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1 | Averting the climate crisis | Al Gore | {0: 'Al Gore'} | {0: ['climate advocate']} | {0: 'Nobel Laureate Al Gore focused the world’s attention on the global climate crisis. Now he’s showing us how we’re moving towards real solutions.\r\n'} | 3,523,392 | 2006-02-25 | 2006-06-27 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gl', 'gu', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'lv', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'sw', 'th', 'tl', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 272 | 977 | ['alternative energy', 'cars', 'climate change', 'culture', 'environment', 'global issues', 'science', 'sustainability', 'technology'] | {243: 'New thinking on the climate crisis', 547: 'The business logic of sustainability', 2093: 'The state of the climate — and what we might do about it', 54715: 'How we can turn the tide on climate', 29968: 'The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it', 2339: "Climate change is happening. Here's how we adapt"} | https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_averting_the_climate_crisis/ | With the same humor and humanity he exuded in "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore spells out 15 ways that individuals can address climate change immediately, from buying a hybrid to inventing a new, hotter brand name for global warming. | Thank you so much, Chris. And it's truly a great honor to have the opportunity to come to this stage twice; I'm extremely grateful. I have been blown away by this conference, and I want to thank all of you for the many nice comments about what I had to say the other night. And I say that sincerely, partly because (Mock sob) I need that. (Laughter) Put yourselves in my position. (Laughter) I flew on Air Force Two for eight years. (Laughter) Now I have to take off my shoes or boots to get on an airplane! (Laughter) (Applause) I'll tell you one quick story to illustrate what that's been like for me. (Laughter) It's a true story — every bit of this is true. Soon after Tipper and I left the — (Mock sob) White House — (Laughter) we were driving from our home in Nashville to a little farm we have 50 miles east of Nashville. Driving ourselves. (Laughter) I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but — (Laughter) I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me. There was no motorcade back there. (Laughter) You've heard of phantom limb pain? (Laughter) This was a rented Ford Taurus. (Laughter) It was dinnertime, and we started looking for a place to eat. We were on I-40. We got to Exit 238, Lebanon, Tennessee. We got off the exit, we found a Shoney's restaurant. Low-cost family restaurant chain, for those of you who don't know it. We went in and sat down at the booth, and the waitress came over, made a big commotion over Tipper. (Laughter) She took our order, and then went to the couple in the booth next to us, and she lowered her voice so much, I had to really strain to hear what she was saying. And she said "Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper." And the man said, "He's come down a long way, hasn't he?" (Laughter) (Applause) There's been kind of a series of epiphanies. (Laughter) The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy. And I began the speech by telling them the story of what had just happened the day before in Nashville. And I told it pretty much the same way I've just shared it with you: Tipper and I were driving ourselves, Shoney's, low-cost family restaurant chain, what the man said — they laughed. I gave my speech, then went back out to the airport to fly back home. I fell asleep on the plane until, during the middle of the night, we landed on the Azores Islands for refueling. I woke up, they opened the door, I went out to get some fresh air, and I looked, and there was a man running across the runway. And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, "Call Washington! Call Washington!" And I thought to myself, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Atlantic, what in the world could be wrong in Washington? Then I remembered it could be a bunch of things. (Laughter) But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America. It was printed in Monterey, I checked. (Laughter) And the story began, "Former Vice President Al Gore announced in Nigeria yesterday," quote: 'My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant'" — (Laughter) "'named Shoney's, and we are running it ourselves.'" (Laughter) Before I could get back to U.S. soil, David Letterman and Jay Leno had already started in on — one of them had me in a big white chef's hat, Tipper was saying, "One more burger with fries!" (Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" (Laughter) We like to celebrate each other's successes in life. (Laughter) I was going to talk about information ecology. But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time. (Applause) Chris Anderson: It's a deal! (Applause) Al Gore: I want to focus on what many of you have said you would like me to elaborate on: What can you do about the climate crisis? I want to start with a couple of — I'm going to show some new images, and I'm going to recapitulate just four or five. Now, the slide show. I update the slide show every time I give it. I add new images, because I learn more about it every time I give it. It's like beach-combing, you know? Every time the tide comes in and out, you find some more shells. Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January. This is just for the United States of America. Historical average for Januarys is 31 degrees; last month was 39.5 degrees. Now, I know that you wanted some more bad news about the environment — I'm kidding. But these are the recapitulation slides, and then I'm going to go into new material about what you can do. But I wanted to elaborate on a couple of these. First of all, this is where we're projected to go with the U.S. contribution to global warming, under business as usual. Efficiency in end-use electricity and end-use of all energy is the low-hanging fruit. Efficiency and conservation — it's not a cost; it's a profit. The sign is wrong. It's not negative; it's positive. These are investments that pay for themselves. But they are also very effective in deflecting our path. Cars and trucks — I talked about that in the slideshow, but I want you to put it in perspective. It's an easy, visible target of concern — and it should be — but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks. Cars and trucks are very significant, and we have the lowest standards in the world. And so we should address that. But it's part of the puzzle. Other transportation efficiency is as important as cars and trucks. Renewables at the current levels of technological efficiency can make this much difference. And with what Vinod, and John Doerr and others, many of you here — there are a lot of people directly involved in this — this wedge is going to grow much more rapidly than the current projection shows it. Carbon Capture and Sequestration — that's what CCS stands for — is likely to become the killer app that will enable us to continue to use fossil fuels in a way that is safe. Not quite there yet. OK. Now, what can you do? Reduce emissions in your home. Most of these expenditures are also profitable. Insulation, better design. Buy green electricity where you can. I mentioned automobiles — buy a hybrid. Use light rail. Figure out some of the other options that are much better. It's important. Be a green consumer. You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis. Consider this: Make a decision to live a carbon-neutral life. Those of you who are good at branding, I'd love to get your advice and help on how to say this in a way that connects with the most people. It is easier than you think. It really is. A lot of us in here have made that decision, and it is really pretty easy. It means reduce your carbon dioxide emissions with the full range of choices that you make, and then purchase or acquire offsets for the remainder that you have not completely reduced. And what it means is elaborated at climatecrisis.net. There is a carbon calculator. Participant Productions convened — with my active involvement — the leading software writers in the world, on this arcane science of carbon calculation, to construct a consumer-friendly carbon calculator. You can very precisely calculate what your CO2 emissions are, and then you will be given options to reduce. And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets. Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral. Again, some of us have done that, and it's not as hard as you think. Integrate climate solutions into all of your innovations, whether you are from the technology, or entertainment, or design and architecture community. Invest sustainably. Majora mentioned this. Listen, if you have invested money with managers who you compensate on the basis of their annual performance, don't ever again complain about quarterly report CEO management. Over time, people do what you pay them to do. And if they judge how much they're going to get paid on your capital that they've invested, based on the short-term returns, you're going to get short-term decisions. A lot more to be said about that. Become a catalyst of change. Teach others, learn about it, talk about it. The movie is a movie version of the slideshow I gave two nights ago, except it's a lot more entertaining. And it comes out in May. Many of you here have the opportunity to ensure that a lot of people see it. Consider sending somebody to Nashville. Pick well. And I am personally going to train people to give this slideshow — re-purposed, with some of the personal stories obviously replaced with a generic approach, and it's not just the slides, it's what they mean. And it's how they link together. And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge. Working with Larry Lessig, it will be, somewhere in that process, posted with tools and limited-use copyrights, so that young people can remix it and do it in their own way. (Applause) Where did anybody get the idea that you ought to stay arm's length from politics? It doesn't mean that if you're a Republican, that I'm trying to convince you to be a Democrat. We need Republicans as well. This used to be a bipartisan issue, and I know that in this group it really is. Become politically active. Make our democracy work the way it's supposed to work. Support the idea of capping carbon dioxide emissions — global warming pollution — and trading it. Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system. Once it becomes a closed system, with U.S. participation, then everybody who's on a board of directors — how many people here serve on the board of directors of a corporation? Once it's a closed system, you will have legal liability if you do not urge your CEO to get the maximum income from reducing and trading the carbon emissions that can be avoided. The market will work to solve this problem — if we can accomplish this. Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. We have to change the minds of the American people. Because presently, the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done. And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. It's now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. We have to buy a lot of those ads. Let's re-brand global warming, as many of you have suggested. I like "climate crisis" instead of "climate collapse," but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this. Somebody said the test we're facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination. (Laughter) That's really true. I said the other night, and I'll repeat now: this is not a political issue. Again, the Republicans here — this shouldn't be partisan. You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do. This is an opportunity. Not just this, but connected to the ideas that are here, to bring more coherence to them. We are one. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. (Applause) |
92 | The best stats you've ever seen | Hans Rosling | {0: 'Hans Rosling'} | {0: ['global health expert; data visionary']} | {0: 'In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development -- with some surprisingly good news -- snaps into sharp focus.'} | 14,501,685 | 2006-02-22 | 2006-06-27 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'bn', 'bs', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'is', 'it', 'ja', 'kn', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'mk', 'ml', 'mn', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'sw', 'ta', 'te', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 628 | 1,190 | ['Africa', 'Asia', 'Google', 'demo', 'economics', 'global issues', 'health', 'statistics', 'global development', 'visualizations', 'math'] | {2056: "Own your body's data", 2296: 'A visual history of human knowledge', 620: 'Let my dataset change your mindset', 2806: "Doesn't everyone deserve a chance at a good life?", 2560: 'How Africa can keep rising', 1418: "Let's put birth control back on the agenda"} | https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen/ | You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world." | About 10 years ago, I took on the task to teach global development to Swedish undergraduate students. That was after having spent about 20 years, together with African institutions, studying hunger in Africa. So I was sort of expected to know a little about the world. And I started, in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. But when you get that opportunity, you get a little nervous. I thought, these students coming to us actually have the highest grade you can get in the Swedish college system, so I thought, maybe they know everything I'm going to teach them about. So I did a pretest when they came. And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: "Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?" And I put them together so that in each pair of countries, one has twice the child mortality of the other. And this means that it's much bigger, the difference, than the uncertainty of the data. I won't put you at a test here, but it's Turkey, which is highest there, Poland, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa. And these were the results of the Swedish students. I did it so I got the confidence interval, which is pretty narrow. And I got happy, of course — a 1.8 right answer out of five possible. That means there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. (Laughter) But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. I have shown that Swedish top students know, statistically, significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees. (Laughter) Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. They would be right half of the cases. But the students are not there. The problem for me was not ignorance; it was preconceived ideas. I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute, which hands out the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzee there. (Laughter) This is where I realized that there was really a need to communicate, because the data of what's happening in the world and the child health of every country is very well aware. So we did this software, which displays it like this. Every bubble here is a country. This country over here is China. This is India. The size of the bubble is the population, and on this axis here, I put fertility rate. Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, "What do you really think about the world?" Well, I first discovered that the textbook was Tintin, mainly. (Laughter) And they said, "The world is still 'we' and 'them.' And 'we' is the Western world and 'them' is the Third World." "And what do you mean with 'Western world?'" I said. "Well, that's long life and small family. And 'Third World' is short life and large family." So this is what I could display here. I put fertility rate here — number of children per woman: one, two, three, four, up to about eight children per woman. We have very good data since 1962, 1960, about, on the size of families in all countries. The error margin is narrow. Here, I put life expectancy at birth, from 30 years in some countries, up to about 70 years. And in 1962, there was really a group of countries here that were industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. And these were the developing countries. They had large families and they had relatively short lives. Now, what has happened since 1962? We want to see the change. Are the students right? It's still two types of countries? Or have these developing countries got smaller families and they live here? Or have they got longer lives and live up there? Let's see. We stopped the world then. This is all UN statistics that have been available. Here we go. Can you see there? It's China there, moving against better health there, improving there. All the green Latin American countries are moving towards smaller families. Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries, and they get longer life, but not larger families. The Africans are the green here. They still remain here. This is India; Indonesia is moving on pretty fast. In the '80s here, you have Bangladesh still among the African countries. But now, Bangladesh — it's a miracle that happens in the '80s — the imams start to promote family planning, and they move up into that corner. And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries. And the rest of them all move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world. (Applause) (Applause ends) Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 1964: America had small families and long life; Vietnam had large families and short lives. And this is what happens. The data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. By the end of the year, family planning started in Vietnam, and they went for smaller families. And the United States up there is getting longer life, keeping family size. And in the '80s now, they give up Communist planning and they go for market economy, and it moves faster even than social life. And today, we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam, 2003, as in United States, 1974, by the end of the war. I think we all, if we don't look at the data, we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economic change. So let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of income. This is the world distribution of income of people. One dollar, 10 dollars or 100 dollars per day. There's no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth. There's a little hump here. But there are people all the way. And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent of the world's annual income. And the richest 20 percent, they take out of that about 74 percent. And the poorest 20 percent, they take about two percent. And this shows that the concept of developing countries is extremely doubtful. We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. But in the middle, we have most of the world population, and they have now 24 percent of the income. We heard it in other forms. And who are these? Where are the different countries? I can show you Africa. This is Africa. Ten percent of the world population, most in poverty. This is OECD — the rich countries, the country club of the UN. And they are over here on this side. Quite an overlap between Africa and OECD. And this is Latin America. It has everything on this earth, from the poorest to the richest in Latin America. And on top of that, we can put East Europe, we can put East Asia, and we put South Asia. And what did it look like if we go back in time, to about 1970? Then, there was more of a hump. And most who lived in absolute poverty were Asians. The problem in the world was the poverty in Asia. And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty, and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. And the best projection from the World Bank is that this will happen, and we will not have a divided world. We'll