I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table for the kids. 
And, from my experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or is foreign to them. 
They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids. 
So I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, "" Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs. "" But, of course, that's the point. 
That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. 
So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in without any adults for two minutes on their own. 
The doors open, the kids descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. 
And I said, "" Kids, really quickly — I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house — nothing too big, two or three stories — but, if you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me? "" And immediately a voice shouted, "" Kangaroo! "" "No, no, no! Should be a frog!" 
"No. It should be Go Go Gadget!" 
"No, no, no! It should be the Incredibles." 
And other things that I don't — aren't familiar with. 
And then, one eight-year-old said, "Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" 
And the whole room, including me, was like, "" Yeah. "" (Laughter) And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "" disabled "" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. 
Somebody that might even be super-abled. 
Interesting. 
So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago. 
And there's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. 
TED literally was the launch pad to the next decade of my life's exploration. 
At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. 
I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have seen on stage yesterday. 
And also these very life-like, intrinsically painted silicone legs. 
So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs. 
So that we can stop compartmentalizing form, function and aesthetic, and assigning them different values. 
Well, lucky for me, a lot of people answered that call. 
And the journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee — Chee Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today. 
She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and she gave me a cover story. 
This started an incredible journey. 
Curious encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd been accepting numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. 
And people would come up to me after the conference, after my talk, men and women. 
And the conversation would go something like this, "" You know Aimee, you're very attractive. 
You don't look disabled. "" (Laughter) I thought, "" Well, that's amazing, because I don't feel disabled. "" And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored, about beauty. 
What does a beautiful woman have to look like? 
What is a sexy body? 
And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? 
I mean, people — Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. 
Nobody calls her disabled. 
(Laughter) So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring that conversation. 
So, three months after TED I found myself on a plane to London, doing my first fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover — "" Fashion-able ""? 
Three months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash. 
Nobody knew — everyone thought they were wooden boots. 
Actually, I have them on stage with me: grapevines, magnolias — truly stunning. 
Poetry matters. 
Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. 
It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand. 
I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. 
The artist Matthew Barney, in his film opus called the "" The Cremaster Cycle. "" This is where it really hit home for me — that my legs could be wearable sculpture. 
And even at this point, I started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal. 
So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they're actually optically clear polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material. 
Heavy! 
Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them, and beetroots out the top, and a very lovely brass toe. 
That's a good close-up of that one. 
Then another character was a half-woman, half-cheetah — a little homage to my life as an athlete. 
14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a gecko. 
(Laughter) And then another pair of legs we collaborated on were these — look like jellyfish legs, also polyurethane. 
And the only purpose that these legs can serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination. 
So whimsy matters. 
Today, I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet, and I can change my height — I have a variable of five different heights. 
(Laughter) Today, I'm 6 '1 "". 
And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopedic in England and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on the town, I went to a very fancy party. 
And a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5 '8 "". 
Her mouth dropped open when she saw me, and she went, "" But you're so tall! "" And I said, "" I know. Isn't it fun? "" I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts, but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have. 
And I was having fun with it. 
And she looked at me, and she said, "" But, Aimee, that's not fair. "" (Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she really meant it. 
It's not fair that you can change your height, as you want it. 
And that's when I knew — that's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. 
It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. 
It's a conversation about augmentation. 
It's a conversation about potential. 
A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. 
It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. 
So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. 
And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology — robotics, bionics — with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity. 
I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. 
I think of Shakespeare's Shylock: "" If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh? "" It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. 
Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. 
But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. 
Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. 
I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. 
Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. 
I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. 
Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. 
A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. 
You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. 
The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature — enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. 
Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. 
You are ready? 
Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. 
You get a mouth. 
This is a person going for a walk. 
Person. 
If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "" Help! I'm on fire! "" — This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. 
This is a tree. 
Tree. 
This is a mountain. 
The sun. 
The moon. 
The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. 
I call these eight characters radicals. 
They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. 
A person. 
If someone walks behind, that is "" to follow. "" As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. 
If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "" It was this big. "" The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. 
He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. 
One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. 
Three trees together, we create the forest. 
Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. 
Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "" idiot. "" (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. 
Remember fire? 
Two fires together, I get really hot. 
Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. 
Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. 
For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. 
Two suns together, prosperous. 
Three together, that's sparkles. 
Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. 
It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. 
The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. 
A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. 
Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. 
Knock knock. Is anyone home? 
This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. 
On the left, we have a woman. 
Two women together, they have an argument. 
(Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery. 
So we have gone through almost 30 characters. 
By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. 
The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. 
So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. 
So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. 
For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. 
We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. 
This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. 
So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. 
A person behind Japan, what do we get? 
A Japanese person. 
The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. 
In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. 
Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. 
A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit. 
This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've noticed something interesting about society and culture. 
There's a certain — (Laughter) That's true in everything risky, except technology. 
For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. 
The space bar scrolls down one page. 
Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. 
Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. 
You make the text larger with each tap. 
Go space, space. 
Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. 
Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, "" Leave a message, "" and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years! 
(Laughter) I'm not bitter. (Laughter) 
So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. 
(Beep) David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. 
While we're talking about text — When you want to highlight — this is just an example — (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. 
Double click the word. 
Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. 
You can just type over it. 
Also, you can go double-click, drag, to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. 
(Camera click) (Laughter) So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down — no shutter lag! 
And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you! 
(Laughter) So when that happens — this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program — all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for "" whiteout, "" and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it. 
So I know I went super fast. 

It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and I believe this is true, especially when I hear President Obama often talk about the Korean education system as a benchmark of success. 
Well, I can tell you that, in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the Korean school system, also known as pressure cooker, not everyone can do well in that environment. 
While many people responded in different ways about our education system, my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building. 
Why bows? 
I'm not quite sure. 
Perhaps, in the face of constant pressure, my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows. 
If you think about it, the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times. 
The area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the Joseon dynasty, where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves. 
In order to raise the historical awareness of this fact, the government has planted mulberry trees. 
The seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 Olympics. 
The area near these walls, which nobody bothers to pay attention to, had been left free from major intervention, and this is where I first found my treasures. 
As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood. 
When I went on school field trips, family vacations, or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes, I wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that I sneaked inside my school bag. 
And they would be somethings like saws, knives, sickles and axes that I covered up with a piece of towel. 
I would bring the branches home, riding buses and subways, barely holding them in my hands. 
And I did not bring the tools here to Long Beach. 
Airport security. 
(Laughter) In the privacy of my room, covered in sawdust, I would saw, trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape. 
One day, I was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire. 
Where? The rooftop of my apartment building, a place where 96 families call home. 
A customer from a department store across from my building called 911, and I ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned. 
I want to take this opportunity to tell my mom, in the audience today: Mom, I was really sorry, and I will be more careful with open fire from now on. 
My mother had to do a lot of explaining, telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson. 
I also researched extensively on bows around the world. 
In that process, I tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow. 
I also worked with many different types of wood, such as maple, yew and mulberry, and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that I mentioned before. 
The most effective bow for me would be like this. 
One: Curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow. 
Two: Belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight, which means more power. 
Three: Sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage. 
And four: Horn used to store energy in compression. 
After fixing, breaking, redesigning, mending, bending and amending, my ideal bow began to take shape, and when it was finally done, it looked like this. 
I was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own. 
This is a picture of Korean traditional bows taken from a museum, and see how my bow resembles them. 
Thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention. (Laughter) Through bowmaking, I came in contact with part of my heritage. 
Learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me. 
You see, I searched far and wide, but never bothered to look close and near. 
From this realization, I began to take interest in Korean history, which had never inspired me before. 
In the end, the grass is often greener on my side of the fence, although we don't realize it. 
Now, I am going to show you how my bow works. 
And let's see how this one works. 
This is a bamboo bow, with 45-pound draw weights. 
(Noise of shooting arrow) (Applause) A bow may function in a simple mechanism, but in order to make a good bow, a great amount of sensitivity is required. 
You need to console and communicate with the wood material. 
Each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being, and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow. 
I may be an [odd] student with unconventional interests, but I hope I am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you. 
My ideal world is a place where no one is left behind, where everyone is needed exactly where they are, like the fibers and the tendons in a bow, a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient. 
The bow resembles me, and I resemble the bow. 
Now, I am shooting a part of myself to you. 
No, better yet, a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind. 
Did it strike you? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is a vending machine in Los Angeles. 
It's in a shopping mall, and it sells fish eggs. 
It's a caviar vending machine. 
This is the Art-o-mat, an art vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists, usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes, in limited edition. 
This is Oliver Medvedik. He's not a vending machine, but he is one of the founders of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, New York, where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA. 
In fact, I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago, and this is what led me onto this bizarre path that I'm going to talk to you right now. 
Because strawberry DNA is really fascinating, because it's so beautiful. 
I'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before, before I saw it in this form. 
And a lot of people, especially in the art community, don't necessarily engage in science in this way. 
I instantly joined Genspace after this, and I asked Oliver, "" Well, if we can do this strawberries, can we do this with people as well? "" And about 10 minutes later, we were both spinning it in vials together and coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction. 
And I started doing this on my own, and this is what my DNA actually looks like. 
And I was at a dinner party with some friends, some artist friends, and I was telling them about this project, and they couldn't believe that you could actually see DNA. 
So I said, all right, let's get out some supplies right now. 
And I started having these bizarre dinner parties at my house on Friday nights where people would come over and we would do DNA extractions, and I would actually capture them on video, because it created this kind of funny portrait as well. 
(Laughter) These are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science whatsoever. 
You can kind of tell from their reactions. 
But they became fascinated by it, and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science. 
And so I started doing this regularly. 
It's kind of an odd thing to do with your Friday nights, but this is what I started doing, and I started collecting a whole group of my friends' DNA in small vials and categorizing them. 
This is what that looked like. 
And it started to make me think about a couple of things. 
First of all, this looked a lot like my Facebook wall. 
So in a way, I've created sort of a genetic network, a genetic social network, really. 
And the second thing was, one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like, "" Oh. 
Why are they numbered? Is this person more rare than the other one? "" And I hadn't even thought about that. 
They were just numbered because that was the order that I extracted the DNA in. 
But that made me think about collecting toys, and this thing that's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys, and being able to collect these rare toys. 
You buy these boxes. You're not sure what's going to be inside of them. 
But then, when you open them up, you have different rarities of the toys. 
And so I thought that was interesting. 
I started thinking about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together, and some reason, I was one night drawing a vending machine, thinking about doing paintings of a vending machine, and the little vial of my DNA was sitting there, and I saw this kind of beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine. 
And so, of course, I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine. 
Here it is. 
(Music) ["" DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology. ""] ["" For a reasonable cost, you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine. ""] ["" Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen. ""] ["" DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA. ""] Gabriel Garcia-Colombo: So the DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple galleries in New York, and it's selling out pretty well, actually. 
We're in the first edition of 100 pieces, hoping to do another edition pretty soon. 
I'd actually like to get it into more of a metro hub, like Grand Central or Penn Station, right next to some of the other, actual vending machines in that location. 
But really with this project and a lot of my art projects I want to ask the audience a question, and that is, when biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as, say, laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine, will you still submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine? 
And how much will these samples be worth? 
And will you buy someone else's sample? 
And what will you be able to do with that sample? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Worldwide, over 1.5 billion people experience armed conflict. 
In response, people are forced to flee their country, leaving over 15 million refugees. 
Children, without a doubt, are the most innocent and vulnerable victims... 
but not just from the obvious physical dangers, but from the often unspoken effects that wars have on their families. 
The experiences of war leave children at a real high risk for the development of emotional and behavioral problems. 
Children, as we can only imagine, will feel worried, threatened and at risk. 
But there is good news. 
The quality of care that children receive in their families can have a more significant effect on their well-being than from the actual experiences of war that they have been exposed to. 
So actually, children can be protected by warm, secure parenting during and after conflict. 
In 2011, I was a first-year PhD student in the University of Manchester School of Psychological Sciences. 
Like many of you here, I watched the crisis in Syria unfold in front of me on the TV. 
My family is originally from Syria, and very early on, I lost several family members in really horrifying ways. 
I'd sit and I'd gather with my family and watch the TV. 
We've all seen those scenes: bombs destroying buildings, chaos, destruction and people screaming and running. 
It was always the people screaming and running that really got me the most, especially those terrified-looking children. 
I was a mother to two young, typically inquisitive children. 
They were five and six then, at an age where they typically asked lots and lots of questions, and expected real, convincing answers. 
So, I began to wonder what it might be like to parent my children in a war zone and a refugee camp. 
Would my children change? 
Would my daughter's bright, happy eyes lose their shine? 
Would my son's really relaxed and carefree nature become fearful and withdrawn? 
How would I cope? 
Would I change? 
As psychologists and parent trainers, we know that arming parents with skills in caring for their children can have a huge effect on their well-being, and we call this parent training. 
The question I had was, could parent training programs be useful for families while they were still in war zones or refugee camps? 
Could we reach them with advice or training that would help them through these struggles? 
So I approached my PhD supervisor, Professor Rachel Calam, with the idea of using my academic skills to make some change in the real world. 
I wasn't quite sure what exactly I wanted to do. 
She listened carefully and patiently, and then to my joy she said, "" If that's what you want to do, and it means so much to you, then let's do it. 
Let's find ways to see if parent programs can be useful for families in these contexts. "" So for the past five years, myself and my colleagues — Prof. Calam and Dr. Kim Cartwright — have been working on ways to support families that have experienced war and displacement. 
Now, to know how to help families that have been through conflict support their children, the first step must obviously be to ask them what they're struggling with, right? 
I mean, it seems obvious. 
But it's often those that are the most vulnerable, that we're trying to support, that we actually don't ask. 
How many times have we just assumed we know exactly the right thing that's going to help someone or something without actually asking them first? 
So I travelled to refugee camps in Syria and in Turkey, and I sat with families, and I listened. 
I listened to their parenting challenges, I listened to their parenting struggles and I listened to their call for help. 
And sometimes that was just paused, as all I could do was hold hands with them and just join them in silent crying and prayer. 
They told me about their struggles, they told me about the rough, harsh refugee camp conditions that made it hard to focus on anything but practical chores like collecting clean water. 
They told me how they watched their children withdraw; the sadness, depression, anger, bed-wetting, thumb-sucking, fear of loud noises, fear of nightmares — terrifying, terrifying nightmares. 
These families had been through what we had been watching on the TV. 
The mothers — almost half of them were now widows of war, or didn't even know if their husbands were dead or alive — described how they felt they were coping so badly. 
They watched their children change and they had no idea how to help them. 
They didn't know how to answer their children's questions. 
What I found incredibly astonishing and so motivational was that these families were so motivated to support their children. 
Despite all these challenges they faced, they were trying to help their children. 
They were making attempts at seeking support from NGO workers, from refugee camp teachers, professional medics, other parents. 
One mother I met had only been in a camp for four days, and had already made two attempts at seeking support for her eight-year-old daughter who was having terrifying nightmares. 
But sadly, these attempts are almost always useless. 
Refugee camp doctors, when available, are almost always too busy, or don't have the knowledge or the time for basic parenting supports. 
Refugee camp teachers and other parents are just like them — part of a new refugee community who's struggling with new needs. 
So then we began to think. 
How could we help these families? 
The families were struggling with things much bigger than they could cope with. 
The Syrian crisis made it clear how incredibly impossible it would be to reach families on an individual level. 
How else could we help them? 
How would we reach families at a population level and low costs in these terrifying, terrifying times? 
After hours of speaking to NGO workers, one suggested a fantastic innovative idea of distributing parenting information leaflets via bread wrappers — bread wrappers that were being delivered to families in a conflict zone in Syria by humanitarian workers. 
So that's what we did. 
The bread wrappers haven't changed at all in their appearance, except for the addition of two pieces of paper. 
One was a parenting information leaflet that had basic advice and information that normalized to the parent what they might be experiencing, and what their child might be experiencing. 
And information on how they could support themselves and their children, such as information like spending time talking to your child, showing them more affection, being more patient with your child, talking to your children. 
The other piece of paper was a feedback questionnaire, and of course, there was a pen. 
So is this simply leaflet distribution, or is this actually a possible means of delivering psychological first aid that provides warm, secure, loving parenting? 
We managed to distribute 3,000 of these in just one week. 
What was incredible was we had a 60 percent response rate. 
60 percent of the 3,000 families responded. 
I don't know how many researchers we have here today, but that kind of response rate is fantastic. 
To have that in Manchester would be a huge achievement, let alone in a conflict zone in Syria — really highlighting how important these kinds of messages were to families. 
I remember how excited and eager we were for the return of the questionnaires. 
The families had left hundreds of messages — most incredibly positive and encouraging. 
But my favorite has got to be, "Thank you for not forgetting about us and our children." 
This really illustrates the potential means of the delivery of psychological first aid to families, and the return of feedback, too. 
Just imagine replicating this using other means such as baby milk distribution, or female hygiene kits, or even food baskets. 
But let's bring this closer to home, because the refugee crisis is one that is having an effect on every single one of us. 
We're bombarded with images daily of statistics and of photos, and that's not surprising, because by last month, over one million refugees had reached Europe. 
One million. 
Refugees are joining our communities, they're becoming our neighbors, their children are attending our children's schools. 
So we've adapted the leaflet to meet the needs of European refugees, and we have them online, open-access, in areas with a really high refugee influx. 
For example, the Swedish healthcare uploaded it onto their website, and within the first 45 minutes, it was downloaded 343 times — really highlighting how important it is for volunteers, practitioners and other parents to have open-access, psychological first-aid messages. 
In 2013, I was sitting on the cold, hard floor of a refugee camp tent with mothers sitting around me as I was conducting a focus group. 
Across from me stood an elderly lady with what seemed to be a 13-year-old girl lying beside her, with her head on the elderly lady's knees. 
The girl stayed quiet throughout the focus group, not talking at all, with her knees curled up against her chest. 
Towards the end of the focus group, and as I was thanking the mothers for their time, the elderly lady looked at me while pointing at the young girl, and said to me, "" Can you help us with...? "" Not quite sure what she expected me to do, I looked at the young girl and smiled, and in Arabic I said, "Salaam alaikum. Shu-ismak?" 
"What's your name?" 
She looked at me really confused and unengaged, but then said, "" Halul. "" Halul is the pet's name for the Arabic female name, Hala, and is only really used to refer to really young girls. 
At that point I realized that actually Hala was probably much older than 13. 
It turns out Hala was a 25-year-old mother to three young children. 
Hala had been a confident, bright, bubbly, loving, caring mother to her children, but the war had changed all of that. 
She had lived through bombs being dropped in her town; she had lived through explosions. 
When fighter jets were flying around their building, dropping bombs, her children would be screaming, terrified from the noise. 
Hala would frantically grab pillows and cover her children's ears to block out the noise, all the while screaming herself. 
When they reached the refugee camp and she knew they were finally in some kind of safety, she completely withdrew to acting like her old childhood self. 
She completely rejected her family — her children, her husband. 
Hala simply could no longer cope. 
This is a parenting struggle with a really tough ending, but sadly, it's not uncommon. 
Those who experience armed conflict and displacement will face serious emotional struggles. 
And that's something we can all relate to. 
If you have been through a devastating time in your life, if you have lost someone or something you really care about, how would you continue to cope? 
Could you still be able to care for yourself and for your family? 
Given that the first years of a child's life are crucial for healthy physical and emotional development, and that 1.5 billion people are experiencing armed conflict — many of whom are now joining our communities — we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the needs of those who are experiencing war and displacement. 
We must prioritize these families' needs — both those who are internally displaced, and those who are refugees worldwide. 
These needs must be prioritized by NGO workers, policy makers, the WHO, the UNHCR and every single one of us in whatever capacity it is that we function in our society. 
When we begin to recognize the individual faces of the conflict, when we begin to notice those intricate emotions on their faces, we begin to see them as humans, too. 
We begin to see the needs of these families, and these are the real human needs. 
When these family needs are prioritized, interventions for children in humanitarian settings will prioritize and recognize the primary role of the family in supporting children. 
Family mental health will be shouting loud and clear in global, international agenda. 
And children will be less likely to enter social service systems in resettlement countries because their families would have had support earlier on. 
And we will be more open-minded, more welcoming, more caring and more trusting to those who are joining our communities. 
We need to stop wars. 
We need to build a world where children can dream of planes dropping gifts, and not bombs. 
Until we stop armed conflicts raging throughout the world, families will continue to be displaced, leaving children vulnerable. 
But by improving parenting and caregiver support, it may be possible to weaken the links between war and psychological difficulties in children and their families. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. 
The auditorium was empty. 
It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign. 
This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. 
She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late-night concert of jazz from the American musician, Keith Jarrett. 
1,400 people were coming. 
And in just a few hours, Jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play. 
But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well. 
Jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer. 
Then the producer came over to Vera and said... 
"If you don't get a new piano, Keith can't play." 
There'd been a mistake. 
The opera house had provided the wrong instrument. 
This one had this harsh, tinny upper register, because all the felt had worn away. 
The black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small. 
It wouldn't create the volume that would fill a large space such as the Cologne Opera House. 
So Keith Jarrett left. 
He went and sat outside in his car, leaving Vera Brandes to get on the phone to try to find a replacement piano. 
Now she got a piano tuner, but she couldn't get a new piano. 
And so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to Keith Jarrett, begging him not to cancel the concert. 
And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, "Never forget... only for you." 
And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began. 
(Music) Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. 
Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality. 
But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. 
And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row. 
It's an electrifying performance. 
It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. 
And the audience loved it. 
Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history. 
Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess. 
He had embraced that mess, and it soared. 
But let's think for a moment about Jarrett's initial instinct. 
He didn't want to play. 
Of course, I think any of us, in any remotely similar situation, would feel the same way, we'd have the same instinct. 
We don't want to be asked to do good work with bad tools. 
We don't want to have to overcome unnecessary hurdles. 
But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. 
And I think our instinct is also wrong. 
I think we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess. 
So let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science, from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll. 
So cognitive psychology first. 
We've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacle, can actually improve our performance. 
For example, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers. 
And he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were giving to some of their classes. 
So the regular handout would be formatted in something straightforward, such as Helvetica or Times New Roman. 
But half these classes were getting handouts that were formatted in something sort of intense, like Haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce, like Comic Sans italicized. 
Now, these are really ugly fonts, and they're difficult fonts to read. 
But at the end of the semester, students were given exams, and the students who'd been asked to read the more difficult fonts, had actually done better on their exams, in a variety of subjects. 
And the reason is, the difficult font had slowed them down, forced them to work a bit harder, to think a bit more about what they were reading, to interpret it... 
and so they learned more. 
Another example. 
The psychologist Shelley Carson has been testing Harvard undergraduates for the quality of their attentional filters. 
What do I mean by that? 
What I mean is, imagine you're in a restaurant, you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversations going on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focus on what's important to you. 
Can you do that? 
If you can, you have good, strong attentional filters. 
But some people really struggle with that. 
Some of Carson's undergraduate subjects struggled with that. 
They had weak filters, they had porous filters — let a lot of external information in. 
And so what that meant is they were constantly being interrupted by the sights and the sounds of the world around them. 
If there was a television on while they were doing their essays, they couldn't screen it out. 
Now, you would think that that was a disadvantage... 
but no. 
When Carson looked at what these students had achieved, the ones with the weak filters were vastly more likely to have some real creative milestone in their lives, to have published their first novel, to have released their first album. 
These distractions were actually grists to their creative mill. 
They were able to think outside the box because their box was full of holes. 
Let's talk about complexity science. 
So how do you solve a really complex — the world's full of complicated problems — how do you solve a really complicated problem? 
There are lots and lots of different variables, the operating temperature, the materials, all the different dimensions, the shape. 
You can't solve that kind of problem all in one go, it's too hard. 
So what do you do? 
Well, one thing you can do is try to solve it step-by-step. 
So you have some kind of prototype and you tweak it, you test it, you improve it. 
You tweak it, you test it, you improve it. 
Now, this idea of marginal gains will eventually get you a good jet engine. 
And it's been quite widely implemented in the world. 
So you'll hear about it, for example, in high performance cycling, web designers will talk about trying to optimize their web pages, they're looking for these step-by-step gains. 
That's a good way to solve a complicated problem. 
But you know what would make it a better way? 
A dash of mess. 
You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better. 
And the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process, the marginal gains, is they can walk you gradually down a dead end. 
And if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely, and your problem-solving becomes more robust. 
Let's talk about social psychology. 
So the psychologist Katherine Phillips, with some colleagues, recently gave murder mystery problems to some students, and these students were collected in groups of four and they were given dossiers with information about a crime — alibis and evidence, witness statements and three suspects. 
And the groups of four students were asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime. 
And there were two treatments in this experiment. 
In some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well. 
In other cases, three friends and a stranger. 
And you can see where I'm going with this. 
Obviously I'm going to say that the groups with the stranger solved the problem more effectively, which is true, they did. 
Actually, they solved the problem quite a lot more effectively. 
So the groups of four friends, they only had a 50-50 chance of getting the answer right. 
Which is actually not that great — in multiple choice, for three answers? 50-50's not good. 
(Laughter) The three friends and the stranger, even though the stranger didn't have any extra information, even though it was just a case of how that changed the conversation to accommodate that awkwardness, the three friends and the stranger, they had a 75 percent chance of finding the right answer. 
That's quite a big leap in performance. 
But I think what's really interesting is not just that the three friends and the stranger did a better job, but how they felt about it. 
So when Katherine Phillips interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job. 
They were complacent. 
When she spoke to the three friends and the stranger, they had not had a nice time — it's actually rather difficult, it's rather awkward... 
and they were full of doubt. 
They didn't think they'd done a good job even though they had. 
And I think that really exemplifies the challenge that we're dealing with here. 
Because, yeah — the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move... 
these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative. 
But we don't feel that they're helping us. 
We feel that they're getting in the way... 
and so we resist. 
And that's why the last example is really important. 
So I want to talk about somebody from the background of the world of rock 'n' roll. 
And you may know him, he's actually a TED-ster. 
His name is Brian Eno. 
He is an ambient composer — rather brilliant. 
He's also a kind of catalyst behind some of the great rock 'n' roll albums of the last 40 years. 
He's worked with David Bowie on "" Heroes, "" he worked with U2 on "" Achtung Baby "" and "" The Joshua Tree, "" he's worked with DEVO, he's worked with Coldplay, he's worked with everybody. 
And what does he do to make these great rock bands better? 
Well, he makes a mess. 
He disrupts their creative processes. 
It's his role to be the awkward stranger. 
It's his role to tell them that they have to play the unplayable piano. 
And one of the ways in which he creates this disruption is through this remarkable deck of cards — I have my signed copy here — thank you, Brian. 
They're called The Oblique Strategies, he developed them with a friend of his. 
And when they're stuck in the studio, Brian Eno will reach for one of the cards. 
He'll draw one at random, and he'll make the band follow the instructions on the card. 
So this one... 
"Change instrument roles." 
Yeah, everyone swap instruments — Drummer on the piano — Brilliant, brilliant idea. 
"Look closely at the most embarrassing details. Amplify them." 
"Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action. Incorporate." 
These cards are disruptive. 
Now, they've proved their worth in album after album. 
The musicians hate them. 
(Laughter) So Phil Collins was playing drums on an early Brian Eno album. 
He got so frustrated he started throwing beer cans across the studio. 
Carlos Alomar, great rock guitarist, working with Eno on David Bowie's "" Lodger "" album, and at one point he turns to Brian and says, "Brian, this experiment is stupid." 
But the thing is it was a pretty good album, but also, Carlos Alomar, 35 years later, now uses The Oblique Strategies. 
And he tells his students to use The Oblique Strategies because he's realized something. 
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you. 
The strategies actually weren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list — list on the recording studio wall. 
A checklist of things you might try if you got stuck. 
The list didn't work. 
Know why? 
Not messy enough. 
Your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whatever was the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely. 
And what Brian Eno came to realize was, yes, we need to run the stupid experiments, we need to deal with the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts. 
These things help us. 
They help us solve problems, they help us be more creative. 
But also... 
we really need some persuasion if we're going to accept this. 
So however we do it... 
whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Recently, I flew over a crowd of thousands of people in Brazil playing music by George Frideric Handel. 
I also drove along the streets of Amsterdam, again playing music by this same composer. 
Let's take a look. 
(Music: George Frideric Handel, "" Allegro. "" Performed by Daria van den Bercken.) (Video) Daria van den Bercken: I live there on the third floor. 
[(In Dutch) "" Handel house concert ""] (Applause) Daria van den Bercken: All this was a real magical experience for hundreds of reasons. 
Now you may ask, why have I done these things? 
They're not really typical for a musician's day-to-day life. 
Well, I did it because I fell in love with the music and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible. 
I was sitting at home on the couch with the flu and browsing the Internet a little, when I found out that Handel had written works for the keyboard. 
Well, I was surprised. I did not know this. 
So I downloaded the sheet music and started playing. 
And what happened next was that I entered this state of pure, unprejudiced amazement. 
It might be easier to relate to this when you hear it. 
The first piece that I played through started like this. 
(Music) Well this sounds very melancholic, doesn't it? 
And I turned the page and what came next was this. 
(Music) Well, this sounds very energetic, doesn't it? 
So within a couple of minutes, and the piece isn't even finished yet, I experienced two very contrasting characters: beautiful melancholy and sheer energy. 
I've given a lot of children's concerts for children of seven and eight years old, and whatever I play, whether it's Bach, Beethoven, even Stockhausen, or some jazzy music, they are open to hear it, really willing to listen, and they are comfortable doing so. 
And when classes come in with children who are just a few years older, 11, 12, I felt that I sometimes already had trouble in reaching them like that. 
The complexity of the music does become an issue, and actually the opinions of others — parents, friends, media — they start to count. 
But the young ones, they don't question their own opinion. 
They are in this constant state of wonder, and I do firmly believe that we can keep listening like these seven-year-old children, even when growing up. 

