- the Cassini people -- it has been like a Jules Verne adventure come true.
This is a picture of Titan, backlit by the Sun, with the rings as a beautiful backdrop.
We have instruments on Cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere, and my camera system is one of them.
It was so mystifying: we couldn't make out what we were seeing on Titan.
This, we later found out, is, in fact, a crater, but there are very few craters on the surface of Titan, meaning it's a very young surface.
But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan.
And that was the deployment of the Huygens probe, the European-built Huygens probe that Cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system. We deployed it to the atmosphere of Titan, it took two and a half hours to descend, and it landed on the surface.
This is a device of human making, and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history.
It is so significant that, in my mind, this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the U.S. and Europe, and sadly, that wasn't the case.
(Laughter).
It was significant for another reason. This is an international mission, and this event was celebrated in Europe, in Germany, and the celebratory presentations were given in English accents, and American accents, and German accents, and French and Italian and Dutch accents.
It was a moving demonstration of what the words "united nations" are supposed to mean: a true union of nations joined together in a colossal effort for good.
And, in this case, it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet, and to come to understand a planetary system that, for all of human history, had been unreachable, and now humans had actually touched it.
So it was -- I mean, I'm getting goose bumps just talking about it.
It was a tremendously emotional event, and it's something that I will personally never forget, and you shouldn't either.
(Applause).
And it was a shocker, because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be.
It was an unambiguous pattern, a geological pattern.
It's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids.
And you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge.
And they converge into this channel here, which drains into this region.
But this is somewhat of a shoreline.
This picture is taken at 16 kilometers.
This is the picture taken at eight kilometers, OK? Again, the shoreline.
Okay, now, 16 kilometers, eight kilometers -- this is roughly an airline altitude.
If you were going to take an airplane trip across the U.S., you would be flying at these altitudes.
And here is the horizon, OK?
These are probably water ice pebbles, yes?
(Applause).
And obviously, it landed in one of these flat, dark regions and it didn't sink out of sight. So it wasn't fluid that we landed in.
This is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane.
And it's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of Titan through these channels that we saw, and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins.
Where were they? It got even more puzzling when we found dunes.
OK, so this is our movie of the equatorial region of Titan, showing these dunes. These are dunes that are 100 meters tall, separated by a few kilometers, and they go on for miles and miles and miles.
There's hundreds, up to a 1,000 or 1,200 miles of dunes.
It's obviously a place which is very dry, or you wouldn't get dunes.
It's about the size of Lake Ontario.
And then, only a week and a half ago, we flew over the north pole of Titan and found, again, we found a feature here the size of the Caspian Sea.
And I think you would agree that we have found Titan is a remarkable, mystical place. It's exotic, it's alien, but yet strangely Earth-like, and having Earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity, and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself.
And so now we go onto Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon, it's about a tenth the size of Titan. And you can see it here next to England, just to show you the size. This is not meant to be a threat.
(Laughter).
And Enceladus is very white, it's very bright, and its surface is obviously wrecked with fractures.
And they're a different color because they're a different composition.
That's as bizarre as finding that the Antarctic on the Earth is hotter than the tropics.
And then, when we took additional pictures, we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine, icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space.
And when we color-code this image, to bring out the faint light levels, we see that these jets feed a plume that, in fact, we see, in other images, goes thousands of miles into the space above Enceladus.
My team and I have examined images like this, and like this one, and have thought about the other results from Cassini.
And we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may be erupting from pockets of liquid water under the surface of Enceladus.
So we have, possibly, liquid water, organic materials and excess heat.
In other words, we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration, or in other words, an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms.
And I don't think I need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system, whether it be on Enceladus or elsewhere, would have enormous cultural and scientific implications.
Right now, Earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life.
It is precious, it is unique, it is still, so far, the only home we've ever known.
It was the first time that Earth was imaged from space, and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe, and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own planet.
Well, we on Cassini have taken an equivalent first, a picture that no human eye has ever seen before.
It is a total eclipse of the Sun, seen from the other side of Saturn.