have most people in the middle. Of course it's a logarithmic scale here, but our concept of economy is growth with percent. We look upon it as a possibility of percentile increase. If I change this and take GDP per capita instead of family income, and I turn these individual data into regional data of gross domestic product, and I take the regions down here, the size of the bubble is still the population. And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. Now I have money on that axis, and I have the possibility of children to survive there. In some countries, 99.7% of children survive to five years of age; others, only 70. And here, it seems, there is a gap between OECD, Latin America, East Europe, East Asia, Arab states, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The linearity is very strong between child survival and money. But let me split sub-Saharan Africa. Health is there and better health is up there. I can go here, and I can split sub-Saharan Africa into its countries. And when it bursts, the size of each country bubble is the size of the population. Sierra Leone down there, Mauritius is up there. Mauritius was the first country to get away with trade barriers, and they could sell their sugar, they could sell their textiles, on equal terms as the people in Europe and North America. There's a huge difference [within] Africa. And Ghana is here in the middle. In Sierra Leone, humanitarian aid. Here in Uganda, development aid. Here, time to invest; there, you can go for a holiday. There's tremendous variation within Africa, which we very often make that it's equal everything. I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. But there's a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. I can split Arab states. How are they? Same climate, same culture, same religion — huge difference. Even between neighbors — Yemen, civil war; United Arab Emirates, money, which was quite equally and well-used. Not as the myth is. And that includes all the children of the foreign workers who are in the country. Data is often better than you think. Many people say data is bad. There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data. East Europe: Soviet economy for a long time, but they come out after 10 years very, very differently. And there is Latin America. Today, we don't have to go to Cuba to find a healthy country in Latin America. Chile will have a lower child mortality than Cuba within some few years from now. Here, we have high-income countries in the OECD. And we get the whole pattern here of the world, which is more or less like this. And if we look at it, how the world looks, in 1960, it starts to move. This is Mao Zedong. He brought health to China. And then he died. And then Deng Xiaoping came and brought money to China, and brought them into the mainstream again. And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this, so it's sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world. But I would like to bring you back to about here, at 1960. I would like to compare South Korea, which is this one, with Brazil, which is this one. The label went away for me here. And I would like to compare Uganda, which is there. I can run it forward, like this. And you can see how South Korea is making a very, very fast advancement, whereas Brazil is much slower. And if we move back again, here, and we put trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less at the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. They came from here, a mineral country. They cached all the oil; they got all the money; but health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population. And Sheikh Zayed did that in a fairly good way. In spite of falling oil prices, he brought this country up here. So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used it in the past. Now, this is, more or less, if you look at the average data of the countries — they are like this. That's dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries. So if I go and look here, we can see that Uganda today is where South Korea was in 1960. If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. These are the quintiles of Uganda. The richest 20 percent of Ugandans are there. The poorest are down there. If I split South Africa, it's like this. And if I go down and look at Niger, where there was such a terrible famine [recently], it's like this. The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here, and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there, and yet we tend to discuss what solutions there should be in Africa. Everything in this world exists in Africa. And you can't discuss universal access to HIV [treatment] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here. The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it's not relevant to have it on a regional level. We must be much more detailed. We find that students get very excited when they can use this. And even more, policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing. Now, why doesn't this take place? Why are we not using the data we have? We have data in the United Nations, in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other nongovernmental organizations. Because the data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively. All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly funded statistics. There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. (Laughter) And this won't work. (Applause) So what is needed? We have the databases. It's not a new database that you need. We have wonderful design tools and more and more are added up here. So we started a nonprofit venture linking data to design, we called "Gapminder," from the London Underground, where they warn you, "Mind the gap." So we thought Gapminder was appropriate. And we started to write software which could link the data like this. And it wasn't that difficult. It took some person years, and we have produced animations. You can take a data set and put it there. We are liberating UN data, some few UN organization. Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world. But what we really need is, of course, a search function, a search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. And what do we hear when we go around? I've done anthropology on the main statistical units. Everyone says, "It's impossible. This can't be done. Our information is so peculiar in detail, so that cannot be searched as others can be searched. We cannot give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs of the world." But this is what we would like to see, isn't it? The publicly funded data is down here. And we would like flowers to grow out on the net. One of the crucial points is to make them searchable, and then people can use the different design tools to animate it there. And I have pretty good news for you. I have good news that the [current], new head of UN statistics doesn't say it's impossible. He only says, "We can't do it." (Laughter) And that's a quite clever guy, huh? (Laughter) So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. This is the income distribution of China, 1970. This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. Almost no overlap. Almost no overlap. And what has happened? What has happened is this: that China is growing, it's not so equal any longer, and it's appearing here, overlooking the United States, almost like a ghost, isn't it? (Laughter) It's pretty scary. (Laughter) But I think it's very important to have all this information. We need really to see it. And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the internet users per 1,000. In this software, we access about 500 variables from all the countries quite easily. It takes some time to change for this, but on the axes, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. But this is hypothesis-generating. I end now with the world. There, the internet is coming. The number of internet users are going up like this. This is the GDP per capita. And it's a new technology coming in, but then amazingly, how well it fits to the economy of the countries. That's why the $100 computer will be so important. But it's a nice tendency. It's as if the world is flattening off, isn't it? These countries are lifting more than the economy, and it will be very interesting to follow this over the year, as I would like you to be able to do with all the publicly funded data. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
7 | Simplicity sells | David Pogue | {0: 'David Pogue'} | {0: ['technology columnist']} | {0: 'David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the <em>New York Times</em> and a tech correspondent for CBS News. He\'s also one of the world\'s bestselling how-to authors, with titles in the For Dummies series and his own line of "Missing Manual" books. '} | 1,920,832 | 2006-02-24 | 2006-06-27 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 124 | 1,286 | ['computers', 'entertainment', 'interface design', 'media', 'music', 'performance', 'simplicity', 'software', 'technology'] | {1725: '10 top time-saving tech tips', 2274: 'The first secret of design is ... noticing', 172: 'Designing for simplicity', 2664: 'Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet', 2464: 'The mind behind Linux', 1347: 'The secret structure of great talks'} | https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_simplicity_sells/ | New York Times columnist David Pogue takes aim at technology’s worst interface-design offenders, and provides encouraging examples of products that get it right. To funny things up, he bursts into song. | (Music: "The Sound of Silence," Simon & Garfunkel) Hello voice mail, my old friend. (Laughter) I've called for tech support again. I ignored my boss's warning. I called on a Monday morning. Now it's evening, and my dinner first grew cold, and then grew mold. I'm still on hold. I'm listening to the sounds of silence. I don't think you understand. I think your phone lines are unmanned. I punched every touch tone I was told, but I've still spent 18 hours on hold. It's not enough your software crashed my Mac, and it constantly hangs and bombs — it erased my ROMs! Now the Mac makes the sounds of silence. In my dreams I fantasize of wreaking vengeance on you guys. Say your motorcycle crashes. Blood comes gushing from your gashes. With your fading strength, you call 9-1-1 and you pray for a trained MD. But you get me. (Laughter) And you listen to the sounds of silence. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Good evening and welcome to: "Spot the TED Presenter Who Used to Be a Broadway Accompanist." (Laughter) When I was offered the Times column six years ago, the deal was like this: you'll be sent the coolest, hottest, slickest new gadgets. Every week, it'll arrive at your door. You get to try them out, play with them, evaluate them until the novelty wears out, before you have to send them back, and you'll get paid for it. You can think about it, if you want. So, I've always been a technology nut, and I absolutely love it. The job, though, came with one small downside, and that is, they intended to publish my email address at the end of every column. And what I've noticed is — first of all, you get an incredible amount of email. If you ever are feeling lonely, get a New York Times column, because you will get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails. And the email I'm getting a lot today is about frustration. People are feeling like things — Ok, I just had an alarm come up on my screen. Lucky you can't see it. People are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like it's too much technology, too fast. It may be good technology, but I feel like there's not enough of a support structure. There's not enough help. There's not enough thought put into the design of it to make it easy and enjoyable to use. One time I wrote a column about my efforts to reach Dell Technical Support, and within 12 hours, there were 700 messages from readers on the feedback boards on the Times website, from users saying, ""Me too, and here's my tale of woe." I call it "software rage." And man, let me tell you, whoever figures out how to make money off of this frustration will — Oh, how did that get up there? Just kidding. (Laughter) Ok, so why is the problem accelerating? And part of the problem is, ironically, because the industry has put so much thought into making things easier to use. I'll show you what I mean. This is what the computer interface used to look like, DOS. Over the years, it's gotten easier to use. This is the original Mac operating system. Reagan was President. Madonna was still a brunette. And the entire operating system — this is the good part — the entire operating system fit in 211 k. You couldn't put the Mac OS X logo in 211 k! (Laughter) So the irony is, that as these things became easier to use, a less technical, broader audience was coming into contact with this equipment for the first time. I once had the distinct privilege of sitting in on the Apple call center for a day. The guy had a duplicate headset for me to listen to. And the calls that — you know how they say, "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance?" Uh-uh. Your call may be recorded so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD. (Laughter) Which they do. (Laughter) And I have a copy. (Laughter) It's in your gift bag. No, no. With your voices on it! So, some of the stories are just so classic, and yet so understandable. A woman called Apple to complain that her mouse was squeaking. Making a squeaking noise. And the technician said, "Well, ma'am, what do you mean your mouse is squeaking?" She says, "All I can tell you is that it squeaks louder, the faster I move it across the screen." (Laughter) And the technician's like, "Ma'am, you've got the mouse up against the screen?" She goes, "Well, the message said, 'Click here to continue.'" (Laughter) Well, if you like that one — how much time have we got? Another one, a guy called — this is absolutely true — his computer had crashed, and he told the technician he couldn't restart it, no matter how many times he typed "11." And the technician said, "What? Why are you typing 11?" He said, "The message says, 'Error Type 11.'" (Laughter) So, we must admit that some of the blame falls squarely at the feet of the users. But why is the technical overload crisis, the complexity crisis, accelerating now? In the hardware world, it's because we the consumers want everything to be smaller, smaller, smaller. So the gadgets are getting tinier and tinier, but our fingers are essentially staying the same size. So it gets to be more and more of a challenge. Software is subject to another primal force: the mandate to release more and more versions. When you buy a piece of software, it's not like buying a vase or a candy bar, where you own it. It's more like joining a club, where you pay dues every year, and every year, they say, "We've added more features, and we'll sell it to you for $99." I know one guy who's spent $4,000 just on Photoshop over the years. And software companies make 35 percent of their revenue from just these software upgrades. I call it the Software Upgrade Paradox — which is that if you improve a piece of software enough times, you eventually ruin it. I mean, Microsoft Word was last just a word processor in, you know, the Eisenhower administration. (Laughter) But what's the alternative? Microsoft actually did this experiment. They said, "Well, wait a minute. Everyone complains that we're adding so many features. Let's create a word processor that's just a word processor: Simple, pure; does not do web pages, is not a database." And it came out, and it was called Microsoft Write. And none of you are nodding in acknowledgment, because it died. It tanked. No one ever bought it. I call this the Sport Utility Principle. People like to surround themselves with unnecessary power, right? They don't need the database and the website, but they're like, "Well, I'll upgrade, because, I might, you know, I might need that someday." So the problem is: as you add more features, where are they going to go? Where are you going to stick them? You only have so many design tools. You can do buttons, you can do sliders, pop-up menus, sub-menus. But if you're not careful about how you choose, you wind up with this. (Laughter) This is an un-retouched — this is not a joke — un-retouched photo of Microsoft Word, the copy that you have, with all the toolbars open. You've obviously never opened all the toolbars, but all you have to type in is this little, teeny window down here. (Laughter) And we've arrived at the age of interface matrices, where there are so many features and options, you have to do two dimensions, you know: a vertical and a horizontal. You guys all complain about how Microsoft Word is always bulleting your lists and underlining your links automatically. The off switch is in there somewhere. I'm telling you — it's there. Part of the art of designing a simple, good interface, is knowing when to use which one of these features. So, here is the log-off dialogue box for Windows 2000. There are only four choices, so why are they in a pop-up menu? It's not like the rest of the screen is so full of other components that you need to collapse the choices. They could have put them all out in view. Here's Apple's take on the exact same dialogue box. (Applause) Thank you — yes, I designed the dialogue box. No, no. Already, we can see that Apple and Microsoft have a severely divergent approach to software design. Microsoft's approach to simplicity tends to be: let's break it down; let's just make it more steps. There are these "wizards" everywhere. And you know, there's a new version of Windows coming out this fall. If they continue at this pace, there's absolutely no telling where they might wind up. [Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard] (Laughter) (Applause) "Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard." Ok, I'll bite. Let's click "Next" to continue. (Laughter) (Applause) From the drop-down menu, choose the first letter you want to type. Ok. (Laughter) So there is a limit that we don't want to cross. So what is the answer? How do you pack in all these features in a simple, intelligent way? I believe in consistency, when possible, real-world equivalents, trash can folder, when possible, label things, mostly. But I beg of the designers here to break all those rules if they violate the biggest rule of all, which is intelligence. Now what do I mean by that? I'm going to give you some examples where intelligence makes something not consistent, but it's better. If you are buying something on the web, you're supposed to put in your address, and you're supposed to choose what country you're from, ok? There are 200 countries in the world. We like to think of the Internet as a global village. I'm sorry; it's not one yet. It's mainly like, the United States, Europe, and Japan. So why is "United States" in the "U"s? (Laughter) You have to scroll, like, seven screensful to get to it. Now, it would be inconsistent to put "United States" first, but it would be intelligent. This one's been touched on before, but why in God's name do you shut down a Windows PC by clicking a button called "Start?" (Laughter) Here's another pet one of mine: you have a printer. Most of the time, you want to print one copy of your document, in page order, on that printer. So why in God's name do you see this every time you print? It's like a 747 shuttle cockpit. (Laughter) And one of the buttons at the bottom, you'll notice, is not "Print." (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I'm not saying that Apple is the only company who has embraced the cult of simplicity. Palm is also, especially in the old days, wonderful about this. I actually got to speak to Palm when they were flying high in the '90s, and after the talk, I met one of the employees. He says, "Nice talk." And I said, "Thank you. What do you do here?" He said, "I'm a tap counter." I'm like, "You're a what?" He goes, "Well Jeff Hawkins, the CEO, says, 'If any task