But anyway, this is about the evils of science, so I think it ’ s perfect. 
♫ My oh my, walking by, who ’ s the apple of my eye? ♫ ♫ Why, it's my very own Clonie. ♫ ♫ Oh, if I should stroll the hood, who knew I could look so good ♫ ♫ just talking on the phone to Clonie. ♫ ♫ We are pals, it's cool, 'cause we're not lonely, ♫ ♫ shallow gene pool is nothing to my only Clonie. ♫ ♫ Me and you, hustling through, holding on through thick and thin, ♫ ♫ just day by day, our DNA, so the Olson twins got nothing on us. ♫ ♫ We'll survive, side by side. Mother Nature, don ’ t you call her phony, she ’ s my Clonie. ♫ 
♫ Was wealthy, but not healthy, had no one to dwell with me, ♫ ♫ so look who I got born — Clonie. ♫ ♫ Far from broke, bored, rich folk, we don't need no natural yolk — ♫ ♫ our babies come full-formed, Clonie. ♫ ♫ We'll be huggable, get a publicist ♫ ♫ and show them, be the most lovable thing since fucking Eminem. ♫ ♫ Oh my friend, multiply, we ’ re a franchise, like Walt Disney or Hannibal Lecter. ♫ ♫ We can tell our cancer cells are more benign than old Phil Spector. ♫ ♫ We ’ ll survive side by side, should have signed with Verve instead of Sony. ♫ 
♫ You ’ re my Clonie. ♫ "" Oh Clonie, how I love you. "" "Ha, I'm the only person I ever loved." 
♫ Gee, that's swell. I guess you're just my fatal attraction-ie. You ’ re my Clonie. ♫ Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. 
And why is that? 
How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? 
I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into. 
First, gossip. 
Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. 
Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us. 
Second, judging. 
We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. 
It's our national sport. 
Excuses. 
They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that. 
It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. 
For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it? 
(Laughter) And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. 
When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. 
So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. 
See if you can guess. 
The A is authenticity, just being yourself. 
A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. 
The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. 
I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. 
First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. 
Perhaps that's not necessary. 
Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. 
But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. 
I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. 
So hail. 
Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. 
This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. 
I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. 
Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. 
I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. 
But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. 
You hear the difference? 
We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. 
That's register. 
Then we have timbre. 
It's the way your voice feels. 
Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. 
Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. 
Go and get a voice coach. 
And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice. 
Then prosody. I love prosody. 
This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. 
It's root one for meaning in conversation. 
People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. 
That's where the word "" monotonic "" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. 
Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement? 
(Laughter) And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit. 
We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. 
Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. 
(Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? 
And finally, volume. 
(Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. 
Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. 
Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. 
That's called sodcasting, (Laughter) Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. 
It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. 
Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. 
Warm up your voice. 
I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. 
Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. 
First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. 
One more time. 
Ahhhh, very good. 
Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. 
And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. 
We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. 
Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. 
That's like champagne for the tongue. 
Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. 
It's really good. It starts with "" we "" and goes to "" aw. "" The "" we "" is high, the "" aw "" is low. 
Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. 
(Applause) Next time you speak, do those in advance. 
Now let me just put this in context to close. 
This is a serious point here. 
This is where we are now, right? 
We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. 
What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? 
Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? 
That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading. 
Thank you. 

I've always had stage fright, and not just a little bit, it's a big bit. 
And it didn't even matter until I was 27. 
That's when I started writing songs, and even then I only played them for myself. 
Just knowing my roommates were in the same house made me uncomfortable. 
But after a couple of years, just writing songs wasn't enough. 
I had all these stories and ideas, and I wanted to share them with people, but physiologically, I couldn't do it. 
I had this irrational fear. 
So on the week of my 30th birthday, I decided I was going to go to this local open mic, and put this fear behind me. 
There were like 20 people there. 
(Laughter) And they all looked angry. 
But I took a deep breath, and I signed up to play, and I felt pretty good. 
Pretty good, until about 10 minutes before my turn, when my whole body rebelled, and this wave of anxiety just washed over me. 
Next your non-essential systems start to shut down, like digestion. (Laughter) So your mouth gets dry, and blood is routed away from your extremities, so your fingers don't work anymore. 
Your pupils dilate, your muscles contract, your Spidey sense tingles, basically your whole body is trigger-happy. (Laughter) That condition is not conducive to performing folk music. (Laughter) 
I mean, your nervous system is an idiot. 
Really? Two hundred thousand years of human evolution, and it still can't tell the difference between a saber tooth tiger and 20 folksingers on a Tuesday night open mic? 
(Laughter) I have never been more terrified — until now. 
(Laughter and cheers) So then it was my turn, and somehow, I get myself onto the stage, I start my song, I open my mouth to sing the first line, and this completely horrible vibrato — you know, when your voice wavers — comes streaming out. 
And this is not the good kind of vibrato, like an opera singer has, this is my whole body just convulsing with fear. 
I'm embarrassed, the audience is clearly uncomfortable, they're focused on my discomfort. 
It was so bad. 
But that was my first real experience as a solo singer-songwriter. 
And something good did happen — I had the tiniest little glimpse of that audience connection that I was hoping for. 
And I wanted more. But I knew I had to get past this nervousness. 
That night I promised myself: I would go back every week until I wasn't nervous anymore. 
And I did. I went back every single week, and sure enough, week after week, it didn't get any better. The same thing happened every week. (Laughter) I couldn't shake it. 
And that's when I had an epiphany. 
And I remember it really well, because I don't have a lot of epiphanies. (Laughter) All I had to do was write a song that exploits my nervousness. 
That only seems authentic when I have stage fright, and the more nervous I was, the better the song would be. Easy. 
So I started writing a song about having stage fright. 
First, fessing up to the problem, the physical manifestations, how I would feel, how the listener might feel. 
And then accounting for things like my shaky voice, and I knew I would be singing about a half-octave higher than normal, because I was nervous. 
By having a song that explained what was happening to me, while it was happening, that gave the audience permission to think about it. 
They didn't have to feel bad for me because I was nervous, they could experience that with me, and we were all one big happy, nervous, uncomfortable family. (Laughter) By thinking about my audience, by embracing and exploiting my problem, I was able to take something that was blocking my progress, and turn it into something that was essential for my success. 
And having the stage fright song let me get past that biggest issue right in the beginning of a performance. 
And then I could move on, and play the rest of my songs with just a little bit more ease. 
And eventually, over time, I didn't have to play the stage fright song at all. 
(Applause) Can I have a sip of water? 
(Music) Thank you. 
♫ I'm not joking, you know, ♫ ♫ this stage fright is real. ♫ ♫ And if I'm up here trembling and singing, ♫ ♫ well, you'll know how I feel. ♫ ♫ And the mistake I'd be making, ♫ ♫ the tremolo caused by my whole body shaking. ♫ ♫ As you sit there feeling embarrassed for me, ♫ ♫ well, you don't have to be. ♫ ♫ Well, maybe just a little bit. ♫ (Laughter) ♫ And maybe I'll try to imagine you all without clothes. ♫ ♫ But singing in front of all naked strangers scares me more than anyone knows. ♫ 
♫ Not to discuss this at length, ♫ ♫ but my body image was never my strength. ♫ ♫ So frankly, I wish that you all would get dressed, ♫ ♫ I mean, you're not even really naked. ♫ ♫ And I'm the one with the problem. ♫ ♫ And you tell me, don't worry so much, you'll be great. ♫ ♫ But I'm the one living with me ♫ ♫ and I know how I get. ♫ ♫ Your advice is gentle but late. ♫ ♫ If not just a bit patronizing. ♫ ♫ And that sarcastic tone doesn't help me when I sing. ♫ 
♫ But we shouldn't talk about these things right now, ♫ ♫ really, I'm up on stage, and you're in the crowd. Hi. ♫ ♫ And I'm not making fun of unnurtured, irrational fear, ♫ ♫ and if I wasn't ready to face this, ♫ ♫ I sure as hell wouldn't be here. ♫ ♫ But if I belt one note out clearly, ♫ ♫ you'll know I'm recovering slowly but surely. ♫ ♫ And maybe next week, I'll set my guitar ringin '♫ ♫ my voice clear as water, and everyone singin'. ♫ ♫ But probably I'll just get up and start groovin ', ♫ 
♫ my vocal cords movin ', ♫ ♫ at speeds slightly faster than sound. ♫ (Applause) 

Some 17 years ago, I became allergic to Delhi's air. 
My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent, and it was killing me. 
With the help of IIT, TERI, and learnings from NASA, we discovered that there are three basic green plants, common green plants, with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. 
We've also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building, while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards. 
The three plants are Areca palm, Mother-in-Law's Tongue and money plant. 
The botanical names are in front of you. 
Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. 
We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. 
We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. 
The second plant is Mother-in-law's Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. 
And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. 
The third plant is money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. 
And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals. 
With these three plants, you can grow all the fresh air you need. 
In fact, you could be in a bottle with a cap on top, and you would not die at all, and you would not need any fresh air. 
We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi, which is a 50,000-square-feet, 20-year-old building. 
And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants. 
Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one's blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours. 
The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi. 
And the study showed that, compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent. 
And this study has been published on September 8, 2008, and it's available on the government of India website. 
Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20 percent by using these plants. 
And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15 percent, because you need less fresh air. 
We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building, which will have 60,000 indoor plants. 
Why is this important? 
It is also important for the environment, because the world's energy requirements are expected to grow by 30 percent in the next decade. 
40 percent of the world's energy is taken up by buildings currently, and 60 percent of the world's population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years. 
And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places. 
"Be the change you want to see in the world," said Mahatma Gandhi. 
And thank you for listening. 
(Applause) 

Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. 
And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there. 
We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. 
But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. 
But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. 
Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "" Do you understand this? "" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room. 
The other thing that happened is — I put them on YouTube just — I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world. 
(Laughter) Let's pause here. 
I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.' "" (Laughter) We get a lot of feedback along those lines. 
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "" My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math. 
We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. 
We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going. 
And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. 
(Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. (Laughter) 
One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit — the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. 
And so, what I'm showing over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. 
The ones I started were much more primitive. 
And the Khan Academy videos are there. 
You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. 
In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. 
And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. 
The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. 
Green means the student's already proficient. 
Or even better, "" Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer. "" (Applause) Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "" What don't you understand? What do you understand? "" and all the rest. 
Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. 
Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta. 
And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. 
Tell me what you're thinking there. 
(Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? 
Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?" 
Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level, they can see. 
BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. 
(Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. 
The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? 
Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. 
(Applause) 

Well, I'm involved in other things, besides physics. 
In fact, mostly now in other things. 
One thing is distant relationships among human languages. 
And the professional, historical linguists in the U.S. 
and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships, big groupings, groupings that go back a long time, longer than the familiar families. 
They don't like that. They think it's crank. I don't think it's crank. 
And there are some brilliant linguists, mostly Russians, who are working on that, at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow, and I would love to see where that leads. 
Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20, 25,000 years ago? 
And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor, when there was presumably a competition among many languages? 
How far back does that go? How far back does modern language go? 
How many tens of thousands of years does it go back? 
Chris Anderson: Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is? 
Murray Gell-Mann: Well, I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. 
I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. 
So, I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further. 
But that doesn't mean that all, or many, or most of today's attested languages couldn't descend perhaps from one that's much younger than that, like say 20,000 years, or something of that kind. It's what we call a bottleneck. 
CA: Well, Philip Anderson may have been right. 
You may just know more about everything than anyone. 
So, it's been an honor. Thank you Murray Gell-Mann. 
(Applause) 

In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar. 
Millions of people were in severe need of help. 
The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area. 
But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims. 
When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London, it is hard to believe that as of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail. 
The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world's populous faces: not having detailed maps. 
But help was coming. 
At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points. 
And it took them four days. 
The new software they used? Google Mapmaker. 
Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally. 
People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store. 
Maps matter. 
Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land. 
For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone. 
In the last year alone, thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information, and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable. 
And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere. 
Let's look at some of the maps being created by users right now. 
So, as we speak, people are mapping the world in these 170 countries. 
You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal. 
And, closer to home, Chalua, an N.G. road in Bangalore. 
This is the result of computational geometry, gesture recognition, and machine learning. 
This is a victory of thousands of users, in hundreds of cities, one user, one edit at a time. 
This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet. 
Welcome to the new world. 
(Applause) 

Why grow homes? Because we can. 
Right now, America is in an unremitting state of trauma. 
And there's a cause for that, all right. 
We've got McPeople, McCars, McHouses. 
As an architect, I have to confront something like this. 
So what's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses? 
Well, it's been around for 2,500 years. 
It's called pleaching, or grafting trees together, or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous, vascular system. 
And we do something different than what we did in the past; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that. 
We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter, plants, into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab. 
It fits into the environment. It is the environment. 
It is the landscape, right? 
And you can have a hundred million of these homes, and it's great because they suck carbon. 
They're perfect. 
You can have 100 million families, or take things out of the suburbs, because these are homes that are a part of the environment. 
Imagine pre-growing a village — it takes about seven to 10 years — and everything is green. 
So not only do we do the veggie house, we also do the in-vitro meat habitat, or homes that we're doing research on now in Brooklyn, where, as an architecture office, we're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one. 
So we've been doing this for a couple of years, and that's our lab. 
And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs. 
We use a modified inkjet printer, and we print geometry. 
We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like, you know, shoes, leather belts, handbags, etc., where no sentient creature is harmed. 
It's victimless. It's meat from a test tube. 
So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes. 
So here is a typical stud wall, an architectural construction, and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house, where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation, cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows. 
(Laughter) And we know it's incredibly ugly. 
It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial, but we kind of chose this shape. 
And there it is kind of grown, at least one particular section of it. 
We had a big show in Prague, and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat. 
That's why we grow homes. Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

The first time I uttered a prayer was in a glass-stained cathedral. 
I was kneeling long after the congregation was on its feet, dip both hands into holy water, trace the trinity across my chest, my tiny body drooping like a question mark all over the wooden pew. 
I asked Jesus to fix me, and when he did not answer I befriended silence in the hopes that my sin would burn and salve my mouth would dissolve like sugar on tongue, but shame lingered as an aftertaste. 
And in an attempt to reintroduce me to sanctity, my mother told me of the miracle I was, said I could grow up to be anything I want. 
I decided to be a boy. 
It was cute. 
I had snapback, toothless grin, used skinned knees as street cred, played hide and seek with what was left of my goal. 
I was it. 
The winner to a game the other kids couldn't play, I was the mystery of an anatomy, a question asked but not answered, tightroping between awkward boy and apologetic girl, and when I turned 12, the boy phase wasn't deemed cute anymore. 
It was met with nostalgic aunts who missed seeing my knees in the shadow of skirts, who reminded me that my kind of attitude would never bring a husband home, that I exist for heterosexual marriage and child-bearing. 
And I swallowed their insults along with their slurs. 
Naturally, I did not come out of the closet. 
The kids at my school opened it without my permission. 
Called me by a name I did not recognize, said "" lesbian, "" but I was more boy than girl, more Ken than Barbie. 
It had nothing to do with hating my body, I just love it enough to let it go, I treat it like a house, and when your house is falling apart, you do not evacuate, you make it comfortable enough to house all your insides, you make it pretty enough to invite guests over, you make the floorboards strong enough to stand on. 
My mother fears I have named myself after fading things. 
As she counts the echoes left behind by Mya Hall, Leelah Alcorn, Blake Brockington. 
She fears that I'll die without a whisper, that I'll turn into "" what a shame "" conversations at the bus stop. 
She claims I have turned myself into a mausoleum, that I am a walking casket, news headlines have turned my identity into a spectacle, Bruce Jenner on everyone's lips while the brutality of living in this body becomes an asterisk at the bottom of equality pages. 
No one ever thinks of us as human because we are more ghost than flesh, because people fear that my gender expression is a trick, that it exists to be perverse, that it ensnares them without their consent, that my body is a feast for their eyes and hands and once they have fed off my queer, they'll regurgitate all the parts they did not like. 
They'll put me back into the closet, hang me with all the other skeletons. 
I will be the best attraction. 
Can you see how easy it is to talk people into coffins, to misspell their names on gravestones. 
And people still wonder why there are boys rotting, they go away in high school hallways they are afraid of becoming another hashtag in a second afraid of classroom discussions becoming like judgment day and now oncoming traffic is embracing more transgender children than parents. 
I wonder how long it will be before the trans suicide notes start to feel redundant, before we realize that our bodies become lessons about sin way before we learn how to love them. 
Like God didn't save all this breath and mercy, like my blood is not the wine that washed over Jesus' feet. 
My prayers are now getting stuck in my throat. 
Maybe I am finally fixed, maybe I just don't care, maybe God finally listened to my prayers. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. 
In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. 
Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. 
(Laughter) But one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could test-run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. 
And some of the research now is showing that people on the spectrum actually think with the primary visual cortex. 
Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. 
Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. 
You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up, and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. 
Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. 
I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? 
This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. 
In the normal human mind, language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. 
We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kinds of people in the future. 
And let's talk about jobs. 
Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. 
And we need to be working with these students. 
And this brings up mentors. 
Some states now are getting it to where, if you have a degree in biology or in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. 
And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. 
Don't just say, "" Design new software. "" You've got to tell them something more specific: "" We're designing software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing, and it can only use so much memory. "" That's the kind of specificity you need. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Oh — you have a question for me? OK. (Applause) 

Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth. 
They've been here for billions of years, and what they are are single-celled microscopic organisms. 
So they are one cell and they have this special property that they only have one piece of DNA. 
They have very few genes, and genetic information to encode all of the traits that they carry out. 
And the way bacteria make a living is that they consume nutrients from the environment, they grow to twice their size, they cut themselves down in the middle, and one cell becomes two, and so on and so on. 
They just grow and divide, and grow and divide — so a kind of boring life, except that what I would argue is that you have an amazing interaction with these critters. 
I know you guys think of yourself as humans, and this is sort of how I think of you. 
This man is supposed to represent a generic human being, and all of the circles in that man are all of the cells that make up your body. 
There is about a trillion human cells that make each one of us who we are and able to do all the things that we do, but you have 10 trillion bacterial cells in you or on you at any moment in your life. 
So, 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells on a human being. 
And of course it's the DNA that counts, so here's all the A, T, Gs and Cs that make up your genetic code, and give you all your charming characteristics. 
You have about 30,000 genes. 
Well it turns out you have 100 times more bacterial genes playing a role in you or on you all of your life. 
At the best, you're 10 percent human, but more likely about one percent human, depending on which of these metrics you like. 
I know you think of yourself as human beings, but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial. 
(Laughter) These bacteria are not passive riders, these are incredibly important, they keep us alive. 
They cover us in an invisible body armor that keeps environmental insults out so that we stay healthy. 
They digest our food, they make our vitamins, they actually educate your immune system to keep bad microbes out. 
So they do all these amazing things that help us and are vital for keeping us alive, and they never get any press for that. 
But they get a lot of press because they do a lot of terrible things as well. 
So, there's all kinds of bacteria on the Earth that have no business being in you or on you at any time, and if they are, they make you incredibly sick. 
And so, the question for my lab is whether you want to think about all the good things that bacteria do, or all the bad things that bacteria do. 
The question we had is how could they do anything at all? 
I mean they're incredibly small, you have to have a microscope to see one. 
They live this sort of boring life where they grow and divide, and they've always been considered to be these asocial reclusive organisms. 
And so it seemed to us that they are just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals. 
And so we wanted to think if there couldn't be a different way that bacteria live. 
The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri. 
What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri. 
This bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence, like fireflies make light. 
We're not doing anything to the cells here. 
We just took the picture by turning the lights off in the room, and this is what we see. 
What was actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light, but when the bacteria made light. 
What we noticed is when the bacteria were alone, so when they were in dilute suspension, they made no light. 
But when they grew to a certain cell number all the bacteria turned on light simultaneously. 
The question that we had is how can bacteria, these primitive organisms, tell the difference from times when they're alone, and times when they're in a community, and then all do something together. 
What we've figured out is that the way that they do that is that they talk to each other, and they talk with a chemical language. 
This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell. 
When it's alone it doesn't make any light. 
But what it does do is to make and secrete small molecules that you can think of like hormones, and these are the red triangles, and when the bacteria is alone the molecules just float away and so no light. 
But when the bacteria grow and double and they're all participating in making these molecules, the molecule — the extracellular amount of that molecule increases in proportion to cell number. 
And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony. 
That's how bioluminescence works — they're talking with these chemical words. 
The reason that Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology. 
Again, another plug for the animals in the ocean, Vibrio fischeri lives in this squid. 
What you are looking at is the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid, and it's been turned on its back, and what I hope you can see are these two glowing lobes and these house the Vibrio fischeri cells, they live in there, at high cell number that molecule is there, and they're making light. 
The reason the squid is willing to put up with these shenanigans is because it wants that light. 
The way that this symbiosis works is that this little squid lives just off the coast of Hawaii, just in sort of shallow knee-deep water. 
The squid is nocturnal, so during the day it buries itself in the sand and sleeps, but then at night it has to come out to hunt. 
On bright nights when there is lots of starlight or moonlight that light can penetrate the depth of the water the squid lives in, since it's just in those couple feet of water. 
What the squid has developed is a shutter that can open and close over this specialized light organ housing the bacteria. 
Then it has detectors on its back so it can sense how much starlight or moonlight is hitting its back. 
And it opens and closes the shutter so the amount of light coming out of the bottom — which is made by the bacterium — exactly matches how much light hits the squid's back, so the squid doesn't make a shadow. 
It actually uses the light from the bacteria to counter-illuminate itself in an anti-predation device so predators can't see its shadow, calculate its trajectory, and eat it. 
This is like the stealth bomber of the ocean. 
(Laughter) But then if you think about it, the squid has this terrible problem because it's got this dying, thick culture of bacteria and it can't sustain that. 
And so what happens is every morning when the sun comes up the squid goes back to sleep, it buries itself in the sand, and it's got a pump that's attached to its circadian rhythm, and when the sun comes up it pumps out like 95 percent of the bacteria. 
Now the bacteria are dilute, that little hormone molecule is gone, so they're not making light — but of course the squid doesn't care. It's asleep in the sand. 
And as the day goes by the bacteria double, they release the molecule, and then light comes on at night, exactly when the squid wants it. 
First we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what's the mechanism. 
And what we found — so this is now supposed to be, again, my bacterial cell — is that Vibrio fischeri has a protein — that's the red box — it's an enzyme that makes that little hormone molecule, the red triangle. 
And then as the cells grow, they're all releasing that molecule into the environment, so there's lots of molecule there. 
And the bacteria also have a receptor on their cell surface that fits like a lock and key with that molecule. 
These are just like the receptors on the surfaces of your cells. 
When the molecule increases to a certain amount — which says something about the number of cells — it locks down into that receptor and information comes into the cells that tells the cells to turn on this collective behavior of making light. 
Why this is interesting is because in the past decade we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous, glow-in-the-dark bacterium that lives in the ocean — all bacteria have systems like this. 
So now what we understand is that all bacteria can talk to each other. 
They make chemical words, they recognize those words, and they turn on group behaviors that are only successful when all of the cells participate in unison. 
We have a fancy name for this: we call it quorum sensing. 
They vote with these chemical votes, the vote gets counted, and then everybody responds to the vote. 
What's important for today's talk is that we know that there are hundreds of behaviors that bacteria carry out in these collective fashions. 
But the one that's probably the most important to you is virulence. 
It's not like a couple bacteria get in you and they start secreting some toxins — you're enormous, that would have no effect on you. You're huge. 
What they do, we now understand, is they get in you, they wait, they start growing, they count themselves with these little molecules, and they recognize when they have the right cell number that if all of the bacteria launch their virulence attack together, they are going to be successful at overcoming an enormous host. 
Bacteria always control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. 
That's how it works. 
We also then went to look at what are these molecules — these were the red triangles on my slides before. 
This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule. 
This is the word that it talks with. 
So then we started to look at other bacteria, and these are just a smattering of the molecules that we've discovered. 
What I hope you can see is that the molecules are related. 
The left-hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria. 
But the right-hand part of the molecule is a little bit different in every single species. 
What that does is to confer exquisite species specificities to these languages. 
Each molecule fits into its partner receptor and no other. 
So these are private, secret conversations. 
These conversations are for intraspecies communication. 
Each bacteria uses a particular molecule that's its language that allows it to count its own siblings. 
Once we got that far we thought we were starting to understand that bacteria have these social behaviors. 
But what we were really thinking about is that most of the time bacteria don't live by themselves, they live in incredible mixtures, with hundreds or thousands of other species of bacteria. 
And that's depicted on this slide. This is your skin. 
So this is just a picture — a micrograph of your skin. 
Anywhere on your body, it looks pretty much like this, and what I hope you can see is that there's all kinds of bacteria there. 
And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species. 
There has to be a way to take a census of the rest of the bacteria in the population. 
So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual. 
They all have a species-specific system — they have a molecule that says "" me. "" But then, running in parallel to that is a second system that we've discovered, that's generic. 
So, they have a second enzyme that makes a second signal and it has its own receptor, and this molecule is the trade language of bacteria. 
It's used by all different bacteria and it's the language of interspecies communication. 
What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of me and how many of you. 
They take that information inside, and they decide what tasks to carry out depending on who's in the minority and who's in the majority of any given population. 
Then again we turn to chemistry, and we figured out what this generic molecule is — that was the pink ovals on my last slide, this is it. 
It's a very small, five-carbon molecule. 
What the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule. 
So they're all using this molecule for interspecies communication. 
This is the bacterial Esperanto. 
(Laughter) Once we got that far, we started to learn that bacteria can talk to each other with this chemical language. 
But what we started to think is that maybe there is something practical that we can do here as well. 
I've told you that bacteria do have all these social behaviors, they communicate with these molecules. 
Of course, I've also told you that one of the important things they do is to initiate pathogenicity using quorum sensing. 
We thought, what if we made these bacteria so they can't talk or they can't hear? 
Couldn't these be new kinds of antibiotics? 
Of course, you've just heard and you already know that we're running out of antibiotics. 
Bacteria are incredibly multi-drug-resistant right now, and that's because all of the antibiotics that we use kill bacteria. 
They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA. 
We kill bacteria with traditional antibiotics and that selects for resistant mutants. 
And so now of course we have this global problem in infectious diseases. 
We thought, well what if we could sort of do behavior modifications, just make these bacteria so they can't talk, they can't count, and they don't know to launch virulence. 
And so that's exactly what we've done, and we've sort of taken two strategies. 
The first one is we've targeted the intraspecies communication system. 
So we made molecules that look kind of like the real molecules — which you saw — but they're a little bit different. 
And so they lock into those receptors, and they jam recognition of the real thing. 
By targeting the red system, what we are able to do is to make species-specific, or disease-specific, anti-quorum sensing molecules. 
We've also done the same thing with the pink system. 
We've taken that universal molecule and turned it around a little bit so that we've made antagonists of the interspecies communication system. 
The hope is that these will be used as broad-spectrum antibiotics that work against all bacteria. 
To finish I'll just show you the strategy. 
In this one I'm just using the interspecies molecule, but the logic is exactly the same. 
What you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal, in this case, a mouse, it doesn't initiate virulence right away. 
It gets in, it starts growing, it starts secreting its quorum sensing molecules. 
It recognizes when it has enough bacteria that now they're going to launch their attack, and the animal dies. 
What we've been able to do is to give these virulent infections, but we give them in conjunction with our anti-quorum sensing molecules — so these are molecules that look kind of like the real thing, but they're a little bit different which I've depicted on this slide. 
What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium — a multi-drug-resistant pathogenic bacterium — in the same time we give our anti-quorum sensing molecule, in fact, the animal lives. 
We think that this is the next generation of antibiotics and it's going to get us around, at least initially, this big problem of resistance. 
What I hope you think, is that bacteria can talk to each other, they use chemicals as their words, they have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that we're just now starting to learn about. 
Of course what that allows bacteria to do is to be multicellular. 
So in the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference. 
What happens is that bacteria have these collective behaviors, and they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish if they simply acted as individuals. 
What I would hope that I could further argue to you is that this is the invention of multicellularity. 
Bacteria have been on the Earth for billions of years; humans, couple hundred thousand. 
We think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works. 
We think, by studying bacteria, we're going to be able to have insight about multicellularity in the human body. 
We know that the principles and the rules, if we can figure them out in these sort of primitive organisms, the hope is that they will be applied to other human diseases and human behaviors as well. 
I hope that what you've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other. 
By using these two molecules they can say "" me "" and they can say "" you. "" Again of course that's what we do, both in a molecular way, and also in an outward way, but I think about the molecular stuff. 
This is exactly what happens in your body. 
It's not like your heart cells and your kidney cells get all mixed up every day, and that's because there's all of this chemistry going on, these molecules that say who each of these groups of cells is, and what their tasks should be. 
Again, we think that bacteria invented that, and you've just evolved a few more bells and whistles, but all of the ideas are in these simple systems that we can study. 
The final thing is, again just to reiterate that there's this practical part, and so we've made these anti-quorum sensing molecules that are being developed as new kinds of therapeutics. 
But then, to finish with a plug for all the good and miraculous bacteria that live on the Earth, we've also made pro-quorum sensing molecules. 
So, we've targeted those systems to make the molecules work better. 
Remember you have these 10 times or more bacterial cells in you or on you, keeping you healthy. 
What we're also trying to do is to beef up the conversation of the bacteria that live as mutualists with you, in the hopes of making you more healthy, making those conversations better, so bacteria can do things that we want them to do better than they would be on their own. 
Finally, I wanted to show you this is my gang at Princeton, New Jersey. 
Everything I told you about was discovered by someone in that picture. 
I hope when you learn things, like about how the natural world works — I just want to say that whenever you read something in the newspaper or you get to hear some talk about something ridiculous in the natural world it was done by a child. 
Science is done by that demographic. 
All of those people are between 20 and 30 years old, and they are the engine that drives scientific discovery in this country. 
It's a really lucky demographic to work with. 
I keep getting older and older and they're always the same age, and it's just a crazy delightful job. 
I want to thank you for inviting me here. 
It's a big treat for me to get to come to this conference. 
(Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 