And in this impossibly beautiful picture, you see the main rings backlit by the Sun, you see the refracted image of the Sun and you see this ring created, in fact, by the exhalations of Enceladus.
But as if that weren't brilliant enough, we can spot, in this beautiful image, sight of our own planet, cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings.
Now, there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar, and capturing the sight of our little, blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds.
And that, and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that, may be, in the end, the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago.
And thank you very much.
(Applause)
If you think about it, the English language has written into it negative associations towards the clouds.
And when there's bad news in store, there's a cloud on the horizon.
I saw an article the other day.
It was about problems with computer processing over the Internet.
"A cloud over the cloud," was the headline.
It's just that their beauty is missed because they're so omnipresent, so, I don't know, commonplace, that people don't notice them.
They don't notice the beauty, but they don't even notice the clouds unless they get in the way of the sun.
(Laughter) But most people, when you stop to ask them, will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds.
It's just that these days, us adults seem reluctant to allow ourselves the indulgence of just allowing our imaginations to drift along in the breeze, and I think that's a pity.
I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it.
I think we should be a bit more willing, perhaps, to look at the beautiful sight of the sunlight bursting out from behind the clouds and go, "Wait a minute, that's two cats dancing the salsa!"
(Laughter) (Applause) Or seeing the big, white, puffy one up there over the shopping center looks like the Abominable Snowman going to rob a bank.
And you look up and what do you see?
You know, you're thinking about your own mortality.
(Laughter) Or maybe you see a topless sunbather.
But one thing I do know is this: The bad press that clouds get is totally unfair.
I think we should stand up for them, which is why, a few years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society.
Tens of thousands of members now in almost 100 countries around the world.
And the society exists to remind people of this: Clouds are not something to moan about.
Far from it. They are, in fact, the most diverse, evocative, poetic aspect of nature.
I think, if you live with your head in the clouds every now and then, it helps you keep your feet on the ground.
Let's start with this one. It's the cirrus cloud, named after the Latin for a lock of hair.
It's composed entirely of ice crystals cascading from the upper reaches of the troposphere, and as these ice crystals fall, they pass through different layers with different winds and they speed up and slow down, giving the cloud these brush-stroked appearances, these brush-stroke forms known as fall streaks.
And these winds up there can be very, very fierce.
These clouds are bombing along, but from all the way down here, they appear to be moving gracefully, slowly, like most clouds.
And so to tune into the clouds is to slow down, to calm down.
Those are common clouds.
These clouds form in the region of mountains.
When the wind passes, rises to pass over the mountain, it can take on a wave-like path in the lee of the peak, with these clouds hovering at the crest of these invisible standing waves of air, these flying saucer-like forms, and some of the early black-and-white UFO photos are in fact lenticularis clouds. It's true.
This is when a layer is made up of very, very cold water droplets, and in one region they start to freeze, and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below, giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below.
Rarer still, the Kelvin–Helmholtz cloud.
All right. Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus, but they're not that rare.
If you look up, and you pay attention to the sky, you'll see them sooner or later, maybe not quite as dramatic as these, but you'll see them.
And you'll see them around where you live.
And these clouds, these rarer clouds, remind us that the exotic can be found in the everyday.
Nothing is more nourishing, more stimulating to an active, inquiring mind than being surprised, being amazed. It's why we're all here at TED, right?
But you don't need to rush off away from the familiar, across the world to be surprised.
You just need to step outside, pay attention to what's so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everybody else misses it.
One cloud that people rarely miss is this one: the cumulonimbus storm cloud.
It's what's produces thunder and lightning and hail.
They are an expression of the majestic architecture of our atmosphere.
But from down below, they are the embodiment of the powerful, elemental force and power that drives our atmosphere.
To be there is to be connected in the driving rain and the hail, to feel connected to our atmosphere.
We don't live beneath the sky. We live within it.
It's an antidote to the growing tendency we have to feel that we can really ever experience life by watching it on a computer screen, you know, when we're in a wi-fi zone.
But the one cloud that best expresses why cloudspotting is more valuable today than ever is this one, the cumulus cloud.
If you close your eyes and think of a cloud, it's probably one of these that comes to mind.