on the Palm Pilot takes more than three taps of the stylus, it's too long, and it has to be redesigned.' So I'm the tap counter." So, I'm going to show you an example of a company that does not have a tap counter. (Laughter) This is Microsoft Word. Ok, when you want to create a new blank document in Word — it could happen. (Laughter) You go up to the "File" menu and you choose "New." Now, what happens when you choose "New?" Do you get a new blank document? You do not. On the opposite side of the monitor, a task bar appears, and somewhere in those links — by the way, not at the top — somewhere in those links is a button that makes you a new document. Ok, so that is a company not counting taps. You know, I don't want to just stand here and make fun of Microsoft ... Yes, I do. (Laughter) (Applause) The Bill Gates song! (Piano music) I've been a geek forever and I wrote the very first DOS. I put my software and IBM together; I got profit and they got the loss. (Laughter) I write the code that makes the whole world run. I'm getting royalties from everyone. Sometimes it's garbage, but the press is snowed. You buy the box; I'll sell the code. Every software company is doing Microsoft's R&D. You can't keep a good idea down these days. Even Windows is a hack. We're kind of based loosely on the Mac. So it's big, so it's slow. You've got nowhere to go. I'm not doing this for praise. I write the code that fits the world today. Big mediocrity in every way. We've entered planet domination mode. You'll have no choice; you'll buy my code. I am Bill Gates and I write the code. (Applause) But actually, I believe there are really two Microsofts. There's the old one, responsible for Windows and Office. They're dying to throw the whole thing out and start fresh, but they can't. They're locked in, because so many add-ons and other company stuff locks into the old 1982 chassis. But there's also a new Microsoft, that's really doing good, simple interface designs. I liked the Media Center PC. I liked the Microsoft SPOT Watch. The Wireless Watch flopped miserably in the market, but it wasn't because it wasn't simply and beautifully designed. But let's put it this way: would you pay $10 a month to have a watch that has to be recharged every night like your cell phone, and stops working when you leave your area code? (Laughter) So, the signs might indicate that the complexity crunch is only going to get worse. So is there any hope? The screens are getting smaller, people are illuminating, putting manuals in the boxes, things are coming out at a faster pace. It's funny — when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, after 12 years away, it was the MacWorld Expo — he came to the stage in that black turtleneck and jeans, and he sort of did this. The crowd went wild, but I had just seen — I'm like, where have I seen this before? I had just seen the movie "Evita" — (Laughter) with Madonna, and I'm like, you know what? I've got to do one about Steve Jobs. (Music) It won't be easy. You'll think I'm strange. (Laughter) When I try to explain why I'm back, after telling the press Apple's future is black. You won't believe me. All that you see is a kid in his teens who started out in a garage with only a buddy named Woz. (Laughter) You try rhyming with garage! (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. (Laughter) The truth is, I never left you. I know the ropes now, know what the tricks are. I made a fortune over at Pixar. (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. I've still got the drive and vision. I still wear sandals in any weather. It's just that these days, they're Gucci leather. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So Steve Jobs had always believed in simplicity and elegance and beauty. And the truth is, for years I was a little depressed, because Americans obviously did not value it, because the Mac had three percent market share, Windows had 95 percent market share — people did not think it was worth putting a price on it. So I was a little depressed. And then I heard Al Gore's talk, and I realized I didn't know the meaning of depressed. (Laughter) But it turns out I was wrong, right? Because the iPod came out, and it violated every bit of common wisdom. Other products cost less; other products had more features, they had voice recorders and FM transmitters. The other products were backed by Microsoft, with an open standard, not Apple's propriety standard. But the iPod won — this is the one they wanted. The lesson was: simplicity sells. And there are signs that the industry is getting the message. This is a little company that's done very well with simplicity and elegance. The Sonos thing — it's catching on. I've got just a couple examples. Physically, a really cool, elegant thinking coming along lately. When you have a digital camera, how do you get the pictures back to your computer? Well, you either haul around a USB cable, or you buy a card reader and haul that around. Either one, you're going to lose. What I do is, I take out the memory card, and I fold it in half, revealing USB contacts. I just stick it in the computer, offload the pictures, put it right back in the camera. I never have to lose anything. Here's another example. Chris, you're the source of all power. Will you be my power plug? Chris Anderson: Oh yeah. DP: Hold that and don't let go. You might've seen this, this is Apple's new laptop. This the power cord. It hooks on like this. And I'm sure every one of you has done this at some point in your lives, or one of your children. You walk along — and I'm about to pull this onto the floor. I don't care. It's a loaner. Here we go. Whoa! It's magnetic — it doesn't pull the laptop onto the floor. (Applause) In my very last example — I do a lot of my work using speech recognition software. And I'll just — you have to be kind of quiet because the software is nervous. Speech recognition software is really great for doing emails very quickly; period. Like, I get hundreds of them a day; period. And it's not just what I dictate that it writes down; period. I also use this feature called voice macros; period. Correct "dissuade." Not "just." Ok, this is not an ideal situation, because it's getting the echo from the hall and stuff. The point is, I can respond to people very quickly by saying a short word, and having it write out a much longer thing. So if somebody sends me a fan letter, I'll say, "Thanks for that." [Thank you so much for taking the time to write ...] (Laughter) (Applause) And conversely, if somebody sends me hate mail — which happens daily — I say, "Piss off." (Laughter) [I admire your frankness ...] (Laughter) (Applause) So that's my dirty little secret. Don't tell anyone. (Laughter) So the point is — this is a really interesting story. This is version eight of this software, and do you know what they put in version eight? No new features. It's never happened before in software! The company put no new features. They just said, "We'll make this software work right." Right? Because for years, people had bought this software, tried it out — 95 percent accuracy was all they got, which means one in 20 words is wrong — and they'd put it in their drawer. And the company got sick of that, so they said, "This version, we're not going to do anything, but make sure it's darned accurate." And so that's what they did. This cult of doing things right is starting to spread. So, my final advice for those of you who are consumers of this technology: remember, if it doesn't work, it's not necessarily you, ok? It could be the design of the thing you're using. Be aware in life of good design and bad design. And if you're among the people who create this stuff: Easy is hard. Pre-sweat the details for your audience. Count the taps. Remember, the hard part is not deciding what features to add, it's deciding what to leave out. And best of all, your motivation is: simplicity sells. CA: Bravo. DP: Thank you very much. CA: Hear, hear! (Applause) |
53 | Greening the ghetto | Majora Carter | {0: 'Majora Carter'} | {0: ['activist for environmental justice']} | {0: 'Majora Carter redefined the field of environmental equality, starting in the South Bronx at the turn of the century. Now she is leading the local economic development movement across the USA.'} | 2,664,069 | 2006-02-26 | 2006-06-27 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'kn', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sw', 'ta', 'te', 'th', 'tr', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 219 | 1,116 | ['MacArthur grant', 'activism', 'business', 'cities', 'environment', 'green', 'inequality', 'politics', 'pollution'] | {1041: '3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship', 1892: 'A new vision for rebuilding Detroit', 2078: 'A park underneath the hustle and bustle of New York City', 2636: 'How an old loop of railroads is changing the face of a city', 12571: 'My $500 house in Detroit -- and the neighbors who helped me rebuild it', 3581: "A Republican mayor's plan to replace partisanship with policy"} | https://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_greening_the_ghetto/ | In an emotionally charged talk, MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter details her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx -- and shows how minority neighborhoods suffer most from flawed urban policy. | If you're here today — and I'm very happy that you are — you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger. The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog — an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city. So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed-grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river, because of all the lovely facilities that I mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx. And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way, and the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that $10,000 seed grant more than 300 times, into a $3 million park. And in the fall, I'm going to exchange marriage vows with my beloved. (Audience whistles) Thank you very much. (Applause) That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time. (Laughter) (Applause) But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. We feel the problems right now, and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. Fifty percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line; 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency-room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy. Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term, and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common? Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking. (Laughter) Graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good. (Laughter) But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other. So how did things get so different for us? In the late '40s, my dad — a Pullman porter, son of a slave — bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later, he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions — dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding. Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway-expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home, and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors and friends along the way, was enough. Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was "planning" — in quotes — that did not have our best interests in mind. Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a Greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue — and that's redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that. As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx [Environmental] Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restoration, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green-collar jobs — and with people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing and local economic development. We also built New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. Cool roofs are highly-reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat, and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions — which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends! [Butterfly] (Laughter) So cool! Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx. [Green is the new black ...] (Laughter) (Applause) I like that, too. Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: We need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway — (Laughter) (Applause) OK. Katrina. Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored, and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone. Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two, like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine? Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through. Like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later, if you want to know. (Laughter) But — I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up. At present, that's not happening in New York City. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban-planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to propose big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally-challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues. Now let's get this straight: I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. And, but I don't have — (Laughter) You probably all have, and if you haven't, you need to. (Laughter) So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins — both heroes of mine by the way — have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities, is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization. Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking; a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogotanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering. Crime rates dropped, because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget, at that. We have no excuse in this country, I'm sorry. But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather, to provide opportunities for all Bogotanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the U.S. But Bogota's example has the power to change that. You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive, sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time! Listen — when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer. (Applause) What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money. (Laughter) But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count. (Applause) I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly-growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Ciao, bellos! (Applause) |
66 | Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | {0: 'Sir Ken Robinson'} | {0: ['author', 'educator']} | {0: "Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. "} | 65,051,954 | 2006-02-25 | 2006-06-27 | TED2006 | en | ['af', 'ar', 'az', 'be', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'et', 'eu', 'fa', 'fi', 'fil', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gl', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'inh', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'kn', 'ko', 'ku', 'lo', 'lt', 'lv', 'mfe', 'mk', 'mn', 'mr', 'nb', 'ne', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 4,931 | 1,164 | ['children', 'creativity', 'culture', 'dance', 'education', 'parenting', 'teaching'] | {865: 'Bring on the learning revolution!', 1738: "How to escape education's death valley", 2276: 'How to fix a broken school? Lead fearlessly, love hard', 2182: 'How to run a company with (almost) no rules', 2341: "Why some of us don't have one true calling", 9048: 'The search for "aha!" moments'} | https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity/ | Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. | Good morning. How are you? (Audience) Good. It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving. (Laughter) There have been three themes running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here; just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out. I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly. (Laughter) If you work in education, you're not asked. (Laughter) And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my God. Why me?" (Laughter) "My one night out all week." (Laughter) But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall, because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion and money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet, we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have — their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. (Laughter) "Well, I was born ... " (Laughter) I heard a great story recently — I love telling it — of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute." (Laughter) When my son was four in England — actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? (Laughter) No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it. (Laughter) "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and said, "You OK with that?" They said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?" They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads. They put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this." (Laughter) What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original — if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this? I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. (Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? (Laughter) How annoying would that be? (Laughter) "Must try harder." (Laughter) Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now!" To William Shakespeare. "And put the pencil down!" (Laughter) "And stop speaking like that." (Laughter) "It's confusing everybody." (Laughter) Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition. Actually, my son didn't want to come. I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. (Laughter) Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. He was really upset on the plane. He said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly — (Laughter) because she was the main reason we were leaving the country. (Laughter) But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting? (Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. Another form of life. But they're rather curious. And I say this out of affection for them: there's something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. (Laughter) Don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings. (Laughter) If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night. (Laughter) And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat. (Laughter) Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it. (Laughter) Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? "Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist." Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people. And it's the combination of all the things we've talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain, called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multitasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often ... thankfully. (Laughter) No, she's good at some things. But if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling — (Laughter) she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here." (Laughter) "Give me a break." (Laughter) Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, "If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it happen?" Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great T-shirt recently, which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called "Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see. (Laughter) Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?" It was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. (Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that. (Laughter) Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes, while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school, because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on. Little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "I've listened to all these things your mother's told me. I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We'll be back. We won't be very long," and they went and left her. But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to a dance school." I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me — people who couldn't sit still, people who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. (Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years, all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish." And he's right. What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