I'm a designer and an educator. 
I'm a multitasking person, and I push my students to fly through a very creative, multitasking design process. 
But how efficient is, really, this multitasking? 
Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking. 
A couple of examples. 
Look at that. 
This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter) So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS, and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue. 
So someone tells us the story about supertaskers, so this two percent of people who are able to control multitasking environment. 
But what about ourselves, and what about our reality? 
When's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend? 
So this is a project I'm working on, and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super, hyper — (Laughter) (Applause) to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function. 
Another example: Have you ever been to Venice? 
How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island. 
But our multitasking reality is pretty different, and full of tons of information. 
So what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure? 
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge, but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task, or maybe turning your digital senses totally off. 
So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product. 
Why not? So find your monotask spot within the multitasking world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So why do we learn mathematics? 
Essentially, for three reasons: calculation, application, and last, and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it, inspiration. 
Mathematics is the science of patterns, and we study it to learn how to think logically, critically and creatively, but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated, and when our students ask, "Why are we learning this?" 
then they often hear that they'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test. 
But wouldn't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind? 
Now, I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen, so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers, the Fibonacci numbers. (Applause) Yeah! I already have Fibonacci fans here. 
That's great. 
Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways. 
From the standpoint of calculation, they're as easy to understand as one plus one, which is two. 
Then one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, and so on. 
Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa, and these numbers appear in his book "" Liber Abaci, "" which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today. 
In terms of applications, Fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often. 
The number of petals on a flower is typically a Fibonacci number, or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a Fibonacci number as well. 
In fact, there are many more applications of Fibonacci numbers, but what I find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display. 
Let me show you one of my favorites. 
Suppose you like to square numbers, and frankly, who doesn't? (Laughter) Let's look at the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. 
So one squared is one, two squared is four, three squared is nine, five squared is 25, and so on. 
Now, it's no surprise that when you add consecutive Fibonacci numbers, you get the next Fibonacci number. Right? 
That's how they're created. 
But you wouldn't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together. 
But check this out. 
One plus one gives us two, and one plus four gives us five. 
And four plus nine is 13, nine plus 25 is 34, and yes, the pattern continues. 
In fact, here's another one. 
Suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. 
Let's see what we get there. 
So one plus one plus four is six. 
Add nine to that, we get 15. 
Add 25, we get 40. 
Add 64, we get 104. 
Now look at those numbers. 
Those are not Fibonacci numbers, but if you look at them closely, you'll see the Fibonacci numbers buried inside of them. 
Do you see it? I'll show it to you. 
Six is two times three, 15 is three times five, 40 is five times eight, two, three, five, eight, who do we appreciate? 
(Laughter) Fibonacci! Of course. 
Now, as much fun as it is to discover these patterns, it's even more satisfying to understand why they are true. 
Let's look at that last equation. 
Why should the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13? 
I'll show you by drawing a simple picture. 
We'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square. 
Together, they form a one-by-two rectangle. 
Beneath that, I'll put a two-by-two square, and next to that, a three-by-three square, beneath that, a five-by-five square, and then an eight-by-eight square, creating one giant rectangle, right? 
Now let me ask you a simple question: what is the area of the rectangle? 
Well, on the one hand, it's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it, right? 
Just as we created it. 
It's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared. Right? 
That's the area. 
On the other hand, because it's a rectangle, the area is equal to its height times its base, and the height is clearly eight, and the base is five plus eight, which is the next Fibonacci number, 13. Right? 
So the area is also eight times 13. 
Since we've correctly calculated the area two different ways, they have to be the same number, and that's why the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13. 
Now, if we continue this process, we'll generate rectangles of the form 13 by 21, 21 by 34, and so on. 
Now check this out. 
If you divide 13 by eight, you get 1.625. 
And if you divide the larger number by the smaller number, then these ratios get closer and closer to about 1.618, known to many people as the Golden Ratio, a number which has fascinated mathematicians, scientists and artists for centuries. 
Now, I show all this to you because, like so much of mathematics, there's a beautiful side to it that I fear does not get enough attention in our schools. 
We spend lots of time learning about calculation, but let's not forget about application, including, perhaps, the most important application of all, learning how to think. 
If I could summarize this in one sentence, it would be this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Everyone is both a learner and a teacher. 
This is me being inspired by my first tutor, my mom, and this is me teaching Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to 200 students at Stanford University. 
Now the students and I enjoyed the class, but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern, the teaching technology isn't. 
In fact, I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom. 
Note the textbook, the sage on the stage, and the sleeping guy in the back. (Laughter) Just like today. 
So my co-teacher, Sebastian Thrun, and I thought, there must be a better way. 
We challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our Stanford class, but to bring it to anyone in the world for free. 
We announced the class on July 29th, and within two weeks, 50,000 people had signed up for it. 
And that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries. 
We were thrilled to have that kind of audience, and just a bit terrified that we hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter) So we got to work. 
We studied what others had done, what we could copy and what we could change. 
Benjamin Bloom had showed that one-on-one tutoring works best, so that's what we tried to emulate, like with me and my mom, even though we knew it would be one-on-thousands. 
Here, an overhead video camera is recording me as I'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper. 
A student said, "" This class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who's explaining something you haven't grasped, but are about to. "" And that's exactly what we were aiming for. 
Now, from Khan Academy, we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen. 
We decided to go even shorter and more interactive. 
Our typical video is two minutes, sometimes shorter, never more than six, and then we pause for a quiz question, to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring. 
Here, I'm explaining how a computer uses the grammar of English to parse sentences, and here, there's a pause and the student has to reflect, understand what's going on and check the right boxes before they can continue. 
Students learn best when they're actively practicing. 
We wanted to engage them, to have them grapple with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize the key ideas themselves. 
We mostly avoid questions like, "" Here's a formula, now tell me the value of Y when X is equal to two. "" We preferred open-ended questions. 
One student wrote, "" Now I'm seeing Bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere I look. "" And I like that kind of response. 
That's just what we were going for. 
We didn't want students to memorize the formulas; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world. 
And we succeeded. 
Or, I should say, the students succeeded. 
And it's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education, and in doing so, we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes. 
Most online classes, the videos are always available. 
You can watch them any time you want. 
But if you can do it any time, that means you can do it tomorrow, and if you can do it tomorrow, well, you may not ever get around to it. (Laughter) So we brought back the innovation of having due dates. (Laughter) You could watch the videos any time you wanted during the week, but at the end of the week, you had to get the homework done. 
This motivated the students to keep going, and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time, so if you went into a discussion forum, you could get an answer from a peer within minutes. 
Now, I'll show you some of the forums, most of which were self-organized by the students themselves. 
From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned the concept of "" flipping "" the classroom. 
Students watched the videos on their own, and then they come together to discuss them. 
From Eric Mazur, I learned about peer instruction, that peers can be the best teachers, because they're the ones that remember what it's like to not understand. 
Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that. 
Of course, we couldn't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students, so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums. 
And finally, from Teach For America, I learned that a class is not primarily about information. 
More important is motivation and determination. 
It was crucial that the students see that we're working hard for them and they're all supporting each other. 
Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours. 
They got this statement of accomplishment. 
So what have we learned? 
Well, we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together, but there are more ideas to try. 
Sebastian's teaching another class now. 
I'll do one in the fall. 
Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx and others have more classes coming. 
It's a really exciting time. 
But to me, the most exciting part of it is the data that we're gathering. 
We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come. 
And you'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students. 
(Applause) 

Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life. 
As my New Year's resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. 
Now I eat whenever I'm hungry, and I've lost 10 pounds. 
This was me at age 13, when I started my first diet. 
I look at that picture now, and I think, you did not need a diet, you needed a fashion consult. 
(Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and when I gained it back, of course I blamed myself. 
And for the next three decades, I was on and off various diets. 
No matter what I tried, the weight I'd lost always came back. 
I'm sure many of you know the feeling. 
As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? 
Obviously, how much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn. 
What most people don't realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. 
Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes, and that is a good thing, because your conscious mind — how do we put this politely? — it's easily distracted. 
It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie. 
You don't forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to have for dinner. 
Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no matter what you consciously believe. 
This is called your set point, but that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of about 10 or 15 pounds. 
You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of it. 
The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it, and the system works like a thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism, to keep your weight stable as conditions change. 
That's what a thermostat does, right? 
It keeps the temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside. 
Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up. 
Your brain works exactly the same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push your body back to what it considers normal. 
If you lose a lot of weight, your brain reacts as if you were starving, and whether you started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same. 
We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not, but it can't. 
If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. 
Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed. 
This means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin. 
From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight loss makes sense. 
When food was scarce, our ancestors' survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight when food was available would have protected them against the next shortage. 
Over the course of human history, starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating. 
This may explain a very sad fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. 
Now, if your mother ever mentioned that life is not fair, this is the kind of thing she was talking about. 
(Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower your set point. 
Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven years, your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back. 
If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible response. 
That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time when food was less available, and it's also the reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the most effective solution to obesity. 
Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. 
If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal. 
Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower, like most dieters. 
Let's call them intuitive eaters and controlled eaters. 
The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, and they spend less time thinking about food. 
Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. 
And a small indulgence, like eating one scoop of ice cream, is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. 
Children are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. 
Several long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders. 
The other factor, by the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family members about their weight. 
So don't do that. 
(Laughter) I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in just this one, because I'm a geek, and that's how I roll. (Laughter) 
This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year period based on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. 
Let's start by looking at the normal weight people in the study. 
The height of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had. 
And as you'd expect, the healthier the lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. 
Now let's look at what happens in overweight people. 
The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of death. 
Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. 
For obese people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times higher than the healthiest groups in the study. 
But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too. 
In fact, if you look only at the group with all four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little difference. 
You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even If you can't lose weight and keep it off. 
Diets don't have very much reliability. 
Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight. 
Forty percent of them have gained even more. 
If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it. 
If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next question is, what do you do about it? 
And my answer, in a word, is mindfulness. 
I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga. 
I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry. 
How do you do it? 
Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. 
Sit down to regular meals without distractions. 
Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done. 
It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been worth it. 
I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. 
I often don't think about it. 
I forget we have chocolate in the house. 
I should say that this approach to eating probably won't make you lose weight unless you often eat when you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that makes significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss. 
Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be thin already. 
(Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? 
Diets may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. 
At worst, they ruin lives: Weight obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. 
In the U.S., we have 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they've been on a diet. 
Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the wrong scale. 
Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. 
It takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project, and because willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else. 
Let me leave you with one last thought. 
What if we told all those dieting girls that it's okay to eat when they're hungry? 
What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? 
I think most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of them would probably be thinner. 
I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13. 
Thanks. 

This is a work in process, based on some comments that were made at TED two years ago about the need for the storage of vaccine. 
(Music) (Video) Narrator: On this planet, 1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity, refrigeration or stored fuels. 
This is a problem. 
It impacts: the spread of disease, the storage of food and medicine and the quality of life. 
So here's the plan: inexpensive refrigeration that doesn't use electricity, propane, gas, kerosene or consumables. 
Time for some thermodynamics. 
And the story of the Intermittent Absorption Refrigerator. 
Adam Grosser: So 29 years ago, I had this thermo teacher who talked about absorption and refrigeration. 
It's one of those things that stuck in my head. 
It was a lot like the Stirling engine: it was cool, but you didn't know what to do with it. 
And it was invented in 1858, by this guy Ferdinand Carre, but he couldn't actually build anything with it because of the tools of the time. 
This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall in 1928, and it was a really neat idea, and I'll get to why it didn't work, but here's how it works. 
There's two spheres and they're separated in distance. 
One has a working fluid, water and ammonia, and the other is a condenser. 
You heat up one side, the hot side. 
The ammonia evaporates and it re-condenses in the other side. 
You let it cool to room temperature, and then, as the ammonia re-evaporates and combines with the water back on the erstwhile hot side, it creates a powerful cooling effect. 
So, it was a great idea that didn't work at all: it blew up. 
Because using ammonia you get hugely high pressures if you heated them wrong. 
It topped 400 psi. The ammonia was toxic. It sprayed everywhere. 
But it was kind of an interesting thought. 
So, the great thing about 2006 is there's a lot of really great computational work you can do. 
So, we got the whole thermodynamics department at Stanford involved — a lot of computational fluid dynamics. 
We proved that most of the ammonia refrigeration tables are wrong. 
We found some non-toxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures. 
Brought in a team from the U.K. — there's a lot of great refrigeration people, it turned out, in the U.K. — and built a test rig, and proved that, in fact, we could make a low pressure, non-toxic refrigerator. 
So, this is the way it works. 
You put it on a cooking fire. 
Most people have cooking fires in the world, whether it's camel dung or wood. 
It heats up for about 30 minutes, cools for an hour. 
Put it into a container and it will refrigerate for 24 hours. 
It looks like this. This is the fifth prototype. It's not quite done. 
Weighs about eight pounds, and this is the way it works. 
You put it into a 15-liter vessel, about three gallons, and it'll cool it down to just above freezing — three degrees above freezing — for 24 hours in a 30 degree C environment. It's really cheap. 
We think we can build these in high volumes for about 25 dollars, in low volumes for about 40 dollars. 
And we think we can make refrigeration something that everybody can have. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This means, "" I'm smiling. "" So does that. 
This means "" mouse. "" "Cat." 
Here we have a story. 
The start of the story, where this means guy, and that is a ponytail on a passer-by. 
Here's where it happens. 
These are when. 
This is a cassette tape the girl puts into her cassette-tape player. 
She wears it every day. 
It's not considered vintage — she just likes certain music to sound a certain way. 
Look at her posture; it's remarkable. 
That's because she dances. 
Now he, the guy, takes all of this in, figuring, "Honestly, geez, what are my chances?" 
(Laughter) And he could say, "" Oh my God! "" or "" I heart you! "" "I'm laughing out loud." 
"I want to give you a hug." 
But he comes up with that, you know. 
He tells her, "" I'd like to hand-paint your portrait on a coffee mug. "" (Laughter) Put a crab inside it. 
Add some water. 
Seven different salts. 
He means he's got this sudden notion to stand on dry land, but just panhandle at the ocean. 
He says, "" You look like a mermaid, but you walk like a waltz. "" And the girl goes, "" Wha '? "" So, the guy replies, "" Yeah, I know, I know. 
I think my heartbeat might be the Morse code for inappropriate. 
At least, that's how it seems. 
I'm like a junior varsity cheerleader sometimes — for swearing, awkward silences, and very simple rhyme schemes. 
Right now, talking to you, I'm not even really a guy. 
I'm a monkey — (Laughter) — blowing kisses at a butterfly. 
But I'm still suggesting you and I should meet. 
First, soon, and then a lot. 
I'm thinking the southwest corner of 5th and 42nd at noon tomorrow, but I'll stay until you show up, ponytail or not. 
Hell, ponytail alone. 
I don't know what else to tell you. 
I got a pencil you can borrow. 
You can put it in your phone. "" But the girl does not budge, does not smile, does not frown. 
She just says, "" No thank you. "" You know? 
["" i don't need 2 write it down. ""] (Applause) 

Nine years ago, I worked for the U.S. government in Iraq, helping rebuild the electricity infrastructure. 
And I was there, and I worked in that job because I believe that technology can improve people's lives. 
One afternoon, I had tea with a storekeeper at the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, and he said to me, "" You Americans, you can put a man on the moon, but when I get home tonight, I won't be able to turn on my lights. "" At the time, the U.S. government had spent more than two billion dollars on electricity reconstruction. 
How do you ensure technology reaches users? 
How do you put it in their hands so that it is useful? 
So those are the questions that my colleagues and I at D-Rev ask ourselves. 
And D-Rev is short for Design Revolution. 
And I took over the organization four years ago and really focused it on developing products that actually reach users, and not just any users, but customers who live on less than four dollars a day. 
One of the key areas we've been working on recently is medical devices, and while it may not be obvious that medical devices have something in common with Iraq's electricity grid then, there are some commonalities. 
Despite the advanced technology, it's not reaching the people who need it most. 
So I'm going to tell you about one of the projects we've been working on, the ReMotion Knee, and it's a prosthetic knee for above-knee amputees. 
And this project started when the Jaipur Foot Organization, the largest fitter of prosthetic limbs in the world, came to the Bay Area and they said, "We need a better knee." 
Chances are, if you're living on less than four dollars a day, and you're an amputee, you've lost your limb in a vehicle accident. 
Most people think it's land mines, but it's a vehicle accident. 
You're walking by the side of the road and you're hit by a truck, or you're trying to to jump on a moving train, you're late for work, and your pant leg gets caught. 
And the reality is that if you don't have much money, like this young named Kamal right here, the option you really have is a bamboo staff to get around. 
And how big a problem is this? 
There's over three million amputees every year who need a new or replacement knee. 
And what are their options? 
This is a high-end. This is what we'd call a "" smart knee. "" It's got a microprocessor inside. 
It can pretty much do anything, but it's 20,000 dollars, and to give you a sense of who wears this, veterans, American veterans coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq would be fit with something like this. 
This is a low-end titanium knee. 
It's a polycentric knee, and all that that means is the mechanism, is a four-bar mechanism, that mimics a natural human knee. 
But at 1,400 dollars, it's still too expensive for people like Kamal. 
And lastly, here you see a low-end knee. 
This is a knee that's been designed specifically for poor people. 
And while you have affordability, you've lost on functionality. 
The mechanism here is a single axis, and a single axis is like a door hinge. 
So you can think about how unstable that would be. 
And this is the type of mechanism that the Jaipur Foot Organization was using when they were looking for a better knee, and I just wanted to give you a sense of what a leg system looks like, because I'm showing you all these knees and I imagine it's hard to think how it all fits together. 
So at the top you have a socket, and this fits over someone's residual limb, and everyone's residual limb is a little bit different. 
And then you have the knee, and here I've got a single axis on the knee so you can see how it rotates, and then a pylon, and then a foot. 
And we've been able to develop a knee, a polycentric knee, so that type of knee that acts like a human knee, mimics human gait, for 80 dollars retail. 
(Applause) But the key is, you can have this great invention, you can have this great design, but how do you get it to the people who most need it? 
How do you ensure it gets to them and it improves their lives? 
So at D-Rev, we've done some other projects, and we looked at three things that we really believe gets technologies to customers, to users, to people who need it. 
And the first thing is that the product needs to be world class. 
It needs to perform on par or better than the best products on the market. 
Regardless of your income level, you want the most beautiful, the best product that there is. 
I'm going to show you a video now of a man named Ash. You can see him walking. 
He's wearing the same knee system here with a single axis knee. 
And he's doing a 10-meter walk test. 
And you'll notice that he's struggling with stability as he's walking. 
And something that's not obvious, that you can't see, is that it's psychologically draining to walk and to be preventing yourself from falling. 
Now this is a video of Kamal. 
You remember Kamal earlier, holding the bamboo staff. 
He's wearing one of the earlier versions of our knee, and he's doing that same 10-meter walk test. 
And you can see his stability is much better. 
So world class isn't just about technical performance. 
It's also about human performance. 
And most medical devices, we've learned, as we've dug in, are really designed for Westerners, for wealthier economies. 
But the reality is our users, our customers, they do different things. They sit cross-legged more. 
We see that they squat. They kneel in prayer. 
And we designed our knee to have the greatest range of motion of almost any other knee on the market. 
So the second thing we learned, and this leads into my second point, which is that we believe that products need to be designed to be user-centric. 
And at D-Rev, we go one step further and we say you need to be user-obsessed. 
So it's not just the end user that you're thinking about, but everyone who interacts with the product, so, for example, the prosthetist who fits the knee, but also the context in which the knee is being fit. 
What is the local market like? 
How do all these components get to the clinic? 
Do they all get there on time? The supply chain. 
Everything that goes into ensuring that this product gets to the end user, and it goes in as part of the system, and it's used. 
So I wanted to show you some of the iterations we did between the first version, the Jaipur Knee, so this is it right here. 
(Clicking) Notice anything about it? 
It clicks. 
We'd seen that users had actually modified it. 
So do you see that black strip right there? 
That's a homemade noise dampener. 
We also saw that our users had modified it in other ways. 
You can see there that that particular amputee, he had wrapped bandages around the knee. 
He'd made a cosmesis. 
And if you look at the knee, it's got those pointy edges, right? 
So if you're wearing it under pants or a skirt or a sari, it's really obvious that you're wearing a prosthetic limb, and in societies where there's social stigma around being disabled, people are particularly acute about this. 
So I'm going to show you some of the modifications we did. 
We did a lot of iterations, not just around this, but some other things. 
But here we have the version three, the ReMotion Knee, but if you look in here, you can see the noise dampener. It's quieter. 
The other thing we did is that we smoothed the profile. 
We made it thinner. 
And something that's not obvious is that we designed it for mass production. 
And this goes into my last point. 
We really, truly believe that if a product is going to reach users at the scale that it's needed, it needs to be market-driven, and market-driven means that products are sold. 
They're not donated. They're not heavily subsidized. 
Our product needs to be designed to offer value to the end user. 
It also has to be designed to be very affordable. 
But a product that is valued by a customer is used by a customer, and use is what creates impact. 
And we believe that as designers, it holds us accountable to our customers. 
And with centralized manufacturing, you can control the quality control, and you can hit that $80 price point with profit margins built in. 
And now, those profit margins are critical, because if you want to scale, if you want to reach all the people in the world who possibly need a knee, it needs to be economically sustainable. 
So I want to give you a sense of where we are at. 
We have fit over 5,000 amputees, and one of the big indicators we're looking at, of course, is, does it improve lives? 
Well, the standard is, is someone still wearing their knee six months later? 
The industry average is about 65 percent. 
Ours is 79 percent, and we're hoping to get that higher. 
Right now, our knees are worn in 12 countries. 
This is where we want to get, though, in the next three years. 
We'll double the impact in 2015, and we'll double it each of the following years after that. 
But then we hit a new challenge, and that's the number of skilled prosthetists who are able to fit knees. 
So I want to end with a story of Pournima. 
Pournima was 18 years old when she was in a car accident where she lost her leg, and she traveled 12 hours by train to come to the clinic to be fit with a knee, and while all of the amputees who wear our knees affect us as the designers, she's particularly meaningful to me as an engineer and as a woman, because she was in school, she had just started school to study engineering. 
And she said, "" Well, now that I can walk again, I can go back and complete my studies. "" And to me she represents the next generation of engineers solving problems and ensuring meaningful technologies reach their users. 
So thank you. 
(Applause) 