It's pointless. It's a pointless activity, which is precisely why it's so important.
The digital world conspires to make us feel eternally busy, perpetually busy.
You know, when you're not dealing with the traditional pressures of earning a living and putting food on the table, raising a family, writing thank you letters, you have to now contend with answering a mountain of unanswered emails, updating a Facebook page, feeding your Twitter feed.
(Laughter) And sometimes we need — (Applause) Sometimes we need excuses to do nothing.
It's good for your ideas. It's good for your creativity.
It's good for your soul.
So keep looking up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Throughout the history of computers we've been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen where our imagination can go wild.
And this gap has become shorter, shorter, and even shorter, and now this gap is shortened down to less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touch-screen glass, and the power of computing has become accessible to everyone.
But I wondered, what if there could be no boundary at all?
I started to imagine what this would look like.
Designers can materialize their ideas directly in 3D, and surgeons can practice on virtual organs underneath the screen.
At Microsoft Applied Sciences, along with my mentor Cati Boulanger, I redesigned the computer and turned a little space above the keyboard into a digital workspace.
By combining a transparent display and depth cameras for sensing your fingers and face, now you can lift up your hands from the keyboard and reach inside this 3D space and grab pixels with your bare hands.
(Applause) Because windows and files have a position in the real space, selecting them is as easy as grabbing a book off your shelf.
Then you can flip through this book while highlighting the lines, words on the virtual touch pad below each floating window.
Architects can stretch or rotate the models with their two hands directly.
So in these examples, we are reaching into the digital world.
I'm sure many of us have had the experience of buying and returning items online.
But now you don't have to worry about it.
What I got here is an online augmented fitting room.
This is a view that you get from head-mounted or see-through display when the system understands the geometry of your body.
Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it?
What would such a future look like?
At MIT Media Lab, along with my advisor Hiroshi Ishii and my collaborator Rehmi Post, we created this one physical pixel.
Well, in this case, this spherical magnet acts like a 3D pixel in our space, which means that both computers and people can move this object to anywhere within this little 3D space.
What we did was essentially canceling gravity and controlling the movement by combining magnetic levitation and mechanical actuation and sensing technologies.
And by digitally programming the object, we are liberating the object from constraints of time and space, which means that now, human motions can be recorded and played back and left permanently in the physical world.
So choreography can be taught physically over distance and Michael Jordan's famous shooting can be replicated over and over as a physical reality.
Students can use this as a tool to learn about the complex concepts such as planetary motion, physics, and unlike computer screens or textbooks, this is a real, tangible experience that you can touch and feel, and it's very powerful.
And what's more exciting than just turning what's currently in the computer physical is to start imagining how programming the world will alter even our daily physical activities.
(Laughter) As you can see, the digital information will not just show us something but it will start directly acting upon us as a part of our physical surroundings without disconnecting ourselves from our world.
Today, we started by talking about the boundary, but if we remove this boundary, the only boundary left is our imagination.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Robbie Mizzone: Thank you.
Like he said, we're three brothers from New Jersey -- you know, the bluegrass capital of the world.
(Laughter) We discovered bluegrass a few years ago, and we fell in love with it.
This next song is an original we wrote called "Time Lapse," and it will probably live up to its name.
(Tuning) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much.
On guitar is my 15-year-old brother Tommy.
(Applause) He's also our brother.
And I'm Robbie, and I'm 14, and I play the fiddle.
(Applause) As you can see, we decided to make it hard on ourselves, and we chose to play three songs in three different keys.
(Tuning) Yeah. I'm also going to explain, a lot of people want to know where we got the name "Sleepy Man Banjo Boys" from.
So you can probably piece the rest together.
(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much.
(Cheering) RM: Thank you.
I'm going to start by asking you a question: Is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem?
I think we can all agree it's a serious issue.
Nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water, or swim in a blue algae-infested lake.
Right?
I hope you won't be disappointed, but today, I won't be talking about blue algae.
Instead, I'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue, which I will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis.
And by the end of my presentation, I hope that the general public will be more aware of this crisis and this issue.
We use fertilizers in our farming, chemical fertilizers.