49 | Behind the design of Seattle's library | Joshua Prince-Ramus | {0: 'Joshua Prince-Ramus'} | {0: ['architect']} | {0: 'Joshua Prince-Ramus is best known as architect of the Seattle Central Library, already being hailed as a masterpiece of contemporary culture. Prince-Ramus was the founding partner of OMA New York—the American affiliate of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the Netherlands—and served as its Principal until he renamed the firm REX in 2006.'} | 1,208,138 | 2006-02-23 | 2006-07-10 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 48 | 1,198 | ['architecture', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'design', 'library'] | {750: 'Building a theater that remakes itself', 2092: 'How to reinvent the apartment building', 2183: 'Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you', 2220: 'How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art', 2375: 'Why great architecture should tell a story', 31821: 'Stunning buildings made from raw, imperfect materials'} | https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prince_ramus_behind_the_design_of_seattle_s_library/ | Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus takes the audience on dazzling, dizzying virtual tours of three recent projects: the Central Library in Seattle, the Museum Plaza in Louisville and the Charles Wyly Theater in Dallas. | I'm going to present three projects in rapid fire. I don't have much time to do it. And I want to reinforce three ideas with that rapid-fire presentation. The first is what I like to call a hyper-rational process. It's a process that takes rationality almost to an absurd level, and it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with what people would call, sort of a rational conclusion to something. And it concludes in something that you see here, that you actually wouldn't expect as being the result of rationality. The second — the second is that this process does not have a signature. There is no authorship. Architects are obsessed with authorship. This is something that has editing and it has teams, but in fact, we no longer see within this process, the traditional master architect creating a sketch that his minions carry out. And the third is that it challenges — and this is, in the length of this, very hard to support why, connect all these things — but it challenges the high modernist notion of flexibility. High modernists said we will create sort of singular spaces that are generic, almost anything can happen within them. I call it sort of "shotgun flexibility" — turn your head this way; shoot; and you're bound to kill something. So, this is the promise of high modernism: within a single space, actually, any kind of activity can happen. But as we're seeing, operational costs are starting to dwarf capital costs in terms of design parameters. And so, with this sort of idea, what happens is, whatever actually is in the building on opening day, or whatever seems to be the most immediate need, starts to dwarf the possibility and sort of subsume it, of anything else could ever happen. And so we're proposing a different kind of flexibility, something that we call "compartmentalized flexibility." And the idea is that you, within that continuum, identify a series of points, and you design specifically to them. They can be pushed off-center a little bit, but in the end you actually still get as much of that original spectrum as you originally had hoped. With high modernist flexibility, that doesn't really work. Now I'm going to talk about — I'm going to build up the Seattle Central Library in this way before your eyes in about five or six diagrams, and I truly mean this is the design process that you'll see. With the library staff and the library board, we settled on two core positions. This is the first one, and this is showing, over the last 900 years, the evolution of the book, and other technologies. This diagram was our sort of position piece about the book, and our position was, books are technology — that's something people forget — but it's a form of technology that will have to share its dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media. The second premise — and this was something that was very difficult for us to convince the librarians of at first — is that libraries, since the inception of Carnegie Library tradition in America, had a second responsibility, and that was for social roles. Ok, now, this I'll come back to later, but something — actually, the librarians at first said, "No, this isn't our mandate. Our mandate is media, and particularly the book." So what you're seeing now is actually the design of the building. The upper diagram is what we had seen in a whole host of contemporary libraries that used high modernist flexibility. Sort of, any activity could happen anywhere. We don't know the future of the library; we don't know the future of the book; and so, we'll use this approach. And what we saw were buildings that were very generic, and worse — not only were they very generic — so, not only does the reading room look like the copy room look like the magazine area — but it meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf every other activity that was happening in it. And in this case, what was getting engulfed were these social responsibilities by the expansion of the book. And so we proposed what's at the lower diagram. Very dumb approach: simply compartmentalize. Put those things whose evolution we could predict — and I don't mean that we could say what would actually happen in the future, but we have some certainty of the spectrum of what would happen in the future — put those in boxes designed specifically for it, and put the things that we can't predict on the rooftops. So that was the core idea. Now, we had to convince the library that social roles were equally important to media, in order to get them to accept this. What you're seeing here is actually their program on the left. That's as it was given to us in all of its clarity and glory. Our first operation was to re-digest it back to them, show it to them and say, "You know what? We haven't touched it, but only one-third of your own program is dedicated to media and books. Two-thirds of it is already dedicated — that's the white band below, the thing you said isn't important — is already dedicated to social functions." So once we had presented that back to them, they agreed that this sort of core concept could work. We got the right to go back to first principles — that's the third diagram. We recombined everything. And then we started making new decisions. What you're seeing on the right is the design of the library, specifically in terms of square footage. On the left of that diagram, here, you'll see a series of five platforms — sort of combs, collective programs. And on the right are the more indeterminate spaces; things like reading rooms, whose evolution in 20, 30, 40 years we can't predict. So that literally was the design of the building. They signed it, and to their chagrin, we came back a week later, and we presented them this. And as you can see, it is literally the diagram on the right. (Laughter) We just sized — no, really, I mean that, literally. The things on the left-hand side of the diagram, those are the boxes. We sized them into five compartments. They're super-efficient. We had a very low budget to work with. We pushed them around on the site to make very literal contextual relationships. The reading room should be able to see the water. The main entrance should have a public plaza in front of it to abide by the zoning code, and so forth. So, you see the five platforms, those are the boxes. within each one, a very discrete thing is happening. The area in between is sort of an urban continuum, these things that we can't predict their evolution to the same degree. To give you some sense of the power of this idea, the biggest block is what we call the book spiral. It's literally built in a very inexpensive way — it is a parking garage for books. It just so happens to be on the 6th through 10th floors of the building, but that is not necessarily an expensive approach. And it allows us to organize the entire Dewey Decimal System on one continuous run; no matter how it grows or contracts within the building, it will always have its clarity to end the sort of trail of tears that we've all experienced in public libraries. (Laughter) And so this was the final operation, which was to take these blocks as they were all pushed off kilter, and to hold onto them with a skin. That skin serves double duty, again, for economics. One, it is the lateral stability for the entire building; it's a structural element. But its dimensions were designed not only for structure, but also for holding on every piece of glass. The glass was then — I'll use the word impregnated — but it had a layer of metal that was called "stretched metal." That metal acts as a microlouver, so from the exterior of the building, the sun sees it as totally opaque, but from the interior, it's entirely transparent. So now I'm going to take you on a tour of the building. Let me see if I can find it. For anyone who gets motion sickness, I apologize. So, this is the building. And I think what's important is, when we first unveiled the building, the public saw it as being totally about our whim and ego. And it was defended, believe it or not, by the librarians. They said, "Look, we don't know what it is, but we know it's everything that we need it to be, based on the observations that we've done about the program." This is going into one of the entries. So, it's an unusual building for a public library, obviously. So now we're going into what we call the living room. This is actually a program that we invented with the library. It was recognizing that public libraries are the last vestige of public free space. There are plenty of shopping malls that allow you to get out of the rain in downtown Seattle, but there are not so many free places that allow you to get out of the rain. So this was an unprogrammed area where people could pretty much do anything, including eat, yell, play chess and so forth. Now we're moving up into what we call the mixing chamber. That was the main technology area in the building. You'll have to tell me if I'm going too fast for you. And now up. This is actually the place that we put into the building so I could propose to my wife, right there. (Laughter) She said yes. (Laughter) I'm running out of time, so I'm actually going to stop. I can show this to you later. But let's see if I can very quickly get into the book spiral, because I think it's, as I said, the most — this is the main reading room — the most unique part of the building. You dizzy yet? Ok, so here, this is the book spiral. So, it's very indiscernible, but it's actually a continuous stair-stepping. It allows you to, on one city block, go up one full floor, so that it's on a continuum. Ok, now I'm going to go back, and I'm going to hit a second project. I'm going to go very, very quickly through this. Now this is the Dallas Theater. It was an unusual client for us, because they came to us and they said, "We need you to do a new building. We've been working in a temporary space for 30 years, but because of that temporary space, we've become an infamous theater company. Theater is really focused in New York, Chicago and Seattle, with the exception of the Dallas Theater Company." And the very fact that they worked in a provisional space meant that for Beckett, they could blow out a wall; they could do "Cherry Orchard" and blow a hole through the floor, and so forth. So it was a very daunting task for us to do a brand-new building that could be a pristine building, but keep this kind of experimental nature. And the second is, they were what we call a multi-form theater, they do different kinds of performances in repertory. So they in the morning will do something in arena, then they'll do something in proscenium and so forth. And so they needed to be able to quickly transform between different theater organizations, and for operational budget reasons, this actually no longer happens in pretty much any multi-form theater in the United States, so we needed to figure out a way to overcome that. So our thought was to literally put the theater on its head: to take those things that were previously defined as front-of-house and back-of-house and stack them above house and below house, and to create what we called a theater machine. We invest the money in the operation of the building. It's almost as though the building could be placed anywhere, wherever you place it, the area under it is charged for theatrical performances. And it allowed us to go back to first principles, and redefine fly tower, acoustic enclosure, light enclosure and so forth. And at the push of a button, it allows the artistic director to move between proscenium, thrust, and in fact, arena and traverse and flat floor, in a very quick transfiguration. So in fact, using operational budget, we can — sorry, capital cost — we can actually achieve what was no longer achievable in operational cost. And that means that the artistic director now has a palette that he or she can choose from, between a series of forms and a series of processions, because that enclosure around the theater that is normally trapped with front-of-house and back-of-house spaces has been liberated. So an artistic director has the ability to have a performance that enters in a Wagnerian procession, shows the first act in thrust, the intermission in a Greek procession, second act in arena, and so forth. So I'm going to show you what this actually means. This is the theater up close. Any portion around the theater actually can be opened discretely. The light enclosure can be lifted separate to the acoustic enclosure, so you can do Beckett with Dallas as the backdrop. Portions can be opened, so you can now actually have motorcycles drive directly into the performance, or you can even just have an open-air performance, or for intermissions. The balconies all move to go between those configurations, but they also disappear. The proscenium line can also disappear. You can bring enormous objects in, so in fact, the Dallas Theater Company — their first show will be a play about Charles Lindbergh, and they'll want to bring in a real aircraft. And then it also provides them, in the off-season, the ability to actually rent out their space for entirely different things. This is it from a distance. Open up entire portions for different kinds of events. And at night. Again, remove the light enclosure; keep the acoustic enclosure. This is a monster truck show. I'm going to show now the last project. This also is an unusual client. They inverted the whole idea of development. They came to us and they said — unlike normal developers — they said, "We want to start out by providing a contemporary art museum in Louisville. That's our main goal." And so instead of being a developer that sees an opportunity to make money, they saw an ability to be a catalyst in their downtown. And the fact that they wanted to support the contemporary art museum actually built their pro forma, so they worked in reverse. And that pro forma led us to a mixed-use building that was very large, in order to support their aspirations of the art, but it also opened up opportunities for the art itself to collaborate, interact with commercial spaces that actually artists more and more want to work within. And it also charged us with thinking about how to have something that was both a single building and a credible sort of sub-building. So this is Louisville's skyline, and I'm going to take you through the various constraints that led to the project. First: the physical constraints. We actually had to operate on three discrete sites, all of them well smaller than the size of the building. We had to operate next to the new Muhammad Ali Center, and respect it. We had to operate within the 100-year floodplain. Now, this area floods three to four times a year, and there's a levee behind our site, similar to the ones that broke in New Orleans. Had to operate behind the I-64 corridor, a street that cuts through the middle of these separate sites. So we're starting to build a sort of nightmare of constraints in a bathtub. Underneath the bathtub are the city's main power lines. And there is a pedestrian corridor that they wanted to add, that would link a series of cultural buildings, and a view corridor — because this is the historic district — that they didn't want to obstruct with a new building. (Laughter) And now we're going to add 1.1 million square feet. And if we did the traditional thing, that 1.1 million square feet — these are the different programs — the traditional thing would be to identify the public elements, place them on sites, and now we'd have a really terrible situation: a public thing in the middle of a bathtub that floods. And then we would size all the other elements — the different commercial elements: hotel, luxury housing, offices and so forth — and dump it on top. And we would create something that was unviable. In fact — and you know this — this is called the Time Warner Building. (Laughter) So our strategy was very simple. Just lift the entire block, flip some of the elements over, reposition them so they have appropriate views and relationships to downtown, and make circulation connections and reroute the road. So that's the basic concept, and now I'm going to show you what it leads to. Ok, it seems a very formal, willful gesture, but something derived entirely out of the constraints. And again, when we unveiled it, there was a sort of nervousness that this was about an architect making a statement, not an architect who was attempting to solve a series of problems. Now, within that center zone, as I said, we have the ability to mix a series of things. So here, this is sort of an x-ray — the towers are totally developer-driven. They told us the dimensions, the sizes and so forth, and we focused on taking all the public components — the lobbies, the bars — everything that different commercial elements would have, and combined it in the center, in the sort of subway map, in the transfer zone that would also include the contemporary art museum. So it creates a situation like this, where you have artists who can operate within an art space that also has an amazing view on the 22nd floor, but it also has proximity that the curator can either open or close. It allows people on exercise bicycles to be seen, or to see the art, and so forth. It also means that if an artist wants to invade something like a swimming pool, they can begin to do their exhibition in a swimming pool, so they're not forced to always work within the confines of a contemporary gallery space. So, how to build this. It's very simple: it's a chair. So, we begin by building the cores. As we're building the cores, we build the contemporary art museum at grade. That allows us to have incredible efficiency and cost efficiency. This is not a high-budget building. The moment the cores get to mid level, we finish the art museum; we put all the mechanical equipment in it; and then we jack it up into the air. This is how they build really large aircraft hangars, for instance, the ones that they did for the A380. Finish the cores, finish the meat and you get something that looks like this. Now I only have about 30 seconds, so I want to start an animation, and we'll conclude with that. Thank you. (Applause) Chris asked me to add — the theater is under construction, and this project will start construction in about a year, and finish in 2010. [identify public elements] [insert public elements at grade] [optimize tower dimensions] [place towers on site] [lift program] [flip!] [optimize program adjacencies] [connect to context] [redirect 7th street] |