A hundred years ago this month, a 36-year-old Albert Einstein stood up in front of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin to present a radical new theory of space, time and gravity: the general theory of relativity. 
General relativity is unquestionably Einstein's masterpiece, a theory which reveals the workings of the universe at the grandest scales, capturing in one beautiful line of algebra everything from why apples fall from trees to the beginning of time and space. 
1915 must have been an exciting year to be a physicist. 
Two new ideas were turning the subject on its head. 
One was Einstein's theory of relativity, the other was arguably even more revolutionary: quantum mechanics, a mind-meltingly strange yet stunningly successful new way of understanding the microworld, the world of atoms and particles. 
Over the last century, these two ideas have utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. 
It's thanks to relativity and quantum mechanics that we've learned what the universe is made from, how it began and how it continues to evolve. 
A hundred years on, we now find ourselves at another turning point in physics, but what's at stake now is rather different. 
The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature, or whether maybe for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer, not because we don't have the brains or technology, but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it. 
This is the essential problem: the universe is far, far too interesting. 
Relativity and quantum mechanics appear to suggest that the universe should be a boring place. 
It should be dark, lethal and lifeless. 
But when we look around us, we see we live in a universe full of interesting stuff, full of stars, planets, trees, squirrels. 
The question is, ultimately, why does all this interesting stuff exist? 
Why is there something rather than nothing? 
This contradiction is the most pressing problem in fundamental physics, and in the next few years, we may find out whether we'll ever be able to solve it. 
At the heart of this problem are two numbers, two extremely dangerous numbers. 
These are properties of the universe that we can measure, and they're extremely dangerous because if they were different, even by a tiny bit, then the universe as we know it would not exist. 
The first of these numbers is associated with the discovery that was made a few kilometers from this hall, at CERN, home of this machine, the largest scientific device ever built by the human race, the Large Hadron Collider. 
The LHC whizzes subatomic particles around a 27-kilometer ring, getting them closer and closer to the speed of light before smashing them into each other inside gigantic particle detectors. 
On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced to the world that they'd spotted a new fundamental particle being created at the violent collisions at the LHC: the Higgs boson. 
Now, if you followed the news at the time, you'll have seen a lot of physicists getting very excited indeed, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we get that way every time we discover a new particle. 
Well, that is kind of true, but the Higgs boson is particularly special. 
We all got so excited because finding the Higgs proves the existence of a cosmic energy field. 
Now, you may have trouble imagining an energy field, but we've all experienced one. 
If you've ever held a magnet close to a piece of metal and felt a force pulling across that gap, then you've felt the effect of a field. 
And the Higgs field is a little bit like a magnetic field, except it has a constant value everywhere. 
It's all around us right now. 
We can't see it or touch it, but if it wasn't there, we would not exist. 
The Higgs field gives mass to the fundamental particles that we're made from. 
If it wasn't there, those particles would have no mass, and no atoms could form and there would be no us. 
But there is something deeply mysterious about the Higgs field. 
Relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that it has two natural settings, a bit like a light switch. 
It should either be off, so that it has a zero value everywhere in space, or it should be on so it has an absolutely enormous value. 
In both of these scenarios, atoms could not exist, and therefore all the other interesting stuff that we see around us in the universe would not exist. 
In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on, not zero but 10,000 trillion times weaker than its fully on value, a bit like a light switch that's got stuck just before the off position. 
And this value is crucial. 
If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe. 
So this is the first of our dangerous numbers, the strength of the Higgs field. 
Theorists have spent decades trying to understand why it has this very peculiarly fine-tuned number, and they've come up with a number of possible explanations. 
They have sexy-sounding names like "" supersymmetry "" or "" large extra dimensions. "" I'm not going to go into the details of these ideas now, but the key point is this: if any of them explained this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field, then we should see new particles being created at the LHC along with the Higgs boson. 
So far, though, we've not seen any sign of them. 
But there's actually an even worse example of this kind of fine-tuning of a dangerous number, and this time it comes from the other end of the scale, from studying the universe at vast distances. 
One of the most important consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity was the discovery that the universe began as a rapid expansion of space and time 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang. 
Now, according to early versions of the Big Bang theory, the universe has been expanding ever since with gravity gradually putting the brakes on that expansion. 
But in 1998, astronomers made the stunning discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. 
The universe is getting bigger and bigger faster and faster driven by a mysterious repulsive force called dark energy. 
Now, whenever you hear the word "" dark "" in physics, you should get very suspicious because it probably means we don't know what we're talking about. 
(Laughter) We don't know what dark energy is, but the best idea is that it's the energy of empty space itself, the energy of the vacuum. 
Now, if you use good old quantum mechanics to work out how strong dark energy should be, you get an absolutely astonishing result. 
You find that dark energy should be 10 to the power of 120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy. 
That's one with 120 zeroes after it. 
This is a number so mind-bogglingly huge that it's impossible to get your head around. 
We often use the word "" astronomical "" when we're talking about big numbers. 
It's a thousand trillion trillion trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the entire universe. 
So that's a pretty bad prediction. 
In fact, it's been called the worst prediction in physics, and this is more than just a theoretical curiosity. 
If dark energy were anywhere near this strong, then the universe would have been torn apart, stars and galaxies could not form, and we would not be here. 
So this is the second of those dangerous numbers, the strength of dark energy, and explaining it requires an even more fantastic level of fine-tuning than we saw for the Higgs field. 
But unlike the Higgs field, this number has no known explanation. 
The hope was that a complete combination of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is the theory of the universe at grand scales, with quantum mechanics, the theory of the universe at small scales, might provide a solution. 
Einstein himself spent most of his later years on a futile search for a unified theory of physics, and physicists have kept at it ever since. 
One of the most promising candidates for a unified theory is string theory, and the essential idea is, if you could zoom in on the fundamental particles that make up our world, you'd see actually that they're not particles at all, but tiny vibrating strings of energy, with each frequency of vibration corresponding to a different particle, a bit like musical notes on a guitar string. 
So it's a rather elegant, almost poetic way of looking at the world, but it has one catastrophic problem. 
It turns out that string theory isn't one theory at all, but a whole collection of theories. 
It's been estimated, in fact, that there are 10 to the 500 different versions of string theory. 
Each one would describe a different universe with different laws of physics. 
You can't disprove the theory. 
But others actually turned this on its head and said, well, maybe this apparent failure is string theory's greatest triumph. 
What if all of these 10 to the 500 different possible universes actually exist out there somewhere in some grand multiverse? 
Suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine-tuned values of these two dangerous numbers. 
In most of the multiverse, dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form. 
Now, this idea is extremely controversial, and it's easy to see why. 
If we follow this line of thinking, then we will never be able to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" 
In most of the multiverse, there is nothing, and we live in one of the few places where the laws of physics allow there to be something. 
Even worse, we can't test the idea of the multiverse. 
We can't access these other universes, so there's no way of knowing whether they're there or not. 
So we're in an extremely frustrating position. 
That doesn't mean the multiverse doesn't exist. 
There are other planets, other stars, other galaxies, so why not other universes? 
The problem is, it's unlikely we'll ever know for sure. 
Now, the idea of the multiverse has been around for a while, but in the last few years, we've started to get the first solid hints that this line of reasoning may get born out. 
Despite high hopes for the first run of the LHC, what we were looking for there — we were looking for new theories of physics: supersymmetry or large extra dimensions that could explain this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field. 
But despite high hopes, the LHC revealed a barren subatomic wilderness populated only by a lonely Higgs boson. 
My experiment published paper after paper where we glumly had to conclude that we saw no signs of new physics. 
The stakes now could not be higher. 
This summer, the LHC began its second phase of operation with an energy almost double what we achieved in the first run. 
What particle physicists are all desperately hoping for are signs of new particles, micro black holes, or maybe something totally unexpected emerging from the violent collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. 
If so, then we can continue this long journey that began 100 years ago with Albert Einstein towards an ever deeper understanding of the laws of nature. 
But if, in two or three years' time, when the LHC switches off again for a second long shutdown, we've found nothing but the Higgs boson, then we may be entering a new era in physics: an era where there are weird features of the universe that we cannot explain; an era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly forever beyond our reach; an era where we will never be able to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Harry, even if you just said the science may not have some answers, I would like to ask you a couple of questions, and the first is: building something like the LHC is a generational project. 
I just mentioned, introducing you, that we live in a short-term world. 
How do you think so long term, projecting yourself out a generation when building something like this? 
Harry Cliff: I was very lucky that I joined the experiment I work on at the LHC in 2008, just as we were switching on, and there are people in my research group who have been working on it for three decades, their entire careers on one machine. 
So I think the first conversations about the LHC were in 1976, and you start planning the machine without the technology that you know you're going to need to be able to build it. 
One of the big detectors which record these collisions, they didn't think there was technology that could withstand the radiation that would be created in the LHC, so there was basically a lump of lead in the middle of this object with some detectors around the outside, but subsequently we have developed technology. 
So you have to rely on people's ingenuity, that they will solve the problems, but it may be a decade or more down the line. 
BG: China just announced two or three weeks ago that they intend to build a supercollider twice the size of the LHC. 
I was wondering how you and your colleagues welcome the news. 
HC: Size isn't everything, Bruno. BG: I'm sure. I'm sure. 
But I mean, seriously, it's great news. 
So building a machine like the LHC requires countries from all over the world to pool their resources. 
No one nation can afford to build a machine this large, apart from maybe China, because they can mobilize huge amounts of resources, manpower and money to build machines like this. 
So it's only a good thing. 
What they're really planning to do is to build a machine that will study the Higgs boson in detail and could give us some clues as to whether these new ideas, like supersymmetry, are really out there, so it's great news for physics, I think. 
BG: Harry, thank you. HC: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I teach chemistry. 
(Explosion) All right, all right. 
So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere. 
Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over? 
Some people nodding yes. 
Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened. 
The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. 
Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening. 
(Clang) (Laughs) Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. 
But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level. 
If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle. 
Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario. 
You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. 
But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. 
For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. 
But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction. 
So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information. 
In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta. 
This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there. 
Now, when I got this, I was — press Caps Lock — absolutely freaked out, okay? 
But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied. 
Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it? 
So when I asked him, he told me three things. 
He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work. 
Second, he embraced, and didn't fear, the messy process of trial and error, the inevitable process of trial and error. 
And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life. 
Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. 
Rule number one: Curiosity comes first. 
Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around. 
Rule number two: Embrace the mess. 
We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly. 
And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206. 
And rule number three: Practice reflection. 
What we do is important. It deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision. 
Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms? 
As if what we are doing one day will save lives. 
Our students our worth it. 
And each case is different. 
(Explosion) All right. Sorry. 
The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on. 
So these are my daughters. 
On the right we have little Emmalou — Southern family. 
And, on the left, Riley. 
Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. 
She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, "" Why? "" Yeah. Why. 
I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything. 
We all were at that age. 
But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet. 
How will they grow this curiosity? 
You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids, and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms — to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom. 
But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. 
And it managed to get through my spam filter. 
I'm not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh. 
(Laughter) I know. (Laughter) 
It went like this: it said, "" Hello James Veitch, I have an interesting business proposal I want to share with you, Solomon. "" Now, my hand was kind of hovering on the delete button, right? 
I was looking at my phone. I thought, I could just delete this. 
Or I could do what I think we've all always wanted to do. 
(Laughter) And I said, "" Solomon, Your email intrigues me. "" (Laughter) (Applause) And the game was afoot. 
He said, "" Dear James Veitch, We shall be shipping Gold to you. "" (Laughter) "You will earn 10% of any gold you distributes." (Laughter) 
So I knew I was dealing with a professional. (Laughter) 
I said, "" How much is it worth? "" He said, "" We will start with smaller quantity, "" — I was like, aww — and then he said, "" of 25 kgs. (Laughter) 
The worth should be about $2.5 million. "" I said, "" Solomon, if we're going to do it, let's go big. 
(Applause) I can handle it. How much gold do you have? "" (Laughter) He said, "" It is not a matter of how much gold I have, what matters is your capability of handling. 
We can start with 50 kgs as trial shipment. "" I said, "" 50 kgs? 
There's no point doing this at all unless you're shipping at least a metric ton. "" (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "" What do you do for a living? "" (Laughter) I said, "" I'm a hedge fund executive bank manager. "" (Laughter) This isn't the first time I've shipped bullion, my friend, no no no. 
Then I started to panic. 
I was like, "" Where are you based? "" I don't know about you, but I think if we're going via the postal service, it ought to be signed for. 
That's a lot of gold. "" He said, "" It will not be easy to convince my company to do larger quantity shipment. "" I said, "" Solomon, I'm completely with you on this one. 
I'm putting together a visual for you to take into the board meeting. 
Hold tight. "" (Laughter) This is what I sent Solomon. (Laughter) 
(Applause) I don't know if we have any statisticians in the house, but there's definitely something going on. (Laughter) 
I said, "" Solomon, attached to this email you'll find a helpful chart. 
He said, "" I will be so much happy if the deal goes well, because I'm going to get a very good commission as well. "" And I said, "" That's amazing, What are you going to spend your cut on? "" And he said, "" On RealEstate, what about you? "" I thought about it for a long time. 
And I said, "" One word; Hummus. "" (Laughter) "" It's going places. (Laughter) 
I was in Sainsbury's the other day and there were like 30 different varieties. 
Have you ever done that, Solomon? "" (Laughter) He said, "" I have to go bed now. "" (Laughter) (Applause) "" Till morrow. 
Have sweet dream. "" I didn't know what to say! 
I said, "" Bonsoir my golden nugget, bonsoir. "" (Laughter) Guys, you have to understand, this had been going for, like, weeks, albeit hitherto the greatest weeks of my life, but I had to knock it on the head. 
When we email each other, we need to use a code. "" And he agreed. 
(Laughter) I said, "" Solomon, I spent all night coming up with this code we need to use in all further correspondence: Lawyer: Gummy Bear. 
Bank: Cream Egg. 
Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle. Claim: Peanut M & Ms. 
Documents: Jelly Beans. 
Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard. "" (Laughter) I knew these were all words they use, right? 
I've gone too far. So I had to backpedal a little. 
I said, "" Solomon, Is the deal still on? 
KitKat. "" (Laughter) Because you have to be consistent. 
He said, "" The Business is on and I am trying to blah blah blah... "" I said, "" Dude, you have to use the code! "" What followed is the greatest email I've ever received. 
(Laughter) I'm not joking, this is what turned up in my inbox. 
This was a good day. 
"" The business is on. 
I am trying to raise the balance for the Gummy Bear — (Laughter) so he can submit all the needed Fizzy Cola Bottle Jelly Beans to the Creme Egg, for the Peanut M & Ms process to start. (Laughter) 
Send 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard. "" (Applause) And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? 
And that's what I've been doing for three years on your behalf. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. 
It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. 
I don't think what I'm doing is mean. 
There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. 
All I'm doing is wasting their time. 
And if you're going to do this — and I highly recommend you do — get yourself a pseudonymous email address. 
Don't use your own email address. 
I'd wake up in the morning and have a thousand emails about penis enlargements, only one of which was a legitimate response — (Laughter) to a medical question I had. 
But I'll tell you what, though, guys, I'll tell you what: any day is a good day, any day is a good day if you receive an email that begins like this: (Laughter) "" I AM WINNIE MANDELA, THE SECOND WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA THE FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT. "" I was like, oh! — that Winnie Mandela. (Laughter) 
I know so many. 
"" I NEED TO TRANSFER 45 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THE COUNTRY BECAUSE OF MY HUSBAND NELSON MANDELA'S HEALTH CONDITION. "" Let that sink in. 
She sent me this, which is hysterical. 
(Laughter) And this. 
And this looks fairly legitimate, this is a letter of authorization. 
Given that Nelson died three months ago, I'd describe his health condition as fairly serious. "" (Laughter) That's the worst health condition you can have, not being alive. 
She said, "" KINDLY COMPLY WITH MY BANKERS INSTRUCTIONS. 
ONE LOVE. "" (Laughter) I said, "" Of course. NO WOMAN, NO CRY. "" (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "" MY BANKER WILL NEED TRANSFER OF 3000 DOLLARS. ONE LOVE. "" (Laughter) I said, "" no problemo. 
I SHOT THE SHERIFF. "" [(BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY)] (Laughter) Thank you. 

When I was about three or four years old, I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing. 
And my mum said, "" Darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page. "" And I thought to myself, "" But that's what I want to do. 
I love stories. I want to read. "" Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true. 
I was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. 
The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. 
Little did I know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I'd been born at the right place and the right time, that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution. 
There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan and other developed parts of the world. 
Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. 
And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today. 
It's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. 
But let me tell you a bit about it today. 
When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. 
It's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and I can feel them with my fingers. 
In fact, I think they're putting up my grade six report. 
I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. 
(Laughter) I was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (Laughter) 
When you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. 
Look for it. Have you noticed it? 
I do. I look for it all the time. 
(Laughter) When I was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way I could read. 
When I was in high school, I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. 
I could have family and friends read me material, and I could then read it back as many times as I needed. 
And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. 
For example, when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada, the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. 
I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. 
As one of them said to me, "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment." 
(Laughter) But think of it. These men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help. 
Well, I went back and became an academic at Melbourne's Monash University, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. 
In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape. 
Students, family and friends all read me material. 
Mrs. Lois Doery, whom I later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. 
One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. 
But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. 
But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform. 
(Applause) I saw my first Apple computer in 1984, and I thought to myself, "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." 
How very wrong I was. 
In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerard was born, I got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. 
See it up there? 
And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. 
(Laughter) It's a blind computer. (Laughter) 
It's a Keynote Gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (Laughter) 
Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (Laughter) I think there's more memory in my watch. 
It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. 
Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, but his memory lives on in my heart. 
It meant, for the first time, I could read back what I had typed into it. 
It had a speech synthesizer. 
I'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. 
This now allowed me to read back what I'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory. 
In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. 
Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. 
And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. 
I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 1989, and it blew me away, and in September 1989, the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced, the law school got one, and I could use it. 
For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. 
I didn't have to be nice to people! 
(Laughter) I no longer would be censored. 
For example, I was too shy then, and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. 
(Laughter) But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and — (Laughter) (Applause) Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. 
That's what it's shrunk to. 
And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. 
I can keep up with my friends. 
There are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that I haven't met. 
One is another American inventor Ted Henter. 
Ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. 
He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. 
But in 1989, he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer. 
It's called JAWS, Job Access With Speech, and it sounds like this. 
(JAWS speaking) Ron McCallum: Isn't that slow? 
(Laughter) You see, if I read like that, I'd fall asleep. 
I slowed it down for you. 
I'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it. 
Can we play that one? 
(JAWS speaking) (Laughter) RM: You know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly. 
(Laughter) (Applause) This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well. 
But, you know, I find reading with machines a very lonely process. 
I grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. 
Do you love being read to? 
And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." 
Isn't that a great book? 
I still love being close to someone reading to me. 
But I wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life. 
Of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. 
After all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY. 
But when I'm reading with synthetic voices, I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice. 
Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. 
Many websites we can't read using JAWS and the other technologies. 
Websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3, known as W3C, has developed worldwide standards for the Internet. 
And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. 
There are other barriers brought about by our laws. 
For example, Australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. 
But those books can't travel across borders. 
For example, in Spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish. 
In Argentina, there are 50,000. 
In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand. 
But it's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America. 
There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language. 
And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter. 
Well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter. 
And that's why, next month in Morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. 
It's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. 
I want that to happen. 
(Applause) My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School, where I served a term as dean, or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Geneva. 
I've indeed been a very fortunate human being. 
I wonder what the future will hold. 
The technology will advance even further, but I can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "" Remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers. "" I'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world. 
I'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, Professor Mary Crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. 
I want to thank her too. 
I think I have to say goodbye now. 
Bless you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Yay! (Applause) Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Applause) 

Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain. 
We chart it, we've described it, we've drawn it, we've mapped it. 
Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology — think Google Maps, think GPS — the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation. 
So let's take a look at the brain. 
Most people, when they first look at a fresh human brain, they say, "" It doesn't look what you're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain. "" Typically, what you're looking at is a fixed brain. It's gray. 
And this outer layer, this is the vasculature, which is incredible, around a human brain. 
This is the blood vessels. 
20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ. 
That's basically, if you hold two fists together, it's just slightly larger than the two fists. 
Scientists, sort of at the end of the 20th century, learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain. 
So for example, they can see in the back part of the brain, which is just turning around there. 
There's the cerebellum; that's keeping you upright right now. 
It's keeping me standing. It's involved in coordinated movement. 
On the side here, this is temporal cortex. 
This is the area where primary auditory processing — so you're hearing my words, you're sending it up into higher language processing centers. 
Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought, decision making — it's the last to mature in late adulthood. 
This is where all your decision-making processes are going on. 
It's the place where you're deciding right now you probably aren't going to order the steak for dinner. 
So if you take a deeper look at the brain, one of the things, if you look at it in cross-section, what you can see is that you can't really see a whole lot of structure there. 
But there's actually a lot of structure there. 
It's cells and it's wires all wired together. 
So about a hundred years ago, some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells. 
And that's shown here in the the very light blue. 
You can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained. 
And what you can see is it's very non-uniform. You see a lot more structure there. 
So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex. 
It's one continuous processing unit, if you will. 
But you can also see things underneath there as well. 
And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through. 
They're probably less cell dense. 
So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain. 
And as you can see, they're very non-uniformly distributed. 
And how they're distributed really contributes to their underlying function. 
And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells. 
So let's take a deeper look. 
Let's look at neurons. 
So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons. 
There are also these smaller cells as you'll see. 
These are support cells — astrocytes glia. 
And the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input. 
They're storing it, they're processing it. 
Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain. 
And each neuron itself is largely unique. 
The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry. 
These are proteins. 
They're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement. 
They're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with. 
And they're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do. 
So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes. 
We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes. 
We get one from mom, one from dad. 
And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes. 
They're encoded in the DNA. 
And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on. 
And so our project is seeking to look at this readout, understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on. 
So in order to undertake such a project, we obviously need brains. 
So we sent our lab technician out. 
We were seeking normal human brains. 
What we actually start with is a medical examiner's office. 
This a place where the dead are brought in. 
We are seeking normal human brains. 
There's a lot of criteria by which we're selecting these brains. 
We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60, they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain, no history of psychiatric disease, no drugs on board — we do a toxicology workup. 
And we're very careful about the brains that we do take. 
We're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue, we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death. 
Because what we're trying to measure, the RNA — which is the readout from our genes — is very labile, and so we have to move very quickly. 
One side note on the collection of brains: because of the way that we collect, and because we require consent, we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains. 
Males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life. 
And men are much more likely to have their significant other, spouse, give consent than the other way around. 
(Laughter) So the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what's called an MR. 
This is magnetic resonance imaging — MRI. 
It's a standard template by which we're going to hang the rest of this data. 
So we collect this MR. 
And you can think of this as our satellite view for our map. 
The next thing we do is we collect what's called a diffusion tensor imaging. 
This maps the large cabling in the brain. 
And again, you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways, if you will. 
The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices. 
And those are frozen solid, and they're shipped to Seattle. 
And in Seattle, we take these — this is a whole human hemisphere — and we put them into what's basically a glorified meat slicer. 
There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide. 
We're going to then apply one of those stains to it, and we scan it. 
And then what we get is our first mapping. 
So this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments. 
You could consider this state boundaries, if you will, those pretty broad outlines. 
From this, we're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces, which then we can put on a smaller cryostat. 
And this is just showing this here — this frozen tissue, and it's being cut. 
This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width. 
And remember, it's frozen. 
And so you can see here, old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied. 
We take a microscope slide. 
Then we very carefully melt onto the slide. 
This will then go onto a robot that's going to apply one of those stains to it. 
And our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this. 
So again this is what they can see under the microscope. 
You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places. 
And from there it's routine. They understand where to make these assignments. 
And they can make basically what's a reference atlas. 
This is a more detailed map. 
Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what's called laser scanning microdissection. 
So the technician takes the instructions. 
They scribe along a place there. 
And then the laser actually cuts. 
You can see that blue dot there cutting. And that tissue falls off. 
You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time. 
There's a container underneath that's collecting that tissue. 
We take that tissue, we purify the RNA out of it using some basic technology, and then we put a florescent tag on it. 
We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray. 
Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you, but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass. 
This has roughly 60,000 elements on it, so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome. 
And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample. 
Now we do this over and over again, this process for any given brain. 
We're taking over a thousand samples for each brain. 
This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus. 
It's involved in learning and memory. 
And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples. 
So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements, a thousand samples. 
So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain. 
We've done right now two human brains-worth of data. 
We've put all of that together into one thing, and I'll show you what that synthesis looks like. 
It's basically a large data set of information that's all freely available to any scientist around the world. 
They don't even have to log in to come use this tool, mine this data, find interesting things out with this. 
So here's the modalities that we put together. 
You'll start to recognize these things from what we've collected before. 
Here's the MR. It provides the framework. 
There's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn, it allows you to zoom in, it allows you to highlight individual structures. 
But most importantly, we're now mapping into this anatomic framework, which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on. 
So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree. 
Green is the sort of cool areas where it's not turned on. 
And each gene gives us a fingerprint. 
And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available. 
So what can scientists learn about this data? 
We're just starting to look at this data ourselves. 
There's some basic things that you would want to understand. 
Two great examples are drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin. 
These are commonly prescribed antidepressants. 
Now remember, we're assaying genes. 
Genes send the instructions to make proteins. 
Proteins are targets for drugs. 
So drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off, etc. 
So if you want to understand the action of drugs, you want to understand how they're acting in the ways you want them to, and also in the ways you don't want them to. 
In the side effect profile, etc., you want to see where those genes are turned on. 
And for the first time, we can actually do that. 
We can do that in multiple individuals that we've assayed too. 
So now we can look throughout the brain. 
We can see this unique fingerprint. 
And we get confirmation. 
We get confirmation that, indeed, the gene is turned on — for something like Prozac, in serotonergic structures, things that are already known be affected — but we also get to see the whole thing. 
We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before, and we see these genes turned on there. 
It's as interesting a side effect as it could be. 
One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint. 
So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize. 
Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, "" Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X. "" And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they're great. They analyze large populations. 
They look at their entire genomes, and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes. 
But what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes. 
It tells you the what, but it doesn't tell you the where. 
And so it's very important for those researchers that we've created this resource. 
Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity. 
They can start to look at common pathways — other things that they simply haven't been able to do before. 
So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality. 
And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives. 
But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar. 
We're similar at the genetic level. 
And what we're finding is actually, even at the brain biochemical level, we are quite similar. 
And so this shows it's not 99 percent, but it's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff, so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated. 
And then we find some outliers, some things that lie beyond the cloud. 
And those genes are interesting, but they're very subtle. 
So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level. 
Now what do those differences look like? 
This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were — and they're quite subtle. 
These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type. 
These are two genes that we found as good examples. 
One is called RELN — it's involved in early developmental cues. 
DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia. 
These aren't schizophrenic individuals, but they do show some population variation. 
And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells. 
It's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that's telling us a gene is turned on there. 
Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know. 
Those kinds of studies require much larger populations. 
So I'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go. 
I think these resources are incredibly valuable. 
They give researchers a handle on where to go. 
But we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point. 
We're certainly going to be looking at more. 
I'll just close by saying that the tools are there, and this is truly an unexplored, undiscovered continent. 
This is the new frontier, if you will. 
And so for those who are undaunted, but humbled by the complexity of the brain, the future awaits. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. 
As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "" I collect bad wines. "" Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. 
The second thing I learned that day — and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot — (Laughter) I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. 
In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. 
I'm saying, "" Please blow up. "" I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. 
And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. 
It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. 
I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane — and please don't — but imagine, and how would you change? 

I collaborate with bacteria. 
And I'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour. 
So what you're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing, and as they do so they create an electrical charge. 
And this attracts metals from their local environment. 
And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria. 
One of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water. 
And the desalination process is one where we take out salts. 
We can use it for drinking and agriculture. 
Removing the salts from water — particularly seawater — through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe. 
So seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology. 
We take the water from the sea and we apply pressure. 
And this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane. 
This takes energy, producing clean water. 
But we're also left with a concentrated salt solution, or brine. 
But the process is very expensive and it's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe. 
And also, the brine that's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea. 
And this is detrimental to the local ecology of the sea area that it's pumped back out into. 
So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology. 
And Singapore proposes by 2060 to produce [900] million liters per day of desalinated water. 
But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine. 
And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play. 
So what we're doing at the moment is we're accumulating metals like calcium, potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine. 
And this, in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that I just mentioned, equates to a $4.5 billion mining industry for Singapore — a place that doesn't have any natural resources. 
So I'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn't existed before; imagine a mining industry that doesn't mean defiling the Earth; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine. 
And what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube, a mining industry that is in harmony with nature. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm five years old, and I am very proud. 
My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. 
Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. 
This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. 
So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. 
Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. 
There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. 
She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. 
Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. 
Thanks to Chernobyl, we get asylum in the U.S. 
I am six years old, and I don't cry when we leave home and we come to America, because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum, Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside, Bazooka that we'd get once a year in Ukraine and we'd have to chew one piece for an entire week. 
So the first day we get to New York, my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family's staying in. 
Only, we don't know that it's a homeless shelter. 
We think that it's a hotel, a hotel with lots of rats. 
So we find this penny kind of fossilized in the floor, and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don't just lose money. 
And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand, and it's sticky and rusty, but it feels like I'm holding a fortune. 
I decide that I'm going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum. 
And in that moment, I feel like a millionaire. 
About a year later, I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash, and suddenly I have more toys than I've ever had in my whole life. 
And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order. 
So we take the pizza, our very first pizza, and we devour slice after slice as the deliveryman stands there and stares at us from the doorway. 
And he tells us to pay, but we don't speak English. 
My mother comes out, and he asks her for money, but she doesn't have enough. 
She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare. 
Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza. 
Everyone's upset. 
But the pizza is delicious. 
It doesn't hit me until years later just how little we had. 
On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S., we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S. 
The man at the front desk laughs, and he says, "You can't reserve a room here. This is a homeless shelter." 
My husband Brian was also homeless as a kid. 
His family lost everything, and at age 11, he had to live in motels with his dad, motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill. 
And one time, when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back, it was crawling with roaches. 
But he did have one thing. 
He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure. 
This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams. 
I'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family. 
Once upon a time, Scarlet was used as bait in dog fights. 
She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they'd get more aggressive before the fight. 
And now, these days, she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it, but when we pour water for her in her bowl, she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude. 
Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett, and she rolls through the grass, and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude. 
We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments, and we feel like millionaires. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products. 
So allow me to tell you about it. 
So I have a brother, Gavin. 
When this whole shebang happened, he was four. 
He loved to cook. 
He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. 
He wanted to be a chef really badly. 
And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? 
I mean, we all had those when we were little. 
And he wanted one so badly. 
But then he started to realize something. 
In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. 
And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? 
So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. 
And this discouraged my brother a lot. 
He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. 
Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending. 
And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. 
And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. 
Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. 
And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors. 
So this petition started to take off — humongously fast, you have no idea. 
I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. 
In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So, needless to say, it was crazy. 
Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. 
It was literally one of the best moments of my life. 
It was like "" Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. "" That thing was amazing. 
What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. 
I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. 
People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. 
And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? 
So, let's see. 
From user name Liquidsore29 — interesting user names we have here — "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." 
Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. 
How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." 
From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention." 
So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. 
It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? 
But then I started to realize something. 
Haters gonna hate. 
Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. 
So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. 
I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. 
And you can make that change. 
You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. 
And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So on my way here, the passenger next to me and I had a very interesting conversation during my flight. 
He told me, "" It seems like the United States has run out of jobs, because they're just making some up: cat psychologist, dog whisperer, tornado chaser. "" A couple of seconds later, he asked me, "So what do you do?" 
And I was like, "" Peacebuilder? "" (Laughter) Every day, I work to amplify the voices of women and to highlight their experiences and their participation in peace processes and conflict resolution, and because of my work, I recognize that the only way to ensure the full participation of women globally is by reclaiming religion. 
Now, this matter is vitally important to me. 
As a young Muslim woman, I am very proud of my faith. 
It gives me the strength and conviction to do my work every day. 
My parents moved from Libya, North Africa, to Canada in the early 1980s, and I am the middle child of 11 children. 
Yes, 11. 
But growing up, I saw my parents, both religiously devout and spiritual people, pray and praise God for their blessings, namely me of course, but among others. (Laughter) They were kind and funny and patient, limitlessly patient, the kind of patience that having 11 kids forces you to have. 
And they were fair. 
I was never subjected to religion through a cultural lens. 
I was treated the same, the same was expected of me. 
And my parents' understanding of God as a merciful and beneficial friend and provider shaped the way I looked at the world. 
Being one of 11 children is Diplomacy 101. (Laughter) To this day, I am asked where I went to school, like, "" Did you go to Kennedy School of Government? "" and I look at them and I'm like, "" No, I went to the Murabit School of International Affairs. "" It's extremely exclusive. You would have to talk to my mom to get in. 
Lucky for you, she's here. 
But being one of 11 children and having 10 siblings teaches you a lot about power structures and alliances. 
It teaches you the importance of messaging. 
You have to ask questions in the right way to get the answers you know you want, and you have to say no in the right way to keep the peace. 
But the most important lesson I learned growing up was the importance of being at the table. 
When my mom's favorite lamp broke, I had to be there when she was trying to find out how and by who, because I had to defend myself, because if you're not, then the finger is pointed at you, and before you know it, you will be grounded. 
I am not speaking from experience, of course. 
When I was 15 in 2005, I completed high school and I moved from Canada — Saskatoon — to Zawiya, my parents' hometown in Libya, a very traditional city. 
Mind you, I had only ever been to Libya before on vacation, and as a seven-year-old girl, it was magic. 
It was ice cream and trips to the beach and really excited relatives. 
Turns out it's not the same as a 15-year-old young lady. 
I very quickly became introduced to the cultural aspect of religion. 
The words "" haram "" — meaning religiously prohibited — and "" aib "" — meaning culturally inappropriate — were exchanged carelessly, as if they meant the same thing and had the same consequences. 
And I found myself in conversation after conversation with classmates and colleagues, professors, friends, even relatives, beginning to question my own role and my own aspirations. 
And even with the foundation my parents had provided for me, I found myself questioning the role of women in my faith. 
So at the Murabit School of International Affairs, we go very heavy on the debate, and rule number one is do your research, so that's what I did, and it surprised me how easy it was to find women in my faith who were leaders, who were innovative, who were strong — politically, economically, even militarily. 
Khadija financed the Islamic movement in its infancy. 
We wouldn't be here if it weren't for her. 
So why weren't we learning about her? 
Why weren't we learning about these women? 
Why were women being relegated to positions which predated the teachings of our faith? 
And why, if we are equal in the eyes of God, are we not equal in the eyes of men? 
To me, it all came back to the lessons I had learned as a child. 
The decision maker, the person who gets to control the message, is sitting at the table, and unfortunately, in every single world faith, they are not women. 
Religious institutions are dominated by men and driven by male leadership, and they create policies in their likeness, and until we can change the system entirely, then we can't realistically expect to have full economic and political participation of women. 
Our foundation is broken. 
In 2011, the Libyan revolution broke out, and my family was on the front lines. 
And there's this amazing thing that happens in war, a cultural shift almost, very temporary. 
And it was the first time that I felt it was not only acceptable for me to be involved, but it was encouraged. 
We were part of decision making. 
We were information sharing. We were crucial. 
And I wanted and needed for that change to be permanent. 
Turns out, that's not that easy. 
It only took a few weeks before the women that I had previously worked with were returning back to their previous roles, and most of them were driven by words of encouragement from religious and political leaders, most of whom cited religious scripture as their defense. 
It's how they gained popular support for their opinions. 
So initially, I focused on the economic and political empowerment of women. 
I thought that would lead to cultural and social change. 
It turns out, it does a little, but not a lot. 
I decided to use their defense as my offense, and I began to cite and highlight Islamic scripture as well. 
In 2012 and 2013, my organization led the single largest and most widespread campaign in Libya. 
We entered homes and schools and universities, even mosques. 
We spoke to 50,000 people directly, and hundreds of thousands more through billboards and television commercials, radio commercials and posters. 
And you're probably wondering how a women's rights organization was able to do this in communities which had previously opposed our sheer existence. 
I used scripture. 
I used verses from the Quran and sayings of the Prophet, Hadiths, his sayings which are, for example, "The best of you is the best to their family." 
"Do not let your brother oppress another." 
For the first time, Friday sermons led by local community imams promoted the rights of women. 
Policies were changed. 
In certain communities, we actually had to go as far as saying the International Human Rights Declaration, which you opposed because it wasn't written by religious scholars, well, those same principles are in our book. 
So really, the United Nations just copied us. 
By changing the message, we were able to provide an alternative narrative which promoted the rights of women in Libya. 
It's something that has now been replicated internationally, and while I am not saying it's easy — believe me, it's not. 
Liberals will say you're using religion and call you a bad conservative. 
Conservatives will call you a lot of colorful things. 
I've heard everything from, "" Your parents must be extremely ashamed of you "" — false; they're my biggest fans — to "" You will not make it to your next birthday "" — again wrong, because I did. 
And I remain a very strong believer that women's rights and religion are not mutually exclusive. 
But we have to be at the table. 
We have to stop giving up our position, because by remaining silent, we allow for the continued persecution and abuse of women worldwide. 
By saying that we're going to fight for women's rights and fight extremism with bombs and warfare, we completely cripple local societies which need to address these issues so that they're sustainable. 
It is not easy, challenging distorted religious messaging. 
You will have your fair share of insults and ridicule and threats. 
But we have to do it. 
We have no other option than to reclaim the message of human rights, the principles of our faith, not for us, not for the women in your families, not for the women in this room, not even for the women out there, but for societies that would be transformed with the participation of women. 
And the only way we can do that, our only option, is to be, and remain, at the table. 