Why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture?
Basically, to help plants grow and to produce a better yield.
Before going further, let me give you a crash course in plant biology.
So, what does a plant need in order to grow?
A plant, quite simply, needs light, it needs CO2, but even more importantly, it needs nutrients, which it draws from the soil.
Several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements: phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium.
So, the plant’s roots will extract these resources.
Today I'll be focusing on a major problem that is linked to phosphorus.
Because it is the most problematic chemical element.
By the end of my presentation, you will have seen what these problems are, and where we are today.
Phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life. This is a very important point.
Phosphorus is a key component in several molecules, in many of our molecules of life.
Cell membranes are phosphorus-based: These are called phospholipids.
The energy in all living things, ATP, is phosphorus-based.
And more importantly still, phosphorus is a key component of DNA, something everyone is familiar with, and which is shown in this image.
DNA is our genetic heritage.
Now, where do we find this phosphorus?
As humans, where do we find it?
As I explained earlier, plants extract phosphorus from the soil, through water.
So, we humans get it from the things we eat: plants, vegetables, fruits, and also from eggs, meat and milk.
It’s true that some humans eat better than others.
Some are happier than others.
And now, looking at this picture, which speaks for itself, we see modern agriculture, which I also refer to as intensive agriculture.
Intensive agriculture is based on the use of chemical fertilizers.
And we practice holism.
"Woo. Woo-hoo."
Or I hope you know them. Right?
Here's another case, a knifing.
Anyone?
De facto landmines.
Well what's going to give?
This is a cama.
I was amazed.
Hey.
Anyone?
All examples of models changing.
Give it a little push -- this becomes a rhombus.
Why aren't you?
I hope you appreciate yours.
The serif is not really in place.
What's in it for the ant?
This is what our summum bonum is.
Mill.
Okay? Mmhmm?
This here is Brain.
We could use sales, anything you like.
That's "Clair De lune."
Okay?
But guess what, nobody will really care.
Culturomics is similar.
Will you have a go for me?
What do you do?
Wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening.
It has to get you.
How do you know when to take a turn?
Well how about with higher levels of amputation?
What do you do?
I also planted the bibliotree.
Hey.
By accident.
What do you do?
It was ubiquitous.
Hilarity ensues.
The present self does not want to save at all.
And three: Is it renewable?
Now we get to Chaetomorpha.
No stone left unturned.
It's not going to feel this good all the way across.
The one up there can't divide at all.
It's about as far as we go out.
So it's feeding back on itself.
We're taking off.
Blimey.
Here we go.
Mhm?
Or would we?
Anyone?
What do you have to replace it?
He's out of office today.
I just become skanky.
This is going to be the opposite of that.
So it's what we call freeloading.
You will see how that goes.
And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus.
So this is Zig in this photograph, this is also one of Zig's photographs.
How interesting are you?
(French) Mais quand tu es fâché avec quelqu'un c'est pas passé the first time.
Here we go.
CA: How?
Does anyone know? Chi?
An ollie.
We also refer to subclinical conditions.
You are a pre-vivor.
You know?
And it's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education, and in doing so, we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes.
How can this be?
Hold it up.
And that's not what the debate should be about.
Sí se puede!
Totally ineffective.
you know?
I'm sick of it.
Okay? I'm an ignostic.
No matter what question you ask me.
And then there's the wanting system.
And that's called a ring agglutinate.
It's amazing.
They use it synecdochically.
Salaam alaikum.
Efharisto and kalinihta.
You know?
We were taken care of.
They have to engage in courtship.
Okay?
How were we to do it?
I can see I've got my work cut out for me here.
It's called an allele.
(Laughter) You can see they're very blasé and kind of effortless.
So would I do nothing?
And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition?
That's also true of being bidialectal.
There is no Photoshop involved.
And that's no mean feat.
So they have to scavenge.
Walk the talk.
A person.
So it would be totally renewable.
They produce sameness.
Ban-gap-seum-ni-da.
You've got full attention.
"Gouverner, c'est prévoir."
Why phosphorus in particular?
I’d like everyone to understand precisely what the phosphorus issue is.