86 | Letting go of God | Julia Sweeney | {0: 'Julia Sweeney'} | {0: ['actor', 'comedian', 'playwright']} | {0: 'Julia Sweeney creates comedic works that tackle deep issues like cancer, family and faith.'} | 4,636,596 | 2006-02-24 | 2006-07-10 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'mr', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 980 | 992 | ['Christianity', 'God', 'atheism', 'comedy', 'culture', 'performance', 'religion', 'storytelling', 'humor'] | {22: 'Why people believe weird things', 94: "Let's teach religion -- all religion -- in schools", 856: 'It\'s time for "The Talk"', 71: 'A life of purpose', 2801: '12 truths I learned from life and writing', 31459: 'Embrace your raw, strange magic'} | https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_sweeney_letting_go_of_god/ | When two young Mormon missionaries knock on Julia Sweeney's door one day, it touches off a quest to completely rethink her own beliefs, in this excerpt from Sweeney's solo show "Letting Go of God." | On September 10, the morning of my seventh birthday, I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper or something, and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said, "Hey, happy birthday!" And I said, "I'm seven." And my father smiled and said, "Well, you know what that means, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, that I'm going to have a party and a cake and get a lot of presents?" And my dad said, "Well, yes. But more importantly, being seven means that you've reached the age of reason, and you're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." (Laughter) Now, I had heard this phrase, "age of reason," before. Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about my second-grade class at school. But when she said it, the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations for our first communion and our first confession, and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil. And anyway, I hadn't really paid all that much attention to that phrase, "age of reason." So, I said, "Yeah, yeah, age of reason. What does that mean again?" And my dad said, "Well, we believe, in the Catholic Church, that God knows that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong, but when you're seven, you're old enough to know better. So, you've grown up and reached the age of reason, and now God will start keeping notes on you, and begin your permanent record." (Laughter) And I said, "Oh ... Wait a minute. You mean all that time, up till today, all that time I was so good, God didn't notice it?" And my mom said, "Well, I noticed it." (Laughter) And I thought, "How could I not have known this before? How could it not have sunk in when they'd been telling me? All that being good and no real credit for it. And worst of all, how could I not have realized this very important information until the very day that it was basically useless to me?" So I said, "Well, Mom and Dad, what about Santa Claus? I mean, Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right?" And my dad said, "Yeah, but, honey, I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas." And my mother said, "Oh, Bob, stop it. Let's just tell her. I mean, she's seven. Julie, there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, this was actually not that upsetting to me. My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus: how they had talked to Santa Claus himself and agreed that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve, like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises first thing Christmas morning, our family would give Santa more time. Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o'clock high mass on Christmas morning, but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss. Which made me very suspicious. It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents. I mean, my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style, and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's. (Laughter) Plus, why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house after he'd gone to everybody else's? There was only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence: our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit, and my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrassment, this humiliation of rejection by Santa, who was jolly — but let's face it, he was also very judgmental. So to find out that there was no Santa Claus at all was actually sort of a relief. I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa, but rather, I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing. It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else, someone who could use the information. They had to fit two criteria: they had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason, and not yet seven. The answer was clear: my brother Bill. He was six. Well, I finally found Bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground. It was a Saturday, and he was all by himself, just kicking a ball against the side of a wall. I ran up to him and said, "Bill! I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven, and then you're capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." And Bill said, "So?" And I said, "So, you're six. You have a whole year to do anything you want to and God won't notice it." And he said, "So?" And I said, "So? So everything!" And I turned to run. I was so angry with him. But when I got to the top of the steps, I turned around dramatically and said, "Oh, by the way, Bill — there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, I didn't know it at the time, but I really wasn't turning seven on September 10th. For my 13th birthday, I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends, but a couple of weeks beforehand my mother took me aside and said, "I need to speak to you privately. September 10th is not your birthday. It's October 10th." And I said, "What?" (Laughter) And she said ... (Laughter) "Listen. The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15th." (Laughter) "So I told them that your birthday was September 10th, and then I wasn't sure that you weren't just going to go blab it all over the place, so I started to tell you your birthday was September 10th. But, Julie, you were so ready to start school, honey. You were so ready." I thought about it, and when I was four, I was already the oldest of four children, and my mother even had another child to come, so what I think she — understandably — really meant was that she was so ready, she was so ready. Then she said, "Don't worry, Julie. Every year on October 10th, when it was your birthday but you didn't realize it, I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day." (Laughter) Which was comforting, but troubling. My mother had been celebrating my birthday with me, without me. (Laughter) What was so upsetting about this new piece of information was not that I had to change the date of my slumber party with all of my girlfriends. What was most upsetting was that this meant I was not a Virgo. I had a huge Virgo poster in my bedroom. And I read my horoscope every single day, and it was so totally me. (Laughter) And this meant that I was a Libra? So, I took the bus downtown to get the new Libra poster. The Virgo poster is a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair, sort of lounging by some water, but the Libra poster is just a huge scale. This was around the time that I started filling out physically, and I was filling out a lot more than a lot of the other girls, and frankly, the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale just seemed ominous and depressing. (Laughter) But I got the new Libra poster, and I started to read my new Libra horoscope, and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me. (Laughter) It wasn't until years later, looking back on this whole age-of-reason, change-of-birthday thing, that it dawned on me: I wasn't turning seven when I thought I turned seven. I had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to before God started keeping tabs on me. Oh, life can be so cruel. One day, two Mormon missionaries came to my door. Now, I just live off a main thoroughfare in Los Angeles, and my block is — well, it's a natural beginning for people who are peddling things door to door. Sometimes I get little old ladies from the Seventh Day Adventist Church showing me these cartoon pictures of heaven. And sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won't join a gang and just start robbing people, if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from them. So normally, I just ignore the doorbell, but on this day, I answered. And there stood two boys, each about 19, in white, starched short-sleeved shirts, and they had little name tags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they said they had a message for me, from God. I said, "A message for me? From God?" And they said, "Yes." Now, I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, around a lot of Church of Latter-day Saints people and, you know, I've worked with them and even dated them, but I never really knew the doctrine, or what they said to people when they were out on a mission, and I guess I was sort of curious, so I said, "Well, please, come in." And they looked really happy, because I don't think this happens to them all that often. (Laughter) And I sat them down, and I got them glasses of water — Ok, I got it, I got it. I got them glasses of water. Don't touch my hair, that's the thing. (Laughter) You can't put a video of myself in front of me and expect me not to fix my hair. Ok. (Laughter) So I sat them down and I got them glasses of water, and after niceties, they said, "Do you believe that God loves you with all his heart?" And I thought, "Well, of course I believe in God, but you know, I don't like that word 'heart,' because it anthropomorphizes God, and I don't like the word, 'his,' either, because that sexualizes God." But I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys, so after a very long, uncomfortable pause, I said, "Yes, yes, I do. I feel very loved." And they looked at each other and smiled, like that was the right answer. And then they said, "Do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet?" And I said, "Yes, I do." And I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly. And they said, "Well, then we have a story to tell you." And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi, who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC. Now, apparently in Jerusalem in 600 BC, everyone was completely bad and evil. Every single one of them: man, woman, child, infant, fetus. And God came to Lehi and said to him, "Put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here." And God did lead them. He led them to America. I said, "America? (Laughter) From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC?" And they said, "Yes." (Laughter) Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced, and over the course of 600 years, there were two great races of them, the Nephites and the Lamanites, and the Nephites were totally good — each and every one of them — and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil — every single one of them just bad to the bone. Then, after Jesus died on the cross for our sins, on his way up to heaven, he stopped by America and visited the Nephites. (Laughter) And he told them that if they all remained totally, totally good — each and every one of them — they would win the war against the evil Lamanites. But apparently somebody blew it, because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites. All but one guy, this guy named Mormon, who managed to survive by hiding in the woods. And he made sure this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto gold plates, which he then buried near Palmyra, New York. (Laughter) Well, I was just on the edge of my seat. (Laughter) I said, "What happened to the Lamanites?" And they said, "Well, they became our Native Americans, here in the U.S." And I said, "So, you believe the Native Americans are descended from a people who were totally evil?" And they said, "Yes." Then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates right in his backyard, and he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into, and this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English. Well, at this point I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch. (Laughter) I wanted to say — (Applause) "Ok, don't start with this story." (Laughter) I mean, even the Scientologists know to start with a personality test before they start — (Applause) telling people all about Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord. Then, they said, "Do you believe that God speaks to us through his righteous prophets?" And I said, "No, I don't," because I was sort of upset about this Lamanite story and this crazy gold plate story, but the truth was, I hadn't really thought this through, so I backpedaled a little and I said, "Well, what exactly do you mean by 'righteous'? And what do you mean by prophets? Like, could the prophets be women?" And they said, "No." And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Well, it's because God gave women a gift that is so spectacular, it is so wonderful, that the only gift he had left over to give men was the gift of prophecy." What is this wonderful gift God gave women, I wondered? Maybe their greater ability to cooperate and adapt? (Laughter) Women's longer lifespan? The fact that women tend to be much less violent than men? But no — it wasn't any of these gifts. They said, "Well, it's her ability to bear children." I said, "Oh, come on. I mean, even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45, assuming they didn't die from exhaustion, it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God." And they said, "No." (Laughter) Well, then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me any more, but they had more to say. They said, "Well, we also believe that if you're a Mormon, and if you're in good standing with the church, when you die, you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity." And I said, "Oh, dear. (Laughter) That wouldn't be such a good incentive for me." (Laughter) And they said, "Oh. (Laughter) Hey! Well, we also believe that when you go to heaven, you get your body restored to you in its best original state. Like, if you'd lost a leg, well, you get it back. Or, if you'd gone blind, you could see." I said, "Oh. Now, I don't have a uterus, because I had cancer a few years ago. So does this mean that if I went to heaven, I would get my old uterus back?" And they said, "Sure." And I said, "I don't want it back. I'm happy without it." Gosh. What if you had a nose job and you liked it? (Laughter) Would God force you to get your old nose back? Then they gave me this Book of Mormon, told me to read this chapter and that chapter, and said they'd come back and check in on me, and I think I said something like, "Please don't hurry," or maybe just, "Please don't," and they were gone. Ok, so I initially felt really superior to these boys, and smug in my more conventional faith. But then the more I thought about it, the more I had to be honest with myself. If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, "We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us." (Laughter) "And she had a baby, and that's the son of God," I mean, I would think that's equally ridiculous. I'm just so used to that story. (Laughter) So, I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys. But the question they asked me when they first arrived really stuck in my head: Did I believe that God loved me with all his heart? Because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question. Now, if they had asked me, "Do you feel that God loves you with all his heart?" Well, that would have been much different, I think I would have instantly answered, "Yes, yes, I feel it all the time. I feel God's love when I'm hurt and confused, and I feel consoled and cared for. I take shelter in God's love when I don't understand why tragedy hits, and I feel God's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see." But since they asked me that question with the word "believe" in it, somehow it was all different, because I wasn't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt. |
94 | Let's teach religion -- all religion -- in schools | Dan Dennett | {0: 'Dan Dennett'} | {0: ['philosopher', 'cognitive scientist']} | {0: 'Dan Dennett thinks that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.'} | 3,781,244 | 2006-02-02 | 2006-07-18 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'lt', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 919 | 1,485 | ['God', 'atheism', 'brain', 'cognitive science', 'consciousness', 'evolution', 'philosophy', 'religion'] | {71: 'A life of purpose', 2011: 'Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)', 234: 'My wish: The Charter for Compassion', 113: 'Militant atheism', 2643: "It's time to reclaim religion", 9125: 'My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead'} | https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_let_s_teach_religion_all_religion_in_schools/ | Philosopher Dan Dennett calls for religion -- all religion -- to be taught in schools, so we can understand its nature as a natural phenomenon. Then he takes on The Purpose-Driven Life, disputing its claim that, to be moral, one must deny evolution. | It's wonderful to be back. I love this wonderful gathering. And you must be wondering, "What on earth? Have they put up the wrong slide?" No, no. Look at this magnificent beast, and ask the question: Who designed it? This is TED; this is Technology, Entertainment, Design, and there's a dairy cow. It's a quite wonderfully designed animal. And I was thinking, how do I introduce this? And I thought, well, maybe that old doggerel by Joyce Kilmer, you know: "Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree." And you might say, "Well, God designed the cow." But, of course, God got a lot of help. This is the ancestor of cattle. This is the aurochs. And it was designed by natural selection, the process of natural selection, over many millions of years. And then it became domesticated, thousands of years ago. And human beings became its stewards, and, without even knowing what they were doing, they gradually redesigned it and redesigned it and redesigned it. And then more recently, they really began to do reverse engineering on this beast and figure out just what the parts were, how they worked and how they might be optimized — how they might be made better. Now, why am I talking about cows? Because I want to say that much the same thing is true of religions. Religions are natural phenomena — they're just as natural as cows. They have evolved over millennia. They have a biological base, just like the aurochs. They have become domesticated, and human beings have been redesigning their religions for thousands of years. This is TED, and I want to talk about design. Because what I've been doing for the last four years — really since the first time you saw me — some of you saw me at TED when I was talking about religion — and in the last four years, I've been working just about non-stop on this topic. And you might say it's about the reverse engineering of religions. Now that very idea, I think, strikes terror in many people, or anger, or anxiety of one sort or another. And that is the spell that I want to break. I want to say, no, religions are an important natural phenomenon. We should study them with the same intensity that we study