First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. 
Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. 
It takes guts to stand out like that. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And here comes a second follower. 
Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts — three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. 
So a movement must be public. 
Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. 
Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. 
(Laughter) So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. 
So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you. 
The biggest lesson, if you noticed — did you catch it? — is that leadership is over-glorified. 
And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. 
And what a perfect place to do that, at TED. 
(Applause) 

Please close your eyes, and open your hands. 
Now imagine what you could place in your hands: an apple, maybe your wallet. 
Now open your eyes. 
What about a life? 
What you see here is a premature baby. 
He looks like he's resting peacefully, but in fact he's struggling to stay alive because he can't regulate his own body temperature. 
This baby is so tiny he doesn't have enough fat on his body to stay warm. 
Sadly, 20 million babies like this are born every year around the world. 
Four million of these babies die annually. 
But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe, long-term health problems. 
The reason is because in the first month of a baby's life, its only job is to grow. 
If it's battling hypothermia, its organs can't develop normally, resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes, to heart disease, to low I.Q. 
Imagine: Many of these problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm. 
That is the primary function of an incubator. 
But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand dollars. 
So, you're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries. 
As a result, parents resort to local solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies' bodies, or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you see here — methods that are both ineffective and unsafe. 
I've seen this firsthand over and over again. 
On one of my first trips to India, I met this young woman, Sevitha, who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby, Rani. 
She took her baby to the nearest village clinic, and the doctor advised her to take Rani to a city hospital so she could be placed in an incubator. 
But that hospital was over four hours away, and Sevitha didn't have the means to get there, so her baby died. 
Inspired by this story, and dozens of other similar stories like this, my team and I realized what was needed was a local solution, something that could work without electricity, that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use, given that the majority of births still take place in the home. 
We needed something that was portable, something that could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies and something ultra-low-cost, compared to the 20,000 dollars that an incubator in the U.S. costs. 
So, this is what we came up with. 
What you see here looks nothing like an incubator. 
It looks like a small sleeping bag for a baby. 
You can open it up completely. It's waterproof. 
There's no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily. 
But the magic is in this pouch of wax. 
This is a phase-change material. 
It's a wax-like substance with a melting point of human body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. 
You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it's able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time, after which you simply reheat the pouch. 
So, you then place it into this little pocket back here, and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby. 
Looks simple, but we've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors, moms and clinicians to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities. 
We plan to launch this product in India in 2010, and the target price point will be 25 dollars, less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator. 
Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies. 
But the longer-term social impact is a reduction in population growth. 
This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die. 
We hope that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of technology: simple, localized, affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact. 
In designing this we followed a few basic principles. 
We really tried to understand the end user, in this case, people like Sevitha. 
We tried to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists. 
And then we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem. 
In doing this, I believe we can truly bring technology to the masses. 
And we can save millions of lives through the simple warmth of an Embrace. 

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

Why do so many people reach success and then fail? 
One of the big reasons is, we think success is a one-way street. 
So we do everything that leads up to success, but then we get there. We figure we've made it, we sit back in our comfort zone, and we actually stop doing everything that made us successful. 
And it doesn't take long to go downhill. 
And I can tell you this happens, because it happened to me. 
Reaching success, I worked hard, I pushed myself. 
But then I stopped, because I figured, "" Oh, you know, I made it. 
I can just sit back and relax. "" Reaching success, I always tried to improve and do good work. 
But then I stopped because I figured, "" Hey, I'm good enough. 
I don't need to improve any more. "" Reaching success, I was pretty good at coming up with good ideas. 
Because I did all these simple things that led to ideas. 
But then I stopped, because I figured I was this hot-shot guy and I shouldn't have to work at ideas, they should just come like magic. 
And the only thing that came was creative block. 
I couldn't come up with any ideas. 
Reaching success, I always focused on clients and projects, and ignored the money. Then all this money started pouring in. 
And I got distracted by it. 
And suddenly I was on the phone to my stockbroker and my real estate agent, when I should have been talking to my clients. 
And reaching success, I always did what I loved. 
But then I got into stuff that I didn't love, like management. I am the world's worst manager, but I figured I should be doing it, because I was, after all, the president of the company. 
Well, soon a black cloud formed over my head and here I was, outwardly very successful, but inwardly very depressed. 
But I'm a guy; I knew how to fix it. 
I bought a fast car. 
(Laughter) It didn't help. 
I was faster but just as depressed. 
So I went to my doctor. I said, "" Doc, I can buy anything I want. But I'm not happy. I'm depressed. 
It's true what they say, and I didn't believe it until it happened to me. 
But money can't buy happiness. "" He said, "" No. But it can buy Prozac. "" And he put me on anti-depressants. 
And yeah, the black cloud faded a little bit, but so did all the work, because I was just floating along. I couldn't care less if clients ever called. 
(Laughter) And clients didn't call. (Laughter) 
Because they could see I was no longer serving them, I was only serving myself. 
So they took their money and their projects to others who would serve them better. 
Well, it didn't take long for business to drop like a rock. 
My partner and I, Thom, we had to let all our employees go. 
It was down to just the two of us, and we were about to go under. 
And that was great. 
Because with no employees, there was nobody for me to manage. 
So I went back to doing the projects I loved. 
I had fun again, I worked harder and, to cut a long story short, did all the things that took me back up to success. 
But it wasn't a quick trip. 
It took seven years. 
But in the end, business grew bigger than ever. 
And when I went back to following these eight principles, the black cloud over my head disappeared altogether. 
And I woke up one day and I said, "I don't need Prozac anymore." 
And I threw it away and haven't needed it since. 
I learned that success isn't a one-way street. 
It doesn't look like this; it really looks more like this. 
It's a continuous journey. 
And if we want to avoid "" success-to-failure-syndrome, "" we just keep following these eight principles, because that is not only how we achieve success, it's how we sustain it. 
So here is to your continued success. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

You might think there are many things that I can't do because I cannot see. 
That's largely true. 
Actually, I just needed to have a bit of help to come up to the stage. 
But there is also a lot that I can do. 
This is me rock climbing for the first time. 
Actually, I love sports and I can play many sports, like swimming, skiing, skating, scuba diving, running and so on. 
But there is one limitation: somebody needs to help me. 
I want to be independent. 
I lost my sight at the age of 14 in a swimming pool accident. 
I was an active, independent teenager, and suddenly I became blind. 
The hardest thing for me was losing my independence. 
Things that until then seemed simple became almost impossible to do alone. 
For example, one of my challenges was textbooks. 
Back then, there were no personal computers, no Internet, no smartphones. 
So I had to ask one of my two brothers to read me textbooks, and I had to create my own books in Braille. 
Can you imagine? 
Of course, my brothers were not happy about it, and later, I noticed they were not there whenever I needed them. 
(Laughter) I think they tried to stay away from me. 
I don't blame them. 
I really wanted to be freed from relying on someone. 
That became my strong desire to ignite innovation. 
Jump ahead to the mid-1980s. 
I got to know cutting-edge technologies and I thought to myself, how come there is no computer technology to create books in Braille? 
These amazing technologies must be able to also help people with limitations like myself. 
That's the moment my innovation journey began. 
I started developing digital book technologies, such as a digital Braille editor, digital Braille dictionary and a digital Braille library network. 
Today, every student who is visually impaired can read textbooks, by using personal computers and mobile devices, in Braille or in voice. 
This may not surprise you, since everyone now has digital books in their tablets in 2015. 
But Braille went digital many years before digital books, already in the late 1980s, almost 30 years ago. 
Strong and specific needs of the blind people made this opportunity to create digital books way back then. 
And this is actually not the first time this happened, because history shows us accessibility ignites innovation. 
The telephone was invented while developing a communication tool for hearing impaired people. 
Some keyboards were also invented to help people with disabilities. 
Now I'm going to give you another example from my own life. 
In the '90s, people around me started talking about the Internet and web browsing. 
I remember the first time I went on the web. 
I was astonished. 
I could access newspapers at any time and every day. 
I could even search for any information by myself. 
I desperately wanted to help the blind people have access to the Internet, and I found ways to render the web into synthesized voice, which dramatically simplified the user interface. 
This led me to develop the Home Page Reader in 1997, first in Japanese and later, translated into 11 languages. 
When I developed the Home Page Reader, I got many comments from users. 
One that I strongly remember said, "For me, the Internet is a small window to the world." 
It was a revolutionary moment for the blind. 
The cyber world became accessible, and this technology that we created for the blind has many uses, way beyond what I imagined. 
It can help drivers listen to their emails or it can help you listen to a recipe while cooking. 
Today, I am more independent, but it is still not enough. 
For example, when I approached the stage just now, I needed assistance. 
My goal is to come up here independently. 
And not just here. 
My goal is to be able to travel and do things that are simple to you. 
OK, now let me show you the latest technologies. 
This is a smartphone app that we are working on. 
(Video) Electronic voice: 51 feet to the door, and keep straight. 
EV: Take the two doors to go out. The door is on your right. 
EV: Nick is approaching. Looks so happy. 
Chieko Asakawa: Hi, Nick! 
(Laughter) CA: Where are you going? You look so happy. 
Nick: Oh — well, my paper just got accepted. 
CA: That's great! Congratulations. 
Nick: Thanks. Wait — how'd you know it was me, and that I look happy? 
(Chieko and Nick laugh) Man: Hi. 
(Laughter) CA: Oh... hi. 
EV: He is not talking to you, but on his phone. 
EV: Potato chips. 
EV: Dark chocolate with almonds. 
EV: You gained 5 pounds since yesterday; take apple instead of chocolate. 
(Laughter) EV: Approaching. 
EV: You arrived. 
CA: Now... 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So now the app navigates me by analyzing beacon signals and smartphone sensors and permits me to move around indoor and outdoor environments all by myself. 
But the computer vision part that showed who is approaching, in which mood — we are still working on that part. 
And recognizing facial expressions is very important for me to be social. 
So now the fusions of technologies are ready to help me see the real world. 
We call this cognitive assistance. 
It understands our surrounding world and whispers to me in voice or sends a vibration to my fingers. 
Cognitive assistance will augment missing or weakened abilities — in other words, our five senses. 
This technology is only in an early stage, but eventually, I'll be able to find a classroom on campus, enjoy window shopping or find a nice restaurant while walking along a street. 
It will be amazing if I can find you on the street before you notice me. 
It will become my best buddy, and yours. 
So, this really is a great challenge. 
It is a challenge that needs collaboration, which is why we are creating an open community to accelerate research activities. 
Just this morning, we announced the open-source fundamental technologies you just saw in the video. 
The frontier is the real world. 
The blind community is exploring this technical frontier and the pathfinder. 
I hope to work with you to explore the new era, and the next time that I'm on this stage, through technology and innovation, I will be able to walk up here all by myself. 
Thank you so much. 

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

For years I've been feeling frustrated, because as a religious historian, I've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. 
Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what's been called the Golden Rule. 
Sometimes it comes in a positive version — "Always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself." 
And equally important is the negative version — "Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you." 
Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. 
And people have emphasized the importance of compassion, not just because it sounds good, but because it works. 
People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, "" all day and every day, "" not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism, but to do it all day and every day, you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself. 
And it brings you into the presence of what's been called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao. 
Something that goes beyond what we know in our ego-bound existence. 
But you know you'd never know it a lot of the time, that this was so central to the religious life. 
Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together, religious leaders come together, they're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveighing against homosexuality or something of that sort. 
Often people don't really want to be compassionate. 
I sometimes see when I'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. 
And that of course defeats the object of the exercise. 
Now why was I so grateful to TED? 
Because they took me very gently from my book-lined study and brought me into the 21st century, enabling me to speak to a much, much wider audience than I could have ever conceived. 
Because I feel an urgency about this. 
If we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. 
The task of our time, one of the great tasks of our time, is to build a global society, as I said, where people can live together in peace. 
And the religions that should be making a major contribution are instead seen as part of the problem. 
And of course it's not just religious people who believe in the Golden Rule. 
This is the source of all morality, this imaginative act of empathy, putting yourself in the place of another. 
And so we have a choice, it seems to me. 
We can either go on bringing out or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faith, or we can go back to the rabbis. Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, who, when asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, said, "" That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. 
That is the Torah and everything else is only commentary. "" And the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred and disdain was illegitimate. 
And we need to revive that spirit. 
And it's not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafts us down. 
We have to make this happen, and we can do it with the modern communications that TED has introduced. 
Already I've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners. 
In Singapore, we have a group going to use the Charter to heal divisions recently that have sprung up in Singaporean society, and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically. 
In Malaysia, there is going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking people, young people, and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art. 
Throughout Europe, the Muslim communities are holding events and discussions, are discussing the centrality of compassion in Islam and in all faiths. 
But it can't stop there. It can't stop with the launch. 
Religious teaching, this is where we've gone so wrong, concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines. 
Religious teaching must always lead to action. 
And I intend to work on this till my dying day. 
And I want to continue with our partners to do two things — educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. 
Education because we've so dropped out of compassion. 
People often think it simply means feeling sorry for somebody. 
But of course you don't understand compassion if you're just going to think about it. 
You also have to do it. 
I want them to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people, which are dividing us from one another. 
The same applies to educators. 
I'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism, the dynamic and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. 
And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling. 
I'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people's traditions. 
And perhaps above all, to encourage a sensitivity about uncompassionate speaking, so that because people have this Charter, whatever their beliefs or lack of them, they feel empowered to challenge uncompassionate speech, disdainful remarks from their religious leaders, their political leaders, from the captains of industry. 
Because we can change the world, we have the ability. 
I would never have thought of putting the Charter online. 
I was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of boffins sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement. 
And TED introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas. 
Because that is what is so wonderful about TED. 
In this room, all this expertise, if we joined it all together, we could change the world. 
And of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable. 
But I'd just like to quote, finish at the end with a reference to a British author, an Oxford author whom I don't quote very often, C.S. Lewis. 
But he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since I read it when I was a schoolgirl. 
It's in his book "" The Four Loves. "" He said that he distinguished between erotic love, when two people gaze, spellbound, into each other's eyes. 
And then he compared that to friendship, when two people stand side by side, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on a common goal. 
We don't have to fall in love with each other, but we can become friends. 
And I am convinced. 
I felt it very strongly during our little deliberations at Vevey, that when people of all different persuasions come together, working side by side for a common goal, differences melt away. 
And we learn amity. 
And we learn to live together and to get to know one another. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Some of my most wonderful memories of childhood are of spending time with my grandmother, Mamar, in our four-family home in Brooklyn, New York. 
Her apartment was an oasis. 
It was a place where I could sneak a cup of coffee, which was really warm milk with just a touch of caffeine. 
She loved life. 
And although she worked in a factory, she saved her pennies and she traveled to Europe. 
And I remember poring over those pictures with her and then dancing with her to her favorite music. 
And then, when I was eight and she was 60, something changed. 
She no longer worked or traveled. 
She no longer danced. 
There were no more coffee times. 
My mother missed work and took her to doctors who couldn't make a diagnosis. 
And my father, who worked at night, would spend every afternoon with her, just to make sure she ate. 
Her care became all-consuming for our family. 
And by the time a diagnosis was made, she was in a deep spiral. 
Now many of you will recognize her symptoms. 
My grandmother had depression. 
A deep, life-altering depression, from which she never recovered. 
And back then, so little was known about depression. 
But even today, 50 years later, there's still so much more to learn. 
Today, we know that women are 70 percent more likely to experience depression over their lifetimes compared with men. 
And even with this high prevalence, women are misdiagnosed between 30 and 50 percent of the time. 
Now we know that women are more likely to experience the symptoms of fatigue, sleep disturbance, pain and anxiety compared with men. 
And these symptoms are often overlooked as symptoms of depression. 
And it isn't only depression in which these sex differences occur, but they occur across so many diseases. 
So it's my grandmother's struggles that have really led me on a lifelong quest. 
And today, I lead a center in which the mission is to discover why these sex differences occur and to use that knowledge to improve the health of women. 
Today, we know that every cell has a sex. 
Now, that's a term coined by the Institute of Medicine. 
And what it means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular levels. 
It means that we're different across all of our organs. 
From our brains to our hearts, our lungs, our joints. 
Now, it was only 20 years ago that we hardly had any data on women's health beyond our reproductive functions. 
But then in 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act was signed into law. 
And what this law did was it mandated that women and minorities be included in clinical trials that were funded by the National Institutes of Health. 
And in many ways, the law has worked. 
Women are now routinely included in clinical studies, and we've learned that there are major differences in the ways that women and men experience disease. 
But remarkably, what we have learned about these differences is often overlooked. 
So, we have to ask ourselves the question: Why leave women's health to chance? 
And we're leaving it to chance in two ways. 
The first is that there is so much more to learn and we're not making the investment in fully understanding the extent of these sex differences. 
And the second is that we aren't taking what we have learned, and routinely applying it in clinical care. 
We are just not doing enough. 
So, I'm going to share with you three examples of where sex differences have impacted the health of women, and where we need to do more. 
Let's start with heart disease. 
It's the number one killer of women in the United States today. 
This is the face of heart disease. 
Linda is a middle-aged woman, who had a stent placed in one of the arteries going to her heart. 
When she had recurring symptoms she went back to her doctor. 
Her doctor did the gold standard test: a cardiac catheterization. 
It showed no blockages. 
Linda's symptoms continued. 
She had to stop working. 
And that's when she found us. 
When Linda came to us, we did another cardiac catheterization and this time, we found clues. 
But we needed another test to make the diagnosis. 
So we did a test called an intracoronary ultrasound, where you use soundwaves to look at the artery from the inside out. 
And what we found was that Linda's disease didn't look like the typical male disease. 
The typical male disease looks like this. 
There's a discrete blockage or stenosis. 
Linda's disease, like the disease of so many women, looks like this. 
The plaque is laid down more evenly, more diffusely along the artery, and it's harder to see. 
So for Linda, and for so many women, the gold standard test wasn't gold. 
Now, Linda received the right treatment. 
She went back to her life and, fortunately, today she is doing well. 
But Linda was lucky. 
She found us, we found her disease. 
But for too many women, that's not the case. 
We have the tools. 
We have the technology to make the diagnosis. 
But it's all too often that these sex diffferences are overlooked. 
So what about treatment? 
A landmark study that was published two years ago asked the very important question: What are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? 
The authors looked at papers written over a 10-year period, and hundreds had to be thrown out. 
And what they found out was that of those that were tossed out, 65 percent were excluded because even though women were included in the studies, the analysis didn't differentiate between women and men. 
What a lost opportunity. 
The money had been spent and we didn't learn how women fared. 
And these studies could not contribute one iota to the very, very important question, what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? 
I want to introduce you to Hortense, my godmother, Hung Wei, a relative of a colleague, and somebody you may recognize — Dana, Christopher Reeve's wife. 
All three women have something very important in common. 
All three were diagnosed with lung cancer, the number one cancer killer of women in the United States today. 
All three were nonsmokers. 
Sadly, Dana and Hung Wei died of their disease. 
Today, what we know is that women who are nonsmokers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than are men who are nonsmokers. 
Now interestingly, when women are diagnosed with lung cancer, their survival tends to be better than that of men. 
Now, here are some clues. 
Our investigators have found that there are certain genes in the lung tumor cells of both women and men. 
And these genes are activated mainly by estrogen. 
And when these genes are over-expressed, it's associated with improved survival only in young women. 
Now this is a very early finding and we don't yet know whether it has relevance to clinical care. 
But it's findings like this that may provide hope and may provide an opportunity to save lives of both women and men. 
Now, let me share with you an example of when we do consider sex differences, it can drive the science. 
Several years ago a new lung cancer drug was being evaluated, and when the authors looked at whose tumors shrank, they found that 82 percent were women. 
This led them to ask the question: Well, why? 
And what they found was that the genetic mutations that the drug targeted were far more common in women. 
And what this has led to is a more personalized approach to the treatment of lung cancer that also includes sex. 
This is what we can accomplish when we don't leave women's health to chance. 
We know that when you invest in research, you get results. 
Take a look at the death rate from breast cancer over time. 
And now take a look at the death rates from lung cancer in women over time. 
Now let's look at the dollars invested in breast cancer — these are the dollars invested per death — and the dollars invested in lung cancer. 
Now, it's clear that our investment in breast cancer has produced results. 
They may not be fast enough, but it has produced results. 
We can do the same for lung cancer and for every other disease. 
So let's go back to depression. 
Depression is the number one cause of disability in women in the world today. 
Our investigators have found that there are differences in the brains of women and men in the areas that are connected with mood. 
And when you put men and women in a functional MRI scanner — that's the kind of scanner that shows how the brain is functioning when it's activated — so you put them in the scanner and you expose them to stress. 
You can actually see the difference. 
And it's findings like this that we believe hold some of the clues for why we see these very significant sex differences in depression. 
But even though we know that these differences occur, 66 percent of the brain research that begins in animals is done in either male animals or animals in whom the sex is not identified. 
So, I think we have to ask again the question: Why leave women's health to chance? 
And this is a question that haunts those of us in science and medicine who believe that we are on the verge of being able to dramatically improve the health of women. 
We know that every cell has a sex. 
We know that these differences are often overlooked. 
And therefore we know that women are not getting the full benefit of modern science and medicine today. 
We have the tools but we lack the collective will and momentum. 
Women's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay. 
And it's an issue of the quality and the integrity of science and medicine. 
(Applause) So imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing the health of women if we considered whether these sex differences were present at the very beginning of designing research. 
Or if we analyzed our data by sex. 
So, people often ask me: What can I do? 
And here's what I suggest: First, I suggest that you think about women's health in the same way that you think and care about other causes that are important to you. 
And second, and equally as important, that as a woman, you have to ask your doctor and the doctors who are caring for those who you love: Is this disease or treatment different in women? 
Now, this is a profound question because the answer is likely yes, but your doctor may not know the answer, at least not yet. 
But if you ask the question, your doctor will very likely go looking for the answer. 
And this is so important, not only for ourselves, but for all of those whom we love. 
Whether it be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend or a grandmother. 
It was my grandmother's suffering that inspired my work to improve the health of women. 
That's her legacy. 
Our legacy can be to improve the health of women for this generation and for generations to come. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello everyone. 
And so the two of us are here to give you an example of creation. 
And I'm going to be folding one of Robert Lang's models. 
And this is the piece of paper it will be made from, and you can see all of the folds that are needed for it. 
And Rufus is going to be doing some improvisation on his custom, five-string electric cello, and it's very exciting to listen to him. 
Are you ready to go? OK. 
Just to make it a little bit more exciting. 
All right. Take it away, Rufus. 
(Music) All right. There you go. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

Now, if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics, then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country. 
And it would be easy to implement and inexpensive. 
The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. 
And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. 
And at top of that pyramid, it's calculus. 
And I'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid... 
that the correct summit — that all of our students, every high school graduate should know — should be statistics: probability and statistics. 
(Applause) I mean, don't get me wrong. Calculus is an important subject. 
It's one of the great products of the human mind. 
The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus. 
And every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college. 
But I'm here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious, meaningful way, in their day-to-day lives. 
On the other hand, statistics — that's a subject that you could, and should, use on daily basis. Right? 
It's risk. It's reward. It's randomness. 
It's understanding data. 
I think if our students, if our high school students — if all of the American citizens — knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today. (Laughter) (Applause) Not only — thank you — not only that... 
but if it's taught properly, it can be a lot of fun. 
I mean, probability and statistics, it's the mathematics of games and gambling. 
It's analyzing trends. It's predicting the future. 
Look, the world has changed from analog to digital. 
And it's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital, from the more classical, continuous mathematics, to the more modern, discrete mathematics — the mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data — that being probability and statistics. 
In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means. And I mean it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Seventy-thousand years ago, our ancestors were insignificant animals. 
The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. 
Their impact on the world was not much greater than that of jellyfish or fireflies or woodpeckers. 
Today, in contrast, we control this planet. 
And the question is: How did we come from there to here? 
How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes, minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of planet Earth? 
Usually, we look for the difference between us and all the other animals on the individual level. 
We want to believe — I want to believe — that there is something special about me, about my body, about my brain, that makes me so superior to a dog or a pig, or a chimpanzee. 
But the truth is that, on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee. 
And if you take me and a chimpanzee and put us together on some lonely island, and we had to struggle for survival to see who survives better, I would definitely place my bet on the chimpanzee, not on myself. 
And this is not something wrong with me personally. 
I guess if they took almost any one of you, and placed you alone with a chimpanzee on some island, the chimpanzee would do much better. 
The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level; it's on the collective level. 
Humans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. 
Now, there are other animals — like the social insects, the bees, the ants — that can cooperate in large numbers, but they don't do so flexibly. 
Their cooperation is very rigid. 
There is basically just one way in which a beehive can function. 
And if there's a new opportunity or a new danger, the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight. 
They cannot, for example, execute the queen and establish a republic of bees, or a communist dictatorship of worker bees. 
Other animals, like the social mammals — the wolves, the elephants, the dolphins, the chimpanzees — they can cooperate much more flexibly, but they do so only in small numbers, because cooperation among chimpanzees is based on intimate knowledge, one of the other. 
I'm a chimpanzee and you're a chimpanzee, and I want to cooperate with you. 
I need to know you personally. 
What kind of chimpanzee are you? 
Are you a nice chimpanzee? 
Are you an evil chimpanzee? 
Are you trustworthy? 
If I don't know you, how can I cooperate with you? 
The only animal that can combine the two abilities together and cooperate both flexibly and still do so in very large numbers is us, Homo sapiens. 
One versus one, or even 10 versus 10, chimpanzees might be better than us. 
But, if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans will win easily, for the simple reason that a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. 
And if you now try to cram 100,000 chimpanzees into Oxford Street, or into Wembley Stadium, or Tienanmen Square or the Vatican, you will get chaos, complete chaos. 
Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. 
Complete madness. 
In contrast, humans normally gather there in tens of thousands, and what we get is not chaos, usually. 
What we get is extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. 
All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. 
Think even about this very talk that I'm giving now: I'm standing here in front of an audience of about 300 or 400 people, most of you are complete strangers to me. 
Similarly, I don't really know all the people who have organized and worked on this event. 
I don't know the pilot and the crew members of the plane that brought me over here, yesterday, to London. 
I don't know the people who invented and manufactured this microphone and these cameras, which are recording what I'm saying. 
I don't know the people who wrote all the books and articles that I read in preparation for this talk. 
And I certainly don't know all the people who might be watching this talk over the Internet, somewhere in Buenos Aires or in New Delhi. 
Nevertheless, even though we don't know each other, we can work together to create this global exchange of ideas. 
This is something chimpanzees cannot do. 
They communicate, of course, but you will never catch a chimpanzee traveling to some distant chimpanzee band to give them a talk about bananas or about elephants, or anything else that might interest chimpanzees. 
Now cooperation is, of course, not always nice; all the horrible things humans have been doing throughout history — and we have been doing some very horrible things — all those things are also based on large-scale cooperation. 
Prisons are a system of cooperation; slaughterhouses are a system of cooperation; concentration camps are a system of cooperation. 
Chimpanzees don't have slaughterhouses and prisons and concentration camps. 
Now suppose I've managed to convince you perhaps that yes, we control the world because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. 
The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive listener is: How, exactly, do we do it? 
What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? 
The answer is our imagination. 
We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. 
And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values. 
All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. 
A chimpanzee may say, "" Look! There's a lion, let's run away! "" Or, "" Look! There's a banana tree over there! Let's go and get bananas! "" Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. 
A human can say, "" Look, there is a god above the clouds! 
And if you don't do what I tell you to do, when you die, God will punish you and send you to hell. "" And if you all believe this story that I've invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values, and you can cooperate. 
This is something only humans can do. 
You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him, ""... after you die, you'll go to chimpanzee heaven... "" (Laughter) ""... and you'll receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds. 
So now give me this banana. "" No chimpanzee will ever believe such a story. 
Only humans believe such stories, which is why we control the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. 
Now you may find it acceptable that yes, in the religious field, humans cooperate by believing in the same fictions. 
Millions of people come together to build a cathedral or a mosque or fight in a crusade or a jihad, because they all believe in the same stories about God and heaven and hell. 
But what I want to emphasize is that exactly the same mechanism underlies all other forms of mass-scale human cooperation, not only in the religious field. 
Take, for example, the legal field. 
Most legal systems today in the world are based on a belief in human rights. 
But what are human rights? 
Human rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we've invented. 
They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens. 
Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA, but you won't find any rights. 
The only place you find rights are in the stories that we have invented and spread around over the last few centuries. 
They may be very positive stories, very good stories, but they're still just fictional stories that we've invented. 
The same is true of the political field. 
The most important factors in modern politics are states and nations. 
But what are states and nations? 
They are not an objective reality. 
A mountain is an objective reality. 
You can see it, you can touch it, you can even smell it. 
But a nation or a state, like Israel or Iran or France or Germany, this is just a story that we've invented and became extremely attached to. 
The same is true of the economic field. 
The most important actors today in the global economy are companies and corporations. 
Many of you today, perhaps, work for a corporation, like Google or Toyota or McDonald's. 
What exactly are these things? 
They are what lawyers call legal fictions. 
They are stories invented and maintained by the powerful wizards we call lawyers. 
(Laughter) And what do corporations do all day? 
Mostly, they try to make money. 
Yet, what is money? 
Again, money is not an objective reality; it has no objective value. 
Take this green piece of paper, the dollar bill. 
Look at it — it has no value. 
You cannot eat it, you cannot drink it, you cannot wear it. 
But then came along these master storytellers — the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers — and they tell us a very convincing story: "" Look, you see this green piece of paper? 
It is actually worth 10 bananas. "" And if I believe it, and you believe it, and everybody believes it, it actually works. 
I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to the supermarket, give it to a complete stranger whom I've never met before, and get, in exchange, real bananas which I can actually eat. 
This is something amazing. 
You could never do it with chimpanzees. 
Chimpanzees trade, of course: "Yes, you give me a coconut, I'll give you a banana." 
But, you give me a worthless piece of paper and you except me to give you a banana? 
What do you think I am, a human? 
(Laughter) Money, in fact, is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans, because it is the only story everybody believes. 
Not everybody believes in God, not everybody believes in human rights, not everybody believes in nationalism, but everybody believes in money, and in the dollar bill. 
Take, even, Osama Bin Laden. 
He hated American politics and American religion and American culture, but he had no objection to American dollars. 
He was quite fond of them, actually. 
(Laughter) To conclude, then: We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. 
All other animals live in an objective reality. 
Their reality consists of objective entities, like rivers and trees and lions and elephants. 
We humans, we also live in an objective reality. 
In our world, too, there are rivers and trees and lions and elephants. 
But over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this objective reality a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities, like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations. 
And what is amazing is that as history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities. 
Today, the very survival of rivers and trees and lions and elephants depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities, like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank — entities that exist only in our own imagination. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Yuval, you have a new book out. 
After Sapiens, you wrote another one, and it's out in Hebrew, but not yet translated into... 
Yuval Noah Harari: I'm working on the translation as we speak. 
BG: In the book, if I understand it correctly, you argue that the amazing breakthroughs that we are experiencing right now not only will potentially make our lives better, but they will create — and I quote you — "... new classes and new class struggles, just as the industrial revolution did." 
Can you elaborate for us? 
YNH: Yes. In the industrial revolution, we saw the creation of a new class of the urban proletariat. 
And much of the political and social history of the last 200 years involved what to do with this class, and the new problems and opportunities. 
Now, we see the creation of a new massive class of useless people. 
(Laughter) As computers become better and better in more and more fields, there is a distinct possibility that computers will out-perform us in most tasks and will make humans redundant. 
And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be, "" What do we need humans for? "", or at least, "" What do we need so many humans for? "" BG: Do you have an answer in the book? 
YNH: At present, the best guess we have is to keep them happy with drugs and computer games... 
(Laughter) but this doesn't sound like a very appealing future. 
BG: Ok, so you're basically saying in the book and now, that for all the discussion about the growing evidence of significant economic inequality, we are just kind of at the beginning of the process? 
YNH: Again, it's not a prophecy; it's seeing all kinds of possibilities before us. 
One possibility is this creation of a new massive class of useless people. 
Another possibility is the division of humankind into different biological castes, with the rich being upgraded into virtual gods, and the poor being degraded to this level of useless people. 
BG: I feel there is another TED talk coming up in a year or two. 
Thank you, Yuval, for making the trip. 
YNH: Thanks! 
(Applause) 

Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me. 
I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. 
I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there's a great deal of hopelessness. 
And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me. 
And one of the things that's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity. 
And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world. 
And sometimes when it comes through TED, it has meaning and power that it doesn't have when it doesn't. 
And I mention that because I think identity is really important. 
And we've had some fantastic presentations. 
And I think what we've learned is that, if you're a teacher your words can be meaningful, but if you're a compassionate teacher, they can be especially meaningful. 
If you're a doctor you can do some good things, but if you're a caring doctor you can do some other things. 
And so I want to talk about the power of identity. 
And I didn't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that I do. 
I actually learned about this from my grandmother. 
I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. 
She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful. 
She was the end of every argument in our family. 
She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family. 
She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved. 
Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840's. 
She was born in the 1880's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world. 
And my grandmother was tough, but she was also loving. 
When I would see her as a little boy, she'd come up to me and she'd give me these hugs. 
And she'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she'd let me go. 
And an hour or two later, if I saw her, she'd come over to me and she'd say, "" Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you? "" And if I said, "" No, "" she'd assault me again, and if I said, "" Yes, "" she'd leave me alone. 
And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her. 
And the only challenge was that she had 10 children. 
My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids. 
And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her, it would be difficult to get her time and attention. 
My cousins would be running around everywhere. 
And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around. 
And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me. 
And at first I thought we were playing a game. 
And I would look at her and I'd smile, but she was very serious. 
And after about 15 or 20 minutes of this, she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said, "" Come on, Bryan. You and I are going to have a talk. "" And I remember this just like it happened yesterday. 
I never will forget it. 
She took me out back and she said, "" Bryan, I'm going to tell you something, but you don't tell anybody what I tell you. "" I said, "" Okay, Mama. "" She said, "" Now you make sure you don't do that. "" I said, "" Sure. "" Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said, "" I want you to know I've been watching you. "" And she said, "" I think you're special. "" She said, "" I think you can do anything you want to do. "" I will never forget it. 
And then she said, "" I just need you to promise me three things, Bryan. "" I said, "" Okay, Mama. "" She said, "" The first thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always love your mom. "" She said, "" That's my baby girl, and you have to promise me now you'll always take care of her. "" Well I adored my mom, so I said, "" Yes, Mama. I'll do that. "" Then she said, "" The second thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing. "" And I thought about it and I said, "" Yes, Mama. I'll do that. "" 
Then finally she said, "" The third thing I want you to promise me is that you'll never drink alcohol. "" (Laughter) Well I was nine years old, so I said, "" Yes, Mama. I'll do that. "" I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger. 
When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer — I don't know where he got it — and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods. 
And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did. 
And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me. 
I said, "" No, no, no. That's okay. You all go ahead. I'm not going to have any beer. "" My brother said, "" Come on. We're doing this today; you always do what we do. 
I had some, your sister had some. Have some beer. "" I said, "" No, I don't feel right about that. Y'all go ahead. Y'all go ahead. "" And then my brother started staring at me. 
He said, "" What's wrong with you? Have some beer. "" Then he looked at me real hard and he said, "" Oh, I hope you're not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you. "" (Laughter) I said, "" Well, what are you talking about? "" He said, "" Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special. "" (Laughter) I was devastated. (Laughter) 
And I'm going to admit something to you. 
I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't. 
I know this might be broadcast broadly. 
But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol. 
(Applause) I don't say that because I think that's virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity. 
When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don't actually believe makes sense. 
We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do. 
When I thought about my grandmother, of course she would think all her grandkids were special. 
My grandfather was in prison during prohibition. 
My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases. 
And these were the things she thought we needed to commit to. 
Well I've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system. 
This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago. 
In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons. 
Today, there are 2.3 million. 
The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. 
We have seven million people on probation and parole. 
And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world. 
In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes. 
One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. 
In urban communities across this country — Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington — 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole. 
Our system isn't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race, they're also distorted by poverty. 
We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. 
Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes. 
And yet, we seem to be very comfortable. 
The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems. 
We've been disconnected. 
It's interesting to me. 
We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work. 
My state of Alabama, like a number of states, actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction. 
Right now in Alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote. 
We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. 
And there is this stunning silence. 
I represent children. 
A lot of my clients are very young. 
The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. 
We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. 
And we're actually doing some litigation. 
The only country in the world. 
I represent people on death row. 
It's interesting, this question of the death penalty. 
In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? 
And that's a very sensible question. 
But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. 
The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill? 
I mean, it's fascinating. 
Death penalty in America is defined by error. 
For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row. 
A kind of astonishing error rate — one out of nine people innocent. 
I mean, it's fascinating. 
In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash. 
But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem. 
It's not our problem. 
It's not our burden. 
It's not our struggle. 
I talk a lot about these issues. 
I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill. 
And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African-American history, I tell them about slavery. 
I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II. 
We don't really know very much about it. 
But for African-Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror. 
In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched. 
They had to worry about being bombed. 
It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives. 
And these older people come up to me now and they say, "" Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9 / 11. "" They tell me to say, "" No, tell them that we grew up with that. "" And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid. 
And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. 
We don't like to talk about our history. 
And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. 
We're constantly running into each other. 
We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. 
We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. 
In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation. 
In Rwanda, even after the genocide, there was this commitment, but in this country we haven't done that. 
I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. 
It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, "" Well you know it's deeply troubling to hear what you're talking about. "" He said, "" We don't have the death penalty in Germany. 
And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany. "" And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, "" There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. 
It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people. "" And I thought about that. 
What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? 
I couldn't bear it. 
It would be unconscionable. 
And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people — where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white — in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. 
And yet, there is this disconnect. 
Well I believe that our identity is at risk. 
That when we actually don't care about these difficult things, the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated. 
We love innovation. 
We love technology. We love creativity. 
We love entertainment. 
But ultimately, those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, marginalization. 
And for me, it becomes necessary to integrate the two. 
Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world. 
And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor, the disadvantaged, those who will never get to TED. 
But thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives. 
You know ultimately, we all have to believe things we haven't seen. 
We do. As rational as we are, as committed to intellect as we are. 
Innovation, creativity, development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone. 
They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart. 
And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things. 
Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about this. 
He said, "" When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness. "" Well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what I believe even TED communities have to be engaged in. 
There is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering, to poverty, to exclusion, to unfairness, to injustice. 
Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don't pay attention to this. 
It will get to you. 
I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks. 
And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott — amazing African-American woman — and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King. 
And these women would get together and just talk. 
And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me, and she'd say, "" Bryan, Ms. Parks is coming to town. We're going to get together and talk. 
Do you want to come over and listen? "" And I'd say, "" Yes, Ma'am, I do. "" And she'd say, "" Well what are you going to do when you get here? "" I said, "" I'm going to listen. "" And I'd go over there and I would, I would just listen. 
It would be so energizing and so empowering. 
And one time I was over there listening to these women talk, and after a couple of hours Ms. Parks turned to me and she said, "" Now Bryan, tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is. 
Tell me what you're trying to do. "" And I began giving her my rap. 
I said, "" Well we're trying to challenge injustice. 
We're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted. 
We're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice. 
We're trying to end life without parole sentences for children. 
We're trying to do something about the death penalty. 
We're trying to reduce the prison population. 
We're trying to end mass incarceration. "" I gave her my whole rap, and when I finished she looked at me and she said, "" Mmm mmm mmm. "" She said, "" That's going to make you tired, tired, tired. "" (Laughter) And that's when Ms. Carr leaned forward, she put her finger in my face, she said, "" That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave. "" And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous. 
We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. 
Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity. 
I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do. 
It's just taught me very simple things. 
I've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. 
I believe that for every person on the planet. 
I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. 
I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. 
I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. 
And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. 
I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. 
I don't believe that. 
I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. 
And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason. 
Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. 
Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are. 
I sometimes get out of balance. I'll end with this story. 
I sometimes push too hard. 
I do get tired, as we all do. 
Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important. 
And I've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences. 
And I go to the jail and I see my client who's 13 and 14, and he's been certified to stand trial as an adult. 
I start thinking, well, how did that happen? 
How can a judge turn you into something that you're not? 
And the judge has certified him as an adult, but I see this kid. 
And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power. 
Yeah, Bryan, the judge has some magic power. 
You should ask for some of that. 
And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. 
And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid. 
And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: "" Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive. "" (Applause) And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct. 
There was a crazy line in there about how there's no conduct in this county, it's all misconduct. 
And the next morning, I woke up and I thought, now did I dream that crazy motion, or did I actually write it? 
And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court. 
(Applause) A couple months went by, and I had just forgotten all about it. 
And I finally decided, oh gosh, I've got to go to the court and do this crazy case. 
And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed — overwhelmed. 
And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse. 
And I was thinking, this is going to be so difficult, so painful. 
And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse. 
And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse. 
When this man saw me, he came over to me and he said, "" Who are you? "" I said, "" I'm a lawyer. "" He said, "" You're a lawyer? "" I said, "" Yes, sir. "" And this man came over to me and he hugged me. 
And he whispered in my ear. 
He said, "" I'm so proud of you. "" And I have to tell you, it was energizing. 
It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful. 
Well I went into the courtroom. 
And as soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming in. 
He said, "" Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion? "" I said, "" Yes, sir. I did. "" And we started arguing. 
And people started coming in because they were just outraged. 
I had written these crazy things. 
And police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers. 
And before I knew it, the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality. 
And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth. 
And he kept looking through the window, and he could hear all of this holler. 
He kept pacing back and forth. 
And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table. 
About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break. 
And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court. 
And this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man. 
He said, "" Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom? "" And this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said, "" I came into this courtroom to tell this young man, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. "" I've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 
That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. 
That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. 
That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice. 
And more than anything, for those of you who share that, I've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience, this community, to help you on your way and to do something on this issue. 
Other than writing a check, what could we do? 
BS: Well there are opportunities all around us. 
If you live in the state of California, for example, there's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment. 
For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years — one billion dollars. 
And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest. 
56 percent of all rape cases don't result. 
So there's an opportunity to change that. 
And this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety. 
And I think that opportunity exists all around us. 
CA: There's been this huge decline in crime in America over the last three decades. 
And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it's about increased incarceration rates. 
What would you say to someone who believed that? 
BS: Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable. 
The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn't really in violent crime categories. 
It was this misguided war on drugs. 
That's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population. 
And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment. 
And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle, for low-level property crimes, rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized. 
I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime, not do less. 
And I think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one. 
And I think that's the orientation that we have to change. 
(Applause) CA: Bryan, you've struck a massive chord here. 
You're an inspiring person. 
Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Salaam alaikum. 
Welcome to Doha. 
I am in charge of making this country's food secure. 
That is my job for the next two years, to design an entire master plan, and then for the next 10 years to implement it — of course, with so many other people. 
But first, I need to talk to you about a story, which is my story, about the story of this country that you're all here in today. 
And of course, most of you have had three meals today, and probably will continue to have after this event. 
So going in, what was Qatar in the 1940s? 
We were about 11,000 people living here. 
There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that. 
Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages, fishing, or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water. 
None of the glamour that you see today existed. 
No cities like you see today in Doha or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or Riyadh. 
It wasn't that they couldn't develop cities. 
Resources weren't there to develop them. 
And you can see that life expectancy was also short. 
Most people died around the age of 50. 
So let's move to chapter two: the oil era. 
1939, that's when they discovered oil. 
But unfortunately, it wasn't really fully exploited commercially until after the Second World War. 
What did it do? 
It changed the face of this country, as you can see today and witness. 
It also made all those people who roamed around the desert — looking for water, looking for food, trying to take care of their livestock — urbanize. 
You might find this strange, but in my family we have different accents. 
My mother has an accent that is so different to my father, and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country. 
There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak. 
Someone says, "" How so? How could this happen? "" Because we lived scattered. 
We couldn't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources. 
And when the resources came, be it oil, we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration. 
People started to get to know each other. 
And we realized that there are some differences in accents. 
So that is the chapter two: the oil era. 
Let's look at today. 
This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha. 
So what's the population today? 
It's 1.7 million people. 
That is in less than 60 years. 
The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years. 
Lifespan has increased to 78. 
Water consumption has increased to 430 liters. 
And this is amongst the highest worldwide. 
From having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree, higher than any other nation. 
I don't know if this was a reaction to lack of water. 
But what is interesting about the story that I've just said? 
The interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water. 
Now that is historic. It's never happened before in history. 
Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water. 
This is history being made in this region. 
Not only cities that we're building, but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors. 
Build a nice home, bring the architect, design my house. 
These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn't. 
But of course, with the use of technology. 
So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain. 
Qatar has 74, and we have that growth rate. 
The question is how. 
How could we survive that? 
We have no water whatsoever. 
Simply because of this gigantic, mammoth machine called desalination. 
Energy is the key factor here. It changed everything. 
It is that thing that we pump out of the ground, we burn tons of, probably most of you used it coming to Doha. 
So that is our lake, if you can see it. 
That is our river. 
That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water. 
This is the best technology that this region could ever have: desalination. 
So what are the risks? 
Do you worry much? 
I would say, perhaps if you look at the global facts, you will realize, of course I have to worry. 
There is growing demand, growing population. 
We've turned seven billion only a few months ago. 
And so that number also demands food. 
And there's predictions that we'll be nine billion by 2050. 
So a country that has no water has to worry about what happens beyond its borders. 
There's also changing diets. 
By elevating to a higher socio-economic level, they also change their diet. 
They start eating more meat and so on and so forth. 
On the other hand, there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors. 
And so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen. 
This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know. 
We only have two days of water reserve. 
We import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land. 
The limited number of farmers that we have have been pushed out of their farming practices as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions, etc., etc. 
So we also face risks. 
These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity. 
The question is, is there a solution? 
Is there a sustainable solution? 
Indeed there is. 
This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we've been working on over the past two years. 
Let's start with the water. 
So we know very well — I showed you earlier — that we need this energy. 
So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy? 
A depletable energy? Fossil fuel? 
Or should we use something else? 
Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy? 
I guess most of you by now realize that we do: 300 days of sun. 
And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need. 
And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water. 
And that is a lot of water. 
That water will go then to the farmers, and the farmers will be able to water their plants, and they will be able then to supply society with food. 
But in order to sustain the horizontal line — because these are the projects, these are the systems that we will deliver — we need to also develop the vertical line: system sustenance, high-level education, research and development, industries, technologies, to produce these technologies for application, and finally markets. 
But what gels all of it, what enables it, is legislation, policies, regulations. 
Without it we can't do anything. 
So that's what we are planning to do. 
Within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan and taking it to implementation. 
Our objective is to be a millennium city, just like many millennium cities around: Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, Damascus, Cairo. 
We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever as a city, to live in peace. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Forrest North: The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation. 
And I would like to share with you some of the bits of the conversation that we started with. 
I grew up in a log cabin in Washington state with too much time on my hands. 
Yves Behar: And in scenic Switzerland for me. 
FN: I always had a passion for alternative vehicles. 
This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada. 
YB: Combination of windsurfing and skiing into this invention there. 
FN: And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions. 
This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom, much to the dismay of my mother. 
YB: To the dismay of my mother, this is dangerous teenage fashion right there. 
(Laughter) FN: And I brought this all together, this passion with alternative energy and raced a solar car across Australia — also the U.S. and Japan. 
YB: So, wind power, solar power — we had a lot to talk about. 
We had a lot that got us excited. 
So we decided to do a special project together. 
To combine engineering and design and... 
FN: Really make a fully integrated product, something beautiful. 
YB: And we made a baby. 
(Laughter) FN: Can you bring out our baby? 
(Applause) This baby is fully electric. 
It goes 150 miles an hour. 
It's twice the range of any electric motorcycle. 
Really the exciting thing about a motorcycle is just the beautiful integration of engineering and design. 
It's got an amazing user experience. 
It was wonderful working with Yves Behar. 
He came up with our name and logo. We're Mission Motors. 
And we've only got three minutes, but we could talk about it for hours. 
YB: Thank you. 
FN: Thank you TED. And thank you Chris, for having us. 
(Applause) 

There are other states that do that, but we don't. 
There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't. 

I have the answer to a question that we've all asked. 
The question is, Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown? 
Now I know we learned that in math class, but now it's everywhere in the culture — The X prize, the X-Files, Project X, TEDx. 
Where'd that come from? 
About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language. 
To write a word or a phrase or a sentence in Arabic is like crafting an equation, because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. 
That's one of the reasons so much of what we've come to think of as Western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the Common Era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks. 
This includes the little system in Arabic called al-jebra. 
And al-jebr roughly translates to "the system for reconciling disparate parts." 
Al-jebr finally came into English as algebra. 
One example among many. 
The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe — which is to say Spain — in the 11th and 12th centuries. 
And when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language. 
But there were problems. 
One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice. 
Trust me on that one. 
Also, those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in European languages. 
Here's one of the culprits. 
This is the letter SHeen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH — "" sh. "" It's also the very first letter of the word shalan, which means "" something "" just like the the English word "" something "" — some undefined, unknown thing. 
Now in Arabic, we can make this definite by adding the definite article "" al. "" So this is al-shalan — the unknown thing. 
And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th century derivation of proofs. 
The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter SHeen and the word shalan can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that "" sh "" sound. 
So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, "" ck "" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai. 
Later when this material was translated into a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X. 
And once that happened, once this material was in Latin, it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years. 
But now we have the answer to our question. 
Why is it that X is the unknown? X is the unknown 
because you can't say "" sh "" in Spanish. 
(Laughter) And I thought that was worth sharing. 
(Applause) 

Of all of the available women in the UK, all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive. 
And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love. 
Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. 
But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. 
If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. 
That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. 
As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "" An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again. "" (Laughter) Thanks a lot, Jane. 
In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me. 
So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. 
(Laughter) And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. 
So here's the example. 
Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. 
(Laughter) Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone. (Laughter) 
OK, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. 
So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. 
And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. 
Now, Top Tip # 3: How to avoid divorce. 
Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. 
So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. 
Whereas bad relationships, by which I mean, probably going to get divorced, they found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. 
Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with a 90 percent accuracy. 
(Laughter) So that an arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war. (Laughter) 
Now, I always thought that good marriages were about compromise and understanding and allowing the person to have the space to be themselves. 
But actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. 
These are the couples that don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. 
These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. 
Couples that don't let things go and couples that don't let trivial things end up being a really big deal. 
But I think that it's quite interesting to know that there is really mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger. 
Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. 
They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. 

Time flies. 
It's actually almost 20 years ago when I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together: I invented the World Wide Web. 
Now, 20 years on, at TED, I want to ask your help in a new reframing. 
So going back to 1989, I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system. 
Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much. 
But 18 months later — this is how innovation happens — 18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side, as a sort of a play project, kick the tires of a new computer we'd got. 
And so he gave me the time to code it up. 
So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like: hypertext protocol, HTTP; the idea of URLs, these names for things which started with HTTP. 
I wrote the code and put it out there. 
Why did I do it? 
Well, it was basically frustration. 
I was frustrated — I was working as a software engineer in this huge, very exciting lab, lots of people coming from all over the world. 
They brought all sorts of different computers with them. 
They had all sorts of different data formats, all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems. 
So that, in all that diversity, if I wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this, everything I looked into, I had to connect to some new machine, I had to learn to run some new program, I would find the information I wanted in some new data format. 
And these were all incompatible. 
It was just very frustrating. 
The frustration was all this unlocked potential. 
In fact, on all these discs there were documents. 
So if you just imagined them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky, say on the Internet, then life would be so much easier. 
Well, once you've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people don't read your memo — actually he did, it was found after he died, his copy. 
He had written, "" Vague, but exciting, "" in pencil, in the corner. 
(Laughter) But in general it was difficult — it was really difficult to explain what the web was like. 
It's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then. 
But then — OK, when TED started, there was no web so things like "" click "" didn't have the same meaning. 
I can show somebody a piece of hypertext, a page which has got links, and we click on the link and bing — there'll be another hypertext page. 
Not impressive. 
You know, we've seen that — we've got things on hypertext on CD-ROMs. 
What was difficult was to get them to imagine: so, imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine. 
Alright, that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make. 
Well, some people did. 
So yeah, it was difficult to explain, but there was a grassroots movement. 
And that is what has made it most fun. 
That has been the most exciting thing, not the technology, not the things people have done with it, but actually the community, the spirit of all these people getting together, sending the emails. 
That's what it was like then. 
Do you know what? It's funny, but right now it's kind of like that again. 
I asked everybody, more or less, to put their documents — I said, "" Could you put your documents on this web thing? "" And you did. 
Thanks. 
It's been a blast, hasn't it? 
I mean, it has been quite interesting because we've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away. 
They're much more than we'd originally imagined when we put together the little, initial website that we started off with. 
Now, I want you to put your data on the web. 
Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential. 
There is still a huge frustration that people have because we haven't got data on the web as data. 
What do you mean, "" data ""? What's the difference — documents, data? 
Well, documents you read, OK? 
More or less, you read them, you can follow links from them, and that's it. 
Data — you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer. 
Who was here or has otherwise seen Hans Rosling's talk? 
One of the great — yes a lot of people have seen it — one of the great TED Talks. 
Hans put up this presentation in which he showed, for various different countries, in various different colors — he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality, and he shot this thing animated through time. 
So, he'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world. 
He put up a slide a little bit like this. 
It had underground all the data OK, data is brown and boxy and boring, and that's how we think of it, isn't it? 
Because data you can't naturally use by itself But in fact, data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it. 
In this case, Hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of United Nations websites and things. 
He had put it together, combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he'd put it into this software, which I think his son developed, originally, and produces this wonderful presentation. 
And Hans made a point of saying, "" Look, it's really important to have a lot of data. "" And I was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying, very forcibly, "" It's really important to have a lot of data. "" So I want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected, or six like he did, but I want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data. 
The technology is linked data, and it's extremely simple. 
If you want to put something on the web there are three rules: first thing is that those HTTP names — those things that start with "" http: "" — we're using them not just for documents now, we're using them for things that the documents are about. 
We're using them for people, we're using them for places, we're using them for your products, we're using them for events. 
All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP. 
Second rule, if I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up and I do the web thing with it and I fetch the data using the HTTP protocol from the web, I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event. 
Who's at the event? Whatever it is about that person, where they were born, things like that. 
So the second rule is I get important information back. 
Third rule is that when I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships. 
Data is relationships. 
Interestingly, data is relationships. 
This person was born in Berlin; Berlin is in Germany. 
And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts HTTP. 
So, I can go ahead and look that thing up. 
So I look up a person — I can look up then the city where they were born; then I can look up the region it's in, and the town it's in, and the population of it, and so on. 
So I can browse this stuff. 
So that's it, really. 
That is linked data. 
I wrote an article entitled "" Linked Data "" a couple of years ago and soon after that, things started to happen. 
The idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that Hans had, and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting. 
It's not just a whole lot of other plants. 
It's not just a root supplying a plant, but for each of those plants, whatever it is — a presentation, an analysis, somebody's looking for patterns in the data — they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together, and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is. 
So, linked data. 
The meme went out there. 
And, pretty soon Chris Bizer at the Freie Universitat in Berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up, he noticed that Wikipedia — you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it. 
Well, in those documents, there are little squares, little boxes. 
And in most information boxes, there's data. 
So he wrote a program to take the data, extract it from Wikipedia, and put it into a blob of linked data on the web, which he called dbpedia. 
Dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up Berlin, you'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about Berlin, and they're linked together. 
So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin, you'll end up pulling up these other things as well. 
And the exciting thing is it's starting to grow. 
This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK? 
Let's think about data for a bit. 
Data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms. 
Think of the diversity of the web. It's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there. 
So it is with data. I could talk about all kinds of data. 
We could talk about government data, enterprise data is really important, there's scientific data, there's personal data, there's weather data, there's data about events, there's data about talks, and there's news and there's all kinds of stuff. 
I'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it, so that you also see how much unlocked potential. 
Let's start with government data. 
Barack Obama said in a speech, that he — American government data would be available on the Internet in accessible formats. 
And I hope that they will put it up as linked data. 
That's important. Why is it important? 
Not just for transparency, yeah transparency in government is important, but that data — this is the data from all the government departments Think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in America. 
It's actual useful. It's got value. 
I can use it in my company. 
I could use it as a kid to do my homework. 
So we're talking about making the place, making the world run better by making this data available. 
In fact if you're responsible — if you know about some data in a government department, often you find that these people, they're very tempted to keep it — Hans calls it database hugging. 
You hug your database, you don't want to let it go until you've made a beautiful website for it. 
Well, I'd like to suggest that rather — yes, make a beautiful website, who am I to say don't make a beautiful website? 
Make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data. 
We want unadulterated data. 
OK, we have to ask for raw data now. 
And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? 
Can you say "" raw ""? 
Audience: Raw. 
Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "" data ""? 
Audience: Data. 
TBL: Can you say "" now ""? 
Audience: Now! 
TBL: Alright, "" raw data now ""! 
Audience: Raw data now! 
Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer. 
And it's not just America. It's all over the world. 
And it's not just governments, of course — it's enterprises as well. 
So I'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data. 
Here we are at TED, and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now — curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. 
The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. 
But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared. 
In fact, I'll just go into one area — if you're looking at Alzheimer's, for example, drug discovery — there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos, because they had their genomics data in one database in one building, and they had their protein data in another. 
Now, they are sticking it onto — linked data — and now they can ask the sort of question, that you probably wouldn't ask, I wouldn't ask — they would. 
What proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons? 
Well, you take that mouthful and you put it into Google. 
Of course, there's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before. 
You get 223,000 hits — no results you can use. 
You ask the linked data — which they've now put together — 32 hits, each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at. 
The power of being able to ask those questions, as a scientist — questions which actually bridge across different disciplines — is really a complete sea change. 
It's very very important. 
Scientists are totally stymied at the moment — the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems. 
Now if I go on like this, you'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you. 
But, that's not true. 
In fact, data is about our lives. 
You just — you log on to your social networking site, your favorite one, you say, "" This is my friend. "" Bing! Relationship. Data. 
You say, "" This photograph, it's about — it depicts this person. "" Bing! That's data. Data, data, data. 
Every time you do things on the social networking site, the social networking site is taking data and using it — re-purposing it — and using it to make other people's lives more interesting on the site. 
But, when you go to another linked data site — and let's say this is one about travel, and you say, "" I want to send this photo to all the people in that group, "" you can't get over the walls. 
The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it — tremendous frustration. 
The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites. 
We need to do that with linked data. 
One last type of data I'll talk about, maybe it's the most exciting. 
Before I came down here, I looked it up on OpenStreetMap The OpenStreetMap's a map, but it's also a Wiki. 
Zoom in and that square thing is a theater — which we're in right now — The Terrace Theater. It didn't have a name on it. 
So I could go into edit mode, I could select the theater, I could add down at the bottom the name, and I could save it back. 
And now if you go back to the OpenStreetMap. org, and you find this place, you will find that The Terrace Theater has got a name. 
I did that. Me! 
I did that to the map. I just did that! 
I put that up on there. Hey, you know what? 
If I — that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs. 
And that is what linked data is all about. 
It's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. 
That's how linked data works. 
You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs. 
You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it. 
And we've practiced that. 
So, linked data — it's huge. 
I've only told you a very small number of things There are data in every aspect of our lives, every aspect of work and pleasure, and it's not just about the number of places where data comes, it's about connecting it together. 
And when you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents. 
You get this really huge power out of it. 
So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this — the people who think it's a great idea. 
And all the people — and I think there's a lot of people at TED who do things because — even though there's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it — they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them. 
OK, so it's called linked data. 
I want you to make it. 
I want you to demand it. 
And I think it's an idea worth spreading. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States, and Africa called me back. 
And I founded my country's first graphic design and new media college. 
And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. 
The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. 
We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education. 
And typography's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence. 
Here's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme "" Education is a right. "" Some logos designed by my students. 
Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-known fact, and I wrote the book "" Afrikan Alphabets "" to address that. 
The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. 
So it's a special-interest writing system. 
The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left. 
It's called Sankofa. 
It means, "" Return and get it. "" Learn from the past. 
This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. 
At the top is God, at the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is the moon. 
All the paths lead to and from God. 
These secret societies of the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti. 
In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women, who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their singing — a sort of a musical score, if you may. 
In South Africa, Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces. 
Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. 
and is used to write Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. 
King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25. 
Shü-mom is a writing system. 
It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an alphabet. 
And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years. 
The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. 
It's a syllabary and reads from left to right. 
Next door, in Sierra Leone, the Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left. 
Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today, designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. 
The creative spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been, if only designers could look within. 
This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals. 
Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. 
Most probably, one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt, and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. 
That is, until 1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C., centuries before Mesopotamia. 
Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered, these inscriptions — research is still going on, a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. 
Over here, you see a paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting with the letter A, "" ālep, "" at the top, and "" bêt, "" in the middle, and so forth. 
It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery. 
The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children. 
It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside. 
They've been looking outward for a long time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp, right within them. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

My travels to Afghanistan began many, many years ago on the eastern border of my country, my homeland, Poland. 
I was walking through the forests of my grandmother's tales. 
A land where every field hides a grave, where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century. 
Behind the destruction, I found a soul of places. 
I met humble people. 
I heard their prayer and ate their bread. 
Then I have been walking East for 20 years — from Eastern Europe to Central Asia — through the Caucasus Mountains, Middle East, North Africa, Russia. 
And I ever met more humble people. 
And I shared their bread and their prayer. 
This is why I went to Afghanistan. 
One day, I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River. 
I was alone on foot. 
And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport. 
But he gave me a cup of tea. 
And I understood that his surprise was my protection. 
So I have been walking and traveling, by horses, by yak, by truck, by hitchhiking, from Iran's border to the bottom, to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor. 
And in this way I could find noor, the hidden light of Afghanistan. 
My only weapon was my notebook and my Leica. 
I heard prayers of the Sufi — humble Muslims, hated by the Taliban. 
Hidden river, interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India. 
The mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears, and welcomed as a gift. 
What do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect, about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium? 
These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war. 
These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen. 
What do we know about the women 10 years after the war? 
Clothed in this nylon bag, made in China, with the name of burqa. 
I saw one day, the largest school in Afghanistan, a girls' school. 
13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground, full of scorpions. 
And their love [for studying] was so big that I cried. 
What do we know about the death threats by the Taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in Balkh? 
The region is not secure, but full of the Taliban, and they did it. 
My aim is to give a voice to the silent people, to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game, the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine. 
And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it. 
And I asked myself, why? 
I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. 
And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? 
So, I decided to investigate. 
I'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction. 
And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying he's proud of them. 
But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. 
It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it. 
So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? 
I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, "Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids," but won't ask. 
I know a woman who's good at this. 
She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, "I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids." 
And he goes, "" Oh, this is great, this is great. "" And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. 
And a friend of mine, April, who I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. 
And she said, "" Why wouldn't I thank it, even though they're supposed to do it? "" So, the question is, why was I blocking it? 
Why were other people blocking it? 
Why can I say, "" I'll take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes, "" but I won't say, "Would you praise me this way?" 
And it's because I'm giving you critical data about me. 
I'm telling you where I'm insecure. 
I'm telling you where I need your help. 
And I'm treating you, my inner circle, like you're the enemy. 
Because what can you do with that data? 
You could neglect me. 
You could abuse it. 
Or you could actually meet my need. 
And I took my bike into the bike store — I love this — same bike, and they'd do something called "" truing "" the wheels. 
The guy said, "" You know, when you true the wheels, it's going to make the bike so much better. "" I get the same bike back, and they've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I've had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new. 
So, I'm going to challenge all of you. 
I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear. 
What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife — go ask her, what does she need? 
Go home to your husband — what does he need? 
Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you. 
And it's simple. 
And why should we care about this? 
We talk about world peace. 
How can we have world peace with different cultures, different languages? 
I think it starts household by household, under the same roof. 
So, let's make it right in our own backyard. 
And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons. 
And maybe somebody's never said that to you, but you've done a really, really good job. 
And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. 
Some of those reforms have been good. 
And we know why kids drop out. 
We know why kids don't learn. 
It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... 
But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. 
George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. 
Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. 
I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst. 
A colleague said to me one time, "" They don't pay me to like the kids. 
I should teach it, they should learn it, Case closed. "" Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." 
(Laughter) (Applause) She said, "" That's just a bunch of hooey. "" And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." 
Needless to say, it was. 
He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. 
You ever thought about that? 
(Laughter) I taught a lesson once on ratios. 
I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry. "" They said, "" That's okay, Ms. Pierson. 
You were so excited, we just let you go. "" I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient, that I cried. 
How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? 
I told all my students, "" You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it. "" One of the students said, "" Really? "" (Laughter) I said, "" Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. 
You just have to strut. "" (Laughter) And I gave them a saying to say: "" I am somebody. 
I am powerful, and I am strong. 
I deserve the education that I get here. 
I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go. "" And they said, "" Yeah! "" (Laughter) You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you. 
(Laughter) He said, "" Ms. Pierson, is this an F? "" I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) He said, "" Then why'd you put a smiley face? "" I said, "" Because you're on a roll. 
You got two right. You didn't miss them all. "" (Laughter) I said, "" And when we review this, won't you do better? "" He said, "" Yes, ma'am, I can do better. "" You see, "" -18 "" sucks all the life out of you. 
"+ 2" said, "I ain't all bad." 
For years, I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. 
(Laughter) And kids can be cruel. 
And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "" You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. 
You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. 
And I want you to just see what I've become. "" And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear. 
Can we stand to have more relationships? 
Never. 
You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. 
It's the connection. It's the relationships. 
So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. 
We teach anyway, because that's what we do. 
Teaching and learning should bring joy. 
How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? 
Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. 
We're born to make a difference. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

Today I'm going to speak to you about the last 30 years of architectural history. 
It's a complex topic, so we're just going to dive right in at a complex place: New Jersey. 
Because 30 years ago, I'm from Jersey, and I was six, and I lived there in my parents' house in a town called Livingston, and this was my childhood bedroom. 
I hated that walk, I hated that balcony, I hated that room, and I hated that house. 
(Laughter) Done. 
That feeling, those emotions that I felt, that's the power of architecture, because architecture is not about math and it's not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places that we occupy. 
This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of. 
It's a predictable emotional connection, and we've been using this trick for a long, long time. 
We used it [200] years ago to build banks. 
And look at these solid, stable little soldiers facing the ocean and keeping away the elements. 
This is really, really useful, because building things is terrifying. 
And the people that build things — developers and governments — they're naturally afraid of innovation, and they'd rather just use those forms that they know you'll respond to. 
This is the Livingston Public Library that was completed in 2004 in my hometown, and, you know, it's got a dome and it's got this round thing and columns, red brick, and you can kind of guess what Livingston is trying to say with this building: children, property values and history. 
It's in Seattle. 
This library is about how we consume media in a digital age. 
So how is it possible that in the same year, in the same country, two buildings, both called libraries, look so completely different? 
And the answer is that architecture works on the principle of a pendulum. 
And we push and we push and we push until we completely alienate all of you. 
We wear all black, we get very depressed, you think we're adorable, we're dead inside because we've got no choice. 
So we do that, and you're happy, we feel like sellouts, so we start experimenting again and we push the pendulum back and back and forth and back and forth we've gone for the last 300 years, and certainly for the last 30 years. 
Okay, 30 years ago we were coming out of the '70s. 
Architects had been busy experimenting with something called brutalism. 
And we can't give you enough of it. 
Forms got big, forms got bold and colorful. 
(Laughter) We're all hanging out in malls and we're all moving to the suburbs, and out there, out in the suburbs, we can create our own architectural fantasies. 
(Laughter) Possibly with endless breadsticks. 
They're easy, they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places. 
Ordinarily, the pendulum would just swing back into the other direction. 
Paul Goldberger said that Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were completely united around a building. 
So all of a sudden, everybody wants one of these buildings: L.A., Seattle, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Springfield. 
And it happened because media so successfully galvanized around them that they quickly taught us that these forms mean culture and tourism. 
Because architecture actually moves quite quickly. 
It takes a long time to build a building, three or four years, and in the interim, an architect will design two or eight or a hundred other buildings before they know if that building that they designed four years ago was a success or not. 
So my theory is that when you apply media to this pendulum, it starts swinging faster and faster, until it's at both extremes nearly simultaneously, and that effectively blurs the difference between innovation and symbol, between us, the architects, and you, the public. 
This building was already a part of this community, and then that first summer, when people started arriving and sharing the building on social media, the building ceased to be just an edifice and it became media, because these, these are not just pictures of a building, they're your pictures of a building. 
That means we don't need the Greeks anymore to tell us what to think about architecture. 
If that building was going to be built today, the first thing they would do is go online and search "" new libraries. "" They would be bombarded by examples of experimentation, of innovation, of pushing at the envelope of what a library can be. 
This abundance of experimentation gives them the freedom to run their own experiment. 
Architects are no longer these mysterious creatures that use big words and complicated drawings, and you aren't the hapless public, the consumer that won't accept anything that they haven't seen anymore. 
It means that a public space in the ancient city of Seville can be unique and tailored to the way that a modern city works. 
It means that robots are going to build our buildings, because we're finally ready for the forms that they're going to produce. 
And it means that buildings will twist to the whims of nature instead of the other way around. 
It means that a parking garage in Miami Beach, Florida, can also be a place for sports and for yoga and you can even get married there late at night. 
(Laughter) It means that three architects can dream about swimming in the East River of New York, and then raise nearly half a million dollars from a community that gathered around their cause, no one client anymore. 
And it means that a building doesn't have to be beautiful to be lovable, like this ugly little building in Spain, where the architects dug a hole, packed it with hay, and then poured concrete around it, and when the concrete dried, they invited someone to come and clean that hay out so that all that's left when it's done is this hideous little room that's filled with the imprints and scratches of how that place was made, and that becomes the most sublime place to watch a Spanish sunset. 
And finally, we're not on opposite sides anymore. 

What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you. 
More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush. 
Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours. 
Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. 
In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation. 
Of course there's health consequences to this, scary ones, besides the waist. 
Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those. 
Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of. 
Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't. 
What did get me moving was a social interaction. 
Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, "I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?" 
It seemed kind of odd to do, and actually, that first meeting, I remember thinking, "I have to be the one to ask the next question," because I knew I was going to huff and puff during this conversation. 
And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own. 
So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. 
It's changed my life. 
But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other. 
So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things. 
First, there's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking. 
Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works. 
And second, and probably the more reflective one, is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they're really not that way. 
And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true. 
Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable. 
So I started this talk talking about the tush, so I'll end with the bottom line, which is, walk and talk. 
Walk the talk. 
You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Motor racing is a funny old business. 
We make a new car every year, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we've built to make it better, to make it faster. 
And then the next year, we start again. 
Now, the car you see in front of you is quite complicated. 
The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components, the engine another 6,000, the electronics about eight and a half thousand. 
So there's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong. 
So motor racing is very much about attention to detail. 
The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we're always changing the car. 
We're always trying to make it faster. 
So every two weeks, we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car. 
Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year. 
So how do we do that? 
Well, we start our life with the racing car. 
We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things. 
On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race. 
It's measuring all sorts of things around the car. 
That data is logged. We're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems, about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do, and we're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second. 
So during a two-hour race, each car will be sending 750 million numbers. 
That's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime. 
It's a huge amount of data. 
But it's not enough just to have data and measure it. 
You need to be able to do something with it. 
So we've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell, what's the state of the engine, how are the tires degrading, what's the situation with fuel consumption? 
So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon. 
Okay, so let's have a look at a little bit of data. 
Let's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient. 
This is a child, and what you're seeing here is real data, and on the far right-hand side, where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic, that is the patient going into cardiac arrest. 
It was deemed to be an unpredictable event. 
This was a heart attack that no one could see coming. 
But when we look at the information there, we can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest. 
We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving. 
These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data. 
So the question is, why couldn't we see it? 
Was this a predictable event? 
Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better? 
So this is a child, about the same age as the racing car on stage, three months old. 
It's a patient with a heart problem. 
Now, when you look at some of the data on the screen above, things like heart rate, pulse, oxygen, respiration rates, they're all unusual for a normal child, but they're quite normal for the child there, and so one of the challenges you have in health care is, how can I look at the patient in front of me, have something which is specific for her, and be able to detect when things start to change, when things start to deteriorate? 
Because like a racing car, any patient, when things start to go bad, you have a short time to make a difference. 
So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children's Hospital. 
We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. 
And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change. 
Now, in motor racing, we're all a little bit ambitious, audacious, a little bit arrogant sometimes, so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care. 
Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look? 
And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care. 
And then we started looking at the data. 
So the wiggly lines at the top, all the colors, this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor — heart rate, pulse, oxygen within the blood, and respiration. 
The lines on the bottom, the blue and the red, these are the interesting ones. 
The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning score that Birmingham Children's Hospital were already running. 
They'd been running that since 2008, and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital. 
The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change, and immediately, before we even started putting in clinical interpretation, we can see that the data is speaking to us. 
It's telling us that something is going wrong. 
The plot with the red and the green blobs, this is plotting different components of the data against each other. 
The green is us learning what is normal for that child. 
We call it the cloud of normality. 
And when things start to change, when conditions start to deteriorate, we move into the red line. 
There's no rocket science here. 
It is displaying data that exists already in a different way, to amplify it, to provide cues to the doctors, to the nurses, so they can see what's happening. 
In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes, when to turn into a corner, we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong. 
So we have a very ambitious program. 
We think that the race is on to do something differently. 
We are thinking big. It's the right thing to do. 
We have an approach which, if it's successful, there's no reason why it should stay within a hospital. 
With wireless connectivity these days, there is no reason why patients, doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time. 
And meanwhile, we'll take our little three-month-old baby, keep taking it to the track, keeping it safe, and making it faster and better. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

When my father and I started a company to 3D print human tissues and organs, some people initially thought we were a little crazy. 
But since then, much progress has been made, both in our lab and other labs around the world. 
And given this, we started getting questions like, "" If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather? "" When someone first suggested this to me, quite frankly I thought they were a little crazy, but what I soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all. 
What's crazy is what we do today. 
I'm convinced that in 30 years, when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags, we'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy. 
Did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat, dairy, eggs and leather goods? 
And over the next few decades, as the world's population expands to 10 billion, this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals. 
But maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet. 
Animals are not just raw materials. 
They're living beings, and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land, fresh water, and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change. 
On top of this, when you get so many animals so close together, it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse. 
Clearly, we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment, public health, and food security at risk. 
There is another way, because essentially, animal products are just collections of tissues, and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues. 
What if, instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal, we started with what the tissues are made of, the basic unit of life, the cell? 
This is biofabrication, where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs. 
Already in medicine, biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts, like ears, windpipes, skin, blood vessels and bone, that have been successfully implanted into patients. 
And beyond medicine, biofabrication can be a humane, sustainable and scalable new industry. 
And we should begin by reimagining leather. 
I emphasize leather because it is so widely used. 
It is beautiful, and it has long been a part of our history. 
Growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat. 
It mainly uses one cell type, and it is largely two-dimensional. 
It is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators. 
Until biofabrication is better understood, it is clear that, initially at least, more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods, no matter how delicious. 
In this sense, leather is a gateway material, a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry. 
If we can succeed here, it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon. 
Now how do we do it? 
To grow leather, we begin by taking cells from an animal, through a simple biopsy. 
The animal could be a cow, lamb, or even something more exotic. 
This process does no harm, and Daisy the cow can live a happy life. 
We then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium. 
This takes millions of cells and expands them into billions. 
And we then coax these cells to produce collagen, as they would naturally. 
This collagen is the stuff between cells. 
It's natural connective tissue. 
It's the extracellular matrix, but in leather, it's the main building block. 
And what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets, and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another, like phyllo pastry, to form thicker sheets, which we then let mature. 
And finally, we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process, we create leather. 
And so I'm very excited to show you, for the first time, the first batch of our cultured leather, fresh from the lab. 
This is real, genuine leather, without the animal sacrifice. 
It can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells, and better yet, there is no hair to remove, no scars or insect's bites, and no waste. 
This leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet, a handbag or a car seat. 
It is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator. 
And because we make this material, we grow this leather from the ground up, we can control its properties in very interesting ways. 
This piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick, and as you can see, it is nearly transparent. 
And this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque. 
You don't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather. 
And we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities, like softness, breathability, durability, elasticity and even things like pattern. 
We can mimic nature, but in some ways also improve upon it. 
This type of leather can do what today's leather does, but with imagination, probably much more. 
What could the future of animal products look like? 
It need not look like this, which is actually the state of the art today. 
Rather, it could be much more like this. 
Already, we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years, beginning with products like wine, beer and yogurt. 
And speaking of food, our cultured food has evolved, and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful, sterile facilities like this. 
A brewery is essentially a bioreactor. 
It is where cell culture takes place. 
Imagine that in this facility, instead of brewing beer, we were brewing leather or meat. 
Imagine touring this facility, learning about how the leather or meat is cultured, seeing the process from beginning to end, and even trying some. 
It's clean, open and educational, and this is in contrast to the hidden, guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today. 
Perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind. 
It's environmentally responsible, efficient and humane. 
It allows us to be creative. 
We can design new materials, new products, and new facilities. 
We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved. 
Perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. 
And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn't, and making it kind of an annual thing. 
A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don't get worked on naturally. 
That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. 
And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to. 
So this morning I'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. 
But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. 
Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. 
And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. 
Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. 
Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. 
As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. 
Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. 
So that's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. 
It's a phenomenal thing. 
Each one of those lives matters a lot. 
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. 
For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. 
So we really can make changes. 
The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. 
And I think that's doable in well under 20 years. 
Why? Well there's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. 
So that brings us to the first problem that I'll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitos? 
Well, what's the history of this disease? 
It's been a severe disease for thousands of years. 
In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. 
Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. 
So it was absolutely gigantic. 
And the disease was all over the world. 
A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. 
People didn't know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. 
So it was everywhere. 
And two tools helped bring the death rate down. 
One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. 
The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. 
And so that's why the death rate did come down. 
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. 
So we can see: 1900, it's everywhere. 
1945, it's still most places. 
1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 
1990, you've gotten most of the northern areas. 
And more recently you can see it's just around the equator. 
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn't get much investment. 
For example, there's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. 
Now, baldness, it's a terrible thing. 
(Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. 
And so that's why that priority has been set. 
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 
Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. 
It means that you can't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. 
Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. 
I brought some here, just so you could experience this. 
We'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. 
(Laughter) There's no reason only poor people should have the experience. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected. 
So we've come up with a few new things. We've got bed nets. 
And bed nets are a great tool. 
What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can't get at them. 
And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. 
And that's happened now in a number of countries. 
It's great to see. 
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. 
So every tool that we've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. 
And so you end up with two choices. 
If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. 
And that's where we saw the malaria map shrinking. 
Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you'll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. 
And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn't pay attention. 
Now we're on the upswing. 
Bed net funding is up. 
There's new drug discovery going on. 
Our foundation has backed a vaccine that's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. 
And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it's effective. 
So we're going to have these new tools. 
But that alone doesn't give us the road map. 
Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. 
It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. 
It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. 
We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. 
Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. 
We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. 
And so as these elements come together, I'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria. 
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. 
And this is: How do you make a teacher great? 
It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. 
And the answer is, really, that we don't. 
Let's start with why this is important. 
Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. 
We all had a wonderful education. 
That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. 
I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. 
I had great teachers. 
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. 
There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. 
So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. 
And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. 
And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront. 
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. 
Not only has that been weak. it's getting weaker. 
And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. 
And we have to change this. 
We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. 
We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics. 
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 
Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. 
And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. 
Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. 
But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. 
They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. 
For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. 
And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. 
If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. 
And that doesn't seem entirely fair. 
So, how do you make education better? 
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. 
There's many people working on it. 
We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. 
A lot of these things had a good effect. 
But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. 
And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. 
How much variation is there within a school or between schools? 
And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. 
A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. 
What does that mean? 
That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. 
Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away. 
So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. 
And so you'd say, "" Wow, we should reward those people. 
We should retain those people. 
We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people. "" But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today. 
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? 
What do they look like? 
You might think these must be very senior teachers. 
And the answer is no. 
Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. 
The variation is very, very small. 
You might think these are people with master's degrees. 
They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. 
This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. 
That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree. 
Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. 
One is seniority. 
Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. 
The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. 
But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. 
Teach for America: slight effect. 
For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. 
But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. 
There are some people who are very good at this. 
And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system. 
You might say, "" Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave? "" The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. 
And it's a system with very high turnover. 
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. 
A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. 
KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. 
It's an unbelievable thing. 
They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. 
They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. 
And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. 
They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. 
They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, "" Hey, you caused this amount of increase. "" They're deeply engaged in making teaching better. 
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. 
I sat down and I thought, "" What is going on? "" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. 
I thought, "" I'm in the sports rally or something. 
What's going on? "" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. 
It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. 
Everybody needs to be involved. 
And so KIPP is doing it. 
How does that compare to a normal school? 
Well, in a normal school, teachers aren't told how good they are. 
The data isn't gathered. 
In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. 
And they need advanced notice to do that. 
So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "" Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment. "" Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. 
They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. 
For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. 
And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. 
But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do. 
First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. 
And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. 
Of course, digital video is cheap now. 
Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. 
And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, "" OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. 
Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. 
Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that? "" And they could all sit and work together on those problems. 
You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff. 
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. 
If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. 
And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. 
And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better. 
Now there's a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, "" Work Hard, Be Nice. "" And I thought it was so fantastic. 
It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. 
I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. 
(Applause) Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. 
In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it's interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things. 
But I — I'm optimistic. 
I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. 
I only had time to frame those two problems. 
There's a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. 
And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. 
You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. 
Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. 
The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things. 
So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you're helping to come up with solutions. 
And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

But energy and climate are extremely important to these people; in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. 
In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. 
The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s, we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning; we can make modern materials and do so many things. 
If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. 
And the answer is, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. 
It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. 
So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person is using on average, the energy, on average, for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. 
That's headed up to about nine billion. 
In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, overall, that will more than double the services delivered per person. 
Now, efficiency, "" E, "" the energy for each service — here, finally we have some good news. 
Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings — there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. 
Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. 
But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. 
Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here? "" I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitoes, and somehow people enjoyed that. 
I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. 
And that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. 
It also has three big problems: cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. 
So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. 
And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. 
And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. 
Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. 
Now, how are we going to go forward on this — what's the right approach? 
Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. 
Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. 
And because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. 
The other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and are in the process of getting it elsewhere? 
That's a key element of making that report card. 
Backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? 
The Al Gore book, "" Our Choice, "" and the David MacKay book, "" Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. "" They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. 
What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? 
You'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. 
We do need the market incentives — CO2 tax, cap and trade — something that gets that price signal out there. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Thank you. 
And we start out, actually, by taking the waste that exists today that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry-casking by reactors — that's our fuel to begin with. 
It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. 
CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? 
We certainly need one to succeed. 
And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal. 
Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? 
BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been overeating, and you're about to have a heart attack. 
Then where do you go? 
But I guess I'll accept it, because it's cheaper than what's come before. "" (Applause) CA: So that would be your response to the Bjørn Lomborg argument, basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. 
It shouldn't take away from other things. 
The thing you get into big money on, and reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that — that, to me, mostly is a waste. 
If the trade-off you get into is, "" Let's make energy super expensive, "" then the rich can afford that. 
His shtick now is, "" Why isn't the R & D getting more discussed? "" He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R & D point. 
The R & D piece — it's crazy how little it's funded. 

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

(Cheering) Not good enough. 
(Loud cheering) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. 
He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. 
(Laughter) CP is not genetic. 
No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are. 
(Laughter) It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day. 
Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational. 
It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? 
If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. 
I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey. 
(Laughter) (Applause) If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should. (Laughter) 
I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. 
A lot of people with CP don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in "" can't. "" My father's mantra was, "You can do it, yes you can can." 
If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper. 
(Laughter) My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. 
(Laughter) My inner stripper was very strong. (Laughter) 
Yeah. 
I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian. (Laughter) 
I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. 
And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I. 
And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. 
I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna. 
(Laughter) Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, "" It's working! It's working! "" (Laughter) But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. 
I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. 
My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera "" General Hospital. "" (Laughter) I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota. (Laughter) 
I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes. 
(Laughter) Every time I did a scene from "" The Glass Menagerie, "" my professors would weep. 
But I never got cast. 
Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called "" They Dance Real Slow in Jackson. "" It's a play about a girl with CP. 
So I start shouting from the rooftops, "" I'm finally going to get a part! 
I have cerebral palsy! 
Thank God almighty, I'm free at last! "" I didn't get the part. 
I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. 
I said, "" Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character. "" (Laughter) (Applause) This was a part that I was literally born to play they gave it to a non-palsy actress. 
Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen. 
My dream was coming true. 
And I knew that I would be promoted from "" Diner Diner "" to "" Wacky Best Friend "" in no time. 
(Laughter) But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. 
They only hired perfect people. 
I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. 
So I became a comic. 
(Laughter) (Applause) My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with CP driving him. (Laughter) 
I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered. (Laughter) 
I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical. 
(Laughter) In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year. 
Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous. 
(Laughter) Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability. 
I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." 
I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair. 
(Laughter) So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, "" Excuse me, can I have another chair? "" And she looked at me and she went, "Five, four, three, two..." 
And we were live, right? 
So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. 
I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. 
But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair. 
(Laughter) (Applause) One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. (Laughter) 
Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. 
I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why's she tweakin '?" 
What does she suffer from? 
We should really pray for her. "" One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy. 
If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. 
(Applause) People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment. 
I hope that together, we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. 
Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well. 
My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. 
I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Loreen Arbus. 
I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. 
I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. 
I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC. 
And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. 
But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got — before this moment — (Laughter) (Applause) But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali. (Applause) 
(English) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can. 

And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. 
And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. 
And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! 
Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun. "" Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! 
I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." (Laughter) 
TEDster Bill Gates says, "" I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company. "" I'd say it was a pretty good idea. 
And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it's just doing some very simple things. 