all the other important natural phenomena, like global warming, as we heard so eloquently last night from Al Gore. Today's religions are brilliantly designed — brilliantly designed. They are immensely powerful social institutions and many of their features can be traced back to earlier features that we can really make sense of by reverse engineering. And, as with the cow, there's a mixture of evolutionary design — designed by natural selection itself — and intelligent design — more or less intelligent design — and redesigned by human beings who are trying to redesign their religions. You don't do book talks at TED, but I'm going to have just one slide about my book, because there is one message in it which I think this group really needs to hear. And I would be very interested to get your responses to this. It's the one policy proposal that I make in the book, at this time, when I claim not to know enough about religion to know what other policy proposals to make. And it's one that echoes remarks that you've heard already today. Here's my proposal, I'm going to just take a couple of minutes to explain it: Education on world religions for all of our children — in primary school, in high school, in public schools, in private schools and in home schooling. So what I'm proposing is, just as we require reading, writing, arithmetic, American history, so we should have a curriculum on facts about all the religions of the world — about their history, about their creeds, about their texts, their music, their symbolisms, their prohibitions, their requirements. And this should be presented factually, straightforwardly, with no particular spin, to all of the children in the country. And as long as you teach them that, you can teach them anything else you like. That, I think, is maximal tolerance for religious freedom. As long as you inform your children about other religions, then you may — and as early as you like and whatever you like — teach them whatever creed you want them to learn. But also let them know about other religions. Now, why do I say that? Because democracy depends on an informed citizenship. Informed consent is the very bedrock of our understanding of democracy. Misinformed consent is not worth it. It's like a coin flip; it doesn't count, really. Democracy depends on informed consent. This is the way we treat people as responsible adults. Now, children below the age of consent are a special case. Parents — I'm going to use a word that Pastor Rick just used — parents are stewards of their children. They don't own them. You can't own your children. You have a responsibility to the world, to the state, to them, to take care of them right. You may teach them whatever creed you think is most important, but I say you have a responsibility to let them be informed about all the other creeds in the world, too. The reason I've taken this time is I've been fascinated to hear some of the reactions to this. One reviewer for a Roman Catholic newspaper called it "totalitarian." It strikes me as practically libertarian. Is it totalitarian to require reading, writing and arithmetic? I don't think so. All I'm saying is — and facts, facts only; no values, just facts — about all the world's religions. Another reviewer called it "hilarious." Well, I'm really bothered by the fact that anybody would think that was hilarious. It seems to me to be such a plausible, natural extension of the democratic principles we already have that I'm shocked to think anybody would find that just ridiculous. I know many religions are so anxious about preserving the purity of their faith among their children that they are intent on keeping their children ignorant of other faiths. I don't think that's defensible. But I'd really be pleased to get your answers on that — any reactions to that — later. But now I'm going to move on. Back to the cow. This picture, which I pulled off the web — the fellow on the left is really an important part of this picture. That's the steward. Cows couldn't live without human stewards — they're domesticated. They're a sort of ectosymbiont. They depend on us for their survival. And Pastor Rick was just talking about sheep. I'm going to talk about sheep, too. There's a lot of serendipitous convergence here. How clever it was of sheep to acquire shepherds! (Laughter) Think of what this got them. They could outsource all their problems: protection from predators, food-finding ... (Laughter) ... health maintenance. (Laughter) The only cost in most flocks — not even this — a loss of free mating. What a deal! "How clever of sheep!" you might say. Except, of course, it wasn't the sheep's cleverness. We all know sheep are not exactly rocket scientists — they're not very smart. It wasn't the cleverness of the sheep at all. They were clueless. But it was a very clever move. Whose clever move was it? It was the clever move of natural selection itself. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with Jim Watson, once joked about what he called Orgel's Second Rule. Leslie Orgel is a molecular biologist, brilliant guy, and Orgel's Second Rule is: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Now, that is not Intelligent Design — not from Francis Crick. Evolution is cleverer than you are. If you understand Orgel's Second Rule, then you understand why the Intelligent Design movement is basically a hoax. The designs discovered by the process of natural selection are brilliant, unbelievably brilliant. Again and again biologists are fascinated with the brilliance of what's discovered. But the process itself is without purpose, without foresight, without design. When I was here four years ago, I told the story about an ant climbing a blade of grass. And why the ant was doing it was because its brain had been infected with a lancet fluke that was needed to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to reproduce. So it was sort of a spooky story. And I think some people may have misunderstood. Lancet flukes aren't smart. I submit that the intelligence of a lancet fluke is down there, somewhere between petunia and carrot. They're not really bright. They don't have to be. The lesson we learn from this is: you don't have to have a mind to be a beneficiary. The design is there in nature, but it's not in anybody's head. It doesn't have to be. That's the way evolution works. Question: Was domestication good for sheep? It was great for their genetic fitness. And here I want to remind you of a wonderful point that Paul MacCready made at TED three years ago. Here's what he said: "Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of agriculture, human population, plus livestock and pets, was approximately a tenth of one percent of the terrestrial vertebrate landmass." That was just 10,000 years ago. Yesterday, in biological terms. What is it today? Does anybody remember what he told us? 98 percent. That is what we have done on this planet. Now, I talked to Paul afterwards — I wanted to check to find out how he'd calculated this, and get the sources and so forth — and he also gave me a paper that he had written on this. And there was a passage in it which he did not present here and I think it is so good, I'm going to read it to you: "Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life: complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans — a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature — have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush." We heard about the atmosphere as a thin layer of varnish. Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on this planet. And we're the ones that hold the paintbrush. And how can we do that? The key to our domination of the planet is culture. And the key to culture is religion. Suppose Martian scientists came to Earth. They would be puzzled by many things. Anybody know what this is? I'll tell you what it is. This is a million people gathering on the banks of the Ganges in 2001, perhaps the largest single gathering of human beings ever, as seen from satellite photograph. Here's a big crowd. Here's another crowd in Mecca. Martians would be amazed by this. They'd want to know how it originated, what it was for and how it perpetuates itself. Actually, I'm going to pass over this. The ant isn't alone. There's all sorts of wonderful cases of species which — in that case — A parasite gets into a mouse and needs to get into the belly of a cat. And it turns the mouse into Mighty Mouse, makes it fearless, so it runs out in the open, where it'll be eaten by a cat. True story. In other words, we have these hijackers — you've seen this slide before, from four years ago — a parasite that infects the brain and induces even suicidal behavior, on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness. Does that ever happen to us? Yes, it does — quite wonderfully. The Arabic word "Islam" means "submission." It means "surrender of self-interest to the will of Allah." But I'm not just talking about Islam. I'm talking also about Christianity. This is a parchment music page that I found in a Paris bookstall 50 years ago. And on it, it says, in Latin: "Semen est verbum Dei. Sator autem Christus." The word of God is the seed and the sower of the seed is Christ. Same idea. Well, not quite. But in fact, Christians, too ... glory in the fact that they have surrendered to God. I'll give you a few quotes. "The heart of worship is surrender. Surrendered people obey God's words, even if it doesn't make sense." Those words are by Rick Warren. Those are from "The Purpose Driven Life." And I want to turn now, briefly, to talk about that book, which I've read. You've all got a copy, and you've just heard the man. And what I want to do now is say a bit about this book from the design standpoint, because I think it's actually a brilliant book. First of all, the goal — and you heard just now what the goal is — it's to bring purpose to the lives of millions, and he has succeeded. Is it a good goal? In itself, I'm sure we all agree, it is a wonderful goal. He's absolutely right. There are lots of people out there who don't have purpose in their life, and bringing purpose to their life is a wonderful goal. I give him an A+ on this. (Laughter) Is the goal achieved? Yes. Thirty million copies of this book. Al Gore, eat your heart out. (Laughter) Just exactly what Al is trying to do, Rick is doing. This is a fantastic achievement. And the means — how does he do it? It's a brilliant redesign of traditional religious themes — updating them, quietly dropping obsolete features, putting new interpretations on other features. This is the evolution of religion that's been going on for thousands of years, and he's just the latest brilliant practitioner of it. I don't have to tell you this; you just heard the man. Excellent insights into human psychology, wise advice on every page. Moreover, he invites us to look under the hood. I really appreciated that. For instance, he has an appendix where he explains his choice of translations of different Bible verses. The book is clear, vivid, accessible, beautifully formatted. Just enough repetition. That's really important. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. (Laughter) With me, everybody — (Audience and Dan Dennett) Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Thank you. And now we come to my problem. Because I'm absolutely sincere in my appreciation of all that I said about this book. But I wish it were better. I have some problems with the book. And it would just be insincere of me not to address those problems. I wish he could do this with a revision, a Mark 2 version of his book. "The truth will set you free." That's what it says in the Bible, and it's something that I want to live by, too. My problem is, some of the bits in it I don't think are true. Now some of this is a difference of opinion. And that's not my main complaint, that's worth mentioning. Here's a passage — it's very much what he said, anyway: "If there was no God we would all be accidents, the result of astronomical random chance in the Universe. You could stop reading this book because life would have no purpose or meaning or significance. There would be no right or wrong and no hope beyond your brief years on Earth." Now, I just do not believe that. By the way, I find — Homer Groening's film presented a beautiful alternative to that very claim. Yes, there is meaning and a reason for right or wrong. We don't need a belief in God to be good or to have meaning in us. But that, as I said, is just a difference of opinion. That's not what I'm really worried about. How about this: "God designed this planet's environment just so we could live in it." I'm afraid that a lot of people take that sentiment to mean that we don't have to do the sorts of things that Al Gore is trying so hard to get us to do. I am not happy with that sentiment at all. And then I find this: "All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact." Well, that's Michael Denton. He's a creationist. And here, I think, "Wait a minute." I read this again. I read it three or four times and I think, "Is he really endorsing Intelligent Design? Is he endorsing creationism here?" And you can't tell. So I'm sort of thinking, "Well, I don't know, I don't know if I want to get upset with this yet." But then I read on, and I read this: "First, Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up." I wish that sentence weren't in there, because I think it is false. And I think that thinking this way about the history of the planet, after we've just been hearing about the history of the planet over millions of years, discourages people from scientific understanding. Now, Rick Warren uses scientific terms and scientific factoids and information in a very interesting way. Here's one: "God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA cocktail that created you." I think that's false. Now, maybe we want to treat it as metaphorical. Here's another one: "For instance, your brain can store 100 trillion facts. Your mind can handle 15,000 decisions a second." Well, it would be interesting to find the interpretation where I would accept that. There might be some way of treating that as true. "Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hardwired by God into the very fiber of our being — an inbuilt need to connect with God." Well, the sense of which I agree with him, except I think it has an evolutionary explanation. And what I find deeply troubling in this book is that he seems to be arguing that if you want to be moral, if you want to have meaning in your life, you have to be an Intelligent Designer, you have to deny the theory of evolution by natural selection. And I think, on the contrary, that it is very important to solving the world's problems that we take evolutionary biology seriously. Whose truth are we going to listen to? Well, this is from "The Purpose Driven Life": "The Bible must become the authoritative standard for my life: the compass I rely on for direction, the counsel I listen to for making wise decisions, and the benchmark I use for evaluating everything." Well maybe, OK, but what's going to follow from this? And here's one that does concern me. Remember I quoted him before with this line: "Surrendered people obey God's word, even if it doesn't make sense." And that's a problem. (Sighs) "Don't ever argue with the Devil. He's better at arguing than you are, having had thousands of years to practice." Now, Rick Warren didn't invent this clever move. It's an old move. It's a very clever adaptation of religions. It's a wild card for disarming any reasonable criticism. "You don't like my interpretation? You've got a reasonable objection to it? Don't listen, don't listen! That's the Devil speaking." This discourages the sort of reasoning citizenship it seems to me that we want to have. I've got one more problem, then I'm through. And I'd really like to get a response if Rick is able to do it. "In the Great Commission, Jesus said, 'Go to all people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I've told you.'" The Bible says Jesus is the only one who can save the world. We've seen many wonderful maps of the world in the last day or so. Here's one, not as beautiful as the others; it simply shows the religions of the world. Here's one that shows the sort of current breakdown of the different religions. Do we really want to commit ourselves to engulfing all the other religions, when their holy books are telling them, "Don't listen to the other side, that's just Satan talking!"? It seems to me that that's a very problematic ship to get on for the future. I found this sign as I was driving to Maine recently, in front of a church: "Good without God becomes zero." Sort of cute. A very clever little meme. I don't believe it and I think this idea, popular as it is — not in this guise, but in general — is itself one of the main problems that we face. If you are like me, you know many wonderful, committed, engaged atheists, agnostics, who are being very good without God. And you also know many religious people who hide behind their sanctity instead of doing good works. So, I wish we could drop this meme. I wish this meme would go extinct. Thanks very much for your attention. (Applause) |
71 | A life of purpose | Rick Warren | {0: 'Rick Warren'} | {0: ['pastor', 'author']} | {0: 'Pastor Rick Warren is the author of <em>The Purpose-Driven Life,</em> which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. His has become an immensely influential voice seeking to apply the values of his faith to issues such as global poverty, HIV/AIDS and injustice.'} | 3,998,282 | 2006-02-25 | 2006-07-18 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 930 | 1,262 | ['Christianity', 'God', 'culture', 'happiness', 'leadership', 'motivation', 'philanthropy', 'religion'] | {94: "Let's teach religion -- all religion -- in schools", 676: 'Lose your ego, find your compassion', 2011: 'Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)', 86: 'Letting go of God', 9125: 'My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead', 2801: '12 truths I learned from life and writing'} | https://www.ted.com/talks/rick_warren_a_life_of_purpose/ | Pastor Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose-Driven Life," reflects on his own crisis of purpose in the wake of his book's wild success. He explains his belief that God's intention is for each of us to use our talents and influence to do good. | I'm often asked, "What surprised you about the book?" And I say, "That I got to write it." I would have never imagined that. Not in my wildest dreams did I think — I don't even consider myself to be an author. And I'm often asked, "Why do you think so many people have read this? This thing's selling still about a million copies a month." And I think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease. I think inside at some point, we put our heads down on the pillow and we go, "There's got to be more to life than this." Get up in the morning, go to work, come home and watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, go to parties on weekends. A lot of people say, "I'm living." No, you're not living — that's just existing. Just existing. I really think that there's this inner desire. I do believe what Chris said; I believe that you're not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but I believe God did. I think there are accidental parents; there's no doubt about that. I don't think there are accidental kids. And I think you matter. I think you matter to God; I think you matter to history; I think you matter to this universe. And I think that the difference between what I call the survival level of living, the success level of living, and the significance level of living is: Do you figure out, "What on Earth am I here for?" I meet a lot of people who are very smart, and say, "But why can't I figure out my problems?" And I meet a lot of people who are very successful, who say, "Why don't I feel more fulfilled? Why do I feel like a fake? Why do I feel like I've got to pretend that I'm more than I really am?" I think that comes down to this issue of meaning, of significance, of purpose. I think it comes down to this issue of: "Why am I here? What am I here for? Where am I going?" These are not religious issues. They're human issues. I wanted to tell Michael before he spoke that I really appreciate what he does, because it makes my life work a whole lot easier. As a pastor, I do see a lot of kooks. And I have learned that there are kooks in every area of life. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on that, but there are plenty of religious kooks. There are secular kooks; there are smart kooks, dumb kooks. There are people — a lady came up to me the other day, and she had a white piece of paper — Michael, you'll like this one — and she said, "What do you see in it?" And I looked at it and I said, "Oh, I don't see anything." And she goes, "Well, I see Jesus," and started crying and left. I'm going, "OK," you know? "Fine." (Laughter) Good for you. When the book became the best-selling book in the world for the last three years, I kind of had my little crisis. And that was: What is the purpose of this? Because it brought in enormous amounts of money. When you write the best-selling book in the world, it's tons and tons of money. And it brought in a lot of attention, neither of which I wanted. When I started Saddleback Church, I was 25 years old. I started it with one other family in 1980. And I decided that I was never going to go on TV, because I didn't want to be a celebrity. I didn't want to be a, quote, "evangelist, televangelist" — that's not my thing. And all of the sudden, it brought a lot of money and a lot of attention. I don't think — now, this is a worldview, and I will tell you, everybody's got a worldview. Everybody's betting their life on something. You're betting your life on something, you just better know why you're betting what you're betting on. So, everybody's betting their life on something. And when I, you know, made a bet, I happened to believe that Jesus was who he said he was. And I believe in a pluralistic society, everybody's betting on something. And when I started the church, you know, I had no plans to do what it's doing now. And then when I wrote this book, and all of a sudden, it just took off, and I started saying, now, what's the purpose of this? Because as I started to say, I don't think you're given money or fame for your own ego, ever. I just don't believe that. And when you write a book that the first sentence of the book is, "It's not about you," then, when all of a sudden it becomes the best-selling book in history, you've got to figure, well, I guess it's not about me. That's kind of a no-brainer. So, what is it for? And I began to think about what I call the "stewardship of affluence" and the "stewardship of influence." So I believe, essentially, leadership is stewardship. That if you are a leader in any area — in business, in politics, in sports, in art, in academics, in any area — you don't own it. You are a steward of it. For instance, that's why I believe in protecting the environment. This is not my planet. It wasn't mine before I was born, it's not going to be mine after I die, I'm just here for 80 years and then that's it. I was debating the other day on a talk show, and the guy was challenging me and he'd go, "What's a pastor doing on protecting the environment?" And I asked this guy, I said, "Well, do you believe that human beings are responsible to make the world a little bit better place for the next generation? Do you think we have a stewardship here, to take the environment seriously?" And he said, "No." I said, "Oh, you don't?" I said, "Let me make this clear again: Do you believe that as human beings — I'm not talking about religion — do you believe that as human beings, it is our responsibility to take care of this planet, and make it just a little bit better for the next generation?" And he said, "No. Not any more than any other species." When he said the word "species," he was revealing his worldview. And he was saying, "I'm no more responsible to take care of this environment than a duck is." Well now, I know a lot of times we act like ducks, but you're not a duck. You're not a duck. And you are responsible — that's my worldview. And so, you need to understand what your worldview is. The problem is most people never really think it through. They never really ... codify it or qualify it or quantify it, and say, "This is what I believe in. This is why I believe what I believe." I don't personally have enough faith to be an atheist. But you may, you may. Your worldview, though, does determine everything else in your life, because it determines your decisions; it determines your relationships; it determines your level of confidence. It determines, really, everything in your life. What we believe, obviously — and you know this — determines our behavior, and our behavior determines what we become in life. So all of this money started pouring in, and all of this fame started pouring in. And I'm going, what do I do with this? My wife and I first made five decisions on what to do with the money. We said, "First, we're not going to use it on ourselves." I didn't go out and buy a bigger house. I don't own a guesthouse. I still drive the same four year-old Ford that I've driven. We just said, we're not going to use it on us. The second thing was, I stopped taking a salary from the church that I pastor. Third thing is, I added up all that the church had paid me over the last 25 years, and I gave it back. And I gave it back because I didn't want anybody thinking that I do what I do for money — I don't. In fact, personally, I've never met a priest or a pastor or a minister who does it for money. I know that's the stereotype; I've never met one of them. Believe me, there's a whole lot easier ways to make money. Pastors are like on 24 hours-a-day call, they're like doctors. I left late today — I'd hoped to be here yesterday — because my father-in-law is in his last, probably, 48 hours before he dies of cancer. And I'm watching a guy who's lived his life — he's now in his mid-80s — and he's dying with peace. You know, the test of your worldview is not how you act in the good times. The test of your worldview is how you act at the funeral. And having been through literally hundreds if not thousands of funerals, it makes a difference. It makes a difference what you believe. So, we gave it all back, and then we set up three foundations, working on some of the major problems of the world: illiteracy, poverty, pandemic diseases — particularly HIV/AIDS — and set up these three foundations, and put the money into that. The last thing we did is we became what I call "reverse tithers." And that is, when my wife and I got married 30 years ago, we started tithing. Now, that's a principle in the Bible that says give 10 percent of what you get back to charity, give it away to help other people. So, we started doing that, and each year we would raise our tithe one percent. So, our first year of marriage we went to 11 percent, second year we went to 12 percent, and the third year we went to 13 percent, and on and on and on. Why did I do that? Because every time I give, it breaks the grip of materialism in my life. Materialism is all about getting — get, get, get, get all you can, can all you get, sit on the can and spoil the rest. It's all about more, having more. And we think that the good life is actually looking good — that's most important of all — looking good, feeling good and having the goods. But that's not the good life. I meet people all the time who have those, and they're not necessarily happy. If money actually made you happy, then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest. And that I know, personally, I know, is not true. It's just not true. So, the good life is not about looking good, feeling good or having the goods, it's about being good and doing good. Giving your life away. Significance in life doesn't come from status, because you can always find somebody who's got more than you. It doesn't come from sex. It doesn't come from salary. It comes from serving. It is in giving our lives away that we find meaning, we find significance. That's the way we were wired, I believe, by God. And so we began to give away, and now after 30 years, my wife and I are reverse tithers — we give away 90 percent and live on 10. That, actually, was the easy part. The hard part is, what do I do with all this attention? Because I started getting all kinds of invitations. I just came off a nearly month-long speaking tour on three different continents, and I won't go into that, but it was an amazing thing. And I'm going, what do I do with this notoriety that the book has brought? And, being a pastor, I started reading the Bible. There's a chapter in the Bible called Psalm 72, and it's Solomon's prayer for more influence. When you read this prayer, it sounds incredibly selfish, self-centered. He says, "God, I want you to make me famous." That's what he prays. He said, "I want you to make me famous. I want you to spread the fame of my name through every land, I want you to give me power. I want you to make me famous, I want you to give me influence." And it just sounds like the most egotistical request you could make, if you were going to pray. Until you read the whole psalm, the whole chapter. And then he says, "So that the king ..." — he was the king of Israel at that time, at its apex in power — "... so that the king may care for the widow and orphan, support the oppressed, defend the defenseless, care for the sick, assist the poor, speak up for the foreigner, those in prison." Basically, he's talking about all the marginalized in society. And as I read that, I looked at it, and I thought, you know, what this is saying is that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. The purpose of influence is not to build your ego. Or your net worth. And, by the way, your net worth is not the same thing as your self-worth. Your value is not based on your valuables. It's based on a whole different set of things. And so the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. And I had to admit: I can't think of the last time I thought of widows and orphans. They're not on my radar. I pastor a church in one of the most affluent areas of America — a bunch of gated communities. I have a church full of CEOs and scientists. And I could go five years and never, ever see a homeless person. They're just not in my pathway. Now, they're 13 miles up the road in Santa Ana. So I had to say, ok, I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I've got to help those who don't have either of those. You know, there's a story in the Bible about Moses, whether you believe it's true or not, it really doesn't matter to me. But Moses, if you saw the movie, "The Ten Commandments," Moses goes out, and there's this burning bush, and God talks to him, and God says, "Moses, what's in your hand?" I think that's one of the most important questions you'll ever be asked: What's in your hand? Moses says, "It's a staff. It's a shepherd's staff." And God says, "Throw it down." And if you saw the movie, you know, he throws it down and it becomes a snake. And then God says, "Pick it up." And he picks it back up again, and it becomes a staff again. Now, I'm reading this thing, and I'm going, what is that all about? OK. What's that all about? Well, I do know a couple of things. Number one, God never does a miracle to show off. It's not just, "Wow, isn't that cool?" And, by the way, my God doesn't have to show up on cheese bread. You know, if God's going to show up, he's not going to show up on cheese bread. (Laughter) Ok? I just, this is why I love what Michael does, because it's like, if he's debunking it, then I don't have to. But God — my God — doesn't show up on sprinkler images. He's got a few more powerful ways than that to do whatever he wants to do. But he doesn't do miracles just to show off. Second thing is, if God ever asks you a question, he already knows the answer. Obviously, if he's God, then that would mean that when he asks the question, it's for your benefit, not his. So he's going, "What's in your hand?" Now, what was in Moses' hand? Well, it was a shepherd's staff. Now, follow me on this. This staff represented three things about Moses' life. First, it represented his identity; he was a shepherd. It's the symbol of his own occupation: I am a shepherd. It's a symbol of his identity, his career, his job. Second, it's a symbol of not only his identity, it's a symbol of his income, because all of his assets are tied up in sheep. In those days, nobody had bank accounts, or American Express cards, or hedge funds. Your assets are tied up in your flocks. So it's a symbol of his identity, and it's a symbol of his income. And the third thing: it's a symbol of his influence. What do you do with a shepherd's staff? Well, you know, you move sheep from point A to point B with it, by hook or by crook. You pull them or you poke them. One or the other. So, he's saying, "You're going to lay down your identity. What's in your hand? You've got identity, you've got income, you've got influence. What's in your hand?" And he's saying, "If you lay it down, I'll make it come alive. I'll do some things you could never imagine possible." And if you've watched that movie, "Ten Commandments," all of those big miracles that happen in Egypt are done through this staff. Last year, I was invited to speak at the NBA All-Stars game. And so, I'm talking to the players, because most of the NBA teams, NFL teams and all the other teams have done this 40 Days of Purpose, based on the book. And I asked them, I said, "What's in your hand? So, what's in your hand?" I said, "It's a basketball. And that basketball represents your identity, who you are: you're an NBA player. It represents your income: you're making a lot of money off that little ball. And it represents your influence. And even though you're only going to be in the NBA for a few years, you're going to be an NBA player for the rest of your life. And that gives you enormous influence. So, what are you going to do with what you've been given?" And I guess that's the main reason I came up here today, to all of you very bright people at TED — it is to say, "What's in your hand?" What do you have that you've been given? Talent, background, education, freedom, networks, opportunities, wealth, ideas, creativity. What are you doing with what you've been given? That, to me, is the primary question about life. That, to me, is what being purpose-driven is all about. In the book, I talk about how you're wired to do certain things, you're "SHAPED" with — a little acrostic: Spiritual gifts, Heart, Ability, Personality and Experiences. These things shape you. And if you want to know what you ought to be doing with your life, you need to look at your shape — "What am I wired to do?" Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it? If you're wired to be an anthropologist, you'll be an anthropologist. If you're wired to be an undersea explorer, you'll be an undersea explorer. If you're wired to make deals, you make deals. If you're wired to paint, you paint. Did you know that God smiles when you be you? When my little kids — when my kids were little — they're all grown now, I have grandkids — I used to go in and sit on the side of their bed, and I used to watch my kids sleep. And I just watched their little bodies rise and lower, rise and lower. And I would look at them: "This is not an accident." Rise and lower. And I got joy out of just watching them sleep. Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing, quote, "spiritual things," like going to church or helping the poor, or, you know, confessing or doing something like that. The bottom line is, God gets pleasure watching you be you. Why? He made you. And when you do what you were made to do, he goes, "That's my boy! That's my girl! You're using the talent and ability that I gave you." So my advice to you is: look at what's in your hand — your identity, your influence, your income — and say, "It's not about me. It's about making the world a better place." Thank you. |
55 | My wish: A global day of film | Jehane Noujaim | {0: 'Jehane Noujaim'} | {0: ['filmmaker']} | {0: 'TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim is a gutsy filmmaker whose astonishing documentaries reveal the triumphs and hardships of courageous individuals. '} | 460,994 | 2006-02-26 | 2006-07-25 | TED2006 | en | ['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw'] | 59 | 1,538 | ['TED Prize', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'film', 'global issues', 'peace', 'social change', 'storytelling', 'art', 'movies'] | {2228: 'How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine', 1476: 'The shared wonder of film', 800: 'We are the stories we tell ourselves', 2890: "What it's like to be a woman in Hollywood", 45233: 'How film transforms the way we see the world', 2694: "The data behind Hollywood's sexism"} | https://www.ted.com/talks/jehane_noujaim_my_wish_a_global_day_of_film/ | Jehane Noujaim unveils her 2006 TED Prize wish: to bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film. | I can't help but this wish: to think about when you're a little kid, and all your friends ask you, "If a genie could give you one wish in the world, what would it be?" And I always answered, "Well, I'd want the wish to have the wisdom to know exactly what to wish for." Well, then you'd be screwed, because you'd know what to wish for, and you'd use up your wish, and now, since we only have one wish — unlike last year they had three wishes — I'm not going to wish for that. So let's get to what I would like, which is world peace. And I know what you're thinking: You're thinking, "The poor girl up there, she thinks she's at a beauty pageant. She's not. She's at the TED Prize." (Laughter) But I really do think it makes sense. And I think that the first step to world peace is for people to meet each other. I've met a lot of different people over the years, and I've filmed some of them, from a dotcom executive in New York who wanted to take over the world, to a military press officer in Qatar, who would rather not take over the world. If you've seen the film "Control Room" that was sent out, you'd understand a little bit why. (Applause) Thank you. Wow! Some of you watched it. That's great. That's great. So basically what I'd like to talk about today is a way for people to travel, to meet people in a different way than — because you can't travel all over the world at the same time. And a long time ago — well, about 40 years ago — my mom had an exchange student. And I'm going to show you slides of the exchange student. This is Donna. This is Donna at the Statue of Liberty. This is my mother and aunt teaching Donna how to ride a bike. This is Donna eating ice cream. And this is Donna teaching my aunt how to do a Filipino dance. I really think as the world is getting smaller, it becomes more and more important that we learn each other's dance moves, that we meet each other, we get to know each other, we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other, to understand people's hopes and dreams, what makes them laugh and cry. And I know that we can't all do exchange programs, and I can't force everybody to travel; I've already talked about that to Chris and Amy, and they said that there's a problem with this: You can't force people, free will. And I totally support that, so we're not forcing people to travel. But I'd like to talk about another way to travel that doesn't require a ship or an airplane, and just requires a movie camera, a projector and a screen. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. I was asked that I speak a little bit about where I personally come from, and Cameron, I don't know how you managed to get out of that one, but I think that building bridges is important to me because of where I come from. I'm the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father. So I'm the living product of two cultures coming together. No pun intended. (Laughter) And I've also been called, as an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian American with a Persian name, the "Middle East Peace Crisis." So maybe me starting to take pictures was some kind of way to bring both sides of my family together — a way to take the worlds with me, a way to tell stories visually. It all kind of started that way, but I think that I really realized the power of the image when I first went to the garbage-collecting village in Egypt, when I was about 16. My mother took me there. She's somebody who believes strongly in community service, and decided that this was something that I needed to do. And so I went there and I met some amazing women there. There was a center there, where they were teaching people how to read and write, and get vaccinations against the many diseases you can get from sorting through garbage. And I began teaching there. I taught English, and I met some incredible women there. I met people that live seven people to a room, barely can afford their evening meal, yet lived with this strength of spirit and sense of humor and just incredible qualities. I got drawn into this community and I began to take pictures there. I took pictures of weddings and older family members — things that they wanted memories of. About two years after I started taking these pictures, the UN Conference on Population and Development asked me to show them at the conference. So I was 18; I was very excited. It was my first exhibit of photographs and they were all put up there, and after about two days, they all came down except for three. People were very upset, very angry that I was showing these dirty sides of Cairo, and why didn't I cut the dead donkey out of the frame? And as I sat there, I got very depressed. I looked at this big empty wall with three lonely photographs that were, you know, very pretty photographs and I was like, "I failed at this." But I was looking at this intense emotion and intense feeling that had come out of people just seeing these photographs. Here I was, this 18-year-old pipsqueak that nobody listened to, and all of a sudden, I put these photographs on the wall, and there were arguments, and they had to be taken down. And I saw the power of the image, and it was incredible. And I think the most important reaction that I saw there was actually from people that would never have gone to the garbage village themselves, that would never have seen that the human spirit could thrive in such difficult circumstances. And I think it was at that point that I decided I wanted to use photography and film to somehow bridge gaps, to bridge cultures, bring people together, cross borders. And so that's what really kind of started me off. Did a stint at MTV, made a film called "Startup.com," and I've done a couple of music films. But in 2003, when the war in Iraq was about to start, it was a very surreal feeling for me, because before the war started, there was kind of this media war that was going on. And I was watching television in New York, and there seemed to be just one point of view that was coming across, and the coverage went from the US State Department to embedded troops. And what was coming across on the news was that there was going to be this clean war and precision bombings, and the Iraqis would be greeting the Americans as liberators, and throwing flowers at their feet in the streets of Baghdad. And I knew that there was a completely other story that was taking place in the Middle East, where my parents were. I knew that there was a completely other story being told, and I was thinking, "How are people supposed to communicate with each other when they're getting completely different messages, and nobody knows what the other's being told? How are people supposed to have any kind of common understanding or know how to move together into the future? So I knew that I had to go there. I just wanted to be in the center. I had no plan. I had no funding. I didn't even have a camera at the time — I had somebody bring it there, because I wanted to get access to Al Jazeera, George Bush's favorite channel, and a place which I was very curious about because it's disliked by many governments across the Arab world, and also called the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden by some people in the US government. So I was thinking, this station that's hated by so many people has to be doing something right. I've got to go see what this is all about. And I also wanted to go see Central Command, which was 10 minutes away. And that way, I could get access to how this news was being created — on the Arab side, reaching the Arab world, and on the US and Western side, reaching the US. And when I went there and sat there, and met these people that were in the center of it, and sat with these characters, I met some surprising, very complex people. And I'd like to share with you a little bit of that experience of when you sit with somebody and you film them, and you listen to them, and you allow them more than a five-second sound bite. The amazing complexity of people emerges. Samir Khader: Business as usual. Iraq, and then Iraq, and then Iraq. But between us, if I'm offered a job with Fox, I'll take it. To change the Arab nightmare into the American dream. I still have that dream. Maybe I will never be able to do it, but I have plans for my children. When they finish high school, I will send them to America to study there. I will pay for their study. And they will stay there. Josh Rushing: The night they showed the POWs and the dead soldiers — Al Jazeera showed them — it was powerful, because America doesn't show those kinds of images. Most of the news in America won't show really gory images and this showed American soldiers in uniform, strewn about a floor, a cold tile floor. And it was revolting. It was absolutely revolting. It made me sick at my stomach. And then what hit me was, the night before, there had been some kind of bombing in Basra, and Al Jazeera had shown images of the people. And they were equally, if not more, horrifying — the images were. And I remember having seen it in the Al Jazeera office, and thought to myself, "Wow, that's gross. That's bad." And then going away, and probably eating dinner or something. And it didn't affect me as much. So, the impact that had on me — me realizing that I just saw people on the other side, and those people in the Al Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't as bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war. But it doesn't make me believe that we're in a world that can live without war yet. Jehane Noujaim: I was overwhelmed by the response of the film. We didn't know whether it would be able to get out there. We had no funding for it. We were incredibly lucky that it got picked up. And when we showed the film in both the United States and the Arab world, we had such incredible reactions. It was amazing to see how people were moved by this film. In the Arab world — and it's not really by the film, it's by the characters — I mean, Josh Rushing was this incredibly complex person who was thinking about things. And when I showed the film in the Middle East, people wanted to meet Josh. He kind of redefined us as an American population. People started to ask me, "Where is this guy now?" Al Jazeera offered him a job. (Laughter) And Samir, on the other hand, was also quite an interesting character for the Arab world to see, because it brought out the complexities of this love-hate relationship that the Arab world has with the West. In the United States, I was blown away by the motivations, the positive motivations of the American people when they'd see this film. You know, we're criticized abroad for believing we're the saviors of the world in some way, but the flip side of it is that, actually, when people do see what is happening abroad and people's reactions to some of our policy abroad, we feel this power, that we need to — we feel like we have to get the power to change things. And I saw this with audiences. This woman came up to me after the screening and said, "You know, I know this is crazy. I saw the bombs being loaded on the planes, I saw the military going out to war, but you don't understand people's anger towards us until you see the people in the hospitals and the victims of the war, and how do we get out of this bubble? How do we understand what the other person is thinking?" Now, I don't know whether a film can change the world. But I know the power of it, I know that it starts people thinking about how to change the world. Now, I'm not a philosopher, so I feel like I shouldn't go into great depth on this, but let film speak for itself and take you to this other world. Because I believe that film has the ability to take you across borders, I'd like you to just sit back and experience for a couple of minutes being taken into another world. And these couple clips take you inside of two of the most difficult conflicts that we're faced with today. [The last 48 hours of two Palestinian suicide bombers.] [Paradise Now] [Man: As long as there is injustice, someone must make a sacrifice!] [Woman: That's no sacrifice, that's revenge!] [If you kill, there's no difference between victim and occupier.] [Man: If we had airplanes, we wouldn't need martyrs, that's the difference.] [Woman: The difference is that the Israeli military is still stronger.] [Man: Then let us be equal in death.] [We still have Paradise.] [Woman: There is no Paradise! It only exists in your head!] [Man: God forbid!] [May God forgive you.] [If you were not Abu Azzam's daughter ...] [Anyway, I'd rather have Paradise in my head than live in this hell!] [In this life, we're dead anyway.] [One only chooses bitterness when the alternative is even bitterer.] [Woman: And what about us? The ones who remain?] [Will we win that way?] [Don't you see what you're doing is destroying us?] [And that you give Israel an alibi to carry on?] [Man: So with no alibi, Israel will stop?] [Woman: Perhaps. We have to turn it into a moral war.] [Man: How, if Israel has no morals?] [Woman: Be careful!] [And the real people building peace through non-violence] [Encounter Point] Video: (Ambulance siren) [Tel Aviv, Israel 1996] [Tzvika: My wife Ayelet called me and said, ] ["There was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv."] [Ayelet: What do you know about the casualties?] [Tzvika off-screen: We're looking for three girls.] [We have no information.] [Ayelet: One is wounded here, but we haven't heard from the other three.] [Tzvika: I said, "OK, that's Bat-Chen, that's my daughter.] [Are you sure she is dead?"] [They said yes.] Video: (Police siren and shouting over megaphone) [Bethlehem, Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2003] [George: On that day, at around 6:30] [I was driving with my wife and daughters to the supermarket.] [When we got to here ...] [we saw three Israeli military jeeps parked on the side of the road.] [When we passed by the first jeep ...] [they opened fire on us.] [And my 12-year-old daughter Christine] [was killed in the shooting.] [Bereaved Families Forum, Jerusalem] [Tzvika: I'm the headmaster for all parts.] [George: But there is a teacher that is in charge?] [Tzvika: Yes, I have assistants.] [I deal with children all the time.] [One year after their daughters' deaths both Tzvika and George join the forum] [George: At first, I thought it was a strange idea.] [But after thinking logically about it, ] [I didn't find any reason why not to meet them] [and let them know of our suffering.] [Tzvika: There were many things that touched me.] [We see that there are Palestinians who suffered a lot, who lost children,] [and still believe in the peace process and in reconciliation.] [If we who lost what is most precious can talk to each other,] [and look forward to a better future,] [then everyone else must do so, too.] [From South Africa: A Revolution Through Music] [Amandla] (Music) (Video) Man: Song is something that we communicated with people who otherwise would not have understood where we're coming from. You could give them a long political speech, they would still not understand. But I tell you, when you finish that song, people will be like, "Damn, I know where you niggas are coming from. I know where you guys are coming from. Death unto apartheid!" Narrator: It's about the liberation struggle. It's about those children who took to the streets — fighting, screaming, "Free Nelson Mandela!" It's about those unions who put down their tools and demanded freedom. Yes. Yes! (Music and singing) (Singing) Freedom! (Applause) Jehane Noujaim: I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation. And what I'd like to talk about is how can we use that feeling to actually create a movement through film? I've been listening to the talks in the conference, and Robert Wright said yesterday that if we have an appreciation for another person's humanity, then they will have an appreciation for ours. And that's what this is about. It's about connecting people through film, getting these independent voices out there. Now, Josh Rushing actually ended up leaving the military and taking a job with Al Jazeera. (Laughter) So his feeling is that he's at Al Jazeera International because he feels like he can actually use media to bridge the gap between East and West. And that's an amazing thing. But I've been trying to think about ways to give power to these independent voices, to give power to the filmmakers, to give power to people who are trying to use film for change. And there are incredible organizations that are out there doing this already. There's Witness, that you heard from earlier. There's Just Vision, that are working with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace, and documenting that process and getting interviews out there and using this film to take to Congress to show that it's a powerful tool, to show that this is a woman who's had her daughter killed in an attack, and she believes that there are peaceful ways to solve this. There's Working Films and there's Current TV, which is an incredible platform for people around the world to be able to put their — (Applause) Yeah, it's amazing. I've watched it and I'm blown away by it and its potential to bring voices from around the world — independent voices from around the world — and create a truly democratic, global television. So what can we do to create a platform for these organizations, to create some momentum, to get everybody in the world involved in this movement? I'd like for us to imagine for a second. Imagine a day when you have everyone coming together from around the world. You have towns and villages and theaters — all from around the world, getting together, and sitting in the dark, and sharing a communal experience of watching a film, or a couple of films, together. Watching a film which maybe highlights a character that is fighting to live, or just a character that defies stereotypes, makes a joke, sings a song. Comedies, documentaries, shorts. This amazing power can be used to change people and to bond people together; to cross borders, and have people feel like they're having a communal experience. So if you imagine this day when all around the world, you have theaters and places where we project films. If you imagine projecting from Times Square to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the same film in Ramallah, the same film in Jerusalem. You know, we've been talking to a friend of mine about using the side of the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China. It's endless what you can imagine, in terms of where you can project films and where you can have this communal experience. And I believe that this one day, if we can create it, this one day can create momentum for all of these independent voices. There isn't an organization which is connecting the independent voices of the world to get out there, and yet I'm hearing throughout this conference that the biggest challenge in our future is understanding the other, and having mutual respect for the other and crossing borders. And if film can do that, and if we can get all of these different locations in the world to watch these films together — this could be an incredible day. So we've already made a partnership, set up through somebody from the TED community, John Camen, who introduced me to Steven Apkon, from the Jacob Burns Film Center. And we started calling up everybody. And in the last week, there have been so many people that have responded to us, from as close as Palo Alto, to Mongolia and to India. There are people that want to be a part of this global day of film; to be able to provide a platform for independent voices and independent films to get out there. Now, we've thought about a name for this day, and I'd like to share this with you. Now, the most amazing part of this whole process has been sharing ideas and wishes, and so I invite you to give brainstorms onto how does this day echo into the future? How do we use technology to make this day echo into the future, so that we can build community and have these communities working together, through the Internet? There was a time, many, many years ago, when all of the continents were stuck together. And we call that landmass Pangea. So what we'd like to call this day of film is Pangea Cinema Day. And if you just imagine that all of these people in these towns would be watching, then I think that we can actually really make a movement towards people understanding each other better. I know that it's very intangible, touching people's hearts and souls, but the only way that I know how to do it, the only way that I know how to reach out to somebody's heart and soul all across the world, is by showing them a film. And I know that there are independent filmmakers and films out there that can really make this happen. And that's my wish. I guess I'm supposed to give you my one-sentence wish, but we're way out of time. Chris Anderson: That is an incredible wish. Pangea Cinema: The day the world comes together. JN: It's more tangible than world peace, and it's certainly more immediate. But it would be the day that the world comes together through film, the power of film. CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Jehane Noujaim. |
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Dataset origin: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/miguelcorraljr/ted-ultimate-dataset
Context
TED is devoted to spreading powerful ideas in just about any topic. These datasets contain over 4,000 TED talks including transcripts in many languages.
If you would like a dataset for a language that is not listed below or a in a different file format (JSON, SQL, etc.), please checkout my Python module – TEDscraper.
Attributes
| Attribute | Description | Data Type |
|---|---|---|
| talk_id | Talk identification number provided by TED | int |
| title | Title of the talk | string |
| speaker_1 | First speaker in TED's speaker list | string |
| speakers | Speakers in the talk | dictionary |
| occupations | *Occupations of the speakers | dictionary |
| about_speakers | *Blurb about each speaker | dictionary |
| views | Count of views | int |
| recorded_date | Date the talk was recorded | string |
| published_date | Date the talk was published to TED com | string |
| event | Event or medium in which the talk was given | string |
| native_lang | Language the talk was given in | string |
| available_lang | All available languages (lang_code) for a talk | list |
| comments | Count of comments | int |
| duration | Duration in seconds | int |
| topics | Related tags or topics for the talk | list |
| related_talks | Related talks (key='talk_id', value='title') | dictionary |
| url | URL of the talk | string |
| description | Description of the talk | string |
| transcript | Full transcript of the talk | string |
*The dictionary key maps to the speaker in ‘speakers’.
Meta
Author: Miguel Corral Jr.
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iMiguel/
GitHub: https://github.com/corralm
License
Distributed under the Creative Commons license – Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
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