Martin Luther King did not say, "I have a nightmare," when he inspired the civil rights movements. 
He said, "" I have a dream. "" And I have a dream. 
I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. 
I think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times, "" The Road. "" It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. 
And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. 
And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future. 
For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. 
We have focused on the worst-case scenario. 
We have focused on the problems. 
And we have not thought enough about the solutions. 
We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. 
And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. 
It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened — think of a deer. 
A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. 
And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. 
People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. 
And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is. 
What would it be like to be improving the human lot? 
And one of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, an economic definition of what progress is — that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. 
This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear — that more is better. 
Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. 
Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. 
And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. 
In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "" A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income. "" But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. 
And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. 
In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. 
And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. 
And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce. 
But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. 
And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, "" The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile. "" How crazy is that? That our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? 
I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. 
He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being. 
And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. 
This is from a global survey. 
It's asking people, what do they want. 
And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. 
Okay, they think money is slightly important. 
It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. 
We all need to love and be loved in life. 
It's not nearly as important as health. 
We want to be healthy and live a full life. 
These seem to be natural human aspirations. 
Why are statisticians not measuring these? 
Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? 
And really, this is what I've done with my adult life — is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits. 
And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. 
Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? 
And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. 
That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. 
But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. 
We all have one planet. We all have to share it. 
It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. 
And economics is very interested in scarcity. 
When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. 
It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. 
And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. 
It is an efficiency measure. 
And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph. 
Running horizontally along the graph, is "" ecological footprint, "" which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. 
More is bad. 
Running vertically upwards, is a measure called "" happy life years. "" It's about the well-being of nations. 
It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. 
It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. 
And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. 
Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. 
To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. 
They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. 
Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being — typically, sub-Saharan Africa. 
In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. 
The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. 
Malaria, HIV / AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world. 
But now for the good news! 
There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. 
This is an aspirational graph. 
We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. 
They're Latin American. 
The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. 
Maybe some of you have. 
Costa Rica. 
Costa Rica — average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. 
That is longer than in the USA. 
They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet — than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. 
They are the happiest place. 
They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world — a quarter of the resources. 
What's going on there? 
What's happening in Costa Rica? 
We can look at some of the data. 
99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. 
Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. 
They abolished the army in 1949 — 1949. 
And they invested in social programs — health and education. 
They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. 
And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. 
They have the social connectedness. 
(Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly — and the thing we might have to think about — is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. 
It might be Latin American. 
And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. 
That's what we need to do. 
And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. 
And then we're starting to create a happy planet. 
That's one way of looking at it. 
Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. 
We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. 
And this is the trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. 
And so in strict happy-planet methodology, we've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. 
And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. 
It's actually not very long away. 
It's half a human lifetime away. 
A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. 
This is not the very distant future. 
This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. 
And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. 
That is changing our business. 
That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. 
And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. 
No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. 
None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. 
I think we want it to carry on. 
I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. 
And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. 
I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. 
They want to hold on to what they've got. 
And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. 
And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more. 
Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. 
And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. 
Human beings are very motivated by the "" now. "" You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. 
What would that look like for society? 
Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio — I don't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news. 
And why do I hear that? 
Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? 
Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? 
That's how you create a collective goal. 
You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. 
And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. 
At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. 
At a personal level, we need these nudges too. 
Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. 
In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do — never my best thing. 
What are these for happiness? 
What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier? 
We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program — lots and lots of people — involved lots of experts — everything evidence based — a huge tome. 
But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? 
And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from. 
And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. 
Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? 
Keep building them. 
The second one is be active. 
The fastest way out of a bad mood: step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. 
Being active is great for our positive mood. 
The third one is take notice. 
How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? 
Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? 
Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, [very] strong for our well being. 
The fourth is keep learning and keep is important — learning throughout the whole life course. 
Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. 
But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. 
It's more curiosity. 
It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. 
Keep learning. 
And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. 
Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. 
We feel good if we give. 
You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. 
You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. 
You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves. 
And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. 
They don't have any carbon content. 
They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. 
And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. 
Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. 
He said, "" I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. 
I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land. "" Now, he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. 
And not only that, we need to create a Great Transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things. 
Human beings want to be happy. 
Pave them with the five ways. 
And we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them — something like the Happy Planet Index. 
And then I believe that we can all create a world we all want, where happiness does not cost the earth. 
(Applause) 

Today I have just one request. 
Please don't tell me I'm normal. 
Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers. 
Remi is 22, tall and very handsome. 
He's speechless, but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators cannot. 
Remi knows what love is. 
He shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless. 
He's not greedy. He doesn't see skin color. 
He doesn't care about religious differences, and get this: He has never told a lie. 
When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be. 
Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome. 
He has the most impeccable memory. 
He has a selective one, though. 
He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday. 
Don't they sound incredible? 
But most people don't agree. 
And in fact, because their minds don't fit into society's version of normal, they're often bypassed and misunderstood. 
But what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case, although they were not seen as ordinary, this could only mean one thing: that they were extraordinary — autistic and extraordinary. 
Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "" autism, "" it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills. 
It manifests in each individual differently, hence why Remi is so different from Sam. 
And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure. 
And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it. 
I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life. 
And after a few months went by, I realized that he was different. 
He screamed a lot. 
He didn't want to play like the other babies did, and in fact, he didn't seem very interested in me whatsoever. 
Remi lived and reigned in his own world, with his own rules, and he found pleasure in the smallest things, like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between. 
And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious. 
Yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique: a pure and innocent nature, a boy who saw the world without prejudice, a human who had never lied. 
Extraordinary. 
Now, I cannot deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family, moments where I've wished that they were just like me. 
But I cast my mind back to the things that they've taught me about individuality and communication and love, and I realize that these are things that I wouldn't want to change with normality. 
Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong. 
It just means that there's a different kind of right. 
And if I could communicate just one thing to Remi and to Sam and to you, it would be that you don't have to be normal. 
You can be extraordinary. 
Because autistic or not, the differences that we have — We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential. 
The chance for greatness, for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else. 
Please — don't tell me I'm normal. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 

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

My talk today is about something maybe a couple of you have already heard about. 
It's called the Arab Spring. 
Anyone heard of it? 
(Applause) So in 2011, power shifted, from the few to the many, from oval offices to central squares, from carefully guarded airwaves to open-source networks. 
But before Tahrir was a global symbol of liberation, there were representative surveys already giving people a voice in quieter but still powerful ways. 
I study Muslim societies around the world at Gallup. 
Since 2001, we've interviewed hundreds of thousands of people — young and old, men and women, educated and illiterate. 
My talk today draws on this research to reveal why Arabs rose up and what they want now. 
Now this region's very diverse, and every country is unique. 
But those who revolted shared a common set of grievances and have similar demands today. 
I'm going to focus a lot of my talk on Egypt. 
It has nothing to do with the fact that I was born there, of course. 
But it's the largest Arab country and it's also one with a great deal of influence. 
But I'm going to end by widening the lens to the entire region to look at the mundane topics of Arab views of religion and politics and how this impacts women, revealing some surprises along the way. 
So after analyzing mounds of data, what we discovered was this: Unemployment and poverty alone did not lead to the Arab revolts of 2011. 
If an act of desperation by a Tunisian fruit vendor sparked these revolutions, it was the difference between what Arabs experienced and what they expected that provided the fuel. 
To tell you what I mean, consider this trend in Egypt. 
On paper the country was doing great. 
In fact, it attracted accolades from multinational organizations because of its economic growth. 
But under the surface was a very different reality. 
In 2010, right before the revolution, even though GDP per capita had been growing at five percent for several years, Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives. 
Now this is very unusual, because globally we find that, not surprisingly, people feel better as their country gets richer. 
And that's because they have better job opportunities and their state offers better social services. 
But it was exactly the opposite in Egypt. 
As the country got more well-off, unemployment actually rose and people's satisfaction with things like housing and education plummeted. 
But it wasn't just anger at economic injustice. 
It was also people's deep longing for freedom. 
Contrary to the clash of civilizations theory, Arabs didn't despise Western liberty, they desired it. 
As early as 2001, we asked Arabs, and Muslims in general around the world, what they admired most about the West. 
Among the most frequent responses was liberty and justice. 
In their own words to an open-ended question we heard, "" Their political system is transparent and it's following democracy in its true sense. "" Another said it was "" liberty and freedom and being open-minded with each other. "" Majorities as high as 90 percent and greater in Egypt, Indonesia and Iran told us in 2005 that if they were to write a new constitution for a theoretical new country that they would guarantee freedom of speech as a fundamental right, especially in Egypt. 
Eighty-eight percent said moving toward greater democracy would help Muslims progress — the highest percentage of any country we surveyed. 
But pressed up against these democratic aspirations was a very different day-to-day experience, especially in Egypt. 
While aspiring to democracy the most, they were the least likely population in the world to say that they had actually voiced their opinion to a public official in the last month — at only four percent. 
So while economic development made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. 
As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for. 
So rather than viewing their former regimes as generous if overprotective fathers, they viewed them as essentially prison wardens. 
So now that Egyptians have ended Mubarak's 30-year rule, they potentially could be an example for the region. 
If Egypt is to succeed at building a society based on the rule of law, it could be a model. 
If, however, the core issues that propelled the revolution aren't addressed, the consequences could be catastrophic — not just for Egypt, but for the entire region. 
The signs don't look good, some have said. 
Islamists, not the young liberals that sparked the revolution, won the majority in Parliament. 
The military council has cracked down on civil society and protests and the country's economy continues to suffer. 
Evaluating Egypt on this basis alone, however, ignores the real revolution. 
Because Egyptians are more optimistic than they have been in years, far less divided on religious-secular lines than we would think and poised for the demands of democracy. 
Whether they support Islamists or liberals, Egyptians' priorities for this government are identical, and they are jobs, stability and education, not moral policing. 
But most of all, for the first time in decades, they expect to be active participants, not spectators, in the affairs of their country. 
I was meeting with a group of newly-elected parliamentarians from Egypt and Tunisia a couple of weeks ago. 
And what really struck me about them was that they weren't only optimistic, but they kind of struck me as nervous, for lack of a better word. 
One said to me, "" Our people used to gather in cafes to watch football "" — or soccer, as we say in America — "and now they gather to watch Parliament." 
(Laughter) "" They're really watching us, and we can't help but worry that we're not going to live up to their expectations. "" And what really struck me is that less than 24 months ago, it was the people that were nervous about being watched by their government. 
And the reason that they're expecting a lot is because they have a new-found hope for the future. 
So right before the revolution we said that Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives, but not only that, they thought their future would be no better. 
What really changed after the ouster of Mubarak wasn't that life got easier. 
It actually got harder. 
But people's expectations for their future went up significantly. 
And this hope, this optimism, endured a year of turbulent transition. 
One reason that there's this optimism is because, contrary to what many people have said, most Egyptians think things really have changed in many ways. 
So while Egyptians were known for their single-digit turnout in elections before the revolution, the last election had around 70 percent voter turnout — men and women. 
Where scarcely a quarter believed in the honesty of elections in 2010 — I'm surprised it was a quarter — 90 percent thought that this last election was honest. 
Now why this matters is because we discovered a link between people's faith in their democratic process and their faith that oppressed people can change their situation through peaceful means alone. 
(Applause) Now I know what some of you are thinking. 
The Egyptian people, and many other Arabs who've revolted and are in transition, have very high expectations of the government. 
They're just victims of a long-time autocracy, expecting a paternal state to solve all their problems. 
But this conclusion would ignore a tectonic shift taking place in Egypt far from the cameras in Tahrir Square. 
And that is Egyptians' elevated expectations are placed first on themselves. 
In the country once known for its passive resignation, where, as bad as things got, only four percent expressed their opinion to a public official, today 90 percent tell us that if there's a problem in their community, it's up to them to fix it. 
(Applause) And three-fourths believe they not only have the responsibility, but the power to make change. 
And this empowerment also applies to women, whose role in the revolts cannot be underestimated. 
They were doctors and dissidents, artists and organizers. 
A full third of those who braved tanks and tear gas to ask or to demand liberty and justice in Egypt were women. 
(Applause) Now people have raised some real concerns about what the rise of Islamist parties means for women. 
What we've found about the role of religion in law and the role of religion in society is that there's no female consensus. 
We found that women in one country look more like the men in that country than their female counterparts across the border. 
Now what this suggests is that how women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women. 
Where women agree, however, is on their own role, and that it must be central and active. 
And here is where we see the greatest gender difference within a country — on the issue of women's rights. 
Now how men feel about women's rights matters to the future of this region. 
Because we discovered a link between men's support for women's employment and how many women are actually employed in professional fields in that country. 
So the question becomes, What drives men's support for women's rights? 
What about men's views of religion and law? 
[Does] a man's opinion of the role of religion in politics shape their view of women's rights? 
The answer is no. 
We found absolutely no correlation, no impact whatsoever, between these two variables. 
What drives men's support for women's employment is men's employment, their level of education as well as a high score on their country's U.N. Human Development Index. 
What this means is that human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East. 
And the transformation continues. 
From Wall Street to Mohammed Mahmoud Street, it has never been more important to understand the aspirations of ordinary people. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hetain Patel: (In Chinese) Yuyu Rau: Hi, I'm Hetain. I'm an artist. 
And this is Yuyu, who is a dancer I have been working with. 
I have asked her to translate for me. 
HP: (In Chinese) YR: If I may, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork. HP: (In Chinese) 
YR: I was born and raised near Manchester, in England, but I'm not going to say it in English to you, because I'm trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent. 
(Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) YR: The only problem with masking it with Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this paragraph, which I have learned by heart when I was visiting in China. (Laughter) So all I can do is keep repeating it in different tones and hope you won't notice. (Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) (Laughter) 
YR: Needless to say, I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speakers in the audience. 
As a child, I would hate being made to wear the Indian kurta pajama, because I didn't think it was very cool. 
It felt a bit girly to me, like a dress, and it had this baggy trouser part you had to tie really tight to avoid the embarrassment of them falling down. 
My dad never wore it, so I didn't see why I had to. 
Also, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, that people assume I represent something genuinely Indian when I wear it, because that's not how I feel. 
HP: (In Chinese) YR: Actually, the only way I feel comfortable wearing it is by pretending they are the robes of a kung fu warrior like Li Mu Bai from that film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." 
(Music) Okay. 
So my artwork is about identity and language, challenging common assumptions based on how we look like or where we come from, gender, race, class. 
What makes us who we are anyway? 
HP: (In Chinese) YR: I used to read Spider-Man comics, watch kung fu movies, take philosophy lessons from Bruce Lee. 
He would say things like — HP: Empty your mind. 
(Laughter) Be formless, shapeless, like water. 
Now you put water into a cup. 
It becomes the cup. 
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. 
Put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. 
Now, water can flow or it can crash. 
Be water, my friend. (Applause) YR: This year, I am 32 years old, the same age Bruce Lee was when he died. 
I have been wondering recently, if he were alive today, what advice he would give me about making this TED Talk. 
HP: Don't imitate my voice. 
It offends me. 
(Laughter) YR: Good advice, but I still think that we learn who we are by copying others. 
Who here hasn't imitated their childhood hero in the playground, or mum or father? 
I have. 
HP: A few years ago, in order to make this video for my artwork, I shaved off all my hair so that I could grow it back as my father had it when he first emigrated from India to the U.K. in the 1960s. 
He had a side parting and a neat mustache. 
At first, it was going very well. 
I even started to get discounts in Indian shops. 
(Laughter) But then very quickly, I started to underestimate my mustache growing ability, and it got way too big. 
It didn't look Indian anymore. 
Instead, people from across the road, they would shout things like — HP and YR: Arriba! Arriba! Ándale! Ándale! 
(Laughter) HP: Actually, I don't know why I am even talking like this. 
My dad doesn't even have an Indian accent anymore. 
He talks like this now. 
So it's not just my father that I've imitated. 
A few years ago I went to China for a few months, and I couldn't speak Chinese, and this frustrated me, so I wrote about this and had it translated into Chinese, and then I learned this by heart, like music, I guess. 
YR: This phrase is now etched into my mind clearer than the pin number to my bank card, so I can pretend I speak Chinese fluently. 
When I had learned this phrase, I had an artist over there hear me out to see how accurate it sounded. 
I spoke the phrase, and then he laughed and told me, "" Oh yeah, that's great, only it kind of sounds like a woman. "" I said, "" What? "" He said, "" Yeah, you learned from a woman? "" I said, "" Yes. So? "" He then explained the tonal differences between male and female voices are very different and distinct, and that I had learned it very well, but in a woman's voice. 
(Laughter) (Applause) HP: Okay. So this imitation business does come with risk. 
It doesn't always go as you plan it, even with a talented translator. 
But I am going to stick with it, because contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. 
So every time I fail to become more like my father, I become more like myself. 
Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee, I become more authentically me. 
This is my art. 
I strive for authenticity, even if it comes in a shape that we might not usually expect. 
It's only recently that I've started to understand that I didn't learn to sit like this through being Indian. 
I learned this from Spider-Man. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has so elegantly shown. 
Another is to change our lifestyles. 
And what we're learning is how powerful and dynamic these changes can be, that you don't have to wait very long to see the benefits. 
When you eat healthier, manage stress, exercise and love more, your brain actually gets more blood flow and more oxygen. 
But more than that, your brain gets measurably bigger. 
Things that were thought impossible just a few years ago can actually be measured now. 
This was figured out by Robin Williams a few years before the rest of us. 
Now, there's some things that you can do to make your brain grow new brain cells. 
Some of my favorite things, like chocolate and tea, blueberries, alcohol in moderation, stress management and cannabinoids found in marijuana. 
I'm just the messenger. 
(Laughter) What were we just talking about? (Laughter) 
And other things that can make it worse, that can cause you to lose brain cells. 
The usual suspects, like saturated fat and sugar, nicotine, opiates, cocaine, too much alcohol and chronic stress. 
Your skin gets more blood flow when you change your lifestyle, so you age less quickly. Your skin doesn't wrinkle as much. 
Your heart gets more blood flow. 
We've shown that you can actually reverse heart disease. 
That these clogged arteries that you see on the upper left, after only a year become measurably less clogged. 
And the cardiac PET scan shown on the lower left, the blue means no blood flow. 
A year later — orange and white is maximum blood flow. 
We've shown you may be able to stop and reverse the progression of early prostate cancer and, by extension, breast cancer, simply by making these changes. 
We've found that tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70 percent in the group that made these changes, whereas only nine percent in the comparison group. 
These differences were highly significant. 
Even your sexual organs get more blood flow, so you increase sexual potency. 
One of the most effective anti-smoking ads was done by the Department of Health Services, showing that nicotine, which constricts your arteries, can cause a heart attack or a stroke, but it also causes impotence. 
Half of guys who smoke are impotent. 
How sexy is that? 
Now we're also about to publish a study — the first study showing you can change gene expression in men with prostate cancer. 
This is what's called a heat map — and the different colors — and along the side, on the right, are different genes. 
And we found that over 500 genes were favorably changed — in effect, turning on the good genes, the disease-preventing genes, turning off the disease-promoting genes. 
And so these findings I think are really very powerful, giving many people new hope and new choices. 
And companies like Navigenics and DNA Direct and 23andMe, that are giving you your genetic profiles, are giving some people a sense of, "" Gosh, well, what can I do about it? "" Well, our genes are not our fate, and if we make these changes — they're a predisposition — but if we make bigger changes than we might have made otherwise, we can actually change how our genes are expressed. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

About a year ago, I asked myself a question: "" Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian? "" After all, I'm one of the green guys: I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. 
I started a site called TreeHugger — I care about this stuff. 
I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. 
Cruelty: I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. 
Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. 
And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do. 
I also knew that I'm not alone. 
We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. 
So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. 
So really, any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. 
Yet, there I was — chk, chk, chk — tucking into a big old steak. 
So why was I stalling? 
I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. 
It was either you're a meat eater or you're a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn't quite ready. 
Imagine your last hamburger. 
(Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. 
And I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. 
Sound familiar? 
So I wondered, might there be a third solution? 
And I thought about it, and I came up with one. 
I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. 
It's called weekday veg. 
The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. 
On the weekend, your choice. 
Simple. 
If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. 
So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. 
It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it's okay to break it here and there. 
After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake. 
The program has been great, weekday veg. 
My footprint's smaller, I'm lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I'm even saving money. 
Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight. 
So, please ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? 
After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The things we make have one supreme quality — they live longer than us. 
We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. 
Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many. 
I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography — or rather the biographies — of one particular object, one remarkable thing. 
It doesn't, I agree, look very much. 
It's about the size of a rugby ball. 
It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun. 
And as you can see, it's been knocked about a bit, which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879. 
But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. 
And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet. 
The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change. 
And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast — because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC. 
And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling. 
What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. 
And you all know roughly the story. 
Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. 
Not only the Jews, he'd taken the temple vessels. 
He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple. 
And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon. 
Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. 
And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels. 
He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia. 
And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, "" You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians. "" And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell. 
It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. 
It's a great story. It's story we all know. 
"The writing on the wall" is part of our everyday language. 
What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story. 
Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight — the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. 
And Cyrus makes a declaration. 
And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people. 
In ringing Babylonian — it was written in Babylonian — he says, "" I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world. "" They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see. 
This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. 
And it's written, as we'll see in due course, by very skilled P.R. consultants. 
So the hyperbole is not actually surprising. 
And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do? 
He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians — Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar — have captured and enslaved go free. 
He'll let them return to their countries. 
And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. 
All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home, and they'll take with them their gods. 
And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place. 
This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home. 
They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple. 
It's a central document in Jewish history. 
And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms. 
This is the Jewish version of the same story. 
"" Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem. 
Who is there among you of his people? 
The Lord God be with him, and let him go up. '"" "" Go up "" — aaleh. 
The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism. 
As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. 
And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay. 
Two great texts, what about the politics? 
What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history. 
The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. 
Cyrus begins in the 530s BC. 
And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. 
This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it. 
It was the largest empire the world had known until then. 
Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale. 
And it had to be run in a quite new way. 
It had to be run in different languages. 
The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing. 
And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. 
All of those are respected by Cyrus. 
Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society. 
And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander. 
It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. 
The Greek invasions ended that. 
And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain a government and it fragmented. 
But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central. 
The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book "" Cyropaedia "" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. 
And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model. 
This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was. 
And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. 
Jefferson was a great admirer — the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state. 
Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. 
After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost — until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon. 
And it enters now another story. 
It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: Are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them? 
We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. 
No other evidence. 
Suddenly, this appeared. 
And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. 
It's a great 19th century moment. 
But — and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated — the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated. 
Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. 
The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. 
And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk. 
"Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name." 
Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. 
Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free. 
And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk. 
The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this. 
For them, of course, it can't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen. 
It can only be Jehovah. 
And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel — the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people. 
It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event, two different religious takeovers of a political fact. 
God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. 
The question is, which god was it? 
And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion. 
And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. 
And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "" I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me. "" I think it's recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehovah. 
And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk. 
Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts. 
(Laughter) That's 1879. 
40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world. 
This time, the real politics of the contemporary world — the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return. 
And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic. 
And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side — the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem. 
And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan. 
You all know what happened. 
The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over. 
And another story of the cylinder begins. 
The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah. 
And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder. 
When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty. 
Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah. 
10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979. 
Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran — until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks. 
Then another Iran-Iraq war. 
And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won. 
It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians — Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout. 
And the obvious emblem is Cyrus. 
So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together, as we've been doing, the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan. 
It's the only object they want. 
They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder. 
And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time. 
It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani. 
It was a huge event. 
This is the other side of that same picture. 
It's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months. 
This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West. 
And it's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means, what Cyrus means, but above all, Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder — Cyrus as the defender of the homeland, the champion, of course, of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples, tolerant of all faiths. 
And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of. 
To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it. 
It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad. 
Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed? 
Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated? 
This is heady national rhetoric, and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return. 
Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran. 
It was a narrative presented by the president himself. 
And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today. 
It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration. 
It stands with the American constitution. 
It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta. 
It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region. 
A replica of this is at the United Nations. 
In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place. 
And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures. 
It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories. 
And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder? 
The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely — a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate. 
In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are, as you know, shrill. 
But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And she said, "" How are you? "" And I said, "" I'm great. I'm okay. "" She said, "" What's going on? "" And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good. 

For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. 
Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. 
After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. 
Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. 
Now, what have kids done? 
Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. 
Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. 
And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. 
So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
The traits the word "" childish "" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. 
Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "" That won't benefit me. "" For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. 
In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. 
(Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. 
Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. 
The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. 
Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? 
If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. 
Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "" Don't do that, don't do this "" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. 
And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. 
Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. 
Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." 
Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. 
I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. 
Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. 
One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. 
And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. 
But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. 
Kids grow up and become adults just like you. 
(Laughter) Or just like you? Really? 
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. 
(Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. 
It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. 
No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. 
(Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. 
And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. 
Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. 
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 

Everything is interconnected. 
As a Shinnecock Indian, I was raised to know this. 
We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York. 
When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day. 
There were no clouds in the sky. 
And after a while I began to perspire. 
And he pointed up to the sky, and he said, "" Look, do you see that? 
That's part of you up there. 
That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals. "" In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "" Mom, you should do that. "" And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do. 
These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere. 
They can grow so big, blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them. 
Storm chasing is a very tactile experience. 
There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles. 
And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues. 
I've learned to respect the lightning. 
My hair used to be straight. 
(Laughter) I'm just kidding. (Laughter) 
What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds. 
They become lovely monsters. 
When I'm photographing them, I cannot help but remember my grandfather's lesson. 
As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet. 
All my relations. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

This is an ambucycle. 
This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency. 
It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed. 
You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment. 
We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston. 
When I was looking at these pictures, it brought me back many years to my past when I was a child. 
I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem. 
When I was six years old, I was walking back from school on a Friday afternoon with my older brother. 
We were passing by a bus stop. 
We saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes. 
The bus was on fire, and many people were hurt and killed. 
I remembered an old man yelling to us and crying to help us get him up. 
He just needed someone helping him. 
We were so scared and we just ran away. 
Growing up, I decided I wanted to become a doctor and save lives. 
Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child. 
When I was 15, I took an EMT course, and I went to volunteer on an ambulance. 
For two years, I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem. 
I helped many people, but whenever someone really needed help, I never got there in time. We never got there. 
The traffic is so bad. The distance, and everything. 
We never got there when somebody really needed us. 
One day, we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog. 
Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem. 
When we got there, 20 minutes later, we started CPR on the kid. 
A doctor comes in from a block away, stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR. 
That second he declared this child dead. 
At that moment, I understood that this child died for nothing. 
If this doctor, who lived one block away from there, would have come 20 minutes earlier, not have to wait until that siren he heard before coming from the ambulance, if he would have heard about it way before, he would have saved this child. 
He could have run from a block away. 
He could have saved this child. 
I said to myself, there must be a better way. 
Together with 15 of my friends — we were all EMTs — we decided, let's protect our neighborhood, so when something like that happens again, we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance. 
So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company and I told him, "" Please, whenever you have a call coming into our neighborhood, we have 15 great guys who are willing to stop everything they're doing and run and save lives. 
We'll buy these beepers, just tell your dispatch to send us the beeper, and we will run and save lives. "" Well, he was laughing. I was 17 years old. I was a kid. 
And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday — he was a great guy, but he said to me, "" Kid, go to school, or go open a falafel stand. 
We're not really interested in these kinds of new adventures. 
We're not interested in your help. "" And he threw me out of the room. 
"" I don't need your help, "" he said. 
I was a very stubborn kid. 
As you see now, I'm walking around like crazy, meshugenah. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique you've probably all heard of, chutzpah. (Laughter) And the next day, I went and I bought two police scanners, and I said, "" The hell with you, if you don't want to give me information, I'll get the information myself. "" And we did turns, who's going to listen to the radio scanners. 
The next day, while I was listening to the scanners, I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year-old man hurt by a car only one block away from me on the main street of my neighborhood. 
I ran there by foot. I had no medical equipment. 
When I got there, the 70-year-old man was lying on the floor, blood was gushing out of his neck. 
He was on Coumadin. 
I knew I had to stop his bleeding or else he would die. 
I took off my yarmulke, because I had no medical equipment, and with a lot of pressure, I stopped his bleeding. 
When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later, I gave them over a patient who was alive. 
(Applause) When I went to visit him two days later, he gave me a hug and was crying and thanking me for saving his life. 
At that moment, when I realized this is the first person I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance, I knew this is my life's mission. 
So today, 22 years later, we have United Hatzalah. 
(Applause) "" Hatzalah "" means "" rescue, "" for all of you who don't know Hebrew. 
So we have thousands of volunteers who are passionate about saving lives, and they're spread all around, so whenever a call comes in, they just stop everything and go and run and save a life. 
Our average response time today went down to less than three minutes in Israel. 
(Applause) I'm talking about heart attacks, I'm talking about car accidents, God forbid bomb attacks, shootings, whatever it is, even a woman 3 o'clock in the morning falling in her home and needs someone to help her. 
Three minutes, we'll have a guy with his pajamas running to her house and helping her get up. 
The reasons why we're so successful are because of three things. 
Thousands of passionate volunteers who will leave everything they do and run to help people they don't even know. 
We're not there to replace ambulances. 
We're just there to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive. 
And we save people that otherwise would not be saved. 
The second reason is because of our technology. 
You know, Israelis are good in technology. 
Every one of us has on his phone, no matter what kind of phone, a GPS technology done by NowForce, and whenever a call comes in, the closest five volunteers get the call, and they actually get there really quick, and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time. 
And this is a great technology we use all over the country and reduce the response time. 
And the third thing are these ambucycles. 
These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels. 
We don't transfer people, but we stabilize them, and we save their lives. 
They never get stuck in traffic. They could even go on a sidewalk. 
That's why we get there so fast. 
A few years after I started this organization, in a Jewish community, two Muslims from east Jerusalem called me up. 
They ask me to meet. They wanted to meet with me. 
Muhammad Asli and Murad Alyan. 
When Muhammad told me his personal story, how his father, 55 years old, collapsed at home, had a cardiac arrest, and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive, and he saw his father die in front of his eyes, he asked me, "" Please start this in east Jerusalem. "" I said to myself, I saw so much tragedy, so much hate, and it's not about saving Jews. It's not about saving Muslims. 
It's not about saving Christians. It's about saving people. 
So I went ahead, full force — (Applause) — and I started United Hatzalah in east Jerusalem, and that's why the names United and Hatzalah match so well. 
We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs. 
Arabs were saving Jews. Jews were saving Arabs. 
Arabs and Jews, they don't always get along together, but here in this situation, the communities, literally, it's an unbelievable situation that happened, the diversities, all of a sudden they had a common interest: Let's save lives together. 
Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers. 
And these are all volunteers. 
No one is getting money. 
They're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives. 
When my own father collapsed a few years ago from a cardiac arrest, one of the first volunteers to arrive to save my father was one of these Muslim volunteers from east Jerusalem who was in the first course to join Hatzalah. 
Could you imagine how I felt in that moment? 
When I started this organization, I was 17 years old. 
I never imagined that one day I'd be speaking at TEDMED. 
I never even knew what TEDMED was then. 
I don't think it existed, but I never imagined, I never imagined that it's going to go all around, it's going to spread around, and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil. 
All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me, passionate about saving lives, and willing to do it. 
And I'm actually starting it in India very soon with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back. 
Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew years before us in Williamsburg, and now it's all over the Jewish community in New York, even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities. 
But it could spread everywhere. 
It's very easy to adopt. 
You even saw these volunteers in New York saving lives in the World Trade Center. 
Last year alone, we treated in Israel 207,000 people. 
Forty-two thousand of them were life-threatening situations. 
And we made a difference. 
I guess you could call this a lifesaving flash mob, and it works. 
When I look all around here, I see lots of people who would go an extra mile, run an extra mile to save other people, no matter who they are, no matter what religion, no matter who, where they come from. 
We all want to be heroes. 
We just need a good idea, motivation and lots of chutzpah, and we could save millions of people that otherwise would not be saved. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause)